GTGreenwood

This is the last book of the trilogy called The Rosy Crucifixion. The first two are Sexus and Plexus.

In which Miller continues his autobiographical saga of his overwhelming infatuation and diffident relationship with his own emotionally remote wife, June, named Mona, and her ambiguously gendered “friend” Stasia. This relationship would prefigure the actual manage Miller and June would engage in with Anais Nin in Paris immediately following the events here.

Nexus by Henry Miller
Enough of the plot, that’s not what Miller is about.

What Henry Miller is about: extraordinary fits of exuberant confession, baudy description, witty dialogue, powerful internal analysis, and perfectly liberated prose that inspired generations of American novelists.

Here is an excerpt of one of the most liberating bits of prose ever written about writing:

“Quite a discipline, to get words to trickle without fanning them with a feather or stirring them with a silver spoon. To learn to wait, wait patiently, like a bird of prey, even though the flies were biting like mad and the birds chirping insanely. Before Abraham was … Yes, before the Olympian Goethe, before the great Shakespeare, before the divine Dante or the immortal Homer, there was the Voice and the Voice was with every man. Man has never lacked for words. The difficulty arose only when man forced the words to do his bidding, Be still, and wait the coming of the Lord! Erase all thought, observe the still movement of teh heavens! All is flow and movement, light and shadow. What is more still than a mirror, the frozen glassiness of glass – yet what frenzy, what fury, its still surface can yield!”

No wonder Miller was revered by the Beats even before he was published in America! He already had a cult status and one could argue that Kerouac’s style is a direct descendent of Miller. Burroughs too?

And he’s just getting warmed up! Somewhere in the last third of the book he comes across his epiphany of writing. He’s going to bust the whole thing wide open with complete honesty and openness, including abolishing the novelistic stratagems of 3rd person, omniscience, past tense – the whole bag of tricks is dispensed with.

And he discovers the whole mystic, orphic realm.

It is right then his name in the book changes seamlessly and imperceptibly from the fictionalized “Val” to “Henry Miller”. He’s really flowing now. A whole person is laid bare on the page.

This is where Miller gets his oft unsavory reputation as brash, bigoted, and a bit too hedonistic. He’s a human being with nothing to hide now. All the warts. All the faults and weaknesses.

But for all his personal failings, Miller has shown us the way to personal and artistic Freedom. He explores his soul and Many will follow. We thank you for this, Henry Miller.

Book Title: Nexus

Author: 
Henry Miller

Date published: 1965

In language: English

Genre: Fiction

ISBN: 0802151787

Average rating: 4.4

Rating: 5

Votes: 68

Reviewer: 
Glen Taylor

Review rating: 5

Review date: Aug 15, 2014

Book Review by 

Glen Taylor

hello?
Ken Kesey is a unique figure in American letters and Political/Cultural History.

He was involved in the early research on LSD conducted by the American Government at Stanford University. He was a willing participant in one of the greatest studies ever conducted into Human Consciousness. Kesey then took that newfound knowledge of his own psyche and wrote an American Classic. He used the money from

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s NestOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

the successful book and movie to finance a series of experiments and political demonstrations in the 60s that would become legion.
One Flew Over the Cuckoos’s Nest is the story of Randal McMurphy – later portrayed masterfully by Jack Nicholson in the movie version – a perfectly American personification of Liberty trapped in a World of constraints. In this case the constraints are first the laws of society, and second the laws of Nurse Ratched in the mental hospital where he is serving his time.

The story is narrated by one of the other patients, a big Indian named Chief Bromden or Chief Broom. It’s a time worn technique in American Literature to leave the narration to someone with a disadvantage thus allowing for a freedom of expression – the so-called unreliable narrator. Take for other examples Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (young), To Kill a Mockingbird (young), Lolita (weirdo), Bromden (mentally ill), The Racketeer (discreditable). Bromden is a great choice to uncover the absurdities of the modern world and it’s rules which he calls The Combine.

And then it’s a great story of personal liberation.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the movieOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the movie

The movie was the first adult film I ever saw. My parents were struck dumb and were visibly shaken. I think it was before the film ratings system and this is the type of film it was created for. I think my childhood was over after seeing this amazing film. It’s funny, poignant, bloody, disturbed, brilliant and important. It follows the book quite well with a few minor exceptions.

Read it and Watch it.

Book Title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Author: Ken Kesey

Date published: 1963

Image:

In language: English

Genre: Fiction

ISBN: 0451163966

Average rating: 4.4

Rating: 5

Votes: 684

Reviewer: Glen Taylor

Review rating: 5

Review date: Apr 7, 2014

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe

The journalistic book about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters that helped catapult the whole psychedelic movement of the 1960s by the great author of Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff influenced my thought patterns recently while re-reading it in the Southern California sun. It’s a great read and an accurate account of The History of the Sixties and Wolf’s style mimics a psychedelic experience and mirrors the crazy sequences in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

In other words, it’s a manual for liberation.

The style in my Journal has been forever influenced. Here is a small excerpt:

I took a break for a little while and went out on the front grass with my new Christmas mug of white tea, sat in the green cracked Adirondack and continued my re-read of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that I “borrowed” from the cafe up in Fair Oaks. Been wanting to work today, but the baby and all the kids make it impossible and this was my one little respite.

Well, it will probably end up being a very long respite because I see the whole Orphic tradition laid out before me, as I’ve done so often, from Dionysus and the yogis and the swamis and the phenomenologists and the rebel priests like Thomas Aquinas, and the slave owning American Elite wine drinking founders and through to the beats and now these hippies and my days in the Haight and wandering around Europe and North Africa on the heels of all of ‘em. And Burroughs and Kerouac and Even Lewis and Clarke and now Kesey is explaining it again, through Wolfe, and Huxley opens our eyes and the Pranksters and reminds me of my times at Burning Man, all that Day-Glo continuity vs. the White Smocks and the owners of large art cars and money and my “Company” and all my many left brained endeavors that don’t go anywhere, but Melissa, bless her sweet wonderful soul, when I tell her this story of my capitulations and see-saw going nowhere reminds me that the left brain goes on a binge and when the whole person rebels it is an integration, the right brain never “Games the Throne” like the left, never competes for dominance, it has compassion for the left and brings it in closer, learning from it’s sorrowful filtering, integrating and coming out grander in the end. 

            The sun is setting in the glorious Southern California golden stillness. A toy freeway far away with tires the sound of the ocean. Light in my eye, filtered by the fruitless avocado. Reading of the lime neon dust light of the Santa Cruz Redwoods. Ken Kesey trying to graduate. Moving on. You can’t keep going through the door of perception forever. You have to move on and he wants to be that catalyst. Most of the people just want to get high. So he’s shunned the intellectuals and now he shuns the heads. Utopia is crumbling, but something else will accommodate and integrate. Meanwhile people paint on their bodies and connect – I’ve already used the term intersubjectivity – so I’ll stop right there.

Keep reading my Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test with much interest and intrigue. This is going to either save me or take me further off the rails. It keeps happening, I have to acknowledge these things. The tradition I keep coming back to is Mysticism. Orpheus, Dionysus, Plotinus, Spinoza, Aquinas. LSD. Freud’s “Oceanic feeling”. Syncretism. The “union with the Absolute, the Infinite, or God” (wiki). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism#cite_note-EB-Mysticism-2. Burning Man. Coming back from San Francisco and feeling free, Jungian synchronisticism, Weberly cult-like-heroism. One with the ball. Attuned to Nature. The One and the Many.

            But for me it’s never been divine or magical. It’s always been an integration of an “experience” with the “experienced.” In other words, I’ve always looked at the Oceanic Feeling and found reasons, causes, grounds, words. And these words have always confused me because they annihilate the experience and nullify it. “You can’t put it into words,” is expressed by the Pranksters and experientialists of every stripe. But now Melissa gives me another way to treat it. I’ve integrated a left brained thought with a right brained connection, or vice versa.

So it’s a big continuum that links the Orphic and Mystic and Ascetic with the Paleolithic, the shamans, the Greeks and the Hindus and the Christians and the early gnostics, and the jazz musicians and the boojjers and the bohos and the acid heads and the stoners and the opium eaters and the blissed out in general and the long road trippers and the Mexicans and the Garcias and hand drummers and sunshine lovers and lovers in general and fathers and mothers of all kinds and specifically the father of beautiful babies and toddlers, beating psychedelic pollies on living room tables with egg beaters, whisks of all kinds filling my earholes with glorious PsychoSyncretic ™ thought – the kind of thought that is thunk with both hemispheres at once, with both hear holes, with all perspectives, with compassionate and empathetic narratives, associative and disassociative, with cheese AND crackers – and not to mention the beats and the pranksters and the club scene and the burners and the fugitives of all kinds.

YouSeeWhatI’mSayin’?