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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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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