An American writer I admire, Henry Miller, is known for breaking existing literary forms, who sought to reestablish the freedom to live without the constraints and restraints of civilization.
His works often reflected hos own personal experiences, measured with a humanism that often shocked and outraged. Writing about all phases of his life, everything that happened to him struck him as being of equal and monumental importance.His total surrender to life without meaning has resonated with me for a while, and despite succumbing to what some people have referred to as 'existential despair' he never completely surrendered reason. He has become one of the worlds forbidden writers, forbidden because he dared to speak from his dark passionate heart, of some place beyond ideology , where the shadows of the soul know no time.The perception of Henry Miller as a writer and literary outlaw remains today.
The following paragraph was quoted in Normal O. Brown's Life against death and he comments on Millers's text as follows:' Utopian speculations such as these of Henry Miller must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluable. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.'
Here's to Henry Miller spiritual Anarchist.
' The cultural era is past. The new civilization, which my 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 sent 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 aggregates. 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 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.'
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