Take Heart (Notes on Henry Miller’s Nexus, Chapter 11)

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Lee

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Henry Miller falls asleep and has a dream, and that dream becomes a vision. He awakes to see the world with new eyes.

It begins with one of those lucid dreams where anything is possible:

“Nothing I wished to do required the least effort. If I wished to run, whether slow or fast, I did so without losing breath. If I wanted to jump a lake or skip over a hill, I simply jumped. If I wanted to fly, I flew.”

But this pleasant state of absolute freedom is soon transformed, to be replaced gradually with a frightening vision.

He realises he is not alone. There is a presence at his side. “My guardian angel, most likely.” He finds that he can communicate with everything he comes across – animals, plants, rocks – with the presence at his side enabling him to understand and be understood. This would be something to enjoy, but Henry has a feeling of foreboding: he is being “escorted” to some “realm”, for a purpose he cannot understand.

He becomes slowly aware that he is wounded and bleeding, from head to toe. The one who is with him tends to his wounds, but Henry is afraid. Is he about to die?

He looks for the first time to the one tending him. He is reassured by the look of compassion on her face. He begins to have no concern for the world: if he is going to die then he will accept it. “A feeling of peace invaded my being, and again I closed my eyes.” His acceptance of fate gives him “a new vigour”.

But with this new vigour he notices, in contrast to the power he feels in his new body and mind, that there is one place he is still lacking: his heart. Placing his hand there he realises: “To my horror there was a deep hole where the heart should have been. A hole from which no blood flowed.”

It is here that he sees the vision proper: his whole life flashing before him, in a way “no man should be permitted to see until he is ready to give up the ghost.” He sees what a villain he has been, so afraid of getting his heart broken that it shrank and shrank and “dwindled from disuse.”

Without a heart, Henry was invulnerable. But at what cost? “The sense of the utter emptiness of existence overwhelmed me. I had achieved invulnerability, it was mine forever, but life – if this was life – had lost all meaning. My lips moved as if in prayer but the feeling to express anguish failed me. Heartless, I had lost the power to communicate, even with my Creator.”

And then the Angel restores Henry’s heart, holding it before him until it grows full of blood again. “My transgressions had been forgiven; I was free to sin again, free to burn with the flame of the spirit.”

Free to sin again. Knowing he is a sinner he can let himself go and follow his instincts, knowing that his guardian angel watches over him. “What joy now possessed me! What complete and absolute trust!”

Henry Miller had thought his heart was broken – it turns out it had merely shrunk. It shrunk so that it might be safe from breaking. He had made it small and invulnerable. He had made himself invulnerable, by hiding his heart away.

When you’re invulnerable you have no need for a heart. And all meaning in life is lost. Inhuman and heartless. Waking from his dream, Henry Miller is now glad to be human and vulnerable. A madman, shouting at passers-by: “Take heart, O brothers and sisters! Take heart!”

Miller will go through many of these transformations, shrinking and growing and shrinking again. Like a bad pupil he never learns his lesson for long, and starts to shrink again – but fortunately for him he is a man to whom visions come easily, his guardian angel always ready to set him on the path again. One of the reasons Miller can be so inspiring is not so much that he was a great writer, but that he was a weak individual, who was ready to confess his weaknesses, and who succeeded by the grace of God.

(Image is from Pixabay)

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Notes on Dante’s Paradise, Canto 3

Posted on May 3, 2019 by Lee

“… think carefully what love is and you’ll see …”

This line hands you the key to the poem, if you haven’t picked it up already. The universe of Dante is a hierarchy, where every individual’s place in the order is determined by the love in their own heart.

Dante has asked the spirit – luminous shade barely visible against the silver light all around – Dante is standing inside the shining sphere of the moon – How can you be happy here in the lowest realm of Paradise? Knowing as you do that God’s light shines more brightly elsewhere, in the upper regions of Heaven that you will never see.

The spirit answers that it is because they love God that they accept their place in the hierarchy. They do so not grudgingly. They accept their place because it is right.

Lower down, on the mountain of Purgatory, the pilgrim might have noticed the same thing going on. The path up the mountain is there for all to walk on, and yet the spirits remain on their terrace and suffer their punishment, and do not continue up. Why not? We are told: it is because they lack the will to do so.

Just as in life they were shown God’s love but chose to distract themselves from it – perhaps pursuing worldly wealth, or vengeful dreams against neighbours, or gluttony for food and drink – so here in Purgatory they lack the will to face God’s light.

They are unwilling to enter Heaven for now. They will remain here on the mountain and be purged of their sins, and then with a thunderclap they will suddenly find their will returned to them – it was there all along, perhaps they can remember as children having felt a pure love of God – and suddenly they can journey up the mountain.

To seek is to find – to want to know God’s love is to know it. And so when the Earthly Paradise is reached at the top of the mountain, and the pilgrim is ready to enter Heaven, he ascends like an arrow from a bow. He’s beamed up to Paradise by an act of sheer will.

By God’s grace, since it was God that gave you that free will.

Compare these blessed spirits on their journey to Paradise with those that Dante met in Hell, those who will forever remain shut away from God’s light. They too have chosen, and find their place in the order of things determined by the love they hold in their own hearts. Self-love keeps them there in the dark, hearing nothing but the continual sound of their own cries. They will never find the will to enter Heaven, having buried themselves firmly in their own sin.

The cruelty of a system that includes eternal punishment might seem staggering. It seemed so even to Dante, that medieval man himself, who at first showed pity to the shades in Hell and was rebuked by Virgil for it. To pity the damned is to deny the justice in the will of God, says Dante’s guide, and is itself a sin. It is not our place to understand God’s justice. Only to believe in its rightness.

I think it’s futile to try to argue with the medieval minds we encounter. They won’t listen to reason. Better for us to listen to the stuttering of these alien souls – and perhaps we’ll notice the resonances in our own faltering logic. Our own cravings for authority, order, and judgement. And, in noting the distance of centuries that lies between us and Dante, perhaps we’ll come to question those modern impulses we find in ourselves that we are so quick to condemn in souls that we call “medieval.”

(I’ve been reading Dante’s Paradise, translated by Mark Musa. The line quoted at the beginning is Canto 3, line 76.)

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Review of Slavoj Žižek’s Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (Part 1: “Introduction”)

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Lee

Slavoj Žižek begins his book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight by discussing the purpose of philosophy. Its purpose, he says, is to “prod” people – meaning to “corrupt the youth” the way Socrates did, by challenging established norms.

I like the word “extraneate” that Žižek uses, which means something like: “alienate” or “make strange.” For Žižek, the task of philosophy is to make the established norms seems strange so that it is more difficult to accept them, and more natural to question them.

Not all philosophy “prods” though: there’s another kind of philosopher who prefers to “normalise”, in the sense of keeping things in line with the status quo. (There’s a different sense of “normalise” in use now, which means something like “make a new normal.” We’ll come back around to that.)

This “normalising” or “(re)normalising” philosophy Žižek calls “state philosophy.” Strangely, he doesn’t consider Hegel to be a state philosopher. “Hegel unleashed the all-destructive power of negativity,” he writes, and “even if [Hegel and others] sometimes appeared almost as state-philosophers, the establishment was never really at ease with them.” (1)

So being a state or (re)normalising philosopher means that the establishment is at ease with you, you fit into the established pattern, you don’t rock the boat.

Žižek, like all revolutionary thinkers, wants us to establish a new normal. It might sound like an old normal, since what he wants he is unashamed to call “Communism.” But for Žižek real Communism must always be something new, never simply a return to Stalinism, Leninism, or Trotskyism.

In the Introduction to his book, Žižek suggests that we look at all the “bad news” in the world today and try to find the “good news” in it. Looking for good news in the current situation doesn’t mean blithely accepting the status quo. It means looking for the possibility for change in the status quo.

For example, the “automisation of production” (human jobs being lost to machines) can be looked at in a negative, blithely positive, or radically positive way. On the negative side: it costs people their jobs, and risks throwing more and more people into poverty as their jobs are replaced and they can no longer find a way to earn a wage.

To find the good news in automisation is to ask yourself: why be afraid of automisation? Couldn’t it lead to a society where people have to work less and so are happier, more truly free? If you stop there then you’re just being naively optimistic: yes it could lead to that, but current political conditions suggest it won’t, since in fact automisation of production is used to generate more and more profit for a few, rather than to ensure that the mass of humanity have more leisure time, happiness, and freedom.

Looking at things this way can lead you into a kind of radical optimism, by letting you see what’s really wrong with automisation, which is not automatisation per se, but the fact that it is used to increase profits for the owners of industry at the expense of the working classes. The good news here is not in the facts as they stand, but in the possibilities that the facts open up: you can see now how political changes could lead to automisation being a good thing, and not “automatically” a bad thing. (6)

Žižek uses the rise of Jeremy Corbyn as an example of “good news” mediated by the “bad news”. In Corbyn’s case it was “bad news” in more ways than one: a “conservative media” portraying him as “undecided, incompetent, non-electable, and so on” made it seem that Corbyn might never be able to hold on to the Labour leadership. (9) But Žižek argues that all this bad news turned out to be good news: without the pressure of the media against him, Corbyn might have remained “a slightly boring and uncharismatic leader lacking a clear vision, merely a representative of the old Labour Party. It was in his reaction to the ruthless campaign against him that his ordinariness emerged as a positive asset, as something that attracted voters disgusted by the vulgar attacks on him.” (10)

What Žižek is talking about – and which I’m calling “radical positivity” – is using the possibility in a situation to bring a desirable situation about. But Žižek is quick to point out that things aren’t as simple as that. The truth is that you never know what the outcome will be in any given situation. You can merely try. There was no guarantee that Corbyn would survive the onslaught of the conservative media, but neither was there any chance of him surviving if he had blithely accepted the conservative pronouncements in the media and not stood his ground and fought back.

There are similar conservative judgements in the air when it comes to the possibility of Communism, and this brings us back around to the question of the two types of normalisation: normalisation versus what is more properly called “(re)normalisation”. Communism is often painted as if it were an effort in the latter, conservative direction: Communism doesn’t work, people say, and as evidence they point to failed regimes like the Soviet Union, as if it were to get back to that that communists wanted. But this is to ignore the real task of Communism, which is to bring about a new state of affairs, to make a new normal.

Žižek ends his introductory chapter by pointing out that the real goal of Communism, as stated by Marx, is abolition of the state. This, of course, has never been achieved. It might seem impossible to achieve, precisely because it has never been done before. In order to achieve their goals, communists must not look back at old regimes but look instead at the present, and at the possibilities that the “bad news” of the present day offers up to us.

(I’ve been reading Slavoj Žižek’s Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity, published in 2018 by Allen Lane.)

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Get Out of My Garden

Posted on April 29, 2019 by Lee

Henry Miller’s Nexus is, above all, the story of Miller’s own development as a writer.

He says he is learning to read between the lines. It is difficult for him to explain what he means by this: “How could anyone, unless he hugged me like a shadow, know the myriads of waste places I frequented in my search for ore?”

He is searching for “the mysteries hidden in pebbles, twigs, fleas, lice and pollen” and the meaning of “secret codes” and “night messages.”

What is strange is that Miller says that learning to write meant learning to resist the temptation to try to write poetry, where poetry is literature, and literature, as Paul Valéry describes it, is something that has value only according to its law:

“What is of value to us alone (meaning the poets of literature) has no value. This is the law of literature.”

Meaning that, for Valéry, literature is communication, and so the ultimate aim for poets is to find the form to fit the idea, so that the idea can be communicated to others, to non-poets. The way that a poet plays with the poetic tradition she has inherited is not an end in itself: the poet, in honing her craft, is trying to find better and better expression for her ideas.

According to this line from Valéry, your written work is like a public garden, made beautiful for all to enjoy. The more people can enjoy it, the better it is.

The problem with thinking of your work like this is: it becomes very difficult to get started. You have to think like a salesperson, do your market research: what kind of person reads a book like this? What do they want? And you might kid yourself into thinking you have found the answer.

For Miller, this is all too complicated and unreliable. It is better to keep things simple, and follow your own instincts. The creative process begins with following your own desire just to make a sound. “It is enough and more to stretch, yawn, wheeze …”

Following Valéry’s advice means worrying too much about what you should be saying, should be writing: worrying about your “ideal reader.” Miller tells us that he found freedom as a writer when he decided his ideal reader was himself, and anyone like him. He didn’t have to worry about the public:

“An absent-minded gardener I was, who, though tender and observing, did not attach too much importance to the presence of weeds, thorns, nettles, but craved only the joy of frequenting this place apart …”

If you’re writing in order to escape, why would you create a public garden in your work? Better to stay between the lines, in the secret and dark places, where you can find your own enjoyment.

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Book Review: Lanny by Max Porter

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Lee

A lot of the very best books have a very simple story, made interesting by the new perspective that the author has brought to it. Perhaps it’s a story we have heard a hundred times before, but now it’s full of magic and vision.

Lanny is Max Porter’s second book, but I hadn’t heard of him until a few days ago, when I first picked it up. I notice, googling now, that his first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, is described as “surprising” in one of the reviewer quotations on the cover. I would say the same thing about Lanny. There’s little about this book that I could have expected.

I won’t say too much about what happens in the story because I don’t want to spoil it – I notice that the blurb on the cover very cleverly served to intrigue me while giving nothing away. This is a book to be enjoyed as it goes along, where expectation is useless.

This is prose that is also poetry, and that uses the special methods of poetry to have its effect. Poetry is about emotion surely, but the poet’s route to emotion is through the surprising collision of words with words, images with images. What I found in this book was a number of delicious what-is-happening moments, that feeling when a story is interrupted by a sudden collision, an image arriving out of nowhere, and we genuinely wonder where the author might be taking us from here. In the end, Porter provides a poignant meditation on human creativity, love, and loss, but he does so in a way that is as surprising as it is heartfelt.

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Kathy Acker and Postmodernism

Posted on April 15, 2019 by Lee

Though Kathy Acker doubts her ability to write essays, she nevertheless tackles the classical questions like any other essayist. In her short essay on postmodernism, she gives an answer to the question “What is art?”

Her answer is that art is “free discourse”. You make art where you create something new, not limited by the accepted discourse but altering it, and so transforming culture.

Engaging in discourse means “using given meanings and values, changing them and giving them back.” Art isn’t the only way of doing this: “A community, a society is always being constructed in discourse if and when discourse – including art – is allowed.”

Art is not just discourse but “free” discourse because, in art, anything is possible. It is “making”, where “making” means “make it new!”

Art, then, is about economy: you take what is given and give back something new, of your own making.

If the economy is “set”, art is not needed. Fascism, for example, dictates the rules for exchange and so art – in which there must be freedom to create new rules – is forbidden. Fascists believe that everything can be found in the past. I think of Nazis yawning through yet another performance of the Ring Cycle.

Discourse is about the present. Art isn’t paintings in a gallery: art is what is being created now to decide the culture. If you are going to put on some Wagner then “make it new!” – art can be set design and direction, translation and programme-writing.

Even today, perhaps we are heading towards a “set” economy, something like fascism. Everything already decided for us. If culture is decided for you, you don’t need to be an artist.

“We are now, in the United States and in England, in a world in which ownership is becoming more and more set: the rich stay rich; the poor stay dead.”

This is why postmodernism is a necessary “tactic” for an artist. Postmodernism means believing that the given narratives are not enough to explain the world. It means taking the established narratives and “going on” from them, going beyond them, and thereby keeping yourself open to new ways of talking about the world, society, and yourself. You keep discourse alive by affirming your power to create discourse, meaning, and culture.

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Telling It

Posted on March 15, 2019 by Lee

“I see the boys of summer in their ruin

“Lay the gold tithings barren,

“Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils …”

Great store is set today by grit: telling it like it is, calling it as you see it, just “telling the damn story”. But where is the magic if you only speak of what is, and ignore what was and what will be? Time at the heart of being. It’s the tone of prophecy that sets Dylan Thomas apart from the other kind of poet. The magic of his words, that always seem to say more than you can decipher. That seem to do things you cannot explain.

Ruining summer by bringing in the frost. Pointing out the maggots when the flowers are out for all to enjoy. The prophetic poet is not looking to be popular. Wailing over the sound of boys playing, the lazy summer buzz, the poet sees death in everything. The flowers are bright and make up the whole scene, but soon enough they must die.

“Flower, flower, all all and all.”

The flower connects the human being with the earth. It is alive, but of the earth. It is living but is of matter only, and without the spirit, and so is of the earth.

The flower, as plant, stands between the mineral – the dry unaliveness of earth – and the animal – the spirit clothed in flesh for as long as it walks here. The flower is all, tells us all, because it stands at the very centre of creation.

The flower blooms in its garden, our living world, which stands in the midst of the dry earth around and above the fires that roil beneath the surface; the flower and its all-embracing idea exist only in our hemmed-in world of the living. All beyond is darkness and death, dryness and desert. The poet reminds us of the smallness of the flower, and the smallness of life. Why?

Because beauty is only beauty when small and fragile, precarious and evanescent. And the poet’s business is beauty. And so he gives us the sublime – the eternal darkness before and after death, and the vast deserts where life cannot thrive – so that the beautiful can stand out for us in its moment.

And yet … our living life, our fluid spirit, is in the world which is also dryness and death. You cannot have one without the other. But it is so much easier to focus on life, and put thoughts of death aside. And so you tell it like it is, and talk only of “the working world.” Of the ceaseless activity of the human spirit.

And talk of the working world brings its own worries and fears. Unspoken but present. All the answers are supposed to be here. We’ve been honest haven’t we? Called it as we saw it? Told it like it is? But something is missing …

“Fear not the working world, my mortal …”

Remember you are mortal, the poet is saying. Look past the working world. “This too shall pass” is the lesson. And with awareness of mortality comes freedom and vision. The working world will do what it will, but it can only hold you for so long. And then you will be free, as you were free before. And with this knowledge, you cannot but be free now.

I read an article that suggested that “the cities of nine / Days’ night whose towers will catch / In the religious wind / like stalks of tall, dry straw” could be read as a prophecy of 9/11 … Please no, not this. This is not the kind of prophecy we find in Thomas. He does not prophesy the events of the working world. His prophecy is certain: that you will die, and all this will die. And so gives meaning to life above anything those who live and die distracted in the cities’ bustle can give you. Here, by his “breakneck of rocks” looking out by the sea the poet is troubled, “at poor peace,” that he cannot reach those “eternal waters away,” cannot reach those who, for all their working cares, cannot see the reality of life and death. When the poet presents to us the rhythms of nature, he is showing us this reality of death in life.

The poet does not see everything, is not a seer. He is himself limited by the tools he has chosen: his words. “Shut, too, in a tower of words …” he sticks to what he knows, which is words. He is not an expert in nature or the human soul, but in words. But we have a lot still to learn about words, and so we can learn a lot about life by listening to the poet and seeing where the words go, and how they brush up against lived life.

The poet is not a seer, he just gives the impression of being one. This is his art. And words, his tools, are powerful and can often seem all-encompassing. As if all truths could be spoken. Tell it like it is, call it like you see it …

Perhaps the poet does try to say everything. But it is only in his failure to do this that he succeeds in the business of being a poet. Poetry is not about putting things neatly. It is not about spelling things out once and for all. It is about instilling in the mind of the reader a kind of uncertainty, unfamiliarity, and providing fragments of a language by which this uncertainty might be navigated.

Certainty is the enemy of art. The poet points to the signs of death at the heart of life, and the readers’ certainties are shaken. And possibilities for new creation are opened up, again and again, at each reading.

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Vision and Judgement

Posted on February 15, 2019 by Lee

“I don’t know, let’s see.” – Alfred Korzybski

Gilles Deleuze has a problem with judgement. The problem is that judgement has too prominent a place in the way human beings interpret and evaluate the world.

We use judgement to make important decisions. We judge in order to decide what has value and what does not, and what should be valued more than other things.

Whatever problem you might have with judgement, it might seem impossible to dispense with it entirely, since we use it make sense of the world. To renounce judgement would be to cast aside the means for distinguishing between things in the world.

But Deleuze thinks there are other ways to determine values, and to give meaning to life.

The problem with judgement is that it really doesn’t help us decide our principles and values. Instead, it is what happens when you’ve already decided on your principles. You make judgements when you have “pre-existing criteria” to ground them on.

The problem with judgement is it stops anything new coming into being. How can you create new principles when you’ve already settled for the ones you’ve been given?

Deleuze is using this word “judgement” to refer to this limited way of thinking about the world. You accept the pre-existing conditions for judgement, the conditions you were taught as a child, and as you get older you become more adept at building arguments from these, to prove to others and to yourself of the “right” and the “wrong” of various objects, behaviours, and modes of existence.

A problem with judgement is that it is so often used against other people. If you have certain pre-existing ideas about what the world ought to be like, and you meet someone who doesn’t fit into that view, you can create brilliant arguments to prove that that person is in the wrong, and even that that person is of less value as a human being.

It is much more difficult to turn such arguments against yourself. You’ve known your “pre-existing criteria” all your life, and so you’ve had plenty of time to rationalise your own existence within them.

Judgement isn’t a useful tool for self-analysis. It is a weapon to be used against others. Us versus them: the kind of thinking that is used to justify war, prisons, and every form of self-imposed human misery.

One of the reasons we might feel we need judgement is that life is so difficult. It is a struggle. But Deleuze suggests that it is a mistake to think of life as a struggle against others, of you against the world. The real struggle is with yourself.

So you need something other than judgement if you are going to get through the struggle.

What judgement hides is the truth of the human soul: love and hate. We don’t tend to question our deepest beliefs, or ask where they came from. The root of any principle you hold is an emotional one, an instinctual relation between the body and the world – but judgement can’t drill down and examine those roots. It must start with the principles and work up.

The root of your principles is emotional: love and hate. It’s not easy to accept this. Perhaps you pretend you love everyone and everything – and yet still you, or others on your behalf, must deal out judgement and punishment. You tell yourself you don’t want it to be this way, that others must suffer, but that this is what reason dictates. You ignore the fact that there’s hatred at the root of this, and that, by accepting that others must be neglected or punished, you have willed it this way.

The alternative is to drill down and think about how you feel about things. What do you love? What do you hate?

Admitting what it is you hate is a good way to resist judgement. If you know that you hate somebody and for that reason you demand that they be made to suffer, then you are demanding something evil. You might resist making such demands, now that your real motives are visible to you.

It is a lesson that might sound paradoxical, and yet it is ancient wisdom. And it has hardly ever been tried. The lesson: look into your heart to discover what you hate, in order that you might learn compassion.

The lesson then is one of honesty with oneself. Self-knowledge is achieved not through judgement but though vision – through seeing what you, yourself, are. An individual, a body, in the world. And just as vulnerable to the weapons of judgement as every other body out there.

What then is the alternative to judgement, if decisions are to be made? If life is to have value and meaning? Perhaps it would be wisest to say, “I don’t know, let’s see,” as we begin to put the struggle for the vision of the self before the business of judging others.

(I’ve been reading Gilles Deleuze’s essay “To Have Done with Judgement,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco.)

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Fantasy and Reality in Andy Warhol

Posted on January 7, 2019 by Lee

Your “aura” is something you have before you open your mouth, says Andy Warhol. People see you and make an impression of you in their minds. If it’s very favourable or very unfavourable, then perhaps you seem to have an “aura”, a presence that fascinates or repels them. And then you open your mouth.

It doesn’t matter who you are. There’s fantasy at work here: their initial impression of you created something in their mind that wasn’t you at all. They’ve made up all kinds of stories about you – what kind of school you went to, what kind of thing you do for a living, what and how much you like to drink – even if only unconsciously. We all do this all the time with people we just met, as long as they make any impression at all, whether good or bad.

It’s not your fault you burst their bubble. You didn’t write those stories in their mind. You might say your aura did, but it’s more accurate to say they did it to themselves.

And so you open your mouth, and reality kills the fantasy. For better or for worse.

There’s nothing magical about reality. This is why Warhol thinks fantasy is so great. We should be able to hold onto fantasy for as long as possible. Warhol says that we should all remain babies until we are 40 years old, and only then learn the facts of life.

That way, the fantastic part of life, the magical part, could last so much longer. The disappointment would come at one blow, and then be done with.

If there were no opportunity to create fantasies at all, there would be no let-down. Warhol says that he gets bored of meeting celebrities. They never live up to the expectations you had of meeting them, and they’re so easy to meet anyway – for someone like Warhol. The people he likes is to meet are those people he never thought he’d meet in a million years.

He gives an example: in 1972 he met The Singing Lady he’d always listened to on the radio. He’d never even thought about the possibility of meeting her, and so the meeting was something entirely new. It hadn’t been made old through preparation and expectation. He’d had no opportunity to create a fantasy about meeting her.

No fantasy, no let-down.

This method of avoiding fantasy to make reality more bearable would inform his casting choices too, he says. I don’t think he’s talking about his own films here, which, to my knowledge, are all depictions of real life and don’t tend to involve acting. I think he’s talking about if he were to work on a Hollywood film.

He says he would take care to choose the wrong person for the role. Professional actors – the “right” people for the roles – are too predictable, he says. You’re expecting something great and you get it, but it’s the same old thing and so it’s a let-down.

Better to choose an amateur. Amateurs are great, Warhol says, because you never know what they’re going to do. There are no expectations, so whatever happens is new and great.

Perhaps we could say: professional actors are people who have spent a long time creating an “aura”. We go to see their films because we know what to expect from them. And when they don’t deliver it’s a crushing disappointment. When they do deliver it’s a disappointment too, but we don’t tend to consciously notice that. We don’t realise that what we really want is reality, and that seeing these same Hollywood films over and over leaves us empty.

Amateurs don’t have these Hollywood auras, because they’re real. Their appeal will come from what they do, not from any expectation you have of them. What you will see will be real, for better or worse.

What Andy Warhol seems to be saying is: fantasy and reality are both great. Fantasy is what we live for, but reality is what surprises us and makes life worth living. Modern life is a mixture of both, and that is what makes it so painful and so interesting.

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Henry Miller’s Christmas

Posted on December 17, 2018 by Lee

Unexpected Cheer

Henry Miller always said that he couldn’t write stories: his books are huge spiral-formed stream-of-consciousness works that can’t really be called novels. And he tends to depict the grim and obscene realities of life rather than giving a sentimental view of things. So I was surprised, when I read Chapter 6 of Nexus for the first time, to discover that here we find a rather sweet story about a Christmas spent with his family.

Miller vs Christmas

It starts predictably enough, with Miller explaining why he’s always hated Christmas and pouring scorn upon it as he does all the other traditions Americans are supposed to hold dear. Like them, he couldn’t seem to escape it: “Christmas Day always found me in the bosom of my family – the melancholy knight wrapped in his black armour, forced like every other idiot in Christendom to stuff his belly and listen to the utterly empty babble of his kin.”

Even those of us who tend to enjoy Christmas can probably relate to Henry’s disgust with it: we’ve probably all had Christmases at times when life wasn’t so good for us, when the idea of going home to be jolly with the family seemed impossibly forced, when the commercialism of Christmas made the event seem rotten, when it might have seemed a better idea to cancel all plans and stay in bed all day. And Henry Miller’s life isn’t going well at the time this story is set: he is in a disastrous ménage à trois with Mona and Stasia, his writing is going nowhere, and he is without any other kind of meaningful work.

We can understand why Henry might have preferred to just stay in bed on Christmas Day.

Christmas Dinner

In fact it turns out that he is up first, and has to work hard to drag Mona and Stasia – who were out drinking until 3am the night before – out of bed and into their clothes and into a cab. As much as he hates Christmas, Henry seems determined not to let his family down by being late for dinner.

Things seem to be going OK at first: he is surprised at how well Mona and Stasia are getting along with his family. It’s polite conversation all around the table. His only worry is how to escape: as soon as possible, but not so soon as to be rude. It’s only 3.30pm! “I wondered how on earth we would manage to keep the conversation going until it was time to go.”

It’s strange to think of Henry Miller, rebel and iconoclast, worrying about the conversation around the Christmas dinner table. But he’s worried that when the polite conversation stops the bullets might begin to fly – starting with his mother asking him difficult questions about his writing, a side of his character she cannot and will not understand.

Bullets

Mona and Stasia ask to be allowed to take a nap, and so Henry is left to carry the conversation with the relatives. He seems to do OK at this, because it’s a few hours until things start to fall apart. Mona – she and Stasia having woken up now – declares that Henry is a genius, to which his mother replies with sarcasm: “He certainly is no genius at making money.”

Henry can see it’s turning into a row, but he’s glad of it. He’s finally had enough of the small-talk, the “empty babble”, and he’s hoping an argument will be “revivifying.” And those who are familiar with Miller’s other books are probably expecting carnage and chaos at this point, some kind of Christmas horror story culminating in a minor crime being committed.

Christmas Magic

Things don’t work out like that. Henry’s father ends up taking the side of Henry and his artist friends, and he and Stasia have an enjoyable conversation about painting. Henry’s mother retreats from the room for a while, defeated for the time being. The family albums come out and the rest of the evening is spent merrily. Henry is able to abandon any drastic escape plan he might have entertained when his father finally says: “Let’s have something to eat… I’m sure they’ll want to be getting home soon.”

Perhaps I was so little expecting a story with any Christmas cheer at all that my expectations were very low for this one. Perhaps a real “magic of Christmas” type story would involve Henry finally reconciling with his mother once and for all, rather than winning the day by forcing her to retreat. It always seems a shame to me, reading Miller, to think how much he apparently hated her.

And yet this story stands out, resting as it does amid so many stories of despair, for being a true story of reconciliation. If not a reconciliation with his mother, perhaps it is at least a tale of Miller’s reconciliation with Christmas itself, his usual grim expectations of the world banished for at least a few hours.

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