Today's Letter

I read something today that affected me.  Times are stranger and stranger these days - and I wanted to share this because it seemed like it made sense a midst the chaos.


This is the preface to "Tropic of Cancer" written by Anais Nin.

Something to keep in - the author of "Tropic of Cancer" is Henry Miller.  Anais Nin was Henry Miller's lover for many years.  So, to be explicit, she is writing about the work of a man she is intimately involved with. 

Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities.  The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full.  But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium.  A continual oscillation between extremes, with bare stretches that taste like brass and leave the full flavor of emptiness.  It is beyond optimism or pessimism.  The author has given us the last frisson.  Pain has no more secret recesses.  

In a world grown paralyzed with introspection and constipated by delicate mental meals this brutal exposure of the substantial body comes as a vitalizing current of blood.  The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.  

The restorative value of experience, prime source of wisdom and creation, is reasserted.  There remain waste areas of unfinished thought and action, a bundle of shreds and fibers with which the overcritical may strangle themselves.  Referring to his Wilhelm Meister Goethe once said, "People seek a central point: that is hard, and not even right.  I should think a rich, manifold life, brought close to our eyes would be enough without any express tendency; which, after all, is only for the intellect."

The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and rotation of events.  Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of struggle since there is no question of will, but only a obedience to flow.

The gross caricatures are perhaps more vital, "more true to life," than the full portraits of the conventional novel for the reason that the individual today has no centrality and produces not the slightest illusion of wholeness.  The characters are integrated to the false, cultural void in which we are drowning; thus is produced the illusion of chaos, to face which requires the ultimate courage.

The humiliations and defeats, given with a primitive honesty, end not in frustration, despair, or futility, but in hunger, and ecstatic, devouring hunger - for more life.  The poetic is discovered by stripping away the vestiture of art; by descending to what might be styled "a preartistic level,
 the durable skeleton of form which is hidden in the phenomena of disintegration reappears to be transfigured again in the ever-changing flesh of emotion.  The scars are burned away - the scars left by the obstetricians of culture.  Here is an artist who reestablishes the potency of illusion by gaping at the open wounds, by courting the stern, psychological reality which man seeks to avoid through recourse to the oblique symbolism of art.  Here the symbols are laid bare, presented almost as naively and unblushingly by this over-civilized individual as by the well-rooted savage. 

It is no false primitivism which gives rise to this savage lyricism.  It is not a retrogressive tendency, but a swing forward into unbeaten areas.  To regard a naked book such as this with the same critical eye that is turned upon even such diverse types as Lawrence, Breton, Joyce and Celine is a mistake.  Rather let us try to look at it with the eyes of a Patagonian for whom all that is sacred and taboo in our world is meaningless.  For the adventure which has brought the author to the spiritual ends of the earth is the history of every artist who, in order to express himself, must traverse the intangible gridirons of his imaginary world.  The air pockets, the alkali wastes, the crumbling monuments, the putrescent cadavers, the crazy jig and maggot dance, all this forms a grand fresco of our epoch, done with shattering phrases and loud, strident, hammer strokes.  [my emphasis]

If there is here revealed a capacity to shock, to startle the lifeless ones from their profound slumber, let us congratulate ourselves; for the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing an longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy.  No more violent dreams, no refreshment, no awakening.  In the anaesthesia produced by self-knowledge, life is passing, art is passing, slipping from us: we are drifting with time and our fight is with shadows.  We need a blood transfusion.

And it is blood and flesh which are here given us.  Drink, food, laughter, desire, passion, curiosity, the simple realities which nourish the roots of our highest and vaguest creations.  The superstructure is lopped away.  This book brings with it a wind that blows down the dead and hollow trees whose roots are withered and lost in the barren soil of our times.  This book goes to the roots and digs under, digs for subterranean springs.  

-Anaïs Nin
1934