package arrives; commence living

& sunlight so bright it burns out the world to a film noir; yes, yes sir, this is Godard's Paris, yet again, and louder! Godard's Paris!  


I feel acutely, painfully alive today. To be alive! To be conscious! To simply, complicatingly BE! Henry Miller is keeping me company right now. I have come a long way since first discovering him in Thailand's used book stores; his writing was too dark, too base for me, too reductive in its use of the crass as redemption, but his use of language thrilled me with a straight shot ZAP to my brain. Reading, re reading all his books after the amazon book binge of december 2009, and now I know him well enough as a writer to get what he was trying to say through the confusion and through the often shocking destructive nature of his renderings. 
 
Unlike the other authors I love, and tend to love, he is not transcendent; not like Rand, or Nin, Emerson, e.e cummings, Thoreau -- he is not living in a godlike state of optimism and absolutism and stylization, Miller is a piece of oozing human flesh who writes about the anti-paradise as often as he does paradise itself. There is something inhuman about the former authors; he, conversely is human to an embarassing degree.


Henry Miller, various quotations:  


The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. 
Tropic of Capricorn (1939) 

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.... 
The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949), Chapter 1. (New York: Grove Press, c1965, p. 17-18)  


Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm. 
Black Spring (1938) 

I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death. Tropic Of Cancer (1934)  


Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. 
Tropic Of Cancer (1934)