Henry Miller and the religion of deeds

"The Christian Church in all its freakish ramifications and efflorescences is as dead as a doornail; it will pass away utterly when the political and social systems in which it is now embedded collapse. The new religion will be based on deeds, not beliefs." Henry Miller

Henry Miller was a complete apostate who achieved notoriety in his battle to have his books published in the United States. Despite his disdain for Christianity he has an incredible insight into life which makes him hit close to the truth when you least expect it. His books are almost painful to read in their negativity. I remember when I read Tropic of Cancer about ten years ago. I almost put it down at least a dozen times, but everytime I thought I couldn't take it any more, Miller would launch into a description of life that was so accurate it would almost make me cry. These descriptions would usually be based on the ugly stories that preceded them. So I learned to wade through the sordid details of Miller's life and look forward to the gems that would follow. Reading Henry Miller is like drinking strong liquor- it can't be done in large doses and it needs to be chased by something pure (like the Bible.)

Being completely familiar with Christianity, Miller's choice of words in the above quote is interesting. Instead of "faith and works," he speaks of "beliefs and deeds." And, perhaps unwittingly, Miller has hit on the primary problem of modern Christianity. After all, isn't there a huge difference between simply believing things to be true and having faith? Modern Christianity (which of course was thoroughly mainstream in Miller's childhood) is obsessed with having correct beliefs as opposed to having faith.

Rently I dove into Tropic of Capricorn and I found a couple of excerpts that are fascinating in light of Henry Miller's apparent believe in the religion of deeds:

The meat balls devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor, belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the twenty-four-carat sparkle and fall in with the theater pack. This time I wander through the side streets following a blind man with an accordion. Now and then I sit on a stoop and listen to an aria. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy. The woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is a part of life too, like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the Metropolitan Opera House. Everybody and everything is a part of life, but when they have all been added together, still somehow it is not life. When is it life, I ask myself, and why not now? The blind man wanders on and I remain sitting on the stoop. The meat balls were rotten, the coffee was lousy, the butter was rancid. Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, rancid. The street is like a bad breath; the next street is the same, and the next and the next. At the corner the blind man stops again and plays "Home to Our Mountains." I find a piece of chewing gum in my pocket- I chew it. I chew for the sake of chewing. There is absolutely nothing better to do unless it were to make a decision, which is impossible. The stoop is comfortable and nobody is bothering me. I am part of the world, of life, as they say, and I belong and I don't belong.

Miller accurately describes in this passage the futility of life in a twisted world. Each street is the same, and none of them are really alive. Miller is longing for life and it escapes him. All of his deeds are useless; pointless.

This next passage is even more poignant:

The wonder and the mystery of life- which is throttled in us as we become responsible members of society! Until we were pushed out to work the world was very small and we were living on the fringe of it, on the frontier, as it were, of the unknown. A small Greek world which was nevertheless deep enough to provide all manner of variation, all manner of adventure and speculation. Not so very small either, since it held in reserve the most boundless potentialities. I have gained nothing by the enlargement of my world; on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a superinfantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I have been an adult and a father and a responsible member of society. I have earned my daily bread. I have adapted myself to a world which never was mine. I want to break throught this enlarged world and stand again on the frontier of a unknown world which will throw this pale, unilateral world into shadow. I want to pass beyond the responsibility of fatherhood to the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor cajoled nor bribed nor traduced. I want to take as my guide Oberon the nightrider who, under the spread of his black wings, eliminates both the beauty and the horror of the past; I want to flee toward a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, regret, or repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse to the earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even the strongest wings will enable me to traverse. Even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible, adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched arms, the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to moment. Any other world is meaningless to me, and alien and hostile. In retraversing the first bright world which I knew as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter world from which I must have escaped. What this world is like I do not know, nor am I even sure that I will find it, but it is my world and nothing else intrigues me.

Here Miller expresses the longing which (despite Miller's cynical opinions to the contrary) is in every human heart- the longing for a wholeness which is not to be found in this present world. And, ironically, Miller affirms that this wholeness is not to be found in deeds- not in becoming a "responsible adult" or even in being an "inventive man."

Fred on 11.19.04 @ 09:33 PM EST [more..]