The Henry Miller Reader

by Lawrence Durrell

  Before the present conflict is terminated it is altogether likely that we shall see unleashed the deadly secret weapon so often hinted at on all sides. At the very beginning of the war I described (in an unpublished book on America) the ironic possibilities which the discovery and use of a deadly “human flit” would entail. The ambivalent attitude of dread and ridicule which this idea generally elicits is significant. It means that the inconceivable and unconscionable has already become a dire possibility. That the men of science will be coerced into yielding up the secret now in their possession I have no doubt. If the Japanese can unblushingly carry on their program of systematically doping their victims it is not at all unthinkable that we on our side will come forth with an even more effective, certainly a more drastic and immediate, weapon of destruction. All the rules of warfare which have hitherto obtained are destined to be smashed and relegated to the scrap-heap. This is merely a corollary to the dissolution of the Hague Tribunal, the Maginot Line and all our fond conceptions of peace, justice and security. It is not that we have become more brutal and cynical, more ruthless and immoral—it is that ever since the last war we are consciously or unconsciously (probably both) making war upon war. The present methods of making war are too ineffectual, too protracted, too costly in every sense. All that impedes us thus far is the lack of imaginative leaders. The common people are far more logical, ruthless and totalitarian in spirit than the military and political cliques. Hitler, for all that has been said against him, is hardly the brilliant imaginative demon we credit him with being. He merely served to unleash the dark forces which we tried to pretend did not exist. With Hitler Pluto came out into the open. In England and America we have far more realistic, far more ruthless, types. All that deters them is fear of consequences: they are obsessed by the image of the boomerang. It is their habit to act obliquely, shamefacedly, with guilty consciences. But this conscience is now being broken down, giving way to something vastly different, to what it was originally, what the Greeks called syneidesis. Once a deep vision of the future opens up these types will proceed with the directness and remorselessness of monomaniacs.

  The problem of power, what to do with it, how to use it, who shall wield it or not wield it, will assume proportions heretofore unthinkable. We are moving into the realm of incalculables and imponderables in our everyday life just as for the last few generations we have been accustoming ourselves to this realm through the play of thought. Everything is coming to fruition, and the harvest will be brilliant and terrifying. To those who look upon such predictions as fantastic I have merely to point out, ask them to imagine, what would happen should we ever unlock the secret patents now hidden in the vaults of our unscrupulous exploiters. Once the present crazy system of exploitation crumbles, and it is crumbling hourly, the powers of the imagination, heretofore stifled and fettered, will run riot. The face of the earth can be changed utterly overnight once we have the courage to concretize the dreams of our inventive geniuses. Never was there such a plenitude of inventors as in this age of destruction. And there is one thing to bear in mind about the man of genius—even the inventor—usually he is on the side of humanity, not the devil. It has been the crowning shame of this age to have exploited the man of genius for sinister ends. But such a procedure always acts as a boomerang: ultimately the man of genius always has his revenge.

  Within the next fifteen years, when the grand clean-up goes into effect, the man of genius will do more to liberate the fettered sleeping giants than was ever done in the whole history of man. There will be strange new offices, strange new powers, strange new rules. It will seem for a while as though everything were topsy-turvy, and so it will be, regarded from today’s vantage point. What is now at the bottom will come to the top, and vice versa. The world has literally been standing on its head for thousands of years. So great has been the pressure from above that a hole has been bored through the very stuff of consciousness. Into the empty vessel of life the waters are now pouring. The predatory few, who sought to arrange life in their own vulpine terms, will be the first to be drowned. “The few,” I say, but in all truth they are legion. The floods of destruction sweep high and low; we are all part and parcel of the same mold; we have all been abetting the crime of man against man. The type of man we represent will be drowned out utterly. A new type will arise, out of the dregs of the old. That is why the stirring of sleepy Asia is fraught with such fateful consequences for the man of Europe, or shall I say, the man of the Western world. All this muck, these lees and dregs of humanity, the coolies and Untouchables, will have to be absorbed in our blood stream. The clash of East and West will be like a marriage of the waters; when the new dry land eventually appears the old and the new will be indistinguishable.

  The human fundament is in the East. We have talked breathlessly about equality and democracy without ever facing the reality of it. We shall have to take these despised and neglected ones to our bosom, melt into them, absorb their anguish and misery. We cannot have a real brotherhood so long as we cherish the illusion of racial superiority, so long as we fear the touch of yellow, brown, black or red skins. We in America will have to begin by embracing the Negro, the Indian, the Mexican, the Filipino, all those Untouchables whom we so blithely dismiss from our consciousness by pointing to our Bill of Rights. We have not even begun to put the Emancipation Proclamation into effect. The same is true of course for England, for imperialist Holland, and colonial France. Russia took the first genuine steps in this direction, and Russia, nobody will dispute, has certainly not been weakened by carrying out her resolution to the letter.

  And now, what about Art? What is the place and the future of art in all this turmoil? Well, in the first place, it seems to me that what we have hitherto known as art will be nonexistent. Oh yes, we will continue to have novels and paintings and symphonies and statues, we will even have verse, no doubt about it. But all this will be as a hangover from other days, a continuation of a bad dream which ends only with full awakening. The cultural era is past. The new civilization, which may take centuries or a few thousand years to usher in, will not be another civilization—it will be the open stretch of realization which all the past civilizations have pointed to. The city, which was the birth-place of civilization, such as we know it to be, will exist no more. There will be nuclei of course, but they will be mobile and fluid. The peoples of the earth will no longer be shut off from one another within states but will flow freely over the surface of the earth and intermingle. There will be no fixed constellations of human aggregate. Governments will give way to management, using the word in a broad sense. The politician will become as superannuated as the dodo bird. The machine will never be dominated, as some imagine; it will be scrapped, eventually, but not before men have understood the nature of the mystery which binds them to their creation. The worship, investigation and subjugation of the machine will give way to the lure of all that is truly occult. This problem is bound up with the larger one of power—and of possession. Man will be forced to realize that power must be kept open, fluid and free. His aim will be not to possess power but to radiate it.

  At the root of the art instinct is this desire for power—vicarious power. The artist is situated hierarchically between the hero and the saint. These three types rule the world, and it is difficult to say which wields the greatest power. But none of them are what might be called adepts. The adept is the power behind the powers, so to speak. He remains anonymous, the secret force from which the suns derive their power and glory.

  To put it quite simply, art is only a stepping-stone to reality; it is the vestibule in which we undergo the rites of initiation. Man’s task is to make of himself a work of art. The creations which man makes manifest have no validity in themselves; they serve to awaken, that is all. And that, of course, is a great deal. But it is not the all. Once awakened, everything will reveal itself to man as creation. Once the blinders have been removed and the fetters unshackled, man will have no need to recreate through the elect cult of
genius. Genius will be the norm.

  Throughout history the artist has been the martyr, immolating himself in his work. The very phrase, “a work of art,” gives off a perfume of sweat and agony. Divine creation, on the other hand, bears no such connotation. We do not think of sweat and tears in connection with the creation of the universe; we think of joy and light, and above all of play. The agony of a Christ on Calvary, on the other hand, illustrates superbly the ordeal which even a Master must undergo in the creation of a perfect life.

  In a few hundred years or less books will be a thing of the past. There was a time when poets communicated with the world without the medium of print; the time will come when they will communicate silently, not as poets merely, but as seers. What we have overlooked, in our frenzy to invent more dazzling ways and means of communication, is to communicate. The artist lumbers along with crude implements. He is only a notch above his predecessor, the cave man. Even the film art, requiring the services of veritable armies of technicians, is only giving us shadow plays, old almost as man himself.

  No, the advance will not come through the use of subtler mechanical devices, nor will it come through the spread of education. The advance will come in the form of a breakthrough. New forms of communication will be established. New forms presuppose new desires. The great desire of the world today is to break the bonds which lock us in. It is not yet a conscious desire. Men do not yet realize what they are fighting for. This is the beginning of a long fight, a fight from within outwards. It may be that the present war will be fought entirely in the dark. It may be that the revolution ensuing will envelop us in even greater darkness. But even in the blackest night it will be a joy and a boon to know that we are touching hands around the world. That has never happened before. We can touch and speak and pray in utter darkness. And we can wait for the dawn—no matter how long—provided we all wait together.

  The years immediately ahead of us will be a false dawn, that is my belief. We cannot demolish our educational, legal and economic pediments overnight, nor even our phony religious superstructures. Until these are completely overthrown there is not much hope of a new order. From birth we live in a web of chaos in which all is illusion and delusion. The leaders who now and then arise, by what miracle no one knows, these leaders who come forward expressly to lead us out of the wilderness, are nearly always crucified. This happens on both sides of the fence, not just in the domain of Axis tyrants. It can happen in Soviet Russia too, as we know. And it happens in a less spectacular but all the more poisonous, insidious way in the United States, “home of the brave and land of the free.” It is idle to blame individuals, or even classes of society. Given the educational, legal, economic and religious background of the cultural nations of this day, the results are inevitable. The savagery of a Céline is like the prattle of a child to those who can look into the heart of things with naked eye. Often, when I listen to the radio, to a speech by one of our politicians, to a sermon by one of our religious maniacs, to a discourse by one of our eminent scholars, to an appeal by one of our men of good will, to the propaganda dinned into us night and day by the advertising fiends, I wonder what the men of the coming century would think were they to listen in for just one evening.

  I do not believe that this repetitious cycle of insanity which is called history will continue forever. I believe there will be a great breakthrough—within the next few centuries. I think that what we are heralding as the Age of Technic will be nothing more than a transition period, as was the Renaissance. We will need, to be sure, all our technical knowledge and skill to settle once and for all the problem of securing to every man, woman and child the fundamental necessities. We will make a drastic revision, it also goes without saying, of our notion of necessities, which is an altogether crude and primitive one. With the concomitant emancipation of woman, entailed by this great change, the awakening of the love instinct will transform every domain of life. The era of neuters is drawing to a close. With the establishment of a new and vital polarity we shall witness the birth of male-and-female in every individual. What then portends in the realm of art is truly unthinkable. Our art has been masculine through and through, that is to say, lop-sided. It has been vitiated by the unacknowledged feminine principle. This is as true of ancient as of modern art. The tyrannical, subterranean power of the female must come to an end. Men have paid a heavy tribute for their seeming subjugation of the female.

  If we dare to imagine a solution of these seemingly fixed problems, dare to imagine an end of perhaps ten thousand years of pseudo-civilization, dare to imagine a change as radical as from the Stone Age to the Age of Electricity, let us say, for in the future we will not advance slowly step by step as in the past but with the rush of the whirlwind, then who can say what forms of expression art will assume? Myself I cannot see the persistence of the artist type. I see no need for the individual man of genius in such an order. I see no need for martyrs. I see no need for vicarious atonement. I see no need for the fierce preservation of beauty on the part of a few. Beauty and Truth do not need defenders, nor even expounders. No one will ever have a lien on Beauty or Truth; they are creations in which all participate. They need only to be apprehended; they exist externally. Certainly, when we think of the conflicts and schisms which occur in the realm of art, we know that they do not proceed out of love of Beauty or Truth. Ego worship is the one and only cause of dissension, in art as in other realms. The artist is never defending art, but simply his own petty conception of art. Art is as deep and high and wide as the universe. There is nothing but art, if you look at it properly. It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis. But how many deeply and sincerely believe that? Are we not devotees of the static? Are we not always on the defensive? Are we not always trying to circumscribe, erect barriers, set up taboos? Are we not always preparing for war? Are we not always in the grip of “fear and trembling”? Are we not always sanctifying, idolizing, martyrizing, proselytizing? What a pitiful, ignominious spiritual shambles, these last ten thousand years! Civilized, we say. What a horrible word! What bedeviled idiocy skulks behind that arrogant mask! Oh, I am not thinking of this war, nor of the last one, nor of any or all the wars men have waged in the name of Civilization. I am thinking of the periods in between, the rotten, stagnant eras of peace, the lapses and relapses, the lizardlike sloth, the creepy molelike burrowing in, the fungus growths, the barnacles, the stink-weeds; I am thinking of the constant fanatical dervish dance that goes on in the name of all that is unreal, unholy and unattainable, thinking of the sadistic-masochistic tug of war, now one getting the upper hand, now the other. In the name of humanity when will we cry Enough!

  There are limits to everything, and so I believe there is a limit to human stupidity and cruelty. But we are not yet there. We have not yet drained the bitter cup. Perhaps only when we have become full-fledged monsters will we recognize the angel in man. Then, when the ambivalence is clear, may we look forward with confidence to the emergence of a new type of man, a man as different from the man of today as we are from the pithecanthropus erectus. Nor is this too much to hope for, even at this remote distance. There have been precursors. Men have walked this earth who, for all they resemble us, may well have come from another planet. They have appeared singly and far apart. But tomorrow they may come in clusters, and the day after in hordes. The birth of Man follows closely the birth of the heavens. A new star never makes its appearance alone. With the birth of a new type of man a current is set in motion which later enables us to perceive that he was merely the foam on the crest of a mighty wave.

  I have a strange feeling that the next great impersonation of the future will be a woman. If it is a greater reality we are veering towards then it must be woman who points the way. The masculine hegemony is over. Men have lost touch with the earth; they are clinging to the windowpanes of their unreal superstructures like blind bats lashed by the storms of oceanic depths. Their worl
d of abstractions spells babble.

  When men are at last united in darkness woman will once again illumine the way—by revealing the beauties and mysteries which enfold us. We have tried to hide from our sight the womb of night, and now we are engulfed in it. We have pretended to be single when we were dual, and now we are frustrate and impotent. We shall come forth from the womb united, or not at all. Come forth not in brotherhood, but in brotherhood and sisterhood, as man and wife, as male and female. Failing, we shall perish and rot in the bowels of the earth, and time pass us by ceaselessly and remorselessly.

  * The present strife with Japan is more a clash of rivals than of genuine antagonists. But it serves to damage irreparably our unwarranted prestige in the East.

  † Title of Dane Rudhyar’s new and as yet unpublished book.

  REFLECTIONS ON WRITING