Et encore, henry miller on a becoming of creativity - from Sexus



The world would only begin to get something of value from me the moment i stopped being a serious member of society and became - myself. The State, the nations, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it till death -- and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it "life". If you asked anyone to define life, what was the be all and end all, you got a blank look for answer. Life was something philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, "the plugs in harness", had no time for such idle questions. "You got to eat, haven't you?" This query, which was supposed to be a stop-gap, and which had already been answered, if not in the absolute negative at least in a disturbingly realtive negative by those who knew, was a clue to all the other questions which followed in the veritable Euclidian suite. From the little reading i had done i had observed that men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognised only one kind of activity - creation. Nobody could command their services because they had of their own pledged themeselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because that is the only way to give. This was the way of life which appealed to me: it made sound sense. It was life -- not the simulacrum which those about me worshipped.

[...]

"I stood before a mirror and said fearfully: 'I want to see how I look in the mirror with my eyes closed'" (Richter)

[...]

There is a time when ideas tyrannize over one, when one is just a hapless victim of an other's thoughts. This "possession" by another seems to occur in periods of depersonalisation, then the warring selves come unglued, as it were. Normally one is impervious to ideas; they come and go, are accepted or rejected, put on like shirts, taken off like dirty socks. But in those periods one calls crises, when the mind sunders and splinters like a diamond under the blows of a sledge-hammer, these innocent ideas of a dreamer take hold, lodge in the crevices of the brain, and by some sublte process of inflitration bring about a definite, irrevocable alteration of the personality. Outwardly no great change take place; the individual affected does not suddenly behave differently; on the contrary, he may behave in more "normal" fashion than before. This seeming normality assumes more and more the quality of a protective device. From surface deception he passes to inner deception. With each new crisis, however, he becomes more strongly aware of a change which is no change, but rather an intensification of somthing hidden deep within. Now when he closes his eyes, he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the distant personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses: here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated.