Readings: Concerning Love and Miracles

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A couple of weeks ago, while straightening up my desk at work, I came across in one of the drawers a sheet of notebook paper on which I had listed ten or twelve movies that I was interested in borrowing from the audio-visual department of the library. One of these was the film treatment of the book Henry and June by Anaïs Nin. The book consists of excerpts depicting the passionate love affair of American novelist, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin, as compiled from her unexpurgated diaries.

I borrowed both the DVD of the film and the book itself at the same time. Having viewed the movie [which I recommend only if: a) you are interested in the subject of Miller and Nin; or b) you are partial to lesbian sex scenes], I am slowly making my way through the book.

I wrote down the first few words of two brief passages that resonated with me. The first is this observation of Anaïs Nin’s concerning men:

“I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they never could have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them.”

She could be talking about me here, in relation to a woman I knew in the mid-1970s in London and New York and have never forgotten. I still have a bundle of the letters she wrote to me; letters that are too painful for me to read. I have some poems she wrote…

The next little snippet consists of two consecutive sentences written by novelist Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin at the height of their affair. The words express very well what I felt toward the woman mentioned above at the height of ours. In that regard, the first sentence here could have been seen as somehow true only in light of the second:

… “Oh, it is beautiful to love, and to be free at the same time. “


… “I don’t know what to expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle.”

That miracles do not exist in time, but sometimes threaten to break through to give us a glimpse of the transcendent, is perhaps why we are able to endure time's tyrannies.
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Reflections: A Collage

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Two lines of poetry often tell us more, give us more, than the weightiest tome by an erudite. To make anything truly significant one has to poetize it. …Knowledge weighs one down; wisdom saddens one. The love of truth has nothing to do with knowledge or wisdom: it’s beyond their domains. Whatever certitude one possesses is beyond the realm of proof.
xxx~ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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Ironic Couplet

Although the gates of Hell
Were locked,
Determined Billy
Kristol knocked.
xxx~ Rodak

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Matt. 18:3 …Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

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The intellect is a product of ego, and the ego can never be stilled, never be satisfied.
xxx~ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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It’s only when we stop trying to see, stop trying to know, that we really see and know. (ibid.)

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Freedom is a misnomer. …Freedom implies choice and choice exists only to the extent that we are aware of our ineptitude. (ibid.)

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If we abandoned fear and prejudice, we could meet the murderer as easily as the saint. (ibid.)
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Quote(s) du Jour: Some Assembly Required

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Creation is a fiction of God’s

xxx~ Simone Weil

Sometimes I come home on the double-quick, my mind so saturated with ideas and impressions that I feel I must hasten to make a few notes—for the morrow. If I have been writing, these thoughts and sensations have to do with pure irrelevancies. Useful ones, however, since they are often completed thoughts which had made themselves known in embryonic form months, even years, ago. This experience, which happens over and over, only convinces me the more that “we” create nothing, that “it” is doing it for us and through us, and that if we could really tune in, as it were, we would do as Whitman said—make our own Bibles.
xxx~ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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Quote du Jour: Like Simone

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I have an intuition that Simone Weil would have nothing to say against this:

xxxThe longing for paradise, whether here on earth or in the beyond, has almost ceased to be. Instead of an idée-force it has become an idée fixe. From a potent myth it has degenerated into a taboo. Men will sacrifice their lives to bring about a better world—whatever that may mean—but they will not budge an inch to attain paradise. Nor will they struggle to create a bit of paradise in the hell they find themselves. It is so much easier, and gorier, to make revolution, which means, to put it simply, establishing another, a different, status quo. If paradise were realizable—this is the classic retort!—it would no longer be paradise.

xxxWhat is one to say to a man who insists on making his own prison?

xxxxxxxxx~ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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Readings: ...but not yet.

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet. ~ Augustine of Hippo

Below is a representative excerpt from The Time of the Assassins, the notorious Henry Miller’s excellent, highly personal, and almost brutally insightful sketch of the meteorically brief, brilliant career of French poet, Arthur Rimbaud:

One thing is certain, God does not want us to come to Him in innocence. We are to know sin and evil, we are to stray from the path, to get lost, to become defiant and desperate; we are to resist as long as we have the strength to resist, in order that the surrender be complete and abject. It is our privilege as free spirits to elect for God with eyes wide-open, with hearts brimming over, with a desire that outweighs all desires. …In destroying man’s innocence God converted man into a potential ally. Through reason and will He gave him the power of choice. And man in his wisdom always chooses God.

While what Miller has to say here undoubtedly constitutes a scandal to the kind of Sunday school orthodoxy that prevails in our world today, unadulterated honesty would compel one to admit that he makes a plausible argument. Can one truly said to be free if one has never tested the moral limits of that freedom? And can one have true knowledge of the Good, without an equivalent knowledge of that which opposes it? It can be argued that one can know Evil without actually committing evil acts oneself. But there is a counter-argument to be made, that this would be like claiming to have obtained a knowledge of engineering through the casual observation of the construction of a bridge from a promontory overlooking the river.

However one chooses to evaluate this particular issue, this little book is a mighty good read, and I strongly recommend it to any person who is in the market for such a thing.

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Readings: Golden Silence

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I've already forgotten where I saw Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's name dropped that prompted me to read her. But I can say where the great joy of reading her, as expressed in several posts below, has sent me next. The poetic quality of Lispector's philosophically-loaded fiction has reminded me of the thought of Simone Weil, on the one hand, and of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, on the other. Weil, of course, I was already reading on a regular basis. Rimbaud, however, I hadn't contemplated for years. I therefore went to my shelves and took down a translation of A Season in Hell, which I had purchased years ago and never read. My perception of correspondences between Rimbaud and Lispector persisted in that reading. I next went to the stacks of the university library and borrowed Henry Miller's study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assasins. I think that I had read this in the past. Henry Miller was an early enthusiasm of mine, but one that became satiated sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s. I can now say that what I have learned in the interim has enabled me to get a lot more out of reading "Assassins" today than I was equipped to absorb in that early first reading.

In the course of these studies I was struck by the correspondences intrinsic to the following excerpts, each being a comment on the function of poetic language. The first is Lispector, from "The Foreign Legion":

Since one feels obliged to write, let it be without obscuring the space between the lines with words... The word fishes for something that is not a word. And when that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be thrown away with relief.

And here is Miller, from The Time of the Assassins, writing about the sensibility of the poet, as exemplified by Rimbaud:

The signs and symbols which the poet employs are one of the surest proofs that language is a means of dealing with the unutterable and inscrutable. As soon as the symbols become communicable on every level they lose their validity and effectiveness.

In his study, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, Miklos Veto expounds upon Simone Weil's conception of beauty:

Weil is careful to specificy that "[t]he world's beauty is not an attribute of matter in itself. It is a relation of the world to our sensibility." The beautiful is...the sensible experience of the order of the world.

That is, just as the effective beauty of the poem is not in the formal necessity of the word, but rather in that which the word inspires in our hearts, so the beauty of the world is not in objects in the world, but rather in the fact that, as Veto says, because [the world] appears beautiful to us, we can feel all the sweetness of obedience through the iron links of necessity. The beauty of the world, like that of poetry, adds immeasurable value to our ontological state. It makes life in the material world bearable, even joyous.

Miller goes on to say the following of the "uncompromising pitch" of Rimbaud's symbolic language:

Unlike our latter-day poets, be it noted, he did not make use of the symbols used by the mathematicians and scientists. His language is the language of the spirit, not of weights, measures and abstract relations.

In the introduction of his book, Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life, author George Abbott White quotes Weil's brother, noted mathematician, Andre Weil, of saying of this sister:

[T]here is no doubt that in many ways she transcended [her] philosophical training. She never uses technical philosophic language, for example, and she wrote in very simple and beautiful French. Some have said they find her hard reading, however, since her thought is sometimes difficult...

It is this capacity in Clarice Lispector, in Arthur Rimbaud, and in Simone Weil, to transcend concrete words and the formal sterility of mere technique, in order to expose to the sensibilities of the human heart the transcendent intelligibility of the essentially Real, that has made a rewarding constellation of their works in my recent contemplative reading.
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