All magical writers, all intuitive artists speak or write or paint or photograph a piece that blends into the strange grey area between the place she begins and you end, or vice versa. A boundary issue always presents itself with a great moving display of artistry or humanity in whatever form. I used to think I was over-identifying. That's what people told me. I got laughed at. "Silly, Lulu...you identify too much, you feel too much you're too sensitive and easily shifted by things like that."
Or...I'm not numb. Maybe I'm not over-identifying because I have some psychological delusion or need to close off my heart bit. What would that world look like? If everyone were emotionally removed, and disciplined about their feelings? If all of us stood in the same cloak of cynicism, and fear of being at a movie or reading a book or going somewhere that might offend the "prude and stale sensibilities?"
Henry Miller is quickly becoming a favored author of mine. His first book was published at age 41. (late bloomers rock.) He also had zero tolerance for bullshit. People who were bullshit, words that were bullshit, and most of all the inane self-righteous of the world that tried to extend or prescribe judgment when they were so very small or broken inside themselves. He called their bullshit out. God, I love him. I do. I can't help it because I continually find myself with a cringe and giggle and then feel acceptance and recognition spread across my face.
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" Listen. Who writes the great books? It isn’t we who sign our names. What is an artist? He’s a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in the atmosphere, in the cosmos; he merely has the facility for hooking on, as it were. Who is original? Everything that we are doing, everything that we think, exists already, and we are only intermediaries, that’s all, who make use of what is in the air. Why do ideas, why do great scientific discoveries often occur in different parts of the world at the same time? The same is true of the elements that go to make up a poem or a great novel or any work of art. They are already in the air, they have not been given voice, that’s all." -Henry Miller (Paris Review,no28)
“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything," ― Henry Miller, Lexus
We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.”― Henry Miller
“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it,or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that, as I said therein, if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing.”
― Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953
And so I read on. His words and my open heart create the most insane and intense prose. I love when a man sees the world in the bright light of feeling it. He inspires the presence of being and recording our lives without concern to the plot, end result or outcome. Just live.
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"Shimmer with a smile. Life is hard, bloom anyway."
