Gnashing my teeth at the silence

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Lee

“If you insist on gnashing your teeth you can gnash them at the wild waves, at the silent forest, or at the stony hills. One can get desperate here in a way that no city man understands. Sure, you can run amok . . . but where would it lead you? You can’t slash mountains to ribbons, nor cut the sky to pieces, nor flatten a wave with the broadest sword.” (146)

When you’re alone in nature, every feeling you have, every action you take, is met by silence. It’s different when you’re among people. People will respond to you, using their own words to encourage you, cheer you, judge you or condemn you.

These trees and mountains don’t judge – though sometimes they seem to. Your thought (perhaps you dared to speak it aloud, since you believed you were alone?) returns to you. You hear it: and it seems empty and vain in this vast silence.

In a sense, the trees and mountains are speaking to you. The silence of nature is a full silence, not a mere emptiness. Wordless waves crash, birds sing telepathic songs. The waves and skies seem able to take your words and repeat them back to you, they have nothing to add, content in their own sound and motion. Their indifference feels like acceptance. Nature accepts you for what you are. When in the city you feel beset, the indifference of rocks and trees can be a great comfort.

Uncompromising, nature tells its truth simply. Its truth is simplicity: live simply. If you’re unsure of something, ask your heart. If you find no answer, be silent a while and the answer will come. Let the trees speak: but don’t expect them to tell you if you’re right or wrong. Let the skies listen: but they will tell you nothing you cannot tell yourself. And when you’re ready to hear “the wisdom of the heart”, the heart will speak.

(The page number refers to Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, New Directions, 1957)

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Truth and Wonder in “Henry and June”

Posted on April 28, 2016 by Lee

Taken from her diaries, Henry and June is Anaïs Nin’s account of her relationship with Henry Miller and his wife June Mansfield. During the course of the relationship, we see Anaïs and Henry grow, learning from each other. And all the while June in the background, chaotic and mysterious.

Aside from their love of June, Anaïs and Henry share also a love of truth, and a love of wonder. But they have a complicated relationship with both of these.

Firstly, it’s impossible for either of them to be completely honest. Certainly Anaïs can’t be honest with her husband Hugo about her relationship with Henry. And both Nin and Miller struggle to be honest in their writing: they’re often holding something back, however much they try to be truthful. If truth means total open honesty, then they will achieve truth only through a great struggle. Miller demands “frankness” however “painfully obtained”. (64) But Nin doesn’t think truth simply means honesty:

“You are right, in one sense, when you speak of my honesty. An effort, anyway, with the usual human or feminine retractions. To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyse inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is a danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.” (65)

Honesty means facing up to the truth, and speaking openly about it. Sometimes you can be hated for your honesty, because it means pointing out painful truths to those who would rather ignore those truths. It’s often better to remain silent – a dishonest silence, such as Nin’s silence with her husband about Henry. But how can a lover of truth bear to be dishonest? Nin’s rationalisation for dishonesty seems to be that she fears for the things she might destroy were she to be honest. It’s better to let things be. Henry is more honest than she, she seems to be saying at this point: but Henry is brutal in his honesty and risks hurting those around him. He uses “caricature”, which means ruthlessly pointing out the faults of those he describes, exaggerating in order to magnify these characteristics. Nin seems to be asking: if we were to be totally honest about our relationship, what then? Would it die? And what about June? Could she stand up to caricature?

This is where the other love comes in: wonder. Wonder is as valuable as truth, but they are not always compatible. Wonder is what makes us alive, it’s what we live for. The feeling of the beauty and life of things. But when you see things as they truly are, wonder can be lost. You need to keep a distance from things to preserve their wonder. Wonder can be annihilated where truth is too direct and honesty too brutal. While Henry examines every detail, Anaïs tries to keep the love of wonder alive for both of them: “I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by . . . and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it.” (66)

As Anaïs and Henry’s relationship progresses, we see a sort of dialectic at work. Or perhaps “dialectic” is the wrong word, because we might say that nothing is resolved. Instead Nin swings from one direction to another, until finally she falls into an honesty that has destroyed the wonder of her relationship with Henry:

“Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality – to Henry’s selfishness, June’s love of power, my insatiable creativity which must concern itself with others and cannot be sufficient to itself. I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing.” (274)

The relationship continues – the last line of the book is: “So Henry is coming this afternoon, and tomorrow I am going out with June.” (274) But it’s been transformed into a new kind of love, one grounded in truth and not in wonder. Could we call this a resolution?

It depends on what comes next. Does the end of Henry and June point to a new phase in the relationship of these three people? Or does Nin once again retreat from these brutal truths, heading off in the other direction? Away from truth and into wonder again?

(Page numbers refer to Henry and June by Anaïs Nin, Penguin Classics 2001)

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First Encounters: Miller, Dostoevsky, Deleuze and Guattari

Posted on April 20, 2016 by Lee

“Such a day it may be when first you encounter Dostoevsky. You remember the smell of the tablecloth on which the book rests; you look at the clock and it is only five minutes from eternity; you count the objects on the mantelpiece because the sound of numbers is a totally new sound in your mouth, because everything new and old, or touched and forgotten, is a fire and a mesmerism.” (BS 10-11)

Before Henry Miller first read Dostoevsky he heard the name: “The Jew who pronounced his name for me had thick lips; he could not say Vladivostock, for instance, nor Carpathians – but he could say Dostoevsky divinely.” (BS 11) Miller was enchanted, and even when he came to read Dostoevsky’s words themselves, and even long afterwards, when he had become familiar with Dostoevsky’s many books, he never forgot all that was contained for him in that first utterance of the writer’s name.

I first encountered the name “Henry Miller” reading Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. At least this was the first time the name came to mean something to me. Because I encountered Miller in this work of philosophy, Miller was a philosopher for me before he was a writer of novels. Deleuze and Guattari tend to do this to the artists they write about: they philosophise them, turn them into philosophers. Miller seemed to have something important to say about desire. The following is a passage from Miller’s “Hamlet” essay, quoted by Deleuze and Guattari:

“What could I mean except that from this intellectual world in which we are swimming there must body forth a new world; but this new world can only be bodied forth in so far as it is conceived. And to conceive there must first be desire . . .” (AO 328)

Miller seemed to be saying something that I’d not seen clearly enough before then: whatever is created – a work of art, a new world – emanates from desire, arises because something new is desired. And because it is so easy to find contentment in what already exists – or if not contentment, then at least a hope that things might improve if we leave things as they are – there needs to be a deliberate shift in an individual’s consciousness, towards a desire for something new, before anything new can be created. This is from Miller’s Black Spring:

“I believe, as I walk through the horror of the present, that only those who have the courage to close their eyes, only those whose permanent absence from the condition known as reality can affect our fate.” (BS 124)

The state of affairs we call “reality” is stultifying, trapping us in hope and contentment. Only by absenting yourself from reality can you find your own desires, to find the gap or “crack”, the void from which something new can be created.

How to break reality open, to escape, to make a space for creativity? One way is to listen out for sounds, strange clues to new possible realities. A strange new name perhaps – “Miller” or “Dostoevsky” or something else – that can lead to a new way of thinking. A glimpse of light in the fog of everyday reality.

Works cited

AO = Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Published in 2004 by Continuum.

BS = Black Spring by Henry Miller. Published in 2012 by Alma Classics.

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Henry Miller Goes Into the Nightlife

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Lee

(Page numbers refer to the edition of Henry Miller’s Black Spring published by Alma Classics in 2012)

There’s a chapter in Henry Miller’s Black Spring called “Into the Nightlife. . .” It’s about “this mad thing called sleep”, and describes a dream. (118) To begin with, the succession of strange images seems merely random: a catalogue of images from a man’s dream. But slowly things start to make sense, and you can discover a message of “fertilising wisdom” at the heart of the dream. (114)

In the image-world of the dream, it’s from the graves in a cemetery that the wisdom comes. And shadows of death throughout – glimpses of the graveyard, and visions of heaven and hell: “Over the foot of the bed is the shadow of the cross”, the dream begins. (97)

The scene is “desolate” for the most part, empty, and even when a man pokes a hole in Miller’s side there is no blood. (98, 100) Lifeless and bloodless, the dreamer has only memories of life: “Life is written down in headlines twelve feet high with periods, commas and semicolons.” (100)

There are smells in this dream: “the air is full of chopped onions and sizzling hamburgers” – and these smells keep coming back to him. (103) But the human beings in this dream are not alive, they don’t respond to the sights and smells. Instead they wait on the beach, “human clams waiting for someone to pry their shells apart.” (103) Or they’ve already disappeared in “the white chalk breath of Plymouth” so that only a “non-human tranquillity” remains. (104) Or they are locked into their own private rituals, like the man who “is reading aloud in a monotonous voice from a huge iron book” with “his head . . . thrown back in ecstasy”. Miller’s metaphor here sums up the inhuman appearance of this man: “He looks like a broken street lamp gleaming in a wet fog.” (108)

And finally we get to the cemetery. “The whole cemetery is singing with its rich fat produce. Singing through the blades of wheat, the corn, the oats, the rye, the barley. The cemetery is bursting with things to eat . . . The whole street is now living off the cemetery grounds.” (113) It’s an amazing sight to the dreamer: “Who would have dreamt that the poor dead flat-chested buggers rotting under the stone slabs contained such fertilising wisdom?” (113-114) Of course, it’s Henry Miller who is dreaming. It’s Miller who dreams that this is where wisdom is found, in the sleep of death.

When you sleep, some of this wisdom opens up to you, if you know how to look. The wisdom of the dead, that you can glimpse even before it’s your time to die. In the next chapter, Miller writes: “I believe, as I walk through the horror of the present, that only those who have the courage to close their eyes, only those whose permanent absence from the condition known as reality can affect our fate.” (124) Absent from reality: like the sleeping and the dead. Miller’s dream tells him that wisdom is found in peace and silence.

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Henry Miller’s Certitude in Black Spring

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Lee

(Page numbers refer to the edition of Henry Miller’s Black Spring published by Alma Classics in 2012)

In the chapter of Black Spring called “The Angel is my Watermark”, we get to watch Henry Miller as he creates a work of art, a painting. Towards the end of the chapter, he stands back and admires his “masterpiece”:

“What appears now before my eyes is the result of innumerable mistakes, withdrawals, erasures, hesitations; it is also the result of a certitude.” (48)

Miller’s “certitude”: it’s the name he gives to the something of himself that he puts into the work. “You would like to give the nail brush credit, and the water credit. Do so – by all means. Give everybody and everything credit.” (48-49) You can add up all the things that go into the work: the materials, the influences . . . But you’ll always fall short. “Out by a penny, eh? If you could take a penny from your pocket and balance the books you would do so. But you are no longer dealing with actual pennies. There is no machine clever enough to devise, to counterfeit, this penny which does not exist.” (49)

The penny which does not exist is this certitude that comes from Miller himself. It doesn’t exist because it’s something negative: “I have never been able to draw a balance. I am always minus something. I have a reason therefore to go on.” (49) It’s what we lack that makes us go on. It’s the same with all meaningful human activity:

“We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognised.” (17)

Strange to give the name “certitude” to this “minus”. When I hear the word “certitude” I usually think of something positive: a self-belief, something you can stand for. But Miller isn’t sure of anything positive. He’s only sure that he lacks something and so has to go on.

Miller’s certitude takes his work in a certain direction, but never to any conclusion. Even when the work is finished, it is never concluded. “It has nothing to do with clarity, precision, et cetera. (The et cetera is important!)” (17) He ends with an “et cetera” because there is always more that he could say.

Certitude means choosing a direction and sticking to it, because what else is there to do? In a strange way it does mean being certain of yourself. It means being certain that this activity is good enough, as long as you’re expressing yourself in some way.

Certitude seems to be opposed to precision (and clarity, et cetera). “Precision” means trying to make everything fit into a predetermined form, whereas certitude means taking a direction on the basis of nothing – a minus – and seeing where it takes you. Experiment.

When you write with certitude, the work may be messy and full of mistakes. “Don’t worry about errors when you’re writing. The biographers will explain all errors.” (23) Certitude does not guarantee precision, far from it. Certitude guarantees imprecision, because the brain is constantly whirring and changing and throwing up new ideas as you proceed. “The mind blunders because it is too precise an instrument; the threads break against the mahogany knots . . .” (17) Contradiction is an essential part of what it means to think. (“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then . . .”)

So how to proceed? Choose a direction and just go: “When each thing is lived through to the end there is no death and no regrets . . .” (16)

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Spiral Form in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Lee

(Page numbers refer to Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity by James M Decker. Routledge, 2005)

Henry Miller rejected linear narrative, creating instead something he called “spiral form”. (4) “I . . . have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment.” (7) Miller digresses, repeats himself, lets the narrative dissolve into dream sequences . . . he uses spiral form to create the impression that he’s telling the story just as it happens to come out, as it occurs to him to tell it. (“I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write.”)

James M Decker explains the purpose of spiral form: in Tropic of Cancer, Miller is telling his stories “not in a logical progression, but in a subjective order.” (63) It’s all about the subject, the self: “narrative continuity” is sacrificed so that Miller can tell the story of the self from various positions, many of which “contradict or undercut one another”, and this creates “a hermeneutics of the self.” (1) In other words, we see a development of the self as it reveals itself to the reader in all its many conflicting aspects.

“Spiral form” means drifting away from the linear narrative and returning to it again and again. Digression and repetition are essential to spiral form. The linear narrative is there to be abandoned and picked up as the narrator sees fit, as he focuses on the spiral of the self’s subjective journey.

Some examples of spiral form:

  1. Interior monologue. Miller can interrupt the action with “anecdotes . . . asides, explanations, or expostulations.” (74-75)
  2. Lamentation. A particular kind of aside, where Miller will launch into a “vitriolic explosion” triggered by something in the narrative. Often a lamentation of the plight of modern man under capitalism. (72)
  3. Boredom. Miller’s narrator will spiral away from a boring scene with strange “improvisations”. For example, listening to someone speak and suddenly Miller is drifting away from what the speaker is saying and instead imagining him or her in some fantastic scene. (70)
  4. Dreams. “Spiral flow” seems to apply particularly to dreams, in which there is rarely much narrative continuity. When he was working on his Paris texts, Miller was very interested in this problem of how to render dreams in prose. (71)
  5. Emotion. Miller sometimes creates the impression of an “onslaught of emotion” by using “a flourish of illogical sights and sounds.” We momentarily step outside the “chronological current” as we are given a sense of what the narrator is feeling in that moment. (74)
  6. Catalogues. The narrator takes us away from the action to provide long lists, “a deluge of information.” Often these lists are attempts to “evoke a sense” of a scene, a person or a room. But the lists are often so chaotic – the narrator seems to pick out details at random – that the reader gets a sense that there’s a lot more that could be said about the scene, if the narrator were not so overwhelmed by it. This subjective sense of being overwhelmed in the attempt to recall a scene takes over momentarily, before we’re returned to the action. (72-73)

Decker tells us that Miller’s contribution to literature was to ask: does a novel have to have a plot? (155) Miller decided that it doesn’t, and that a novel can dispense with plot to focus on exploring what it means to be an individual self. In the many digressions and repetitions of spiral form the self will revisit old experiences and ideas from new perspectives, these new perspectives often contradicting the old. It’s essential to let these contradictions stand, so we get a sense of the development, or “hermeneutics”, of the self. (154)

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Notes on James M Decker’s Concept of “Spiral Form”: An Essay Review

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Lee

Page numbers refer to “‘The agonizing gutter of my past’: Henry Miller, Conversion, and the Trauma of the Modern” by James M Decker, in Henry Miller: New Perspectives, ed. James M. Decker and Indrek Männiste (Bloomsbury, 2015) pp. 21-31

Abandoned by his wife, Henry Miller is shocked “to the core”, traumatised by the realisation of who he is and what he’s done in his life. He experiences a “conversion of the soul”. James M Decker therefore places him in the “conversion tradition” of writing: Miller’s mental discomfort is a punishment for what he’s done, and his punishment brings about a kind of repentance, which will lead to a kind of conversion. (21)

In Nexus, Miller describes what happened next: he writes down the story of his life “rapidly, in telegraphic style”. It all comes out in chronological order. But later on, having developed as a writer, he would write in “an alinear, spiral form”. (22)

The conversion proper happens when Miller is able to reject the freedoms of modernity and find his own personal creative freedom. The “boundless freedom and opportunity” of modernity “has dissolved into vacuity and mechanisation”: “alphabetically, numerically, statistically, it made sense. But . . . when you examined one lone individual . . . you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano.” You have to “close your eyes” to the promises of modernity to find yourself, and this amounts to a kind of faith. (23-24)

Closing your eyes to reality and searching for creative metaphors to capture the truth of events is something you do in the face of trauma. Miller was explicit about his practice of distorting the facts and using “creative memory” to reconstruct events. It’s a way of coping with trauma. (25)

But to reconstruct events this way, Miller had to become an artist. His response to trauma in the first instance was just to put down events as they occurred – in “telegraphic style”, as we saw above – but this wasn’t enough: he had to become an artist to get to the “greater reality”, since only an artist can create something new out of his or her experience. (25)

You start not with form but with formlessness, just putting it all down, you “wade through rivers of shit to find a germ of reality”. Then you “spiral around” the self over and over again before you find the form that fits the reality you’ve found. You need to spiral around because you’re trying to get to the traumatic truth and you can’t simply state it. And you never quite hit that truth, so the form becomes a spiral form. (25-26)

“Overwhelmed – or perhaps amused – by his inability to replicate experience, the narrator . . . generates metaphor after metaphor, mask after mask, that can only intimate (imitate?) his trauma and stand for his conversion.” This is what makes Miller’s writing appear formless: metaphor after metaphor that can seem arbitrary, because Miller can never quite express what these metaphors refer to. He’s always “at play” with the reality he’s trying to express, moving around it. (26)

Conversion involves “antisocialisation”: in other words, the convert turns away from his old mode of existence – even friends and family – and towards the new. The “marked” passages in Miller, the “rhetorical pyrotechnics that blast off the page” serve this process of antisocialisation. Decker is suggesting that, in these wild passages in his books, Miller is breaking away from the old forms of literature to create something new, using his own voice. He’s “converted” once “everything that is literature has fallen from [him]”, and so he’s no longer copying other writers and he’s writing in his own voice. (27)

But Decker suggests that Miller’s conversion didn’t end there. He continues to move away from and closer to the self in an endless spiral, each cycle being a rebirth, and “more and more himself with each rebirth.” (27)

Decker’s essay is a nice overview of lots of ideas about Miller, trauma and conversion from various writers – Paul Jahshan, Peter A. Dorsey, Leigh Gilmore, to name a few. It’s given me a sense of what “spiral form” means. Next I’ll read Decker’s book Henry Miller and Narrative Form, in order to get a fuller sense of the concept.

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Notes on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer Episode 7: Hopelessness and Endurance

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Lee

“Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.”

Giving up belief in miracles means giving up hope, giving up any reason to endure. Henry Miller describes the feeling of giving up hope:

“. . . and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.”

It’s not that miracles can’t happen. It’s just that they probably won’t. And so acting as if a miracle will occur is a mistake. Better to face the probability that nothing will improve, and the only moment you can count on is the present one.

Hope is something that can inspire you to go on. But what does hope inspire you to go on to do? What do you hope for? Hope makes promises about success, wealth, happiness – and the trouble is that such things can be gained by all kinds of means, good and bad. You can become successful, wealthy and happy at the expense of others, and even at the expense of yourself: sacrificing your dreams to your success, if success is bought by conforming to someone else’s rules.

If you can extinguish hope, then you can extinguish that illusion that tempts you to seek personal gain at any cost. You can live entirely for the moment, since it’s all you have.

And the secret is: give up hope, belief in miracles, the reason for enduring – and you’ll endure anyway. A new kind of endurance, grounded in hopelessness.

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Henry Miller and Being in the Moment

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Lee

(Some notes on the text and related thoughts as I read Indrek Männiste’s Henry Miller: The Inhuman Artist Chapter 3. Where I write about Zen I’m recalling – however imperfectly – something from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. There’s a Miller quotation from Tropic of Cancer, and another from The Colossus of Maroussi which is quoted by Männiste himself.)

Indrek Männiste compares Henry Miller’s ideas to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Miller’s “traditional present” is Heidegger’s “metaphysical ground” of modernity.

Heidegger: the metaphysics of an age determines the self-understanding of those who live in that age. In the case of modernity, everything is understood through a positivist, scientific outlook.

Miller: modern men and women understand themselves in the moment, but this moment is always part of a linear progression. The modern self-understanding: life takes place in the “traditional present”. I’m at a point in the story of my life; we’re at a stage in world history. Every moment leads to the next one, and you can evaluate a moment based on the outcome. And you can look back at the past to determine how far you’ve progressed and evaluate the moment that way. Modern politicians congratulate themselves on their work because they see how far we’ve come – in terms of wealth, human rights, and so on.

As soon as you start to talk about the moment in time any differently – denying the importance of this progression of moments through time – in the modern world it starts to sound like you’re talking nonsense, because you’re trying to talk outside the bounds of the metaphysics of the age. Miller often slips into this kind of nonsense when he’s trying to describe the possibility of escape from modern life into the “full present”. (“Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air.”)

Trying to explain what Miller means by “full present”, one way is to turn to Zen: being in the full present is what Zen teachers are telling you to do when they say things like “When eating, eat!” You don’t eat because you are hungry or because you need energy, or if you do you should forget about this in the moment and just dwell in the activity of eating. Zen teachers remind their students to be present to themselves, and in this way become free of the ego. Everything in Zen sounds like a contradiction because it’s an attempt to break the modern programming through which we understand ourselves.

Escaping into the moment can bring us peace, and we need peace. “We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbour is doing we might get a new lease of life. We might learn to do without mines, without explosives, without battleships . . .” So even the escape into the moment can be a means to an end, a step on the way to progress, the way to a new kind of society.

But Miller didn’t know whether such a change could occur, and probably thought it unlikely. The escape into the moment and the peace it brings to the individual is an end in itself, it’s simply the way a living creature ought to live. Especially an artist, who ought to be more alive even than anyone else.

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Notes on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer Episode 2: “The Last Book”

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Lee

These madmen, Henry and Boris, want to write “The Last Book”. It will be the last because it will break everything apart.

“Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air.” When we finally come apart this reality will come forth again out of us, and everything will be as new.

Miller studies a painting – a still life by Dufresne – and tries to hold on to his identity. Trying to capture something alive – the artist, himself, his vision – and hold it there, in the work of art. Miller the writer, who will write the book to end all books, blowing everything to pieces.

When the world is torn apart the continents within us will rise up to create a new reality, and we’ll have no need for these identities we struggle to hold onto. Swept along.

Miller’s identity: a writing machine. If I can keep writing then I know what I am.

Or: lost in the writing. Giving himself completely over to description of what’s going on around him. Negation of the self.

“I am a writing machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows . . . I am the machine . . .”

Identity is non-identity. Going with the flow is holding onto the raft you have built, your own identity.

The writing process continues, and the people Miller writes about seem to dance for him – Miller is the only stable thing in the room. He’s entrenched himself and he writes like a machine, dreaming his own dream, warding off the nightmare.

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