Weblogsky: Henry Miller

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Henry Miller

A bit of surfing: I followed Pesco's link to Erik Davis' piece about Druid Heights, which includes a link to Steve Speer's Greetings from the S.S. Vallejo, a piece about the Vallejo's renovation. At the Vallejo site I saw a link under "stories" to Alicia Bay Laurel, author of Living on Earth, a book Marsha and I had around the house for years after we joined forces in '73. Curious, I followed that link, and found a piece that mentions the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. This brought back memories... I spent the summer of '72 in California and visited Big Sur with friends – we were on our way to Yosemite from Los Angeles. On that trip I had been reading Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Heironymus Bosch, a great little slice of Henry Miller's life. In fact all of his works were slices of his life in various shapes and sizes. I recall Big Sur as one of the Miller books that suggested a choice between making art, and making your life a work of art. At the time, having been told so many times by various mentors that I had writing talent, I thought I would be a kind of artist, a writer and poet. Miller made me wonder about that, and over the next year, around the time I was married, I sat for hours trying to write as an end in itself, and convinced myself that I didn't have a story worth telling (which is bogus – everybody has a story worth telling, you just have to believe that's the case).

Now I write what I want to when I want to – i.e. I blog – and I have plenty to talk about, but I don't practice writing as a craft the way I did then. This odd bit of surfing, though, has taken me back to a fountain where I can drink again and renew some of the old urges. Reading Henry Miller again can do that, and thinking about Big Sur, and finding the art in my still-robust life.

jon posted this at 9:36 AM
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Comments

For me, the loop back to the source was rereading "Dharma Bums" by Kerouac, his great evocation of getting to know the poet Gary Snyder. And then reading this by Snyder:

"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."

Something about the self-referential nature of early podcasts and their making resonated with the Gary Snyder poem:

Axe Handles

One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with-"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wen Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-in the
Preface: "In making the handle of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.-
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.