When I was fifteen, there was nothing more interesting to me than the mysteries found on my brother’s bookshelves. He had just moved away to college and I sorely missed him. Many days after school I would retreat to his room to lay on his bed, smell his bedspread, and comb through the relics of what he’d left behind. I didn’t route through his drawers or private possessions. It seemed to be safe enough to look towards the bookshelves, at what he was displaying for anyone who visited to see… to read and write in a space that, in a different time, my brother had read and wrote. An electric landscape of dust, secrets, ideas and sleep. My brother to me at that time seemed infinitely wise. In many ways, he still does. While I sometimes felt betrayed, misunderstood, or abandoned by him simply because he was older and ahead of me in life, I also felt that he knew so many of the answers to my questions— the questions that stick like burrs to your heart, that hurt even to pluck them off and examine them; the questions that were too deeply stuck to even consider asking most adults or friends. With my brother, these questions needed no verbalization. In fact, he answered them without a word, but with the books he left behind.
One day I found a book that began a lifelong journey to the heart of the beast— that would give birth to a change within me— essentially where all the ideas I hold close to my heart started. If I recall rightly, it was a humid summer day, cicadas creaking, and I was sidetracked in my brother’s room on my path to shut all the windows in the house. A tattered black paperback was tucked in the corner of the shelf by this window. This book, The Time of the Assassins by Henry Miller, recalled a man’s profound relationship with a writer (Rimbaud) whom he had never met and had no hope of meeting, separated by time, mortality, space and country. This was easy to connect with, as I soon became the next link on the chain— I became fascinated with the fascinated man, Henry Miller.
In many ways I am quite a distance today from that young woman who picked up the withered paperback and decided that reading it was more interesting than chores. But happily, in the most important ways, I still share an intimacy with her through the ideas that began to percolate through that book. The idea that a grown man could feel so passionately connected to an author long dead whom he never knew gave me permission to do so. And do it I did. It seems that for years (and to this day) I was fixated on what I referred to as “my spiritual family.” Ancestors who did not share a bloodline with me, but rather, a heart line. Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, John Keats, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, The Situationist International, Shostakovitch, Tchaikovsky, Billie Holiday, Susan B. Anthony, Ben Franklin, the list goes on.
(Today I realize with chagrin that most of the founding members of my spiritual family were men— that my own heart carried along with it a dearth of female counterparts, or so I believed. These days, I’ve become obsessed with finding them.)
It’s hard to believe that the it all started with an middle aged man from Brooklyn, who became tired of a “Good Life” and gave it up to chase wild dreams through which he could discover himself. This became fuel for many youthful fantasies. As an independent adult, sometimes I come down hard on myself for not being more wild, more adventurous with my life— but I do still feel that I am embracing his spirit, simply because I am trying to live out the idea that there is more to life than a comfortable paycheck.
Later I went on to read bits and pieces of his other books, including a long-fought struggle to finish Tropic of Cancer, (I can’t tell you what happened in it because it took me so long to finish!) but it remains that to this day I prefer his non-fiction and his essays. Because it is Henry, truly Henry that I love.
“Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all. Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types. Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit.
The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair than just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation; how to celebrate his hungerings and sufferings, turning disappointment into something positive— a great book, a sonata, a film, a painting, or a dance.”
-Henry Miller, Reflections
I still struggle with that word, “artist,” and what it’s come to signify in my own mind. Artist, always with a CAPITAL A, always with an air of pomposity and importance. I used to strive to be nothing but an artist. But today I would be loathe to call myself one. Mostly because that conversation always seems to lead to the other party classifying whether or not they feel what I do is Art. And let me be the first to tell you, most people do not include an obsession with history, conversation and making people feel the tireless tread of humanity around them art, especially if it’s not Poetry or Painting or Music.
It is true that I think about creating art more often than I actually succeed in making it. But to me, trying to make this life work, this life that is within the boundaries that my spiritual family has set around me, feels a lot like art. To live a life that compromises no one’s integrity, a life that works to create and/or maintain a world that is safe and creative and significant for a variety of people, to live as honestly and equitably as possible— this is a difficult task. There are so many obstructions to work around, and I want to make it look effortless.
Today Henry crept into my mind as I was artfully re-arranging my bank account to attempt to avoid an already percolating “maintenance” fee. I wondered if the real reason his books were banned in 43 countries was not the sex, but rather the exhibition of an anti-capitalist lifestyle— a life governed by a love of adventure, of being human and experiencing humanity and being honest about it’s darker colors—rather than a concern for security and the “American Dream.”
I wouldn’t put it past us.
Tonight, riding my bike home from work, I rode past Henry Miller’s house. I still can’t quite accept that I live so close an epicenter of the mythology I hold so dear. It is there— just a normal private home that betrays its secret history through the visitors sneaking onto the stoop for a photograph. Maybe they feel how I feel. Maybe that photo, of themselves on the stoop of a house that once contained Henry Miller, but not for a long time… maybe that is a photo of them with their spiritual Grandfather. I know that’s how I feel.