Los seres humanos constituyen una fauna y flora extrañas. De lejos parecen insignificantes; de cerca parecen feos y maliciosos. Más que nada necesitan estar rodeados de suficiente espacio: de espacio más que de tiempo.]]

Con esta ultima frase termina Tròpico de Cancer.Henry Miller

Κι αυτό είναι αλήθεια. Το βιβλίο αυτό δυσφημίζει έναν άνθρωπο, τον ίδιο τον συγγραφέα, αλλά και όλον τον κόσμο που τον περιβάλλει, ο οποίος είναι διαποτισμένος από την πλήρη απαξίωση της ανθρώπινης ύπαρξης, από την απόλυτη ηθική κατάπτωση, από τη δυσωδία των παθών, από τον εξευτελισμό της ανθρώπινης αξιοπρέπειας. Ο ήρωας του βιβλίου –που δεν είναι άλλος από τον ίδιο τον συγγραφέα- αναγνωρίζει αυτόν τον ξεπεσμό αλλά δεν προσπαθεί καθόλου να ξεφύγει από αυτήν την κατάσταση. Αντίθετα είναι κυνικός, μισογύνης και απάνθρωπος, δεν έχει καμία εμπιστοσύνη στους ανθρώπους και σε καμία Αρχή, ο κόσμος του όπως λέει ο ίδιος ¨έχει κατρακυλήσει πέρα από τα ανθρώπινα όρια¨.  O συγγραφέας περιγράφει έναν κόσμο που βυθίζεται στο τέλμα, που αυτοκαταστρέφεται , που οδηγείται σε ένα αδιέξοδο. Θα κρατήσει την ελευθερία του να ενεργεί και να σκέπτεται όπως αυτός θέλει και να κινείται σε πλαίσια μη συμβατικά, σουρεαλιστικά και εκστατικά. Και θα μάς παροτρύνει με το δικό του τρόπο να αναποδογυρίσουμε τον κόσμο, να αλλάξουμε την υφιστάμενη κατάσταση πραγμάτων για να δημιουργήσουμε κάτι καινούριο.

Las cosas que importan no son cosas - Ley universal por la que deberían regirse los humanos.

Now I’m awake and waiting to hear the kettle go, then I’ll be picking up Tropic of Capricorn and getting in some “in the dark morning” reading done. I have a feeling this may be a long day.

Actually, while putting some milk in my black tea I saw some honeydew and cantaloupe; it looks like a good morning. Things just got a whole lot better.

Michael

Richard Brautigan - 1957

By 1956, Brautigan had settled in San Francisco, California. There he sought to establish himself as a writer, was known for handing out his poetry on street corners, and often participated in "Blabbermouth Night" readings at The Place, a popular gathering spot for artists and poets. His first published "book" was The Return of the Rivers (1957), a single poem, followed by two collections of poetry: The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958), Lay the Marble Tea (1959).

Emily Bronte - 1840

In 1837 she became a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, where she spent six months. Emily worked at Miss Patchet's shdoll - according to Charlotte - "from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between" and called it slavery. To facilitate their plan to keep school for girls, Emily and Charlotte Brontë went in 1842 to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Emily returned on the same year to Haworth. In 1842 Aunt Branwell died. When she was no longer taking care of the house and her brother-in-law, Emily agreed to stay with her father.

Robert Creeley - 1946

A year with the American Field Service in India and Burma (1944/5) interrupted his time at Harvard; on his return he married, left Harvard without graduating, and, in 1948, went to New Hampshire to try subsistence farming. His attempt two years later to launch his own magazine failed, but prompted a long correspondence with Charles Olson and provided material for Cid Corman's journal, Origin.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 1843

Dostoevsky was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in 1842 and next years he graduated as a War Ministry draftsman. He had no interest in military engineering but at the academy he could also study Russian and French literature.

Dostoevsky's father Mikhail Andreevich died in 1839, probably of apoplexy, but there was strong rumors that he was murdered by his own serfs in a quarrel. With the help of a small income from the estate, he resigned in 1844 his commission to devote himself to writing.

Gustave Flaubert - 1843

In the 1840s Flaubert studied law at Paris, a brief episode in his life, and in 1844 he had a nervous attack. "I was cowardly in my youth," Flaubert wrote once to George Sand. "I was afraid of life." He recognized from suffering a nervous disease, although it could have been epilepsy. However, the diagnosis changed Flaubert's life. He failed his law exams and decided to devote himself to literature. In this Flaubert was helped by his father who bought him a house at Croisset, on the River Seine between Paris and Rouen.

James Joyce - 1904

He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid (they married in 1931), staying in Pola, Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste, which was the world’s seventh busiest port. Joyce gave English lessons and talked about setting up an agency to sell Irish tweed. Refused a post teaching Italian literature in Dublin, he continued to live abroad.

Franz Kafka - 1905

In 1901 he entered Ferdinand-Karls University, where he studied law and received a doctorate in 1906. During these years Kafka became a member of a circle of intellectuals, which included Franz Werfel, Oskar Baum and Max Brod, whom Kafka met in 1902. About 1904 Kafka began writing, making reports on industrial accidents and health hazard in the office by day, and writing stories by night. His profession marked the formal, legalistic language of his stories which avoided all sentimentality and moral interpretations - all conclusions are left to the reader.

D. H. Lawerence - 1907

He worked as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory and then four years as a pupil-teacher. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence received his teaching certificate at 22 and briefly pursued a teaching career at Davidson Road School in Croydon in South London (1908-1911). Lawrence's mother died in 1910 - he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine.

Federico Garcia Lorca - 1920

 García Lorca first read law at the University of Granada, but later entered the University of Madrid. At the same time he also studied music. In the 1920s García Lorca collaborated with Manuel de Falla, becoming an expert pianist and guitar player. In 1919 he moved to Madrid, where he lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, the intellectual center of the town. His friends included the writers Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pablo Neruda.

Thomas Mann - 1897

Mann was educated at the Lübeck gymnasium and he also spent some time at the University of Munich. He then worked for the south German Fire Insurance Company for a short period. Mann's career as a writer started in the magazine Simplicissimus. Mann's first book, DER KLEINE HERR FRIEDMANN, was published in 1898.

While at university, Mann became immersed in the writings of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as in the music of composer Richard Wagner. In Buddenbrooks, Mann's early masterpiece, he used the technique of the leitmotif, which he adapted from Wagner. Mann had started the book in 1897 as a small story about one member of the family. However, the "protracted finger practice with no ulterior advantages" enlarged into a saga of a wealthy Hanseatic family, which declines from strength to decadence. The last Buddenbrook, the musically gifted young Hanno who dies of a typhoid infection; he is the first of many similar, often morally suspect aesthetes in Mann's novels, continuing in Tonio Kröger, Gustav Aschenbach, Felix Krull, and Adrian Lewerkühn.

Vladimir Mayakovsky - 1905

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Kutais region (subsequently Mayakovski), Georgia. He was of Russian and Cossack descent on his father's side and Ukrainian on his mother's. At home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school Mayakovky used Georgian. His father, who was a forest ranger, died in 1906 of septicemia, and left the family penniless.

Mayakovsky attended the gymnasium at Kutais (1902-06) and a school in Moscow (1906-08), where the family had moved after selling all their movable property.

Cormac McCarthy - 1955

Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. He attended Catholic High School in Knoxville, then went to the University of Tennessee in 1951-52. His major: liberal arts. McCarthy joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953; he served four years, spending two of them stationed in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show.

Henry Miller - 1916

From 1909 to 1924 he tried different jobs, including working for a cement company, assisting his father at a tailor shop, and sorting mail for the Post Office. While in the messenger department of Western Union, he started writing a novel.

Vladimir Nabokov - 1921

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg into a wealthy, aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal politician, lawyer, and journalist. The household was Anglophile - Nabokov spoke Russian and English, and at the age of five he learned French. Nabokov received his education at the Tenishev, St. Petersburg's most innovative school. At 16 he inherited a large estate from his father's brother, but he did not have much time to enjoy his wealth. During the Russian Revolution his father was briefly arrested. The family emigrated to Berlin and Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1923. Vladimir Dimitrievich was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a Russian monarchist.

Anais Nin - 1925

In New York Nin studied art, and married in 1923 the banker and artist Hugh Guiler. Later known also as an engraver and filmmaker, he illustrated her books under the pseudonym Ian Hugo. When she started writing fiction, Nin moved in 1924 with Guiler to Paris, France, where she associated with the villa Seurat group.

Frank O'Hara - 1948

Frank (Francis Russell) O'Hara was born on June 27, 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O'Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.

Following the war, O'Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art. He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.

Charles Olson - 1932

Charles Olson, the son of Karl Joseph Olson, a postman, and Mary Hines, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1910. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University. Olson taught English for two years at Clark University then entered Harvard University in 1936, where he completed coursework for a Ph.D. in American civilization.

Kenneth Patchen - 1933

In 1911, Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio. His lifelong romance with writing commenced at age twelve, when he took up keeping a diary and reading the works of famous writers. His first published work was in his high school newspaper. After working for two years with his father, Patchen when on to college in Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College for one year, and then to the University of Wisconsin. He grew bored of his studies, and began to wander around the US. He continued his writing, and in 1934, he married Miriam Oikemus.

Ezra Pound - 1907

From 1903 to 1906 Pound studied Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at Hamilton College. In 1907 his teaching career was cut short at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, when he had entertained an actress in his room.

Kenneth Rexroth - 1927

Rexroth and his first wife, the painter Andrée Shafer, moved to San Francisco in 1927. There he published his first poems in a variety of small magazines, while also pursuing an interest in eastern mysticism and leftist politics. He kept company with like-minded left-wing poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky, and with them aimed to rescue poetry from its supposed downslide into formalist sentimentality. They organized clubs to support struggling writers and artists.

Arthur Schopenhauer - 1810

With the inheritance Schopenhauer received, he was able devote himself entirely to intellectual pursuits. In 1809 Schopenhauer entered the University of Göttingen as a student in medicine and received later the degree of doctor of philosophy from the University of Jena in 1813. During this period he fell in love with Karoline Jagermann, the mistress of the duke of Weimar. She did not respond to his feelings.

John Steinbeck - 1924

Steinbeck attended the local high school and worked on farms and ranches during his vacations. To finance his education, he held many jobs and sometimes dropped out of college for whole quarters. Between 1920 and 1926, he studied marine biology at Stanford University, but did not take a degree-he always planned to be a writer. Several of his early poems and short stories appeared in university publications.

Kurt Vonnegut - 1944

Vonnegut was sent to Europe. He was taken as a prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. After being transported to Dresden, an old cultural town, he worked there making a diet supplement for pregnant women. Between February 13 and 14 the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force made heavy raids on Dresden. At that time Vonnegut was a prisoner in a meat-locker under a slaughterhouse, and was among the few people to survive the total destruction of the city. Later he was employed by the Germans to dig out corpses. Dresden was occupied in 1945 by Soviet troops and Vonnegut was repatriated to the United States.

After the war Vonnegut studied anthropology at Chicago University from 1944 to 1947, but his M.A. thesis 'Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales' was rejected.

John Wieners - 1956

Weiners was the founder of Boston's MEASURE magazine in the 50's, a graduate of the innovative Black Mountain School of poet Charles Olsen, and the author of any number of poetry collections, the first being THE HOTEL WENTLEY POEMS.

Wieners had said that a significant event occurred to him while he was walking by the Charles St. Meeting House on Beacon Hill in Boston, during the 1950's. Famed Gloucester poet, Charles Olsen was reading and folks were handing out his literary and art journal the BLACK MOUNTAIN REVIEW. Weiners was inspired by this magazine, which was founded by such men as Olsen, Robert Creeley, Robert Motherwell and John Cage. The BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL , ( connected with the magazine) in rural North Carolina was described as an "experiment in open education." In the spring of 1955 Wieners enrolled in this unique institution, and later came back to Boston,to publish MEASURE MAGAZINE, that featured many BLACK MOUNTAIN poets.

Virginia Woolf - 1904

Leslie Stephen suffered a slow death from stomach cancer, he died in 1904. When Virginia's brother Thoby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown. Vanessa, Virginia's sister, influenced a number of her characters; in childhood they bathed and slept together.

William Butler Yeats - 1887

As a writer Yeats made his debut in 1885, when he published his first poems in The Dublin University Review. In 1887 the family returned to Bedford Park, and Yeats devoted himself to writing. He visited Mme Blavatsky, the famous occultist, and joined the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, but was later asked to resign.

"Ever wonder if there's a difference between having a mystical experience and completely losing your mind?" ~ Michael Peddie

Well, perhaps there is not much of a difference after all.

... [there is] the darker aspects of a person’s tragic encounter with the upheaval of wonderment -- where the ‘outsider’ was seen as an individual who had not properly assimilated novel realisations into their existence. On the other side of the coin, however, there exist the ‘crazies’ who have lived abundantly (well, some who did, some who didn’t) and joyously in their new perspective, despite being permanently stationed on the fringe of life. These heroes of sane ignorance are the wise madmen and madwomen ... who, from time to time, maintain enough functional control of their faculties to record for the rest of us the annihilation of every solidity, every certainty, and every truth, for they have come to exist defiantly in the limbo of freedom, madness, and wonder.

One of these individuals, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, has done a remarkable job of describing the internal struggles of those who have seen the precariousness of our reality. From his aptly titled novel, "The Idiot", to his not-so-short story "Notes From Underground", to his brilliantly succinct and inspiring "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", he provides us with a collage of disparate, idiosyncratic ‘fools’, as it were. We shall not here delve into these works, but instead be satisfied with Henry Miller’s description of Dostoyevsky himself, which is as lucid as Dostoyevsky's characters were strange. Of this rare ‘outsider’, Miller wrote:

“Dostoyevsky was the sum of all those contradictions which either paralyse a man or lead him to the heights. There was no world too low for him to enter, no place too high for him to ascend. He went the whole gamut, from the abyss to the stars. ... It is a pity that we shall never have the opportunity to read again or see a man placed at the very core of mystery, and by his flashes not merely illuminating things for us, but showing us the depth, the immensity of the darkness.”

At ‘the core of mystery’, when all the walls, repressions, denials, and lies crumble to useless pieces around the lucky or forsaken individual (as they did for Dostoyevsky, who survived numerous crises, including almost being executed, and many torturous years in the hopeless gulag), there is no hidden meaning which bubbles to the fore, only an obvious non‑meaning ensconcing all and everything; an essential, immense non‑meaning, for non-meaning is the essence of the core.

"I am at home in the marvellous. Absolutely at home. The unknown, the mysterious, the exotic,the strange, the never-lived-before, the difficult." ~ Anais Nin

At the throbbing core of life, mystery suddenly becomes unavoidably obvious ...because meaning is now absolutely obscured. It is this descent from the surface of reasonableness, to the unreasonable center, which is the hero or heroine's true journey. Heroic clarity then comes from simply accepting the furthest extent of one's irrevocable confusion one can endure.

Along with Dostoyevsky noted above, Henry Miller wrote about many of his other heroes as well, most of whom were mad artists ... he relates:

"I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other path to pursue. ... anything less shuddering ... less mad, less intoxicated ... is counterfeit. ... Let us have ... a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts."

Ah, but what of propriety, respectability, and convention? Indeed, what of these? In the pursuit of ecstasy and wonder, there is no room for petty concerns or approbation. And that applies as much inwardly, as it does out. Hence Ernest Becker described Rudolph Otto's tangle with his own shattered psyche, stating:

"[He] talked about the terror of the world, the feeling of overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation- the miracle of it, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of each thing, of the fact that there are things at all."

When the mind comes undone, the ego comes undone with it, as we recall from the necessary relationship between epistemological and psychological surrender.

The fact is that those who come to this critical loss of all cohesion find that there is much that is perceived by non-understanding alone; sublime phenomena requiring perversions of themselves in order to be vouchsafed to us. Which is to say, as it is by vegetation that we eat soil, air, sunlight, and dung, so it is through not-knowing that we apprehend the unknown. And therefore, if we seek to have a relationship with what cannot be known, then it is obvious that we cannot expect to exist in the security of 'knowing'.

"... to have that secret that I still couldn't understand, I would again give my life. I had risked the world in search of the question that comes after the answer. ... I hadn't found a human answer to the enigma. But much more, oh much more: I had found the enigma itself." ~ Clarice Lispector

Without this catastrophic intelligent ignorance, we might know a great deal of little knowings, and yet know nothing of the immense unknown.

To come to such a perspective (or non-perspective) is one of the ultimate human sacrifices (recall here the Bhagavad Gita's claim that "Better than the sacrifice of any objects is the sacrifice of wisdom.") Thus, Benjamin Tucker describes this wilful sacrifice, concluding:

"It is in the rehabilitation of position that the succumbing power refuses to be defined, and in the process (if the process is fabulous enough) emerges from its own emerging, writhes in the passage that is omnidirectional, pursues the intensity so furiously that the conundrum becomes the home." [brackets are JH's]

Therefore, to attempt any understanding at this rarefied level of non-understanding ...is to misunderstand. Genius does not discern truth for us, it exposes us to mystery.

Only mystery is true to form; only an enigma is seen as what it truly 'is'- whatever that may be. There is no such thing as understanding, only more sublime levels of non-understanding, or more tragic levels of misunderstanding; the greater the apparent understanding, the greater the misunderstanding.

"Back in those days, everything was simpler and more confused." ~ Jim Morrison

To arrive at the precious and perilous realm of incohesion, of unawareness, we must be willing and brave; we must allow the veneer of being to immolate completely; nothing of what we hold onto or believe in can survive a single moment of true, apocalyptic wonder. All the monuments fall in the earthquake of incognition; it may mean that our old well-ordered lives are ruined completely, that we are done for, if we come to rupturous, rapturous non-understanding correctly. Nothing remains of life as it was imagined to be -- for finally we have matured beyond the pablum of knowledge. That is the way of the mad and the mystic.

Lispector describes this maturity in one of her characters, writing: "With this enormous courage the man had finally stopped being intelligent." Which is to say, to give yourself away to the mystery that you are, to float upward like a balloon without a mooring, to unrecognise existence with a fearless glance unshaken by the nebulous infinity, is to die and be born again, at every moment, without a clue what is happening to you.

"It is the logic of Illogic. And this is all one can say. ... My lucid unreason is not afraid of chaos." ~ Antonin Artaud

Though Artaud is one of the mystical madmen who perhaps lost it too completely in the end (spending nine years in an asylum in France, where he aggressively declared, "I am a fanatic, I am not a madman"), at least he went down swinging.

Anais Nin wrote, after meeting Artaud, "All I could see that evening was his revolt against interpretations. He was impatient with their presence, as if they prevented him from exaltation." And so he was a hero indeed, forfeiting all reasonableness and caution for one thing and one thing only -- ecstasy.

Wonder for some individuals, then, is not merely an experience to be had and then quickly 'gotten over', as it were; it is instead an outlook which must be sedulously integrated until it becomes a fanatical disposition demanding intimacy with the unfathomableness of being, and this is the power which redeems all of creation from the bounds of logic and reason.

"The non-mysterious concerns of human beings may be drawn as clearly as the outlines of this page. ... What is to be inscribed here but the disgust of generations linked like propositions in the sterile fatality of a syllogism?" ~ E.M. Cioran

We see that when the will to honesty overpowers the need for the security of understanding, only then will the exasperated individual stand his or her ground; only then will a person hold firm in the acceptance that the history of knowledge and learning is but a cowardly attempt to orient oneself within an unimaginable event- life! To finally come to terms with such a realization is to isolate oneself from the claustrophobia of man's 'reason', and to believe in one's vision, despite what all others claim you should see.

This 'new' madness is the sanity of wonder. And only those strong enough to withstand the tide of mankind's misconceptions, and to walk clean through without succumbing to the taint, only they shall be counted as the Keepers of the Mystery.

Osho (Bagwhan Shree Rajneesh) provides us with a definition of this type, stating:

"Strangeness of a thing immediately shakes you out of the rut of unconsciousness. ...if someone can go mad consciously, it would be a great experience; no other experience could be greater than this. ...it is in such a situation that a feeling of utter strangeness overwhelms you... You suddenly find that all connections, all communications...have snapped, that all bridges have broken, and all adjustments have collapsed. You find that everything relevant has become irrelevant; the day to day relevance of things is lost altogether."

Again, wonder is not about seeing spectacles that are wonderful, but wonder is instead a living function of the individual's openness, which is independent of any specific phenomena -- because it includes everything; magic is a perspective, not an occurrence. Wonder is woven into the immanent fabric of the wondering mind, not in the outward recognition of something wonderful; it is the individual's inward ability to unrecognise everything at once, in a euphoric implosion of non-interpretation.

From another individual who went the full distance into Mystery, so to speak, we have, from Vaslav Nijinski's diary, "I want the death of mind. ...The mind is stupidity, but wisdom is God."

... It is said that in the final stages of his [VN] insanity (or perhaps sanity, as it were) he was found giving his money away on the street, and claiming that he had suffered more than Christ. Whatever the reality of his experience, there is no doubt from his diary that he, like Artaud, went so far away from the profane understanding of mankind, that he could not get back; neither of them could any longer participate conventionally in a world which was far below their understandings (or non-understanding) of life. Their manias were the passions of men awoken in a prison who believed that they alone knew all others were in prison as well. And that prison is the mind.

"... everything is distorted and displaced as soon as it understands itself." ~ Heinrich von Kleist

Is it not our habit to distort everything, especially ourselves, by assuming to understand them? It is our pathos, our temerity, or caution, or demise.

And therefore, recognising this, when finally we do confront ourselves with complete openness and candor, we must struggle not to turn quickly away, having found that we do not actually know who or what we are. Instead we must remain there, right in the eye of the hurricane, fully intimate with the self's bewilderment and confusion. We must "keep that don't-know mind" when it matters most -- when it is our own 'I' of which we know nothing.

Cioran stated: "When we perceive ourselves existing we have the sensation of a stupefied madman who surprises his own lunacy and vainly seeks to give it a name."

What is required of mystical madmen, or madwomen, is to forge relentlessly into the unknown, no longer into the known; to accept over and over again that indeed we are all lost -- that we understand nothing of the world or ourselves, and then to have the endurance to expect no reward, no solution, no final understanding, but only the need for more exasperation, more uncertainty, more incapacity.

"If the fool would continue his folly, he would become wise", wrote William Blake in his Proverbs of Hell. And the lucky corollary to Blake's aphorism is: if the wise man would continue his wisdom, he would become a fool.

If we are passionate and mad enough, the more we seek to understand the more we realise we do not understand, and eventually we cease to seek, and instead we just 'are' -- we just live in the uncertain, absurd, implausible, inconceivable void. Indeed, the wise person who continues on with wisdom must necessarily fall ...dumb.

Hence Cioran finally admitted:

"And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad..."

So be it. It is the natural outcome of the ardent seeker -- to come to awe through a short-circuited intelligence; for to stare into oneself with brutal honesty is to destroy all images and conclusions about what one is, or what one is supposed to be. That is all that is required -- the honesty to unflinchingly be one's true, inconceivable self, despite the perilous, ignominious outcome. One who needs to see external miracles in order to believe in the miraculous, is a hopeless candidate for catastrophic, redemptive awe.

"Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light." ~ Unknown

Blessed indeed. Beatitudes abound in the sinless humility of irrevocable confusion.

"For there is no progression in the notion of universal vanity, nor conclusion", argued the loquacious Cioran, "and as far as we venture in such ruminations, our knowledge makes us no gain: it is in its present state as rich and as void as its point of departure. It is a surcease within the incurable, a leprosy of the mind, a revelation by stupor."

Knowledge is vanity; to imagine that we 'know' is to beseech the universe to endure the absence of our inherent essence -- the ecstasy of fools.

Fools we are, fools we were, and fools we shall be, yet only a very few of us are brave, or wild, or uninhibited, or oblivious enough to play the role of the jester in the Palace of Wonders we live within. Henry Miller describes one who took this role -- of divine lunacy -- as a vocation:

"At the foot of the ladder reaching to the moon, Auguste would sit in contemplation, his smile fixed, his thoughts far away. This simulation of ecstasy, which he had brought to perfection, always impressed the audience as the summation of the incongruous. The great favorite had many tricks up his sleeve but this one was inimitable. Never before had a buffoon thought to depict the miracle of ascension."

To be a fool because you are a fool is one thing, to willingly express your foolishness so as to enlighten others to their own ridiculousness is a whole new realm of sainthood.

Thomas Merton records this 'sacrifice' by one of the Desert Fathers, who had written:

"One of the elders said: Either fly as far as you can from men, or else, laughing at the world and the men who are in it, make yourself a fool in many things."

So it is with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Mr. Bean, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and so on; the jocular exposure of our limitless stupidity is the mark of artistic rarity. These actors not only make us laugh, they show us who we truly are, for "Anyone who thinks he is not a fool shows his ignorance."

"Some people never go crazy/ what truly horrible lives they must lead." ~ Charles Bukowski

To not grasp for respectable perspectives, nor reputable lives, but to hold fast in the trenches of ignorance, this is the heroism of the day. So it is that courage and endurance are needed by anyone perspicacious enough to see their journey through to the disastrous realm of unmeaning.

We must all endure this route, in one way or another, to one extremity or another, for the true self is eventually born only from a sarcophagus containing the remains of all the corpses we once were, and which we, ourselves, did kill, with wise ignorance. The murderer is the murdered. Man is his own sacrifice, and his own mercy; man is his own meat. The mind is an abattoir, wonder is a knife.

Cioran declares this process for us, writing:

"The artist abandoning his poem, exasperated by the indigence of words, prefigures the confusion of the mind discontented with the context of the existent. Incapacity to organise the elements -- as stripped of meaning and savour as the words which express them -- leads to the revelation of the void."

To paraphrase this, if I may: our false meanings, false lives, and false selves cannot survive under the pressure of our own relentless scrutiny; we disappear into mystery under our own fiery gaze.

Which is to say, there is, for the mad and the mystic, no such thing as intelligence, only cold-blooded honesty.

"I want, once and for all, not to know many things", bellowed the wearisome Nietzsche, sundered apart between the warring armies of megalomania, syphilis, and genius.

We must, if we are to find what these individuals have found (though perhaps not to suffer what they have suffered), heroically return our limited interpretations back to the glorious enigma of being; just as a growing child would hand their training-wheels back to their parents; though we must do this not because we are necessarily ready to ride, but because ...we are ready to crash.

"The purpose of life is to bring us closer to those secrets, and madness is the only means." ~ Kahlil Gibran

We must fearlessly surrender to the collapse of all our conceptual armaments, perhaps even allowing ourselves to dissipate into the helpless shamelessness of drooling morons, and gaping fools.

"Such is the effect of coming face to face with the living mystery of God", admitted Kallistos Ware, "we are assailed by dizziness; all the familiar footholds vanish, and there seems nothing for us to grasp."

And from H. Rider Haggard:

"For the mind wearies easily when it strives to grapple with the Infinite, and to trace the footsteps of the Almighty as he strides from sphere to sphere, or deduce His purpose from His works. Such things are not for us to know... Too much wisdom would perchance blind our imperfect sight, and too much strength would make us drunk, and overweight our feeble reason till it fell [hence the 'Fall'], and we were drowned in the depths of our own vanity. For what is the first result of man's increased knowledge interpreted from Nature's book by the persistent nature of his purblind effort? Is it not but too often to make him question the existence of his Maker, or indeed of any intelligent purpose beyond his own? The truth is veiled, because we could no more look upon her glory than we can upon the sun. It would destroy us. Full knowledge is not for man as man is here, for his capacities, which he is apt to think so great, are indeed but small. The vessel is soon filled, and, were one-thousandth part of the unutterable and silent wisdom that directs the rolling of those shining spheres, and the force which makes them roll, pressed into it, it would be shattered into fragments."

Indeed, our reason must be shattered into fragments if we are to witness the unreasonable.

And now, if you do not accept these accounts of the blessedness of mad wisdom, perhaps we should go directly to the Source for corroboration: "In order to truly know God, you have to be out of your mind", says God. Which is to say, you have to 'lose your mind' if you would have 'no mind' and thus be able to know the unknowable.

"I ended by finding something sacred in the disorder of my mind." ~ Rimbaud

Recalling that the English word 'mystery' is a direct translation from the original Greek word for 'sacred', we can see that to not allow mystery into our lives is to desecrate (de-secret) all of life. To exist without awe is a sacrilege.

For "The hallmark, then, of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other", states J.D. Salinger, "...the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile."

Perhaps this is the reason why Jiddu Krishnamurti was constantly stating that one must give up the desire for respectability if one is to progress towards reality; that is, one must not worry about being respectable, because only madness will set one free.

As such, David Goddard claims:

"The enlightened sage is one who has attained cosmic consciousness- who is a fool as the world judges things and is free from the illusion of separateness, liberated from all appearances and limitations."

And Osho describes a "god-enlightened" being as such:

"...he was a madman -- all religious people are mad. Mad, because they don't trust reason. Mad, because they love life. Mad, because they can dance and they can sing. Mad, because to them life is not a question, not a problem to be solved but a mystery into which one has dissolved. ...I am waiting for the day you are ready, so I can be as absurd as God is."

This point is summed up by G.K. Chesterton, describing the holy fool St. Francis of Assisi: "He had made a fool of himself... [T]here was not a rag of him that was not ridiculous. Everybody knew that at the best he had made a fool of himself. It was a solid objective fact, like the stones in the road, that he had made a fool of himself...[but] he was wearing the...word 'fool' as a feather in his cap; as a crest or crown. He would go on being a fool; he would become more and more of a fool; he would be the court fool of the King of Paradise. ...And we can say...that the stars which passed above... the rocky floor had for once in all their shining cycles round the world of laboring humanity, looked down upon a happy man."

Ignorance is bliss. How perilously far we have come from wonder, exuberance, innocence, and laughter. And oh what foolishness it will require to take us back.

"You see, all of us go through the same doubts. We are afraid of being mad; unfortunately for us, of course, all of us are already mad." ~ don Juan

Aleister Crowley furthers the idea that holiness and foolishness are one, stating:

"The connection between foolishness and holiness is traditional. It is no sneer that the family nitwit had better go into the church. In the East the madman is believed to be 'possessed', a holy man or prophet. So deep is this identity that it is actually embedded in the language. 'Silly' means empty -- the Vacuum of Air- Zero -- ...And the word is from German selig, holy, blessed. It is the innocence of the Fool which most strongly characterises him. ...The Great Fool is definite doctrine. The world is always looking for a saviour, and the doctrine in question is philosophically more than a doctrine; it is a plain fact."

That is, the Pearl of Great Price, The Holy Grail, the Vision of God, Nirvana, Valhalla, Heaven, or Salvation, call it what you will, it will not be found until the individual forgets who they are, and what they are looking for. Then they shall find it. For, as Aleister Crowley relates:

"Men smote me; then, perceiving that I was but a Pure Fool, they let me pass. Thus and not otherwise I came to the Temple of the Graal."

~ from "The Way of Wonder" by Jack Haas

If you live long enough, you will witness the marshaling of the same arguments at different instances of space and time. If the arguments prove ignorant on the first go-round, you can generally expect that they will likewise wobble wrongly in succeeding revolutions. This is part of what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he wrote:

Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished. 

The cohorts of George II at present instruct that we must pursue all over the planet a War On Terra because "if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here." If you slip in a disc of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, you can watch one of the first known invocations of this same mantra, as a band of ur-men brandishing bones crushes the skulls of a rival band at a strategically important watering hole. Fast-forward the planet some several million years, and you may observe hundreds of thousands of Americans and Australians, awash in the same shibboleth, floating over to Europe for WWI, there to ensure Germans do not occupy Topeka, and Turks do not site a mosque on Ayers Rock.

In my youth, the United States transformed Southeast Asia into a charnel house in order to "there" put a stop to Communism, so that "here" we would not be forced to burn all our money and construct refrigerators out of cement. The US lost that war, but there don't now seem to be any more Communists here where I live than there were before the defeat. Just the same one guy, an economics professor at the university, ready soon to retire. The US will lose the War on Terra, too, but I don't expect that as a result my daughter will be immured in a burka, or that I will be impressed into service as a dervish.

Gore Vidal, having despaired of any other method of teaching history to American young people, proposed in Screening History that it be imparted via film. There is merit in this idea. Peter Weir's Gallipoli, it seems to me, could ensure that few young men or women would in future be bamboozled into hamburger by barnums hardblowing the ignorance of "if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here."

In that film, two heedless young Australians, off to enlist for the British crown and be sent to their deaths in Turkey, encounter in the parched Australian outback a grizzled old desert rat who has heard nothing of what would come to be known as WWI. Asked how it started, he is told by the young men: "don't know exactly, but it was the Germans' fault." The old man is surprised: the only German he ever met, he says, was a decent fellow. The point of Australian entry into a European war is lost on the old man: "I can't see what it's got to do with us." To which a doomed youth replies: "if we don't stop them there, they could end up here." The old man takes a long look at the arid desolation around him, and concludes: "and they're welcome to it."  

Paperless brown people emigrating to the United States from Mexico and points south are a great evil, it is being argued—right now—on my radio. They are responsible for any number of moral and medical plagues, and our nation is on the verge of hernia, groaning under the unsupportable burden of providing for them.

Maybe I'd be tempted more to believe this balderdash if I couldn't reach over and open this volume of Orwell, and find that the ignoramuses of England were arguing the very same things in 1947—about Poles.

Recently I was listening to a conversation between two small businessmen in a Scottish hotel . . . We were sitting round a rather inadequate peat fire, and the conversation started off with the coal shortage. There was no coal, it appeared, because the British miners refused to dig it out, but on the other hand it was important not to let Poles work in the pits because this would lead to unemployment . . . They began talking about the housing problem, and almost immediately they were back to the congenial subject of the Poles . . . [I]t seemed that it was impossible to buy houses or flats nowadays. The Poles were buying them up, and "where they get the money from is a mystery." The Poles were also invading the medical profession. They even had their own medical school in Edinburgh or Glasgow (I forget which) and were turning out doctors in great numbers while "our lads" found it impossible to buy practices . . . .

The younger man remarked that he belonged to several business and civic associations, and that on all of them he made a point of putting forward resolutions that the Poles should be sent back to their own country. The older one added that the Poles were "very degraded in their morals." They were responsible for much of the immorality that was prevalent nowadays. "Their ways are not our ways," he concluded piously. It was not mentioned that the Poles pushed their way to the head of queues, wore bright-coloured clothes and displayed cowardice during air raids, but if I had put forward a suggestion to this effect I am sure it would have been accepted.

Have you ever heard of the great post-WWII Polish debasement of Great Britain? Neither have I. That's because it never occurred. Yet there they were, "solid citizens," "serious people," arguing their ignorance, as convinced that the Britain of 1947 was imperiled by Poles as the ignorant of today are convinced that the United States of 2008 is imperiled by Mexicans and their southern brethren.

I live in California, in the foothills overlooking the "great foodbasket" of the Central Valley, from where I can see a state and an industry that would grind to a halt, instantly, if it were not for paperless brown people, here on hejira from points south. The California Farm Bureau Federation, the powerful lobbying group representing industrialized agriculture in this state, explicitly admitted more than 15 years ago that it is dependent on paperless workers: without them, it would collapse. These people are not going anywhere. The only question is whether they are going to be treated decently.

The current system is the one most conducive to the interests of capital, which is why it persists. Paperless people may not organize or complain, either on the job or in the community. Anyone who causes any sort of trouble, in the workplace or in the outer world, can simply be picked up and dumped back across the border. The systemic failures of the industrialized health and education systems may be conveniently blamed on the few paperless people who use them. Just as crime statistics may be manipulated, by including those detained on immigration violations, to deliver the false impression that the foreign-born are largely responsible for the national villainy.

Unfortunately for the lords of capital, who would prefer to continue the current system (chaos controlled by them), overzealous politicians who slipped the leash have in recent years so worried "race hatred and mass delusions"—Orwell again—that a less palatable alternative may now be necessary. This would be the disinterment of the disgraceful "guest worker" program, in which paperless brown people would be pressganged into service in the United States for some set number of years, and then booted back across the border. This is what will occur if Bomb McCain becomes president. If Barack Obama is instead allowed into the Oval Office, it is the present system that will persist—subject to race-based attacks from the right, and human-decency-based complaints from the left.

In the meantime, per Vidal's Screening History, people could do worse, in trying to understand, on a human level, the messy truths of paperless brown people in the US, than view The Three Burials of Meliquiades Estrada.

And if you want to be torn to pieces, experiencing vicariously the sort of grief and humiliation suffered by those who must leave home to elsewhere secure their daily bread, view—here in context of Romanians in France—Code Unknown.

Once you have committed to "enforcement" of those artificial constructs known as "borders," you will require bureaucrats, who will inevitably bring forth injustice.

In the same Orwell tome referenced above, he reviews Henry Miller's The Cosmological Eye, which contains a piece recounting Miller's unsuccessful attempt to enter England in 1935.

The immigration officials nosed out the fact that he had very little money in his pockets, and he was promptly clapped into a police-court cell and sent back across the Channel on the following day, the whole thing being done with the maximum of stupidity and offensiveness. The only person who showed a spark of decency in the whole affair was the simple police constable who had to guard Miller through the night. The book in which this sketch occurs was published in 1938, and I remember reading it just after Munich and reflecting that, though the Munich settlement was not a thing to be proud of, this little episode made me feel more ashamed of my country. Not that the British officials at Newhaven behaved much worse than that kind of person behaves everywhere. But somehow the whole thing was saddening. A couple of bureaucrats had got an artist at their mercy, and the mixture of spite, cunning and stupidity with which they handled him made one wonder what is the use of all this talk about democracy, freedom of the press, and whatnot.

This sort of thing reruns in our day. Also with artists (who, it must be stressed, are these days generally treated by border officials with greater courtesy and respect than those whose skill-set does not afford them the means to strike back). It will be recalled that Gabriel Garcia-Marquez has, several times, been denied entry to the United States. Even though, when the histories are written, Marquez will be credited with more advancing human liberty and decency, than all the presidents, and all the presidents' men, who worked so spitefully, so ignorantly, to keep him out.

By the time you read this column I will have walked out to the construction on Hwy. 179 and shook the hands of those workers who have been laboring on roads, roundabouts and bridges to make Sedona, Arizona more accessible and more beautiful.

I’m the first to admit I’m one of the biggest cynics about these men and women who sometimes appear to be sitting when they should be working, but then again I’m no engineer and I can’t tell you how many times I stand in awe of something scratching my head – or other regions of the body – wondering what to do next.

Put me in front of a car with the hood up and you might as well videotape me and upload the footage onto YouTube so the whole world can have a laugh. Throw me in a kitchen with a cookbook and it’s as awkward and uncomfortable as watching a monkey mate with a football. So, having that said, I’m learning not to react when I see four men in orange and yellow fluorescent smoking cigarettes and looking down a hole at some Hispanic man wiping the sweat from his brow with one hand and holding a shovel with the other.

By the time you read this column I will have shook the hands of flaggers and construction workers who are simply doing their job. I suggest doing the same. It’s not as if these are corporate executives funneling money from investors – Enron – or mortgage lenders passing out home loans like candy – Countrywide.

My dad used to tell me a person should never judge what another person does, as long as they enjoy what they do. “If that person’s happy, they’ll make you happy. If they aren’t, they’ll be miserable and so will you.” Whether or not they enjoy their job is not so much upon us, but it certainly doesn’t help when we roll down windows and curse, spit or throw empty soda cans and coffee cups at them. We’re making them quit. And when I say “we,” I mean the jerks who will inevitably run over stray nails the construction crews just happen to lose in front of those specific cars. Karma.

If we behaved this way during all the times we were frustrated how would we accomplish anything in life? Imagine this:

April 14, 2009 a man walks into H&R Block and flips over desks of tax professionals because he’s pissed at the IRS.

The next week a couple sue Viagra® for the male’s prolonged erection saying they never wanted to have sex that long. They argue had it not been for the man’s half-mast that they believe was perpetuated from being threatened at H&R Block he wouldn’t have needed the little blue pill.

A month later these same parents blame teachers for their son’s poor test scores complaining they fear he will be “left behind.” They protest enough the state actually begins cutting the funding to programs in the performing and visual arts. All the while the parents are out of country enjoying millions they received in a settlement for a seven-hour skin salute. They tour museums and see operas.

The next year, these parents blame the high school administration for their son’s not-so stellar studies in college. They don’t accept responsibility for their prolonged absences and use the excuse he didn’t have a well-rounded education, such as choir, band, or drama.

Ten years from now, the young man enters rehab after turning to illegal and alcohol to self-medicate over the mind-%$#& his parents put on him for not performing as they expected. In this top-notch rehab his parents can afford the young man learns that prescription drugs are more accessible. Upon release he begins cutting Viagra® with his mother’s Paxil® and sells the product to high school teens who have nothing else to do after school other than study for state tests because their interests – choir, band, drama – are gone.

To cut to the chase, I suggest – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – we all work on thinking before we act, before we speak. If we could imagine a book covering every minute of every moment in our lives how would we like it to read? If we had the ability to skip chapters and see the future, what would you hope to find?

I won’t venture to guess how my book would read. Some might consider it science fiction, mystery, romance, pulp fiction, maybe even smut, heck, I don’t know. I do know the text takes off and plot really begins to impress when the protagonist thinks about consequences and empathizes with others.

In ending, I’d like to quote a passage from Henry Miller’s story Third or Fourth Day of Spring taken from the novel Black Spring.

“I am thinking of that age to come when God is born again, when men will fight and kill for God as now and for a long time to come men are going to fight for food. I am thinking of that age when work will be forgotten and books assume their true place in life, when perhaps there will be no more books, just one great big book – a Bible. For me the book is the man and my book is the man I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man that I am. I am thinking that in that age to come I shall not be overlooked. Then my history will become important and the scar which I leave upon the face of the world will have significance. I cannot forget that I am making history, a history on the side which, like a chancre, will eat away the other meaningless history. I regard myself not as a book, a record, a document, but as a history of our time – a history of all time.”

"If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world." - HM

Have a great weekend all. We have family coming in so it will be the first of next week before I have a new post.

“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” Henry Miller

Dzis bedzie o jednym z najwazniejszych mistrzow mojego zycia, dzieki ktoremu naprawde wiele zrozumialam i dzieki ktoremu ( scislej rzecz ujmujac to dzieki jego zonie - June) nosze taki a nie inny pseudonim.

Henry Miller ( 1891-1980) - amerykanski pisarz, eseista. Kolos z Brooklinu. Znienawidzony przez purytanow i feministki. Jego pisarskie nowatorstwo polega nie tylko na przelamaniu barier obyczajowych, lamaniu ograniczen i konwencji jezykowych, stylistycznych i kompozycyjnych, lecz przede wszystkim na podniesieniu kolokwializmow i potocznego jezyka do rangi zjawiska literackiego. Miller zaciera granice miedzy literatura piekna a autobiografia a zycie codzienne czyni mitem. Niezwykla swoboda, z jaka Miller laczy naturalizm opisow, surrealistyczne wizje senne, brutalizmy i prozaizmy z wyszukana, uwznioslona retoryka, przydaja jego pisarstwu ogromnej emocjonalnej i intelektualnej spontanicznosci.

"Henry wywoluje wscieklosc z powodu swej zadzy zycia( ..) Niczego nie chowa dla siebie, uznajac, ze natchnienie jest niewyczerpane. Ta wyjatkowa szczodrosc przysparzala mu wrogow. Drwili z jego otwartosci, gdyz nie potrafili jej nasladowac. Wszystkie jego wady braly sie z nadmiaru. Lecz z nadmiaru zrodzily sie tez jego wszystkie cnoty." ( E.Jong"Diabel na wolnosci")

Henry to artysta outsider, ktoremu przyszlo tworzyc i zyc w swiecie, gdzie nie toleruje sie roznic pogladowych, nadmiernej uczciwosci i wyarazania swoich pogladow bez ogrodek. Jego pisarstwo spotyka sie z niezrozumieniem - uwaza sie je przede wszystkim za pornograficzne i to nie tylko w purytanskiej Ameryce. Podobnie odczytywany i klasyfikowany byl i jest D.A.F. de Sade. Opinia zboczenca przewaza nad opinia eksperymentatora, ukazujacego wszystko to, co w czlowieku stlumione i uwolnione od spolecznych norm, nakazow prawnych i religijnych. Tenessee Williams na temat funkcji seksu w literaturze mawial - "wykorzystuje seks, by podniesc temperature na widownie, gdy sie publicznosc odpowiednio nastroi, mozna jej powiedziec wszystko".

Trzeba posiadac nie lada odwage, by potrafic powiedziec publicznie WSZYSTKO... Odwage, determinacje i gotowosc na przyjecie ciosow krytyki i wszystkich innych odbiorcow, ktorzy tak naprawde wola teksty zaowalowane a zbytnia dosadnosc w literaturze ( i nie tylko) sprowadzaja do prostactwa albo pornografii. Miller sie odwazyl i ...calkowicie obnazyl, co jak mysle - jest nieodzowne w wielkiej literaturze, i w sztuce wogole. Pierwsi do ataku na Millera przystapili purytanie a nieco pozniej feministki.

Miller szokuje uczynkiem. To trudniejsza strona wolnosci. W latach 30tych - pisal George Orwell - pisarz mogl zostac komunista albo faszysta. Miller nie zostal jednym ani drugim. Ryzykowal swiadomie. W swoich kolejnych powiesciach powtarzal, ze wszechogarniajace systemy nie obchodza go nic a nic, niezalenie od losu, jaki jemu, Millerowi zgotuja. Jego ambicja bylo za wszelka cene pozostac Henrym Millerem.

Pisarstwo Millera jest wolne. Wolne od niedomowien, falszywej skromnosci, od wszelkiej przyzwoitosci. Do czytelnika docieraja slowa brutalnie nagie, obdarte z calej konfekcji ozdobnikow i wieloznacznosci tak lubianej przez wiekszosc zniewolonych. Dla Henry'ego nie istnieje "wzgorek Wenery", on uzywa i to wielkrotnie slowa "pizda".

Henry Miller potrafi sie smiac. Z zycia, z ludzi, z siebie samego. Odrzuca wiare w postep, w wojne, systemy polityczne. Widzi wszystko wyraznie, jest outsiderem dawno po przebudzeniu, dostrzegajacym ulomnosc i nierzeczywistosc swiata w jakim przyszlo mu zyc. I co czyni Miller Outsider? Nie wymysla utopii i ideologii, nie zamyka sie w pustym pokoju, by kontemplowac swoja odmiennosc, nie ulega szalenstwu i nie popelnia w skrajnym akcie rozpaczy samobojstwa.

Miller wybucha prawdziwym smiechem.

"Kiedy aniol po raz pierwszy uslyszal smiech diabla, oslupial. Odbylo sie to na jakiejs uczcie, w ktorej uczestniczylo duzo ludzi i wszyscy oni, jeden za drugim, przylaczali sie do diabelskiego smiechu, tak bardzo byl on zarazliwy. Aniol doskonale rozumial, ze ten smiech wymierzony jest przeciwko Bogu i przeciw godnosci Jego dziela. Wiedzial, ze musi natychmiast jakos zreagowac, lecz czul sie slaby i bezbronny. Poniewaz sam nie potrafil nic wymyslec, zaczal nasladowac swego przeciwnika. Otworzyl usta i wydal przerywany, modulowany dzwiek z gornych rejestrow swej skali glosu i nadal mu odwrotny sens: podczas gdy smiech diabla wskazywal na bezsensownosc rzeczy, to smiech aniola - przeciwnie - wyrazal radosc z tego, ze wszystko na swiecie jest tak madrze urzadzone, wspaniale wymyslone, piekne, dobre i pelne sensu. Diabel i aniol stali wiec na wprost siebie, otwierali usta i wydawali mniej wiecej taki sam dzwiek, lecz kazdy z nich wyrazal w nim cos innego. I diabel patrzac na smiejacego sie aniola, smail sie coraz bardziej, glosniej i prawdziwiej, bo smiejacy sie aniol byl nieskonczenie smieszny." ( Milan Kundera"Ksiega smiechu i zapomnienia")

Prawdziwego smiechu i autentyzmu wszystkim zyczac - zegnam sie na czas jakis - pojutrze wyjazd w dzikie, zielone plenery gdzie mam zamiar zatracic sie w tworzeniu. Byc moze efekty owego wypadu w fotoblogu zamieszcze.

sierpniowe usciski

June

Louis-Ferdinand Céline with a stranger

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Bob Dylan

Naked walking

Home, mania and depression II

Home, mania and depression I

Ioana Luca

Albert Camus

Albert Camus

Marilyn Monroe

Henry Miller in the studio

Hoki Tookuda and Henry Miller

Henry Miller

June Mansfield

June Mansfield

June Mansfield

June Mansfield

Anaïs Nin II

Anaïs Nin I

Anaïs Nin III

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski and Strangers

Teenage commercial party I

Teenage commercial party III

Teenage commercial party II

Die Beerdigung Heinrich Bölls II

Beerdigung Heinrich Bölls

Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll

Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn und Heinrich Böll spazierengehend

Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn und Heinrich Böll spazierengehend

Heinrich Böll und Romy Schneider II

Heinrich Böll und Romy Schneider

Heinrich Böll, Herbert Wehner, Willy Brandt

Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll

Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn

Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn

Die Badenden II

Die Badenden I

Walking in a park

Eternity III

Eternity II

Eternity

Das Badezimmer II

Das Badezimmer I

James Baldwin

horsewoman III

horsewoman II

horsewoman I

childhood

horsewoman

1959 - the never land

Nackte in den Feldern

Nackte und Wiese

Joy

Philip Roth

Philip Roth II

Philip Roth III

http://foth-malerei.com/

Lilla Blå har genomlevt en stekhet dag framför datorn. Lilla Datorn har också genomlevt en stekhet dag och närapå osat bränt. Vi har slitit som djur, min bärbara och jag. Timme efter timme.

Fothelvetet har knorrat såklart. Men jobbet ska göras. Jag haver stretat. Men nu är det nog för idag!

Jag sippar på en iskall Emile 68 och väntar på att en tillstymmelse till svalka ska komma med skymningen, även till min lilla stadslägenhet. Idag har jag ätit två ägg. Det är svårt att äta mat i värmen. Därför slår min mjölkiga gröna drink en kullerbytta i magen när den landar. Det blir varmt innanför naveln. Jag lutar mig tillbaka i soffan och drar efter andan. Tänder cigarillen.

Tänker på Suziluz, den fantastiska bloggaren med det varma skälvande hjärtat som nu befinner sig i Paris på egen hand. Åh, jag hoppas hon mår bra. Jag hoppas även hon har vett att sippa på en absinthe i sommarkvällen, vippa med foten, sittandes på ett café någonstans. Det gör hon säkert.

Imorgon fortsätter jobbet. Det är bråda dagar nu, och har så varit en tid. Ibland tycker jag det tar för mycket av min själsro, ibland slår mig insikten: "gud, vilket bra jobb jag har"! Jag sysslar med skriven text hela dagarna, jag skriver text, jag översätter text, jag flyttar och stuvar om och hittar på och klipper och klistrar text - hela dagarna. Fula texter. Fina texter. Viktiga texter. Bajstexter. Alla slags texter. Och som om detta inte räckte, så bloggar jag också. Med mera texter. Ord, ord, ord. Jag älskar ord. Jag älskar texter. Det är livet, det. Men ibland spyr jag på skiten. Det är okay, det också. Rensar rent.

Det är lite surt att vara så begränsad i sin rörelsefrihet som jag är just nu. Jag ska helst inte belasta foten, men haltar runt i lägenheten så gott jag kan. Vill ut. Har suttit som panelhöna nu sedan i torsdags. Ute steker solen, genom fönstrena hör jag stadens liv, jag tjuvlyssnar till diskussioner på trottoaren utanför. Inbillar mig att alla andra lever intressantare liv än jag; liv med grillpartyn och strandliv och lantliv och semesterliv och social gemenskap så det knakar i fogarna. Själv går jag som ett djur i bur. Vill till havet. Vill ut till min lilla ö och mitt lilla pörte. Andas frisk luft. Ta del av sommaren.

Men jag sitter här, i en skitvarm lägenhet och skriver texter. Himlen utanför vitnar av hettan. Hela stan bågnar under temperaturen.

 Ikväll tror jag att jag ser på "Henry & June". En bra rulle, med manus av Philip och Rose Kaufman. Det handlar om författaren Henry Miller, flintskallig kåtbock som strular runt i Paris 1934, luspank och sugen på livet. Han träffar Anais Nin, en liten docksöt varelse som är gift. De skriver båda texter. Många texter. Henry Miller är också gift, med Jane (här spelad av Uma Thurman). Och så blir Henry knullsugen på Anais och hon på honom. Men så blir hon även sugen på Jane. Och så är trekanten igång. Hej och hå. Det blir dans också. Och bordellbesök. Och författarvåndor. Jag tycker om den här filmen. Jag tycker om tidsskildringen. Jag attraheras av Paris och de skildrade personerna.

Henry Miller blev en känd författare med tiden. Jag gillar honom och inser i just detta nu att jag borde ta och läsa honom snart igen. Anais Nin blev också en känd författare med tiden. Hon skriver också jävligt bra. På 70-talet utgavs hennes dagböcker, där hon bland annat återgav hela den här trekantshistorien som filmen "Henry & June" bygger på. Filmen kom runt 1990 tror jag. Den kanske går att hyra fortfarande. Har ni inte sett den, så har ni något gott att se fram emot. Den är vacker. Den är erotisk. Den är färgstark och humoristisk och lite sorglig.

Äh, vad fan... nu kör jag igång. Hej på ett tag.

Douchebags are a ridiculous, unnecessary piece of equipment that cause more harm than good (douching change sthe pH of the vagina and can cause yeast infections, for just one example). They were invented by an industry that makes its living by convincing women that their vags are dirty, smelly, shameful caves of funk and filth, and no man will want to get anywhere near them unless they spend thousands of yearly dollars and countless hours obsessively grooming every square inch of it.

In short, I can think of no better perjorative to hurl at douchebags like this. Gawker has declared a moratorium on it and asked readers to come up with its heir apparent, to which I can only say: Don't be a bunch of douchebags. It's not going away anytime soon.

The most interesting part of the article is that credit for douchebag as an insult may belong to Henry Miller, one of my biggest literary crushes!

The OED credits Henry Miller's 1934 Tropic of Cancer (object of the great Miller v. Douchebags obscenity trial of 1961, the year the book came out in the States) with early print usage of "douche-bag"—but as actual bag of douche, not epithet. Following the Miller trail, though, we can find this conversation in Plexus (1953) between Mona and Ulrich: "There was one spot, a restaurant, I think, over on Sheridan Square." "You mean Minnie Douchebag's hangout?" "Minnie Douchebag?" "Yes, that crazy fairy who sings and plays the piano ... and wears women's clothes."

Oddly enough, I am currently re-reading Deirdre Bair's biography of Anaïs Nin, who was Miller's lover, patroness, and muse for many years.

Henry Miller