Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

by Henry Miller

  “Jean,” I once ventured to say, “you have declared that all is good, that evil is but the negative of that which is all positive, that the plan is perfect, that light triumphs over darkness, that truth must and does prevail…. But can you forbear to succor the weak, can you forbear to straighten out crooked souls, can you respond to foolish questions, or imperious demands, with silence? Can you just be what you are, confident that nothing more is demanded of you? Is not being the all? Or, as you put it, seeing? Seeing through the false, the illusory, the unreal?”

  There was never the slightest doubt in my mind as to her sincerity. The one defect, if I dare call it that, which I could detect in her was an inordinate sense of compassion. And yet, what greater link can there be between the human and the divine? The compassionate nature is awakened precisely when the heart and mind become as one, when the human will surrenders in absolute trust. In true compassion there is neither attitude nor involvement. Nor is there any relinquishing or deplenishment of powers. Quite the contrary, indeed. When compassion is manifested, all discordant elements are instantly attuned. But it can only make itself felt, only become operative and work its magic, when there is absolute certitude, absolute accord with truth. When “I and the Father are one.”

  What I detected in her now and then was a wavering, or indecisiveness, which prompted her in weak moments to give that little push which only the “master” can refrain from giving—or give because he is certain of the outcome. Formerly she had given many an exhausting push, and had paid the price for doing so. There was little danger of her relapsing. The question was how to go forward, how to be of greater service without creating new temptations, new traps, which the ego ever lies in wait to exploit. With every ounce of wisdom she possessed she schooled herself anew each day to banish even the most innocent kind of intercession. Aware that self-exhortation is but a reminder of hidden failings, she also disciplined herself to do whatever her inner promptings urged. Fighting to leave herself open, to avoid making decisions, to eliminate opinions, use no will, meet each situation as it arose when it arose and not before, fighting not to fight, struggling not to struggle, deciding not to decide, she was indeed making herself a battleground. Outwardly there was little trace of this many-sided conflict; she was always serene, confident, optimistic, and therapeutic, even without meaning to be so. Inwardly, however, she was consumed. She had a role to play in life but the nature of this role was becoming more and more elusive. The more she evolved, the deeper her insight, the less there was for her to do. And she had always been a very active, very energetic person. She scarcely knew what is called fatigue. Moreover, she had done her utmost to make herself as anonymous as possible. She had surrendered even the desire to surrender. But her life—to those who watched her anxiously—only seemed to become more hectic, more involved. Her comings and goings were as erratic as the quivering of a compass needle in the presence of hidden ore. Everyone had a different explanation for her behavior, but no explanations hit the mark. Not even her own.

  To cut short the déroulement of her personal history, as I soon shall, is not to pique the reader’s curiosity nor to arouse interest in an exceptional personality—the world is full of remarkable “personalities”—but to draw attention to a problem which vitally concerns us all, however little we may think about it. It is some times said about this transitional period we are passing through that this time there will be no world figure to emerge and lead us out of the wilderness. This time we will be obliged to save ourselves. (Which is, of course, what every great teacher struggled to make man understand.) Given the dire circumstances in which the world at large is now enmeshed, it is strikingly noticeable that there is no one recognizable figure on the horizon capable of inspiring us as a world leader. Neither is there any new doctrine whose message, if followed, would deliver us from our inertia. That the Kingdom of Heaven is within—or “within our reach,” as scholars now insist the translation should be—that man needs no intermediary, that he cannot be saved except by his own efforts, that the abundance of the earth is inexhaustible—these ineluctable truths now stare us in the face implacably and incontrovertibly. There is indeed a cruel, ironic validity to our stubborn refusal to be saved. The contemptuous, scornful way in which we treat would-be saviours is not altogether a reflection of our imperviousness. We know today that the “do-gooders” and the “fixer-uppers” are capable of doing more damage than the carefree, heedless sinners.

  As a people, we Americans have submitted to some perilous experiments. Ever since 1914 we have been trying to patch things up for the world. Not with a clear, clean conscience, it is true, but not entirely in hypocritical fashion either. In brief, we have behaved as a people would who have had more than their share of the good things of life, who have not been crippled morally, physically and spiritually by successive invasions and revolutions. Yet we have failed completely to ameliorate the harrowing conditions which beset the rest of the world. Not only that, but we ourselves have deteriorated and retrogressed. We have lost much of the character, the independence, the buoyancy and resiliency, to say nothing of the courage, faith and optimism, of our forefathers. Still a young nation, we are already weary, filled with doubts and misgivings, and absolutely at sea as to what course to pursue in world affairs. All we seem able to do is to give ourselves more injections and arm to the teeth. When we do not truculently threaten or menace, we wheedle, cajole and appease as best we know how. It is clear to all the world that all we really care about is to enjoy our huge piece of pie in peace and tranquillity. But we know now beyond all doubt, and it is this which disturbs us profoundly, that we cannot enjoy our pie while the rest of the world starves. We cannot even have our piece of pie unless we aid others to have theirs too. (Assuming that they want pie and not something more substantial.)

  If it is abundance we worship, then common sense would dictate that we cease wasting our time and energy on the manufacture of destructive products and destructive thoughts. Imagine a man who is strong and healthy, who wants nothing of his neighbor because he has more than enough at home, and who insists on taking pills, donning a full coat of armor when he goes to work, and then proceeds to build walls around his dwelling place so that nobody will break in and rob him of so much as a crust of bread. Or who says: “Yes, I shall be happy to sit down to the table with you, but first you must change your ideas.” Or who goes even further and says: “The trouble with you is that you don’t know how to live!”

  I don’t pretend to know how the other half lives, but I do know something about the way this half lives. I don’t even have to stir from the tiny community in which I have my abode. With all the good that I see in the neighbors about me, with all the valiant efforts I observe them making to live up to the good life, to do right by one another, to make the most of the paradise in which they find themselves, still, if I am honest and truthful, I must declare that they have only one foot in this new world which is begging to be opened up. I mean the world of full and harmonious relationship—with God, man, Nature, children, parents, husband or wife, brother or sister. I say not a word, you observe, about art, culture, intellect, invention. The world of play, yes! A vast and perhaps the most profitable world of all, next to that of sheer idleness. But first things first….

  No, as a writer, I cannot help but look upon the immediate scene with different eyes than would a mere friend or neighbor. I can see all that Jean Wharton saw—and perhaps more. I have chosen to dwell on the “interesting” things which happened to me here, whether good or bad, whether wholesome or unwholesome. I am not taking a moral survey of the environment. It doesn’t matter to me that a few hundred yards in this direction or that I can come face to face with an ornery bastard or a God-given son of a bitch or a filthy miser or a vain and arrogant fool. “It takes all kinds to make a world.” Ouais! If I stray from the cowpath on my daily walk through the hills and come home bristling with thistles and burrs, who’s to blame? In a casual conversation with a neighbor you sometim
es get overtones and reverberations of your own private misery which give you an inkling of conditions round about which you had ignored or overlooked. That so-and-so, who seems so well-adjusted, so at peace with the world, so tolerant and gracious, should have a wife who is literally driving him crazy may come as a startling revelation. Or that so-and-so, who seems so happy and content in his field of work and whom every one looks upon as a “success,” regards himself as a miserable failure and thinks of nothing but the great mistake he made in refusing to become a judge, a diplomat, or whatever it may be. No matter what the one in question be—judge, politician, artist, plumber, day laborer or farm hand—if you look deep into his life you will find an unhappy, unfulfilled individual. And if he in his own soul is a miserable creature, you can almost count on it that his wife is an even more miserable one. In the home that seems to you so snug and cozy, so warm, so inviting, there are ghosts and skeletons, tragedies and calamities brewing, far greater, far more subtle and complex, than our dramatists and novelists ever give us. No artist has sufficient genius to touch bottom, where the private life of the individual is concerned. “If you are unhappy,” says Tolstoy, “and I know that you are unhappy….” Those words ever ring in my ears. Tolstoy himself, grand old man that he was, genius that he was, good Christian that he was, was unable to avoid unhappiness. His domestic life reads like a sad joke. The greater he grew in soul the more ridiculous a figure he cut at home. A classic situation, yes, but when repeated on a trivial scale and universally, something to weep about. The husbands are doing their best, the wives are doing their best, yet nothing jells. Firecrackers but no fireworks. Petty quarrels, stupid brawls, jealousy, intrigue, increasing estrangement, hysterical anxiety, followed by more wrangling, more intrigues, more gossip, more vilification and recrimination, after which divorce, alimony, division of progeny, division of chattels, and then a new go at it, whereupon a new failure, a new setback. Finally it’s old John Barleycorn, bankruptcy, cancer or a dash of schizophrenia. Then suicide, moral, spiritual, physical, nuclear and etheric.

  Such is the picture which doesn’t always come clear through the televistic screen. The negative, in other words, from which all that is positive, good and everlasting will eventually come through. Easy to recognize because no matter where your parachute lands you it’s always the same: the everyday life.

  With this setup I am almost as familiar as Jean Wharton who has spent so much time, so much effort, developing positives for those who see only negatives, or rather are unable to read negatives, for if they could they would have no more need for positives than for negatives. Why is it we cannot hold the positive, once it has been shown us? The answers are many, varying with school and dogma. In any case, do we not resemble those myopic individuals who, during a train ride in which they have fallen sound asleep, their spectacles safely in their pockets, suddenly open their eyes and, for a fraction of time, see everything sharp and clear, as sharp and clear as if they enjoyed perfect vision? Let us not quibble. Their vision was perfect—for just a few instants. What made it so? Do they ask themselves the question? No! They calmly wipe their eyes, now blurred again, and put on their specs. With these, so they tell themselves, they can see as well as the next man. But they do not see as well as the man with normal eyesight. They see as cripples.

  It is all of a piece—the look in the eye, the posture, the stance, the gait, and “the angle of vision,” as Balzac says. The angel in man is ready to emerge whenever that dread human will to have it one’s own way can be kept in abeyance. Things not only look different, they are different, when perfect sight is restored. To see things whole is to be whole. The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay, if we accept it. Nothing is solid, fixed or unalterable. All is flux, because everything created is also creative. If you are unhappy—“and I know you are!”—take thought! You can spend the rest of your life fighting it out on every front, in every vector—and get nowhere. Give up, throw in the sponge, and possibly you will look at the world with new eyes. More than possibly you will see your friends and enemies in a new light—even your wife, or that rascally, inconsiderate, hardheaded, ill-tempered, gin-soaked devil of a husband.

  Is there a discrepancy between this realistic picture, which I have just sketched, and the attractive positive which I painted when the “oranges” were in bloom? No doubt there is. Have I contradicted myself? No! Both pictures are true, even though colored by the temperament of the writer. We are always in two worlds at once, and neither of them is the world of reality. One is the world we think we are in, the other is the world we would like to be in. Now and then, as if through a chink in the door—or like the myopic who falls asleep in the train—we get a glimpse of the abiding world. When we do, we know better than any metaphysician can expostulate, the difference between true and false, the real and the illusory.

  Several times now I have stressed the fact that whatever “it” is one gets here at Big Sur, one gets it harder, faster, straighter than one would elsewhere. I come back to it again. I say, the people here are fundamentally no different from people elsewhere. Their problems are basically the same as those who inhabit the cities, the jungles, the desert or the vast steppes. The greatest problem is not how to get along with one’s neighbor but how to get along with one’s self. Trite, you say. But true, nevertheless.

  What is it that makes one’s problems (here in Big Sur) assume such a dramatic aspect? Almost melodramatic at times. The place itself has much to do with it. If the soul were to choose an arena in which to stage its agonies, this would be the place for it. One feels exposed—not only to the elements, but to the sight of God. Naked, vulnerable, set against an overwhelming backdrop of might and majesty, one’s problems become magnified because of the proscenium on which the conflict is staged. Robinson Jeffers is unerring in high-lighting this aspect of his narrative poems. His figures and their manner of behavior are not falsely exaggerated, as some believe. If his narratives smack of Greek tragedy, it is because Jeffers rediscovered here the atmosphere of the gods and fates which obsessed the ancient Greeks. The light here is almost as electric, the hills almost as bare, the community almost as autonomous as in ancient Greece. The rugged pioneers who settled here needed only a voice to make known their secret drama. And Jeffers is that voice.

  But there is another factor which enters into play here. Though not cut off, in the strict sense, Big Sur receives, as through a filter, the violent waves which agitate the world. Living here, whether at the edge of the sea or on top of a mountain, one gets the feeling that it is all happening “out there” somewhere. One is not obliged to read the daily paper over his morning coffee nor tune in on the radio for the latest shock injection. One can live with or without, take it or leave it, and not feel out of step with the rest of the community. One does not rush to work in a crowded, ill-smelling subway; one is not on the telephone all day; one is not confronted with picket lines or police hurling tear bombs into a panic-stricken mob. One isn’t obliged to buy a television set for the children. Life can pursue its course here free of so many disturbing elements which are accepted as normal by the rest of America.

  On the other hand, when things get tough, when one is at his wit’s end, when one’s patience is tried to the breaking point, there is no one to go to, no movie to stultify the mind, no bar to lap it up in (there are drinking places, yes, but one would soon be excommunicated if they were used for this purpose), no pavements to pound, no store windows to stare at, no bastards to pick a fight with. No, you are completely on your own. If you insist on gnashing your teeth you can gnash them at the wild waves, at the silent forest, or at the stony hills. One can get desperate here in a way that no city man understands. Sure, you can run amok … but where would it lead you? You can’t slash mountains to ribbons, nor cut the sky to pieces, nor flatten a wave with the broadest swo
rd. You can get the screaming meemies all right, but what would Mother Nature say if you took to acting up that way?

  I recall one period—right here on Partington Ridge—in which I went through all the demi-quivers of real desperation. It was during the time when my then wife was easing herself out of a hopeless situation. She had taken the children back East, ostensibly to become acquainted with their grandparents whom they had never seen. Some time after they were due back her letters suddenly stopped coming. I waited, wrote a few unanswered letters, one of which was returned unopened (indicating that the addressee had left for parts unknown, or died), and then, as the silence thickened, I suddenly grew panicky. I wasn’t so much concerned for my wife, though perhaps I ought to have been, as I was about the children. “Where in hell are my children?” I kept asking myself. I kept asking myself the question louder and louder, until it seemed to me that I was shouting it for all to hear. Finally I sent my wife’s sister a wire, to which I got a response two days later, informing me that “they” had left by train some days ago and were probably in Los Angeles. It was small comfort, because as I figured then (in my innocence), if she intended to bring the children home, Los Angeles was not home. Besides, how could I know that Los Angeles was her point of destination? Maybe that was only a jumping off place? Maybe they were over the border by now and deep in the heart of Mexico. And then and there I realized that “home” had come to mean some other place—for her. Now I had no way of communicating with her. I was cut off, just as sharp and neat as if by a razor blade. A day passed, two days, three days. Still no word. My pride prevented me from wiring her sister again. “I’ll sit and wait,” I told myself. “I’ll sit till hell freezes over.” Oh yeah? Try it! There are twenty-four hours in a day, and these can be broken down into minutes, seconds, and fractions of seconds which last an eternity. And all you can think of, all you can repeat to yourself over and over and over, is—“Where, where, where?” Yes, one can always go to the police or hire a private detective … a man of action can think of a thousand things to do in such an emergency. But I am not that type. I sit on a rock and think. Or I think I am thinking. No man can say he “thinks” after he has subjected his mind to all the questions and answers his conscience puts him. No, my mind was just a blank, a blank piece of blubber that had been mercilessly pounded by alternate doubts and hopes, alternate recriminations and confessions.