Finally, an early morning. The streetlights on the hill are still lit and the sky is deciding whether or not to drop its dark protection. I have been playing catch up with sleep for some reason and have been uncharacteristically rising in well-established mornings. I missed this feeling, of holding the hand of the day as we emerge into light together. It’s in this liminal space that writing lives with me.
Leading up to and now well beyond my magical Big Sur birthday, I have been becoming reacquainted with the writer Henry Miller. At the Henry Miller Library I picked up three of his books and have been savoring one called Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. It has been my bedtime reading, which means a slow savoring of his writing.
At the beginning of my Miller journey in high school with Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, the only books of his I had read leading up to this current exploration, it was the tangible pathos of the intrinsic idealist that drew me. Maybe all great writers have this element, but in writing of stark realism it seems to shine like a yellow flower in the crack of a tenement sidewalk. The realistic vision on the surface is bleak, but I always connect to this close attention, sensing beneath the griminess an intense seeking for the delicate truth of humanity, for the light of love at the base of everything. By looking so closely and by bringing the terrible into relief, the writer seems to uncover it.
I read this in the writing of Bukowski, of Harry Cruz, of Hemingway, those 20thcentury man’s-man writers whose subject matter is gritty, and yet the tenderness of their love for people floors me every time. This way of seeing ignites a feeling within me like a great ache in my heart, an overwhelming opening that seems to remind me of this core of being human. There is so much light here, no matter all this mess we create in order to disguise it.
When speaking of art paintings, Miller says,
“Nothing is bad when you look at it hungrily.”
This may succinctly say what I have been having a hard time expressing here. When we look at the world around us hungry to see the light in it, we can’t help but see every sordid detail. In order to confirm that which we know, that true spark of humanity and divinity in all that exists, we must not look away from that we don’t want to see. Looking closely, we see all the cruelty, all the desolation, all the darkness. The structures we build stand stark in our vision and we want to look away. It is the hungry gaze of the true idealist that shines light onto reality. Here you find the truth. There is nothing here that is without light. Bringing the darkness forward to be seen is the only way for that delicate truth to be known.
After all that, I feel wedded to Miller in his love of this part of the world.
If it be shortly after sunup of a morning when the fog has obliterated the highway below, I am then rewarded with a spectacle rare to witness. Looking up the coast toward Nepenthe, where I first stayed (then only a log cabin), the sun rising behind me throws an enlarged shadow of me into the iridescent fog below. I lift my arms as in prayer, achieving a wing-span no god ever possessed, and there in the drifting fog a nimbus floats about my head, a radiant nimbus such as the Buddha himself might proudly wear. In the Himalayas, where the same phenomenon occurs, it is said that a devout follower of the Buddha will throw himself from peak – “into the arms of Buddha.”
To love the world seems difficult for many. This despair seems almost intentionally manufactured, for us to lose hope in humanity and the possibility for beauty. The stark realities are gripping and awful to see as we are confronted by our creations and feel helpless in transforming them. I take my cues from the writers and poets who reflect my heart back to me, to look hungrily at it all, knowing there is light here to be uncovered