Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.
—Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Quand je m’y suis mis quelquefois à considérer les diverses agitations des hommes et les périls et les peines où ils s’exposent, dans la cour, dans la guerre, d’où naissent tant de querelles, de passions, d’entreprises hardies et souvent mauvaises, etc. j’ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir plus demeurer en repos dans une chambre.1
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées
When we consider much of what Henry Miller wrote and said about worldly success, it may come as a surprise to know that, during the last few years of his life, he actively campaigned to win the Nobel Prize. In 1978, he even sent out one of his famous round-robin letters, asking, not for money (as he often did: even when the books were selling and film rights were being bought up, Miller never had any cash; he was always giving it away) but for help in influencing the Academy: “Dear Friend,” he wrote, to a number of friends (including, with an irony nobody could invent, the man who would go on to win the Nobel that year, Isaac Bashevis Singer), “In my attempt to obtain the Nobel Prize for Literature this coming year I hope to enlist your support. All I ask is for you to write a few succinct lines to: Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, Borshuset, 11129 Stockholm, Sweden. Please note that the committee urgently requests that the name of the proposed candidate not be publicized. Sincerely, Henry Miller.” Later, when he heard that Singer had won, he quickly revised his plan, assuring the very same friends to whom he had just written that his plan had always been to mount the campaign in 1979. Once again, those unfortunate correspondents duly wrote in, but the prize went to the Greek poet Odysseus Elytis, cited by the Swedish Academy “for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man’s struggle for freedom and creativeness.”2 Ironically, it would be hard to find a more apt summation of Miller’s work. What was both revealing and galling, however, was the remark made by a member of the Academy to Lawrence Durrell, to the effect that the judges were waiting for Miller “to become respectable.”3
It seems odd, and a little unsettling, to think of Miller pursuing this corrupt world’s honors so devotedly. However, he had always fantasized about the Nobel Prize and, according to his friend Brassaï, had started talking about the possibility during the late 1950s.4 To some readers, this has made Miller seem less admirable—less independent, less unworldly—but what they perhaps fail to appreciate is just how hard it is, for the literary writer, to live with the constant suspicion of inevitable failure that comes with the job. For one thing, over a lifetime of labor, the financial rewards are comparatively meager. (Miller said he wanted the Nobel, not for the glory, but for the money, so he could pay off his taxes.) Considering his socialization—and it’s not that much different now, truth be told—it comes as no surprise that Miller always felt a nagging doubt about himself as a writer and as a man.5 For much of his life, the books that would make his reputation were banned; when they did emerge, they were subjected to a flurry of criticism that, while justified in some ways, did miss the central point of what he was trying to do. His experimental techniques with the novel were often adopted by others, who made such compromises as allowed them to achieve both sales and critical respect. As with so many artistic pioneers, Miller was too much, too difficult, too confrontational and, at times, “too dark” for a wider audience—which meant that, the further he went, the deeper he dug, the more risks he took, the less successful, in paying-the-rent terms, he was doomed to be.
A friend of mine calls this The Cassandra Dilemma: do the work well, push the bounds, honestly, and with rigor, and the closer you are to getting it right can be measured fairly accurately by how much attention “the world” takes. You can go so far, but no further. (This, it has to be said, is more true now than it ever has been, but today the bugbears are darkness, intensity, and honest complexity, rather than shock value or supposed obscenity. Nothing is verboten; it just has to come as a sound bite.) The mainstream reader knows what he wants, and that is entertainment with a veneer of “the real,” the challenge of a problem that he can solve, a soupçon of flattery, and a dollop of sex (just as long as it’s grey). What such a reader doesn’t want is an invitation to change his life, or a clear exposition of how rotten the system is, à la Henry Miller, because, as my friend says, that is depressing. To write outside the mainstream, to diagnose the system’s ills, to lay your heart and your spirit out on the page, is lonely work, but it feels lonelier still to think that you did it all for nothing.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that Miller coveted the Nobel—even with his tongue in his cheek. Nor should it surprise us that, at the same time, he understood perfectly well that worldly success wasn’t just an illusion, but was also dangerous to the writer. In a little chapbook he put out at the very end of his life, he had this to say on the matter: “If you have had a successful career, as presumably I have had, the late years may not be the happiest time of your life. (Unless you’ve learned to swallow your own shit.) Success, from the worldly standpoint, is like the plague for a writer who still has something to say. Now, when he should be enjoying a little leisure, he finds himself more occupied than ever. Now he is the victim of his fans and well wishers, of all those who desire to exploit his name. Now it is a different kind of struggle that one has to wage. The problem now is how to keep free, how to do only what one wants to do”—adding that what mattered was to retain a sense of curiosity, and wonder: “With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it.”6
There is an obvious cognitive dissonance here—there always is. Prizes, sales, prestige (though not celebrity) are alluring. Besides, to win a prestigious prize is not only to obtain the wherewithal to cancel those worrying tax bills (or pay the grocery bill, or the children’s college fees), it is also to add weight to what one considers a greater good. Miller’s friend, Seferis, accepting the Nobel in 1972, chose to see the award as a mark of the Academy’s esteem for Greek poetic tradition that “is characterized by love of the human; justice is its norm. In the tightly organized classical tragedies the man who exceeds his measure is punished by the Erinyes. And this norm of justice holds even in the realm of nature.” No doubt, had Miller won the prize in 1980 (which was rumored to be “his year,” until he died too soon to be considered; in the event, the prize went to Czeslaw Milosz), he would have spoken of wonder, of acceptance, and, perhaps, of “the creature world,” a vision that had begun to form during his sojourn in Greece and had gradually developed, not into an organized system of thought (something we can hardly expect from Miller), but into a profound earthly vision that foreshadows even the most recent work in philosophical ecology and emerging ideas around “the creaturely” and biotic interanimation. That vision has been given other names. For a time, I think, Rimbaud meant the same thing when he spoke of Being Beauteous.7 James P. Carse has called it “the infinite game,” seeing the entire sphere of being as a game that encompasses all other (i.e., finite) games, investing them with value while setting them in a context that, while it does not diminish anything, nevertheless reveals their transitory nature: “There are at least two kinds of games,” Carse says. “One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play,” adding that “[h]uman freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history.” And he concludes, “It is not necessary for infinite players to be Christians; indeed, it is not possible for them to be Christians—seriously. Neither is it possible for them to be Buddhists, or Muslims, or atheists, or New Yorkers—seriously. All such titles can only be playful abstractions, mere performances for the sake of laughter. Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish. . . . There is but one infinite game.”8
It should have taken a couple of hours, but it ended up being a day-long schlepp comprising three tedious hops, first, after an hour’s delay, from Grenada to Madrid, then a long wait at Madrid for the next flight, and then, after yet another long delay, from Birmingham to Edinburgh. I have no memory of why all this happened; all I remember now is that, on that last flight, I died for a while, just as the plane was coming in to land. This is not proven scientific fact (I managed to escape the paramedics when I came to), but it was my experience: I was sitting in my seat, 1A, by the window, looking out over the familiar hills, when suddenly my entire body ceased to be, and I ascended—just a little—into a pure whiteness, though not the ever-afterish white light common to stories of this kind (don’t worry, I am not about to claim that Jesus or my favorite uncle came to meet me in the afterworld, and there will, most assuredly, be no angels in this account). No: it wasn’t a light; it was more a kind of blankness. Like the space in a Chinese painting of mist or fog, say, or the untouched white paper in Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s woodcut from 1905, Bäume im Winter, that I once saw at the Brücke Museum, Berlin, a whiteness that suggests both snow and the nothingness that haunts being. This whiteness was, in fact, a nothingness, but it was also active—I have difficulty, explaining this, without resorting to the classics, in this case, the Hagakure of Tsunetomo Yamamoto: “Our bodies are given form from the midst of nothingness. Existing where there is nothing is the meaning of the phrase ‘Form is emptiness.’ That all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, ‘Emptiness is form.’ One should not think that these are two separate”9—and I knew that its action upon me (my body and my person, as well as my soul, or spirit) was to dissolve it utterly. Not to destroy it, as such, but to break it down to the most basic state, the way a leaf, fallen from the tree in October, becomes sweet liquor in the soil, for other plants to feed on come springtime. Though I feel I must add, here, that I don’t mean this altogether literally. If I have to use one word for what I anticipated, at that moment—which I did, quite honestly, think would be my last—I would say that, in that white space, I expected to be absolved, or perhaps, acquitted of presence. However, like those more familiar stories of near-death experiences, my exit didn’t quite come about, and, some time later—it must have been a fair amount of time, because the plane was now on the ground and most of the passengers had departed—I found myself gazing up into the face of a woman who looked somewhat familiar.
It would be satisfying to report more about my imaginary near-death experience, but the truth is that, after the whiteness everything else was pure anticlimax, bordering on farce. I had “regained consciousness” (that really isn’t the right term) in the yellowish glow you might find in a snow globe, expecting more than the two flight attendants who were working on me, one loosening an already loose collar, the other speaking, asking me if I knew my name, or maybe saying my name, it wasn’t entirely clear. It all felt painfully intimate: the attendant who was speaking seemed to be looking into my face from inches away and, at the same time, she also seemed impossibly distant, almost fictional, like a movie ghost, or an apparition. I think, for a moment, I had really believed I was about to enter that clichéd next-life scenario I had read about—mostly in doctors’ waiting rooms, where the magazines seem, one would have thought inappropriately, to specialize in such matters—and I imagine that I had been hoping for a long-dead girlfriend to have turned up by now—the girl I once fell for when I worked in a food processing factory, say, a girl who went home one evening and died unexpectedly in her sleep, come, now, to guide me into the light, or perhaps to some other cliché. But as it turns out, I hadn’t died in seat 1A after all, I’d just passed out rather forcefully, and this was not the afterlife, it was just after. And I can see, now, that we were all disappointed: the younger of the flight attendants in particular, who was a little too insistent in her refusal to believe me when I assured her I was fine (clearly, I wasn’t, and I felt decidedly out of sorts for the next several minutes) and that I was ready to go on alone. It seems that the paramedics had already been summoned and were waiting in the terminal (how long had I been unconscious?) and the young woman, pretty even by flight attendant standards, with reddish-blonde hair tied back in a tight ponytail and very blue eyes, seemed to think I was spoiling something by not playing my designated role. For a moment, I was even tempted to capitulate and allow myself to be guided away, but I have a horror of hospitals and, besides, I wanted to get home, after a long absence. So I insisted I would be fine and walked away on my own two feet, and though I felt ill for days after, I managed to pass the whole incident off as a more than usual degree of travel fatigue.
Nevertheless, that whiteness stayed in my mind, a visible nothingness, and I felt oddly grateful for it—I still do—and for the premonition I’d been vouchsafed of the emptiness that, for now, gives my body form. For a moment, I had known, in Henry Miller’s words, “what the great cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.”10 More important, I could think those words again without dismissing them because I was embarrassed by their raw emotion, or what my dutiful British mind was trained to reject as “sentimental.” For now, I had been treated to a live demonstration of something that, till then, I had only known as a word. I had been given, in real, experiential terms the understanding that I was not merely human, but creaturely. “Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity—I belong to the earth!”11
So says Miller in Tropic of Cancer—and at one time, certainly in my mid-twenties, I thought this was mostly bravado. I had put in my years as sub–Rimbaud wanderer—I had slept on gravestones in old city churchyards and sat in city parks with my hashish-filled corncob pipe, watching children play tag; I had written poems and thrown them away; every year, I gave away any property I had amassed, other than a few books and some clothes; I had worked in the kitchens and gardens and sewers of “The System”—and, to date, I had learned only one thing: that men and governments are everywhere. I had pledged to do nothing that would support the system I loathed, but that didn’t mean that it did not govern my life. For one thing, it had power over my body in at least one sense: it could either prohibit my consumption of hashish and LSD, or, if I chose to continue to practice what I thought of as my “sacrament,” it could throw me in jail for seven years. In those days, as I recall, this was a major concern for people in my walk of life. We were drop-outs, refuseniks, étrangers—but I couldn’t really kid myself: I was powerless, as myself, and even if I wasn’t contributing to the system in a meaningful way (making money, taking orders, voting etcetera etcetera), I still had to labor in its poisoned vineyards to obtain my daily bread. That I was also breaking its laws was not much consolation, when I knew that, should it come to it, I wouldn’t last a day in prison.
Then, slowly, as I mowed the lawns and dredged the ornamental pond in my last garden job—slowly, quietly, as befits a revelation in a garden, I began to understand the key point: belonging. Yes, Miller was like any other man who lived in the civilized world: he had to endure men and governments, creeds and principles, but he did not belong to them. On the other hand, he could choose to belong to the earth—even while that earth was being hopelessly poisoned by men and governments and the profit principle. For belonging is a choice. At that point, I was reading Robinson Jeffers, poems like “Roan Stallion”:
Humanity is
the start of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break
and I had thrilled at the closing lines of “Carmel Point”:
As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.12
I did not see any of this as an expression of spite, or even anger with the enemy; for me, it was the necessary recognition of a rift between self and the societal world, not just as a refusal to take part in the race (a refusal that granted me a kind of boho status that, in James Carse’s terms, could only be seen as a kind of title, or badge of honor) but a departure point from which to imagine an alternative. The first step—a considered Non serviam—was incomplete without the second—être un voyant—but then, after the dérèglement, after the years in the desert, or on the road, or at Walden Pond, the final step was to become new, by choosing to belong, not to the tribe, or the society, but to the earth and to what Miller, in spite of his occasional posturing, still called “the great heart of the world.” Is it a contradiction to want to become “inhuman” and at the same time, wish for one’s heart to beat in unison with all of the rest of creation, including other humans? I do not think so; instead, I think it is the definition of what Miller means by “the creature world” and what we mean by “creaturely”: what Miller saw was that we needed to abandon the limits imposed by civilization and discover anew the spontaneous, hazardous, beauteous being that might allow us to belong to the earth, without wishing to appropriate or control it.
In his novel, Zero K, Don DeLillo describes the sojourn of a man named Jeffrey Lockhart at a remote cryogenics facility where his stepmother, currently suffering from the early stages of a terminal illness, is waiting to undergo a procedure that will freeze her body until it can be repaired, sometime in the future. The facility is called The Convergence, and, as Jeffrey explores it and encounters its denizens, it becomes clear that those involved in its foundation and business are visionaries, men and women who are working for a new language, new meanings, new and unimaginable systems. One of those visionaries, a man named Ben-Ezra13 (who is discovered in a “proper English Garden” in which everything, even the plants, is artificial), proposes an experiment to Jeffrey:
You sit alone in a quiet room at home and you listen carefully. What is it you hear? Not traffic in the street, not voices or rain or someone’s radio. . . . You hear something but what? It’s not room tone or ambient sound. It’s something that may change as your listening deepens, second after second, and the sound is growing louder now—not louder but somehow wider, sustaining itself, encircling you. What Is it? The mind, the life itself, your life? Or is it the world, not the material mass, land and sea, but what inhabits the world, the flood of human existence. The world hum. Do you hear it, yourself, ever?14
It is a profoundly beautiful and troubling vision: the world hum, the hum of all human existence, carrying on, everywhere. Unstoppable. Is it possible to think of that hum and not be almost overwhelmed by a sense, on the one hand, of its sheer vulnerability—a vulnerability occasioned by its own massive and all-consuming presence in a world of finite resources—and, on the other, of its immense beauty? It is this hum that, more likely than not, will end the world as we know it. It is this mass of humanity that will consume our world, just as a flock of locusts consumes a field of grain. And yet it is to this hum that we most surely belong. Having heard it, we cannot deny it. Indeed, how possible is it not to love that eerie music, which is us?
In a 2015 interview, Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked, in relation to angry responses to his poem “Overpopulation”: “Probably the one problem behind all the other crises on earth right now is overpopulation. You could take any daily newspaper and probably 60% of the stories could be traced back to some overpopulation cause. For instance, why do loggers want to cut down rain forests? Because people need more houses. Why do they need more houses? Because there’s a huge increase in population worldwide.”15 Ferlinghetti is not alone. For many in the developed world, any concern with rising population figures is perceived a sign of inherent fascism, or racism, or sexism, or a combination of all three. Those concerned with population are said to be intent on controlling the lives and breeding rights of others. But the truth remains that the land—the soil, the sea, the other creatures with whom we share this planet—cannot meaningfully survive the current exponential growth in human population. If we continue as we are, we are doomed. Even if the human population could carry on for a while longer, the stress on the forests, seas, air, soil, and climate of the planet would lead to a way of life that many of us could not tolerate.16 At the same time, there is nothing we can think of, at present, to halt our journey toward, if not extinction, then at least massive breakdown. Like the children in Jude the Obscure, “we are too menny.” On the other hand, we cannot deny others the right to have children, and we cannot refuse them the “right” to own and use the consumer goods and services that we take for granted. And why would we? They, like us, are part of the hum. They are our kind.
Later, back at The Convergence, Jeffrey tries to repeat Ben-Ezra’s experiment: “I went to my room, turned on the light and sat in the chair thinking. It felt as though I’d done this a thousand times, same room every time, same person in the chair. I found myself listening. I tried to empty my mind and simply listen. I wanted to hear what Ben-Ezra had described, the oceanic sound of people living and thinking and talking, billions, everywhere, waiting for trains, marching to war, licking food off their fingers. Or simply being who they were. The world hum.”17
This, then, is our tragedy. As a species, we have been too successful in certain areas, and miserable failures in others. Miller saw this clearly back in the 1940s:
It is not enough to overthrow governments, masters, tyrants: one must overthrow his own preconceived ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. We must abandon the hard-fought trenches we have dug ourselves into and come out into the open, surrender our arms, our possessions, our rights as individuals, classes, nations, peoples. A billion men seeking peace cannot be enslaved. We have enslaved ourselves, by our own petty, circumscribed view of life. It is glorious to offer one’s life for a cause, but dead men accomplish nothing. Life demands that we offer something more—spirit, soul, intelligence, goodwill. Nature is ever ready to repair the gaps caused by death, but nature cannot supply the intelligence, the will, the imagination to conquer the forces of death. Nature restores and repairs, that is all. It is man’s task to eradicate the homicidal instinct which is infinite in its ramifications and manifestations. It is useless to call upon God, as it is futile to meet force with force.”18
Does Miller frame his argument in such terms because he knows it is too radical, in the current climate? Almost certainly. However, as true anarchists everywhere know, the collapse toward which we are headed can only be avoided by making the sacrifices Miller describes—and if we do not give up those illusions of power and ownership, they will, in due course, be taken from us.
“To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too,” Miller says, elsewhere in The Colossus of Maroussi.
To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven’t the faintest idea what it’s about or why people should enjoy killing one another.19
What I have been seeking in this chapter might sound like a slightly crazed eco-critical reading of Miller’s thought; I believe it is not. In fact, it is, for me, more pressing and personal than that. I have said that I did not go back to Miller to write lit-crit; I wanted to find work that would provoke me to think anew about what I take for granted, whether it be with regard to the writer’s vocation and social function (if there is one), the battle lines drawn up between the sexes by a society that remains sexually and sensually repressive, or the idea of the creaturely in philosophical and ecological terms. In this closing section, what I want is to use Miller’s ideas as much to critique mainstream ecology/environmental methods as to attack The System itself—because, as Miller’s work and life show, there can be no compromise with The System, no matter how green or democratic it pretends to be. Business is business and as long as the world is driven by profit, titles, and power relations, we must look to those who propose radical acts, in our flights, and in our discoveries—and the basis of that radical vision is the sense of “creatureliness” that informs anarchist thinking.
Again, this already sounds too highfalutin and solemn: another way of describing my intention throughout might be to say that I have been trying to recover and reimagine a seriously playful condition (“here all is play and invention”) in which “the world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order,” or in James Carse’s terms, to become infinite players. Too many self-described eco-critical writers are prepared to compromise with power for finite titles, short-term achievements (the most base of which is surely “power-sharing”), or even just a few drops of hope in a parched land; too many environmentalists find themselves able to back corporations and landowners whose greenwashing is sufficiently persuasive; too many green politicians are prepared to put the world in order if it means “keeping the lights on”; and, sadly, we are very far from reaching the stage ‘where the environment (the earth, natural order, the hum of all living things) is the main concern in all—all—of our decisions. Does it sound too radical, really, to say that the lights have to go off now and then? Does it really seem misanthropic to suggest that the earth cannot sustain a population of nine billion, if that population still sees it as a right to keep their lights on (and their cars on the road, and the air-con running day and night)? Miller knew what was stake, and there are times when his writing justifiably hints at apocalypse, or at the very least, the massive ruination of a “developed society” that didn’t, in the end, deserve to continue. It would be wrong not to allow him the last word here—but, because his view of the world is so manifold, because, like his hero, Whitman, he contradicts himself in order to add to the joy and the confusion, I offer two remarks to keep in mind as we stumble on into the darkness, or the (natural) light:
When God answers Job cosmologically it is to remind man that he is only a part of creation, that it is his duty to put himself in accord with it or perish. When man puts his head out of the stream of life he becomes self-conscious. And with self-consciousness comes arrest, fixation, symbolised so vividly by the myth of Narcissus.20
and
The universe is run by laws, if you break the law you have to pay the penalty. That’s only fair, isn’t it? Besides, how are you going to learn except through experience?21