When I arrive at the train in the morning, it almost makes my whole
day to see a certain advertisement as I stand within the trash strewn
underground of the 46th street station. Although often perceived as distracting wastes of time, when viewed with the right eyes, any words visible in your world just might have the power to help you pull through. The bold heading is,
"Sustainable Happiness," and then touts the advantages of philosophy:
"Jobs come and go, physical beauty fades, markets rise and fall. Even close relationships can end. But the benefits of philosophy last a lifetime."
Then it goes on to suggest the merits of this specific program paying
for the advertisement in the place where many eyes will see it and may
just be desperate enough to need it. But the truth is that they've
already told me the part necessary for a smile during the morning
commute. It's strange to smile during the morning commute. Even though
one is aware of all the hearts pumping blood, lungs breathing holy
albeit polluted dank air, and complex brains tuned into the universal
imagination fueled by love equal parts inside, below and above, one
might as well be swimming in a pool of zombies, blank depressed stares
concealing the eloquence of existence that fills the void of every holy
moment in this sea of infinite awareness on the MAGIC flying life ball.
One would hardly recognize that we advanced humans are on a train
at the leading edge of the romantic reality of all experience the way
we trudge along the tracks in the underground, beneath this most
eclectic, rich, creative and powerful collection of excited sensory in
the history of love. I must admit, it's easier to smile on the subway
when you're not on your way to work early in the morning, but each day
is better than the one before it, especially when you have a good book.
I finally met the work of Mr. Henry Miller in a bookstore in Jackson Hole on the 18th of July
in the year two thousand and twelve, several months before the Mayan
apocalypse was supposed to come. Although a different culture than the
Mexican Mayans, I think of Joseph Campbell's explanation of the Indian
form of "maya":
The word maya comes from the root
ma, which means "to build or measure forth." Maya has three powers.
One power is called the obscuring power; it obscures our understanding
of the pure light. The second power is called the projecting power. It
converts the pure light into the phenomenal world as a prism turns
white light into colors of the rainbow. These are the powers that turn
the transcendent into the temporal, spatial world that we know and all
its things. Now if you take colors and spin them on a disk, they will
reveal white again. The colors of this world can be so inflected; they
can be arranged in so artful a way that they will let you experience
through them the true light. This is called the revealing power of
maya--and the function of art is to serve that end. The artist is meant
to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through
them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of
our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly
looked upon, reveal. The hero journey is one of the universal patterns
through which the radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good
life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are
called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each
time, there is the same problem: do I dare?
I was
on yet another self-defined hero journey at the time I found this
amazing expression of universal truth, love, anger, frustration, and
above all, poetic mastery of the English language. It was hiding on the shelves
of a small bookstore nestled in a mini-mall in this town
at the base of Yellowstone National Park, standing as the only enclave of possibly enlightened liberality
amidst the vast open spaces of the least populated and perhaps most
conservative state in the union. I was giving myself a reward for
having survived the hero journey to that point. The journey to which I
refer is not my journey across the United States by car, which was my second
journey from east to west across this big country. I am referring to the universal
human journey through life, at which point I had survived for
twenty-eight years. Being a storyteller and writer, I
decided that a few books were the best way to celebrate being a piece of
poetry amidst providence.
I had been aware of Miller's reputation ever since watching
Seinfeld as a child. As fate would have things, there are currently
Seinfeld ads
in many of the train cars of the NYC subway system. During one
episode, Jerry has to deal with a library cop who claims he never
returned
Tropic of Cancer, even though he clearly remembered doing it. It turns out he had actually returned
Tropic of Capricorn. In my opinion, although they are considered companions to each other,
Capricorn is
the superior work of art. Perhaps that's just my love for the homeland thumbing
my nose at Paris, as much as I've loved every French traveler I've been
graced to meet during journeys.
Capricorn is set in New York,
not that Miller has anything good to say about it. Even so, I wouldn't
have been interested in either if it hadn't been for one of my roommates
and fellow teachers at the English Club in Tokyo constantly singing
Henry's praises as a genius and mastermind. Who knows? What matters is that Capricorn is the symbol of a goat fish, and it doesn't
take much religious imagination to celebrate the wholeness of that one
17 months later I am
in New York City yet again, staring at the mix of zombie humanity
watching television shows on mini-TV screens, not that anyone made small
talk on the subway ten or twenty or fifty years ago anyway. I know they're not all zombies, and probably kiss passionately and make love in ways I clearly cannot discern during a morning commute, but even so, it is not a fun way to start the day. I open
Henry Miller for some kind of cosmic connection, to remind myself that
the deep thoughts are still constantly flowing through the current of
creation, and despite the seeming chaos, there is indeed a deep loving
intelligent poetic peace embracing the human nation:
"My
mind was filled with wonderful treasures, my taste was sharp and
exigent, my muscles were in excellent condition, my appetite was strong,
my wind sound. I had nothing to do except improve myself, and I was
going crazy with the improvements I made every day." (Miller 300)
"Not
only that, but I felt all the books I would one day write myself
germinating inside me: they were bursting inside like ripe cocoons. And
since up to this time I had written nothing but fiendishly long letters
about everything and nothing, it was difficult for me to realize that
there must come a time when I should begin, when I should put down the
first word, the first real word. And this time was now!" (Miller 210)
Soon
I'm on the B train (or is it the D train?) and staring at the face of self-help evangelist Joel
Osteen, who tells me that God wants me to leave my mark on this
generation, and that the seeds of greatness are planted inside of me.
He says I am not meant to live a life where I just get by, to be
ordinary, to be normal. I am supposed to unleash the ultimate power of
my potential. He's rich because he says things like that to people who
want to hear it. I certainly don't mind. I go back to Miller:
"What
is a fanatic? Someone who believes passionately and acts desperately
upon what he believes. I was always believing in something and so
getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more I
believed. I believed--and the rest of the world did not!...You are
perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You
are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink,
your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your feet lies
an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm,
through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love.
The more you reach out toward the world the more the world retreats.
Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand
in his sacred entrails--that's only for the priest in the hour of
sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to
pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such thing as a
skeleton beneath the covering of flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the
motto by which people live. If you continue this balancing at the edge
of the abyss long enough you become very very adept: no matter which
way you are pushed you always right yourself." (Miller 62)
His words bring me back to my state of mind when I last lived amongst this magnetic metropolitan sprawl.
After years away meeting loving minds and myriad landscapes, I
believe I am more adept at balancing than ever before, despite the
doubts, challenges and obstacles that accompany any worthwhile day amidst the divinity of infinity. I am not Henry Miller, and neither are you. If his ghost
were to appear on the street, I imagine he would swindle me for money
and then complain about me afterward, and with such poetic brilliance
that I couldn't help but be honored to have financed that phosphorescent
philosophical fuel he feeds the world. Yes, my young friend from the
Tokyo conversation days had more in common with Henry's insatiable lust
and swinging bouts of ecstasy and depression, but still, I understand
the power conveyed by his words. During my pseudo-Henry Jones, Jr. days I
carried with me a journal purchased in a bookstore in China, with the
purposeful intent of recording all of my thoughts, observations, and
strange illustrations of pyramid poetry I perceived. The inscription on
the front reads:
"A good book is the best of friends, now and always."
When
I reach my class we learn, we laugh, and we all get our money's worth
from the school. Afterward a woman from Togo approaches me and tells me
she has never been to school before in her life, and she didn't know any
English when she came to America, but now she can read a little and
write a little. She is definitely slower than the other students, but
she tries and smiles and clearly has some skills or she wouldn't be
there. She thanks me many times at the end of her speech, and I'm not
sure why because I have only been teaching her for two days. She
learned English herself. I am not responsible. Perhaps she senses
something in me that some perceive and others despise.
It's
hard to tell who loves you and who loathes you. The man from Guinea
slouches in the back and gives me this unimpressed smirk the entire time
I speak, but every time I call on him to read he lights up like a
little boy and joyously shows off his ability to perceive the symbols of
this language which makes itself necessary across the globe, whether
the globe likes it or not. I don't know if he looks at me with the eyes
of a goat or a fish, but it's probably somewhere in between. I suppose
he isn't the other Ben I met in Portland on that journey across the USA, a month after I met Capricorn in the bookstore. He was also visiting from
New York City. He always smiled and waved when he strolled down the driveway to our mutual
host's home in his flashy business suit, back from a meeting with his
corporate colleagues connected to him through a board room in Manhattan, and I returned the gesture as I sat in the backyard reading Henry Miller. He was an incredibly
intelligent and talented man, a graduate of Amherst, a school which had
rejected my attempts to join their academic society of learned
individuals. In the evenings, when our host drew paintings of horses, other Ben threw out
adjectives befitting a black-turtle necked art aficionado with
horned-rimmed glasses and a martini in his hand, refusing to yield the
floor for comments from me or his friend, the artist, so that we could
be perfectly aware of his grand cranial capacity, in case we had any
doubts. He always turned his back to me, and ignored any attempts to
join the conversation. It was only fair. I was a friend of a friend,
passing through, and I suppose I had been intruding on their brief reunion. Even so, his refusal to permit my admission into the discussion brought back turbid memories of the city. It was only
when I finally found an audience for a story I had been dying to tell
that I sensed an uneasiness and perhaps jealousy in my fellow "son of the right hand" (or "blessed" if we're going Latin).
It had been over a week since I had ascended Pyramid Peak, but hadn't
told a soul of my most amazing mountain adventure. I finally found
myself talking to the casual boyfriend of my host's hipster and openly,
happily promiscuous roommate, a girl who, although smiling to my face, I
once overheard explaining my situation to her friend as such: "I don't know,
he's a friend of my roommate's friend and lives with his mom or
something," which couldn't be further from the truth on the heels of 100
days in the wild and a year in Tokyo. What does one have to do to prove adulthood, growth and independence? I suppose being on their couch for five days wasn't the best way to display such strengths from experience, but I was almost completely worn down from the adventure, and I told them every chance I got how much I appreciated their hospitality. Whatever she thought of me, her open-relationship boyfriend was a
gentle soul who loved hiking, and he smiled with enthusiasm and
encouraged me to continue as I got the story off my chest one night when we all happened to be standing in the driveway. Others had filtered inside by the time we introduced ourselves and the mountains came up, I believe because he worked at some sort of hiking or sporting goods store in town. As I grew increasingly excited and spoke faster and faster, noticing his eyes light up expectantly with each step of the tale, I paused and thanked him for listening, as I hadn't been able to tell a
soul almost any of my stories all summer, given my solitary situation on the road. He smiled more and said it was
great, please continue. He loved hiking too. Meanwhile, corporate Manhattan Ben, a man
skilled at leading groups into the wild but who I discerned did not make
a habit of ever doing so alone, and was currently very unhappy and
underwhelmed by his current profession selling sporting equipment ("Most of my success comes from telling fart jokes at meetings"), this
man glared at me with devilish goat eyes from ten feet away in the driveway. He
eventually marched between us and into the house to escape my story,
which was more about my stupidity than any personal glory. I tried to climb a mountain on a whim with nothing but a banana and a few sips of water for fuel, and cursed all mountains everywhere as I stumbled back delirious. And then I prepared and climbed it again. He never heard the finish though. Something about my smile and joyous wonder at the world clearly sickened him. But it was
his time on the earth and I wasn't telling him anyway, so I let him
pass.
His foil is the woman from the race track in
Saratoga, where I saw more money than I could ever imagine, although I'm
sure Joel Osteen could imagine it. My job was to carry hundreds of
thousands of dollars to betting tellers. My official job title was
"messenger." When I had to mix with the crowds, they sent an armed
security guard with me, to both protect me from danger and protect the
money from me. There were several of us in the messenger service, both
young and old. I was merely a shaggy college student back then. I am
still long-haired and bearded, but better groomed through time. There
were others who were much older. One was a blond short-haired woman who
clearly had some sort of relationship with another woman there. I
don't recall talking to her much, but we all hung out in the same room
playing cards and reading books while we waited for the bell to ring and
the boss to send us into the money room to collect enormous wads of
cash and place them in sealed bags to which even we did not have a key.
I had to leave before the end of the season because I was a college
student, but on my final day she said good bye to me and started to get tears in her eyes, mentioning how, ya know, it just gets so difficult at
times. Perhaps she sensed the fish in me. I suppose I had hidden the
goat well, or it had yet to even blossom much back then. I wasn't sure why she was telling this to me. People are always telling me things, regardless of whether or not they know I'm a writer. I remember it clearly because I never received such an emotional response from someone I had mostly considered a stranger before or since. I thought of
her as the Togo woman thanked me for teaching her all of four hours
this week. I will only teach her for four and half more weeks before
the term changes and I get new students, so I doubt she'll be baking me
any face cakes like my previous class, but I thought of that blond race
track messenger as the 'thank you's' poured from her lips. Although I
doubted there were any anti-Ben's in class like my Manhattan Portland
acquaintance, I sensed a clear divide between the 100% poor immigrant males in the room and
myself, who, although I had concealed my education and upbringing,
belied the fact with my dress shirt, tie, formal pants and shoes, all requirements of the job. I
hate wearing ties. This is the first job where I have ever been
required to wear a tie, even counting corporate legal land in
Rockefeller Center. It feels like a noose around the neck. It is not
fair, to me or the students, although supposedly they expect it from me,
according to my supervisors. Funny how, considering my previous school
was higher quality with a more relaxed dress code. Even my friend who
works at Google wore a hoodie and jeans when I went to meet him at
their headquarters for lunch last year, as did everyone else, and they
are one of the most successful companies in the world. Although
aesthetic visual pleasure is certainly an art form and in my personal
opinion superior to anti-fashion focused on looking as ragged as
possible, I do have a theory about an inverse relationship between inner
treasures and obsession with outer appearance. If you've got them
both, more power to you, but to sacrifice the former for the latter is
the wreck of this world and one of the many contributing factors to why
no one looks each other in the eye in this city. Unless they're brave
enough, the inhabitants of this city always avert their beautiful balls of visionary wonder the instant eye contact is made, for fear of a
truly human moment. Or perhaps it is about being somehow figured out, that a stranger's gaze could
somehow undress their soul and learn all of their darkest secrets, like a primitive fearing flash photography. To
which I say, should such powers exist: Glory! Why not? There will be
plenty of time for hiding everything inside when you're no longer riding
Pirsig's train of romantic reality through the peaks and valleys of
human existence. If you prefer the steady track with no windows and
nothing but a beauty magazine or blank stare to occupy your attention,
then bon voyage my friend! But you'll never feel the pure joy of the
fireworks the way you could if you'd just summon the courage to walk into the nature of spirit alone without a smart phone, or, if that's not your style, and even better yet anyway, lock eyes with a stranger
and smile warmly. Perhaps you'll even give a thumb's up, just like my redheaded comrade
who I will never see again did so this past Saturday night as I walked
down the street grinning from ear to ear, my loving vibrations
contagious enough to make others turn their heads, if only for a
moment. And this drunken young man, barely hanging on the shoulders of
his equally drunken friends, looked me in the eye quickly as he passed by and displayed the
evolutionary achievement that separates us from the apes, the upright opposable
thumb.
"With Creative Evolution under my arm I
board the elevated line at the Brooklyn Bridge after work and I
commence the journey homeward. I enter the elevated line below the
ground, like a worm being pushed through the intestines. I know each
time I take my place in the crowd which mills about the platform that I
am the most unique individual down there. I look upon everything which
is happening about me like a spectator from another planet. My
language, my world, is under my arm. I am the guardian of a great
secret; if I were to open my mouth I would tie up traffic. What I have
to say, and what I am holding in every night of my life on this journey
to and from the office, is absolute dynamite. I am not ready yet to
throw my stick of dynamite. I nibble at it meditatively, ruminatively,
cogently." (Miller 222)
I think back to my freshman
year at Cornell, the culmination of years upon years of study that this
lovely warm woman from Togo will never know but perhaps doesn't need because she can smile, talk to people and say thank you, and how I shied from
strangers and eye contact and wandered the nights alone on campus
because my roommate was obsessed with explosive online video games filled with
gunfire and death and destruction a minimum of twelve and maximum of
sixteen hours every day, no hyperbole. "Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!" What's worse, he was acing his
pre-med courses. I hated him. I have rarely ever used such a strong word for an individual, and by the end of the year we were the only pair of roommates who truly got along well, but for those first few months I hated him. All attempts at reconciliation, whether through straightforward diplomacy or bringing in outside authorities, were completely in vain. He chewed tobacco and spit it in
a Pepsi can, and complained that headphones chafed his ears when I asked him to please turn the sound off. If I met him today in a similar situation I would simply shake my head, say "no," and walk away, demanding new accommodations, and if that wasn't possible, he would get an angry earful as opposed to a wimpy passive aggressive hope that he would simply submit to reason and compassion. Had I
been more adept at alcohol consumption I could have numbed the pain at
parties and returned home to pass out in a drunken stupor, but I was
innocent then, virgin in every way possible. That is, except for music,
the goat and the fish united in its holiest form. I will spare myself
the embarrassment of revealing the first CD I received as a gift, but
the first CD I ever asked for as a birthday present was
Recovering the Satellites by
Counting Crows as a young twelve year old, because they sang the merits
of going to California in whiny nasal 90s voices on the school
bus radio while I rode home through the Cambridge countryside of upstate New York. On these nights
I wandered across the bridges where countless students had killed themselves by
leaping into the gorges below rather than risk another midterm exam or
suffocating winter trudge up the snowy hills, because oh the pressure to succeed and be amazing that is thrust upon the beautiful intelligence of the divine human with the opposable thumb which isn't enough, because creative evolution never stops! And sometimes on these walks I thought I would never stop. I persisted against winds,
whether fierce or gentle, going where I knew not but I knew that as long as I was moving it was important and I was somehow achieving an objective set before me at the dawn of my creation, yet still well beyond my understanding as a pimply faced college student who always looked down at the ground as he passed his fellow glowing wonders of the world's art project, accompanied only by cold and desperate isolation amongst the
autumn leaves and beneath the starry skies, listening to the song "Miller's Angels":
Miller's angels are hovering in between the earth and the sun
In the shadow of god's unwavering love
I am a fortunate son
They come out of the blue sky
They come out of the blue
They come out of the blue sky
But you never know
Where they gonna go
Hey Romeo
At
times tears formed in my eyes, sometimes because of the beautiful
sadness of it all, sometimes because of the wind. All I learned back then was how terrible the history of the world and the workings of its machinery had been, could be and most likely would be. Studying government is like working at a fast food restaurant: you don't want to eat there after you learn how they make the food. It was then I began
my true love of piano, despite my inability to play anything besides
"Smoke on the Water." I'd always loved and admired the instrument, but "Miller's Angels" coupled with a few Chopin and Schumann pieces kept my soul alive as others puked on the front lawns of fraternity houses and bragged about sloppy sexual "conquests." One day I would join in the debauchery, but not yet, and it was a good thing too, because I was still learning what my brain could do if it followed through on what my heart knew.
I
dreamed every night that I would meet my soul mate around the next
corner, the next bend, up the next set of stairs, or perhaps even in
between the stars in the sky. Maybe she was on the other side of the
world, or maybe she was a few steps away. Maybe she was waiting for me to grow a pair of horns to carry
those sensitive fish scales up the Pyramid Peak and love the solitude of
the universe, wholly recognizing it as a gift to truly appreciate the
humans around you when they are there, and to give them all of your love
when you stare.
"I
grow light, light as a feather, and my pace becomes more steady, more
calm, more even. What a beautiful night it is! The stars shining so
brightly, so serenely, so remotely... Look around you, young man, see
how still and beautiful everything is... I become very thoughtful, very,
very calm. I love everybody in the world. I know that somewhere at
this very moment there is a woman waiting for me and if only I proceed
very calmly, very gently, very slowly, I will come to her. She will be
standing on a corner perhaps and when I come in sight she will recognize
me--immediately. I believe this, so help me God! I believe that
everything is just and ordained. My home? Why it is the world--the
whole world! I am at home everywhere, only I did not know it before.
But I know now. There is no boundary line any more. There never was a
boundary line: it was I who made it. I walk slowly and blissfully
through the streets. The beloved streets. Where everybody walks and
everybody suffers without showing it... The world, in its visible,
tangible substance, is a map of our love. Not God but life is love.
Love, love, love. And in the midmost midst of it walks this young man,
myself." (Miller 227)
Who doesn't love a mystical promenade?
I am in Queens now, and I need a breather, so I run outside down the street. I am so electrified by the hours of expression that I leap into the air when I pass a tree and high five the nearest leaf, if such an equal exchange is possible. Although overcast and drizzling when I began to write, the sky now reveals a smiling moon and stars shining bright throughout glorious crisp autumn night.
Mr. Miller, by God, you're right.
