“Black Spring”

“…Henceforward everything moves on shifting levels – our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drop from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforward we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect with a hundred feet, a centipede with soft-stirring feet that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into music and sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness.”

   I just reread this book. Having been in a writing slump I needed some sort of recharge and Miller has a way of ionizing an interest in turning bland thoughts into interesting sentences. This book in particular had once altered my idea of writing: turning a simple, entertaining exercise used for writing letters and soused pap smears on bar napkins into a tenuously held belief that I might be able to do      it for a living. 

   Matter of fact this book also contained the passage above, one which helped eradicate any doubts I’d been having over my style. Taken alone it almost reads like the overwrought, thick-tongued, lung butter drivel of your average poet.  But it sits amid a tract about the ships’ bilge, scabbing pollution, anoxic atmosphere and overall tarnished lust of Brooklyn.  And while I feel I’d always been a slow reader because I tend to really envision a book as it gets processed from eye to occipital lobe to wherever the hell else it pings around to in my brain, this chunk of Henry Miller felt like a new multimedia center had opened up inside.  I saw actions and lives dropping and shifting over razor planes of his parallelogram, felt myself split like the shrapnel in a kaleidoscope and the sonic whir of the centipede coiled inside my ears.

   This was how writing is done.  Miller took the rainbows from the dazzling horizon, the ones which shimmer in the oily slicks of shit-choked sewers and all the rest in between and married them in an onslaught of beautiful, uncensored language.  It resurrected my scribbling ambition – no easy feat considering it had taken a gun in its mouth years before and lost half its head and a ragged scoop of neck in the blast. Writing teachers from Woonsocket High through URI and BU had informed me that you could NOT employ both well-written prose and profane thoughts in the same piece.  You were supposed to cloak the unsavory in carefully crafted metaphor, keep it all on the down low or dance all around your idea in some fucking Catholic styled cop out. They’d point to Hemingway and his tedious allusions or even Faulkner – brilliant in his language and far coarser than fat Ernest, but he still failed to address the ugly parts of his tales directly.  Was it enough to know that there was a corncob in the barn while Temple Drake was getting raped? Hell no it wasn’t – did it get kicked up her snatch or did it only get whittled into a pipe as she was groped against her wishes? And Faulkner suddenly seemed too squeamish to commit to the idea that she’d been raped at all.  These were to be my models for writing?  The Canterbury Tales had been assigned to me three times in my various schoolin’ venues and it was comical that none of my teachers ever seemed to notice what a lewd, lowbrow piece of crap that ancient text was.

   But it wasn’t all that pretty a book anyway. Maybe they were all right in the end. You couldn’t weave the nasty into the wonderful – and that meant that life, as it is, could not be expressed in words. I partially murdered the writing bug and decided to just make my little R-rated circuses into letters to send to friends.  One of which prompted my pal, Yella, to draw a comparison to Henry Miller.  So I went and bought Black Spring, being the title I’d never heard of, and shaaa-zam! Writing was suddenly a neat idea again.

   It also began to ruin my tastes in reading, at least as far as fiction goes.  Not that Miller is exactly fiction, but he set the bar so high in regards to both compelling stories and stories compellingly told that many of the make-believe tales I’d later read began to taste like unsalted rice paste. I stumbled upon Reinaldo Arenas’ The Palace of the White Skunks  shortly after Black Spring and that book nearly annihilated my ability to sit through any fiction at all – I’m kind of limited to Dr. Seuss and Chester Himes’ shoot ‘em up Harlem crime books now. 

   So, thanks to the reassurances granted by the wild, marvelous and sordid magic of Henry Miller, I’ve been putting my family through the profane experience of a guy taking a serious stab at writing for income. I don’t consider my efforts to be anywhere near what Miller could produce on a bad day.  But at least I feel good that I can scribble my stuff in my own way.