Essay review: “Henry Miller’s Inhuman Philosophy” by Indrek Männiste (in Henry Miller: New Perspectives, Bloomsbury 2015, pp. 9-20)

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Lee

Miller is a writer, not a philosopher. So he “has” a philosophy, he doesn’t “do” philosophy, says Indrek Männiste. A philosophy, in the sense that Miller has one, is something “intuitive” that affects how one lives one’s life “day to day”. It’s a “metaphysical sense of life”. (9)

Miller thought academic philosophy to be “dull and lifeless”. Ideas had to be “wedded to action”, otherwise they were of no interest. Miller doesn’t have a philosophy in the sense of an abstract set of ideas with no direct practical application. But Männiste thinks that if we take philosophy in the sense of an “intuitive relation to reality” then Miller must have had a philosophy. So the question is not “whether” but “how” Miller’s ideas relate to a philosophy. (9)

Männiste thinks that there are some basic ideas in Miller that we cannot grasp unless we understand the theoretical framework in which they’re embedded. Miller had a philosophical theory of sorts and we have to understand it if we’re to understand him fully. It’s a theory of time (“traditional present” versus “full present”), a theory of humanity (“human” versus “inhuman”) and a theory of the transcendental (the “China-concept”). In his essay, Männiste explains the meaning of Miller’s concepts, as he sees them. We’ll see that Männiste believes that Miller’s philosophy is a practical philosophy for artists. (10)

Part of what drove Miller to write as he did was his (largely negative) reaction to modern life. He was interested in “the possibility of the life of the modern artist” in modern times. Some things that made life difficult for the artist in Miller’s day were “a linear notion of time and history, progress, modern technology . . .” Such things can seem all well and good until you look and see the madness that they produce: anxiety at the passing of time, sacrifice of the individual to economic and technological progress, and so on. (10-11)

Männiste points out that Miller isn’t opposing any one particular philosopher when he opposes these aspects of modernity: he’s reacting to “a general trend of the modern Western world.” However, Männiste does pick out August Comte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as philosophers Miller might oppose: Comte’s positivist account of the human condition ignores the complexities of the condition of the artist, while Miller see Hegel’s “linear account and the universal notion of freedom not as a victory, but indeed as the defeat of humanity.” (11)

Miller thinks that instead of seeing history as a linear progression of which you are a part it’s better to see the past as dead: “I am a carcass getting an injection of new life”. What is to come is not a continuation of the past but something entirely new. A “discontinuation of his life”: a death and a rebirth. (11)

Miller read Oswald Spengler and was hugely influenced by him. He thought that instead of being one of the “historical men” (as Spengler called them) – men who measure time objectively “with clocks and calendars” – it’s better to use your own “inside chronometer” to decide how long a moment lasts: “The moment is over when one no longer wishes to dwell in it, not when the clock or calendar says it’s another minute or day,” Männiste writes. Referring to W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, he writes that Miller “refused to dance ‘to the cracked tune that Chronos sings’” and “wants to awake from the ‘nightmare of history’”. (12-13)

Miller distinguishes between two senses of the “present”. On the one hand we have the “traditional present”, which is the present understood as a continuation of the past. An example of this is the ghost in Hamlet: it is something from the past that refuses to be buried, haunts the present and therefore shapes the present. Similarly we are all haunted by the past, and we make decisions in the present based upon what happened in the past. (13)

On the other hand we have “the full present”, which is (in Miller’s words) “the eternal here and now, the expanding infinite moment which is flame and song”. The full present is what you have when you decide for yourself how long the moment lasts, you dwell on it until you are done with it. The moment passes because you decide to let it pass, and not because the clock has moved on. The full present is the present “in which we move not within definite cultural limits but within unlimited human ones based on the realisation of our own potentialities” (in Miller’s word again, quoted by Männiste). The full present has to do with your own potentialities, rather than what is dictated to you, because you decide how long the moment lasts based on what you’re trying to do. For example: an artist trying to capture a moment in writing or painting holds onto that moment, dwells on it, and in a sense dwells in her vision as she tries to communicate it. (13-14)

But the artist doesn’t do away with the traditional present altogether. Miller wrote that “the world is the mirror of myself dying . . .”, and what he meant by this (Männiste tells us) is that “modern artistic types who ‘carry within themselves profound anxieties (as a mirror of their ‘civilisation’), yet have the power to transform, to transmute them into symbols of spiritual strength, integrity, and plenitude.” Though the artist is always dying – her traditional present moving along the line of time away from birth towards her death – she can take any present moment and dwell on it and preserve it eternally as a symbol in her work. And not only in her work: in order to create an eternal moment in a work of art she must learn to dwell herself in an eternal present, to hold onto it for as long as she wants to. “We have to ‘kill’ the past and future, and embrace ourselves in the ‘present never ending’, which is the full present; an ahistorical state of being. This liberates us to being reborn in the present moment. It frees us from the foot race with time,” writes Männiste. (14)

The necessity that the artist dwell in the full present in order to create works of art grounds another distinction in Miller’s thinking: between the human and the inhuman. The human is one who dwells mainly in the traditional present, racing along in the short time span between birth and death. The artist must be inhuman: able to turn the struggles of human existence into song. The artist is human in that she has a life full of various worldly cares; but she is inhuman in that she can escape and dwell in the full present and see those things that cause us all so much anxiety in a new light, and as material for artistic work.

Männiste tells us that Miller’s “human” is Nietzsche’s “last man”: “a degraded, weak-willed individual of the Western civilisation”. We are all degraded in this way as we go about our day to day lives, struggling to achieve our ambitions or simply to survive. But the artist can escape into the inhuman to reveal the beauty in the present moment. (15)

“China” is the last of Miller’s concepts that Männiste tells us about in his essay. “China” is “a condition, or state, of being”. (16)

The country of China fascinated Miller, though he never visited it. “Miller says that ‘everything Chinese is the extreme opposite of all that we feel, think, do, believe . . . the antithesis of all that we regard the human world to be.” This is what China symbolised, for Miller. (17)

Männiste suggests that we look at Miller’s “Walking Up and Down in China” if we want to see the importance of the China-concept. “Miller draws a parallel to the Great Wall of China as a symbolic demarcation line,” writes Männiste. Miller walks the streets of Paris but he feels walled off, more in touch with the earth and his own dreams than with his fellow human beings who pass him by on these streets. (17)

Feeling walled off in this way, something inhuman is being born in Miller, something that allowed him to escape the flow of time and human progress and become an artist. “I am in China and there are no clocks or calendars here.” He’s learned to be alone in the crowd, alone with the earth. (17)

So Männiste writes: “The ‘timelessness’ of one’s true being and the essential requirement of the full present, which we saw him defend before, are now firmly incorporated into China. The ultimate self qua inhuman artist is necessarily atemporal and ahistorical for Miller.” (17)

“Traditional present stands for being, which needs to be surpassed,” writes Männiste. For Miller, surpassing being is something that every artist needs to do in order to create art. “Surpassing being” means surpassing the human – surpassing the kind of being that dwells in a succession of moments, in the “traditional present” – in order to become an “inhuman artist”, dwelling in the moment of the “full present”. (18)

The artist has difficulty adapting to modern life, and so must escape from reality, the reality of the traditional present, by refusing to sacrifice the moment to the succession of time – from birth to death, clocking in to clocking out, and so on. The moment is instead preserved as a symbol in the work of art. This symbol is a reality of the artist’s own, that the artist dwells within. (18)

When I started reading Männiste I was sceptical about the notion that Miller could be said to have “a philosophy” in anything other than the broadest sense. Though I enjoy Miller’s work very much, it’s the bright moments in his work, those passages that explode in all directions as Miller really takes off, that I enjoy. Miller seemed to me to be an inconsistent writer, and this inconsistency was precisely his charm: without an inconsistent and uneven pace, it would be impossible for those explosive moments to really explode and stand out from the rest of the work. But having read Männiste’s essay I’m starting to wonder whether this inconsistency is merely the outer layer, the style, the artifice that Miller uses to get his message across, while the message itself is thoroughly consistent. Miller was instructing his readers in the practical wisdom he had learned in the process of becoming a writer, giving us a key to the processes by which we might unlock and express our innermost selves, by dwelling in the moment. There’s always a risk when you try to find a “philosophy” in something: that you’ll be heavy-handed about it, and reduce the thing you’re studying to the abstract philosophy you want to bring out, and ignore the nuances that don’t fit. But far from being heavy-handed, or concocting a “dull and lifeless” philosophy out of Miller’s work, Männiste finds in Miller a practical philosophy of creativity that reminds us of the value of Miller’s work, and encourages us to go back to it and read it.

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Notes on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer Episode 1: “Behind the Word is Chaos”

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Lee

Quotations are from Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (Harper, 2005)

Misfortune
Henry Miller is uncomfortable in Boris’s clean, orderly house.
Even though the house is spotless, Boris manages to get lice.
The cleanliness of the house can’t protect these men from misfortune: Boris predicts “more calamities, more death, more despair.”

Literature
Paris has turned Miller into an artist. The difference between the man Miller was and the artist he is now is that he is no longer a student of literature. He no longer thinks about literature. “Everything that was literature has fallen from me.”
He’s writing, but he’s not writing a book. This Tropic of Cancer that he’s writing “is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . .” In other words: a slur against all the great themes of literature.
Literature is fine for building up all these great notions (“. . . God, Man, Destiny . . .”), but what use can it be when the world is falling apart, and everything is turning to chaos? “Chaos is the score upon which all reality is written.” Miller needs to bring down literature to find a new form of expression, one that can sing the song of chaos.

Chaos
The song of chaos: what does it sound like? Miller lets his thoughts run away with him. He starts to doze and he thinks about “the whale with his six-foot penis” . . . possible titles for books (“Lovely Lesbians”) . . . “what a pain in the ass the Borowski’s are” . . .
A world falling apart: what does it sound like? Like the incoherent thoughts of a man falling asleep. Individual thoughts isolated, falling into nothingness, telling no particular story.

Artists
In Boris’s big clean house there’s no trace of food. Boris goes out to eat while Miller goes hungry. Miller can forgive Boris for this. In fact Miller admires him: Boris is “possessed” and glows “inwardly with a white flame.” He is “mad and tone deaf” and he is one of the “sufferers”. This makes him an artist.
Not all writers are artists. Moldorf is one example. He’s “word drunk”. He keeps a lot of words in his brain that he can bring out on occasion. “He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable drawers . . .”
Miller types in front of the mirror. He likes to see himself writing. He’s a writer, there’s no mistake about that.
But this image of Miller satisfied in front of the mirror is soon swept along: nothing is stable in this world. Miller doesn’t write for wealth or fame but to build a little raft for himself he can hang onto as the chaos sweeps him along. The reflected image of himself as a writer. An identity: Miller the writer.

Darkness
Boris’s goatee makes Miller think of nights with Tania. At night it’s dark and you’re in the middle of it all, with whoever you happen to be with. Miller wants Tania but he has Boris. And outside “gaunt trees” with “black boughs”, the “fleecy clouds” swept aside by the night sky. “No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings . . .”
When he looks inward he can see the mirror image of himself writing. Miller the artist. But all about him are “cracked” reflections of himself. “No one to whom I can communicate . . .” He can only observe, and in these cracked mirrors try to get a glimpse of himself. He’s trying to work out what it means to be an artist, in these images cracked by failure and despair . . .

Word
Looking over his work, Miller finds that he’s written literature after all. “This frightens me a little,” he says. He doesn’t want to be like Moldorf. He wants to break apart what he’s written and create something new. “Behind the word is chaos.” He wants to break the word apart and find the chaos. “I sit on the bed in a daze, thinking about man before his birth . . .”
How can you break apart the word? “I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a word of what I write . . . It is the triumph of the individual over art . . . There is only one thing that interests me now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.” You break apart the word by letting thoughts flow, writing all those things you aren’t supposed to write, and not striving for perfection. Essential to literature is a process of revision, through which reality and real thoughts are covered over with artifice, superficial literary tricks creating a distance between the reader and the writer’s vision.
Here’s a vision: of Paris as he saw it when he first arrived. “A weird sort of contentment in those days . . . The golden period.” This was Paris when it appeared to Miller as pleasant confusion, a dream, rather than the cracked nightmare it has now become. Paris before Miller gave up literature. Before he discovered he had to break apart the word.

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Henry Miller’s singing prose

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Lee

Ondřej Skovajsa writes: “In Miller’s attempt to write voice, the usage of parallelism is crucial. Marcel Jousse (1886-1961) interprets the general function of parallelism as mnemonic, connected with and involving the bilateral symmetry of human body and the rhythmical breath with the span of pronouncing 15-17 syllables. Jousse illustrates this on the first verses of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God (Joh. 1:1-2),’ where the illiterate singer rendering the chant – while rocking from leg to leg, gesticulating, and breathing rhythmically – reminds himself of the following by repeating the previous. Miller’s ‘voluntary’ usage of parallel structure in a text (Miller wrote his book, he did not preach on a soapbox or just talk like Van Norden/Wambly Bald) can thus be seen as the composition’s chief structural means of rehabilitation of the body, its ‘pair of lungs,’ and the moves of its ‘parallel’ limbs.” (OS 76)

But if Miller wanted to rehabilitate the body through the “voice” of the work, why didn’t he tell us, his readers, to read his work out loud? Or why didn’t he write poetry rather than prose, a form designed to be read out loud rather than one designed to be read in silence? At the beginning of Tropic of Cancer Miller tells us that he will “sing” for his reader, but he doesn’t ask his reader to sing his words:

“This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . .

“To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.” (TroCan 10)

“I am singing” – Henry Miller is singing. But when you hear song perhaps you will be moved to dance. This is what Skovajsa means when he tells us that Miller writes to “rehabilitate” the body: we’re moved to dance by the sound of the words. At least, we’re moved to respond physically in some way to the sound of the words. But again: if we’re reading in silence – as most readers will when confronted with prose – will we hear the sound of the words?

Through his use of repetition, “Miller thus attacks the linear, dietetic, and prudent narrative of textual modernity, being born out of the thrifty protestant work ethic. In the quoted paragraphs above, we could have observed Miller even ‘tasting the consonants,’ enjoying the melody of the ‘singing,’ and also of the rhythmical strikes of his typewriter.” (OS 77)

So it’s not his readers who sing the words, but Miller himself. Miller is the illiterate singer, rocking back and forth so that we can hear the chant. And as we feel these “rhythmical strikes” the reading process becomes a sort of dance. This encourages the reader to enjoy a work of prose in a way opposed to the common modern way: we don’t read to get the information fast and get to the end of the story; we read to savour the rhythms.

Not only Miller, but also Ezra Pound at around the same time was writing about the music of writing, and thinking about its effect on the body of the reader: “The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music: but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.” (ABC 14)

But while we read Miller in silence and imagine Miller the writer hammering rhythmically on his typewriter as he writes, Pound is writing about poetry, a form designed to be read out loud by the reader, and to generate sounds that resonate with the body of the reader as he or she reads out loud.

So why did Miller choose to sing in prose? In a letter written in 1936 to Lawrence Durrell, Miller writes: “the fact is I know nothing about verse.” (Letters 14) So perhaps the reason is simple: Miller wasn’t able to write in verse, so he used the means he had. He used the rhythms of natural speech to create a prose as close to song as he could manage.

Works Cited

OS = “Tropic of Cancer: Word Becoming Flesh” by Ondřej Skovajsa in Henry Miller: New Perspectives (Bloomsbury 2015) pp.75-84

TroCan = Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (Harper 2005)

ABC = ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound (New Directions 2010)

Letters = The Durrell-Miller Letters edited by Ian S. MacNiven (Faber and Faber 1988)

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Some notes as I work through Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Grammar

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Lee

(Quotations are from Philosophical Grammar by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Anthony Kenny, published 1974 by Blackwell. I’m mostly looking at Part 1 Chapter 1 section 2, found on pages 39-40 of this edition.)

“We regard understanding as the essential thing, and signs as something inessential. – But in that case, why have the signs at all? If you think it is only so as to make ourselves understood by others, then you are very likely looking on the signs as a drug which is to produce in other people the same condition as my own.”

We can say signs are “inessential” because you could use different signs to convey a similar meaning. What’s essential is that you use appropriate signs of some sort, not that you use precisely these ones.

Signs have a purpose. Like a drug, you use them to create an effect in the mind – of the person or persons you are communicating with.

“Suppose that the question is ‘what do you mean by that gesture?’ and the answer is ‘I mean you must leave’. The answer would not have been more correctly phrased: ‘I mean what I mean by the sentence ‘you must leave’.”

A gesture is a sign, and once you understand the gesture you take the meaning: you must leave. As long as you understand the gesture, you don’t need to translate the meaning into words before you know how you are expected to act.

“In attacking the formalist conception of arithmetic, Frege says more or less this: these petty explanations of the signs are idle once we understand the signs. Understanding would be something like seeing a picture from which all the rules followed, or a picture that makes them all clear. But Frege does not seem to see that such a picture would itself be another sign, or a calculus to explain the written one to us.”

Once you understand something, you see clearly how it is to be interpreted. The signs can speak directly to you, now that you have this understanding. Once again: you don’t need to translate the signs into new signs, you simply understand the original signs now that you grasp the rules.

“If I give anyone an order I feel it to be quite enough to give him signs. And if I am given an order, I should never say: ‘this is only words, and I have got to get behind the words’. And when I have asked someone something and he gives me an answer I am content – that was just what I expected – and I don’t raise the objection: ‘but that’s a mere answer.’”

Assuming the one giving the order and the one who receives it are speaking the same language, it’s enough to simply give the order. Understanding (of the language) is there, so the signs speak for themselves.

“But if you say: ‘How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?’ then I say: ‘How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?’

“What is spoken can only be explained in language, and so in this sense language itself cannot be explained.

“Language must speak for itself.”

So we don’t have “nothing but the signs”: what we have is signs in the context of a language. And a language speaks for itself, to those who understand it.

Wittgenstein will go on to show that there are many different ways to “understand”, and just because we use this same word to describe these different ways, it doesn’t mean that there is a single psychological process called “understanding” underlying each one. In the section of Philosophical Grammar I’ve been looking at here, Wittgenstein has been looking at some aspects of what it means to understand a language. We understand a language when we can picture the things that are communicated to us in that language. Language is “pictorial”. “The concept of language is contained in the concept of communication”, because in order to communicate one must make use of language.

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More Notes on Michael Hardt

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Lee

In Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Michael Hardt gives us four “methodological principles” for reading the work of Gilles Deleuze.

1. “Recognise the object and the terms of the primary antagonism.” Every philosophical project is aimed at someone, or at a group of people. Deleuze’s early work is aimed at Hegel and Hegelians. If we ignore this when we read Deleuze’s early work, we miss the point of what he’s writing.

2. “Read Deleuze philosophically.” Although Deleuze often seems to be an “anti-philosopher”, it’s important to remember that Deleuze considered himself to be a philosopher, working with (if not fully in) the philosophical tradition.

3. “Recognise Deleuze’s selectivity.” Many of Deleuze’s books focus on one particular philosopher, for example Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche . . . But when Deleuze writes about a philosopher he has a specific problem (and target, see 1) in mind. This means he isn’t trying to give a conclusive study of the philosopher he’s writing about, but just to use that philosopher’s work in order to solve the problem. We do Deleuze an injustice if we attack him because he fails to discuss this or that aspect of a philosopher’s work, if that aspect is irrelevant to Deleuze’s problem.

4. “Read Deleuze’s thought as an evolution.” Finally, we need to notice that each of Deleuze’s works builds upon the previous works. Though it can be fruitful to “start in the middle” with Deleuze, elements of Deleuze’s work will remain obscure if we don’t go back to earlier work to find the explanation of key terms.

Hardt’s methodology is designed to help us keep in mind why Deleuze wrote and how he worked. Hardt tells us that, in his early work, Deleuze is trying to take on Hegelianism and show us how it is possible to be anti-Hegelian. Deleuze is trying to create new “terrain”, away from Hegel, in which it’s possible to create new concepts. Keeping Hardt’s methodology in mind as we read we’ll be able to decide whether or not Deleuze succeeds in his task.

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Notes on “Who Be Kind To” by Allen Ginsberg

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Lee

“Who Be Kind To” by Allen Ginsberg: a meditation on the importance of kindness, and what it means to be kind.

Kindness is important because every individual is “one and perishable”. Vulnerable. To recognise yourself as one and perishable is to be aware of death, aware of the world as “this place, which is your present habitation” – you won’t be here forever. Be kind in the world while you are here.

Your body will one day perish, and so “be kind to the poor soul that cries in a crack of the pavement because he has no body” is a call for us to recognise that the body is valuable and transient. One day you too will be without a body and will no longer know the touch of another human being, and will no longer be capable of kindness. “Unkindness comes when the body explodes.” Now is the time to be kind, while you are alive in this body.

The neighbour on the “television sofa” is like the soul without a body. “He has no other home”, and eventually the “inspired melodrama” he was watching ends, leaving him to go to bed alone. The home he found in the “click, buzz” of television was an illusion, a disembodied warm distraction.

In his poem Ginsberg starts with the self, “one and perishable”, and then looks out at the world, even looks through your “last eye” as you lie dying, to see what kind of world you find yourself in. A world where you can easily glimpse anger, destruction, unkindness. A world of sad, lost souls “weeping” even “in the galleries of Whitehall, Kremlin, White House . . .”

And then Ginsberg turns from this glimpse of the world and back to you, to “your self”, but now the self “weeps” at the sadness of the world, and turns inward, into itself in its sadness, like the artist “lost in space . . . and hearing himself” playing jazz chords or crying in auditoriums.

But a “universe of Self” is born out of that reflective sadness. The self sees what the world must be if it is to be happy in it. “A dream! a Dream! I don’t want to be alone! I want to know that I am loved!” With this knowledge of what is lacking in the world and what a body most needs – love, human kindness – the new self can seek to make the world better, even to create a new world. You see the actions of the “statue destroyers & tank captains, unhappy murderers” for what they are – acts of unkindness instigated and perpetrated by unhappy men. Men who are lost and weep like the rest of us. And you see that kindness is what the world needs.

Who be kind to? Be kind to all the lost souls, including your own.

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Notes on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer Episode 11

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Lee

Sometimes you have some money in your pocket and you feel content and secure. And sometimes you spend that money and fill your belly up with what you desire, and then “you feel empty, disgusted with yourself.”

Henry Miller returns to Paris with some money in his pocket. Just having money makes him feel “elated”. It’s the feeling of security, and the possibilities it opens up. Possibilities of comfort: a little food, a good bed for a while.

He’s already spent more than he ought to have spent on a good meal. It makes him “miserable” to hoard the money away, against his “nature”, and so he rebels, spends twice as much as his budget allows.

But he feels “wretched” now, he’s doing neither one thing nor the other. He’s neither craftily saving his money up nor carelessly recklessly enjoying himself.

And then he meets a woman: “kind sir . . . dear sir . . . my good man . . .” She wants money. He doesn’t want to help her but he can’t leave her either. She doesn’t want to be left alone. He can’t “break away” for some reason. Stood there in the pouring rain. And eventually he gives her fifty francs and is glad of it. A side of Miller is winning the side that wants to squander all and open himself up to the cosmos . . .

We’re given all sorts of reasons for Miller’s behaviour on this night, but none of them make sense. He “supposes” he felt this way and that, he reasons that doesn’t everybody feel the urge to roam the streets sometimes on nights like these. He’s acting on impulse, something is controlling him, he’s part of a machine – and more precisely we can assume he had a drink or two with his expensive meal and he’s letting the drink carry him along . . . And eventually he arrives at a bar where women are dancing – “women with bare backs and ropes of pearls” – he orders a bottle of champagne. He talks to a woman who starts to cry and has a sick mother and again he wants to escape but can’t, something stops him:

“The thing to do when you’re trapped is to breeze – at once. If you don’t, you’re lost. What retained me, oddly enough, was the thought of paying for a hat check a second time. One always lets himself in for it because of a trifle.”

In the toilet he’s counting his money again, stashing some away, keeping some ready to spend. He keeps fifty francs free and some loose change. He’s allowed to spend this. And he tells the woman this is all he can give her. But she protests and soon he’s agreeing to give more . . .

They’re at her home, and he’s undressed and worrying about the money in the pocket of his trousers laying there on the bed. He wants to keep it close by. He’s already given one hundred francs to the woman. And in bed with her it’s over faster than he’d hoped. And his money spent, the promise of contentment and security it brought is gone.

She goes downstairs and a still drunk Henry Miller starts to feel “restless” and moves about the room. He reads a love letter on her table, he inspects the bottles in the bathroom. She’s been gone a while now and he starts to feel alarmed, some idea that not all is as it seems. She’s told him she’s gone downstairs to look after her sick mother but something feels wrong and “out of a sense of self-preservation, I suppose” – Miller is never entirely sure why he does anything – he dresses again. And then he remembers the one hundred francs he gave the woman. He knows where she put it. He could take it, and he does. Again we’re given no explanation, no justification for this act. Only a sense that one side of Henry Miller has won, the side that wants the money in his pocket and to hell with the rest.

And back in the streets he starts to rationalise his actions. The story she had told about her mother probably wasn’t true. The house was too strange somehow, something was up. This wasn’t an ordinary situation . . . And to hell with the woman and her sick mother anyway. Miller isn’t asking for forgiveness. He’s describing his actions, and we can see for ourselves that this is a man without seriousness, drunk, without direction, worried about the money in his pocket and his next drink and lost, so lost . . . Henry Miller, drunken man-animal, stumbles to the next bar, the deed done, the tale told, and no apologies.

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Alyosha Karamazov’s Laughter

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Lee

Alyosha’s sinful laugh after reading the love letter. And then the laugh is repeated, it isn’t sinful any longer. With the first laugh he seems to be laughing at the girl who is in love with him. With the second laugh he’s laughing at all of us. “These unhappy and turbulent souls”, we are all lost but we will find joy in God. It doesn’t matter how little we know God, our anxieties come to nothing because He exists. And so a light and joyful laugh not only at everyone else’s worries but at his own too, the troubles of the day that even brought him to tears earlier that evening.

When he got to the monastery he’d regretted having forgotten even “for one instant” Father Zossima. Perhaps he’d forgotten God that evening too. To be troubled by such worldly cares! And all it takes is laying down on your hard bed in the monastery to remember again your place in the world and see that none of it matters, or if it matters it’s out of your hands, and you will get your share of joy however you fret.

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Notes on William S Burroughs’ “Ghost of Chance”

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Lee

William S Burroughs’s Ghost of Chance (1995, High Risk Books) has a simple political point at the heart of it: humanity will perish if it continues at odds with nature.

It’s a familiar theme. Human beings are destroying the environment and must stop before it’s too late. But Burroughs’s unique view of why this is happening is interesting. For Burroughs, it’s happening because one side of the human organism – the side that uses language and tools to dominate others – is dominating the other side, the intuitive and innocent side.

To explain Burroughs’s view, it’s worth skipping ahead to the centrepiece of the book: the bit about the “Christ Sickness”.

About half-way through the book, a virus breaks out that makes millions of people believe that they are the Messiah. The symptoms of the disease are:

You hallucinate and start to believe that you can perform miracles.

Violence. You begin to accuse everyone of betraying the Son of Man, and you might attack those you suspect of betrayal: “And some, in their zealous dementia, were driven to release the fateful lightning of terrible, swift homemade flamethrowers and bizarre electrical devices, or to make bloody use of swords and axes.” (34)

The final stage is “grief, apathy and death”. (34)

Those who suffer from the Christ Sickness, believing that they are Christ, believe they can perform miracles. “The question arises: Did Christ actually perpetrate the miracles attributed to him? My guess is that he did certainly commit some of these scandals.” (25)

Miracles are not good things, for the author of Ghost of Chance. And on this point he believes he agrees with Buddhism: “Buddhists consider miracles and healing dubious if not downright reprehensible. The miracle worker is upsetting the natural order, with incalculable long-range consequences, and is often motivated by self-glorification.” (25-6)

You don’t perform miracles if you want to help people, as there’s no way of knowing what the long-term consequences of a miracle will be. Christ didn’t perform miracles in order to help people, but in order to bring glory to Himself. Worse than this, by bringing glory to himself he created the impression that only He could perform miracles. He created a “monopoly” on miracles, “so no more miracles can ever occur”. (25)

People believed Christ when he claimed he was the source of miracles, and when he was gone from the earth the illusion was complete: with Christ gone, people now believed that miracles were impossible. It took a virus outbreak to cause people to believe again in the possibility of miracles.

I don’t know how seriously Burroughs intended for us to take his theory about Christ, but it’s interesting because it’s a vivid illustration of one method of control: make it appear that you are the only game in town. Don’t just do what you can do, but create the impression that only you can do it. In this way you will gain followers, people who depend on you (or think they do, which is the same thing) for your power to create what you create. If you con them expertly, your followers won’t work out that they were ever capable of doing the work themselves.

It’s not just Christ and certain PR people that use this method. It’s also used by a virus called “the word”.

We use words every day, and they are essential to our mode of existence. But aside from their function allowing us to communicate they also have another function: ensuring their own survival. And they do this by creating the impression that we cannot exist without them. (When in fact it’s just our current mode of existence that would be destroyed were the word to be destroyed.)

In Ghost of Chance, Burroughs gives us his ideas of how language functions in the human organism:

“A rift is built into the human organism, the rift or cleft between the two hemispheres, so any attempt at synthesis must remain unrealisable in human terms. I draw a parallel between this rift separating the two sides of the human body and the rift that divided Madagascar from the mainland of Africa. One side of the rift drifted into enchanted timeless innocence. The other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war, exploitation, and slavery.

“It would seem that merging the two us not viable, and one is tempted to say, as Brion Gysin did, ‘Rub out the word.’

“But perhaps ‘rub’ is the wrong word. The formula is quite simple: reverse the magnetic field so that, instead of being welded together, the two halves repel each other like opposing magnets.” (49-50)

So whereas Gysin suggested killing the language-using side of ourselves in order to return to innocence – perhaps giving up on talking and writing and simply painting the world as you see it would be a way of doing this – Burroughs is suggesting that all that is necessary is that we give the non-linguistic side of ourselves a chance, and stop dominating our intuitive and innocent side with our word-using, rationalising side.

In practice perhaps this would mean: stop using language to rationalise the world, and instead look at the world first, and if you have to speak let the words follow from the impression you had before you started trying to put it into words.

“What would a wordless world be like? As Korzybski said: ‘I don’t know. Let’s see.’” (50)

In Ghost of Chance, it’s too late for mankind. They never broke the hold of the word on human life, balance between cleverness and innocence was never achieved, and mankind as we know it is destroyed. And what is the end result? “People of the world are at last returning to their source in spirit, back to the little lemur people of the trees and the leaves, the streams, the rocks, and the sky. Soon, all sign, all memory of the wars and the Plague of Mad will fade like dream traces.” (54)

Pure innocence is forced upon mankind because he couldn’t find balance. The word virus is eliminated, or “rubbed out”.

Burroughs didn’t want humanity as we know it to be destroyed entirely. He wanted it to be transformed so that the word would no longer rule us and we would be able to see clearly.

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“This is realism”: Lessons from Poetry

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Lee

Langdon Hammer describes the stone that Yeats’s fisherman sits on (in the poem “The Fisherman”) as “resistant” and “non-ideal, that is, real”. This equation of “non-ideal” with its common meaning of “imperfect” (as in “my new flat isn’t ideal…”), while also keeping in mind the opposition of “ideal” to “real” is very illuminating: reality is what we get when we make do with things that are not perfect.

The fisherman doesn’t complain, he probably barely notices that the stone on which he sits could be smoother. He does not impose upon reality, he makes do with what he has, which is what makes him the simple soul that Yeats admires.

Compare him to “the clever man who cries the catch cries of the clown”. This man is trying to shape the world to fit him, by bending people to his will (making people repeat his slogans). The poet does not admire this sort of cleverness.

We can learn something about what a poet is supposed to be from Yeats’s poem. Compare to Auden’s famous lines, from his “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

The poet is not trying to change the world, to rally support, and if they did try to do this they would fail anyway. The poet writes about reality, and accepts reality as it is.

So we get Kathy Acker’s method of writing about painting: “I see what I see immediately; I don’t rethink it. My seeing is as rough or unformed as what I’m seeing. This is realism: the unification of my perceiving and what I perceive or a making of a mirror relation between my world and the world of the painting.” Perhaps we could make our writing more polished. But the roughness of the words conveys the roughness of the world as we find it.

The puzzle is: how can the poet accept reality as it is and yet be motivated to try to effect a change in the heart of the reader? I think the answer is: the heart of the reader will never be unaffected if the poet is true in her depiction of reality. And if the reader is affected then she will change. “This is what poetry can offer: it can offer a lesson …” What the poet must do is: write about reality and hope to change the reader by showing her what is real. What the poet really cannot do is: determine what course this change will take.

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