miller on writing

"To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse...

No man ever puts down what he intends to say: the original creation, which is taking place all the time, whether one writes or doesn't write, belongs to the primal flux: it has no dimensions, no form, no time element. In this preliminary state, which is creation and not birth, what dissapears suffers no destruction; something which was already there, something imperishable, like memory, or matter, or God, is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig in a torrent. Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible. In an intellegently ordered world ther would be no need to make the unreasonable attempt of putting such miraculous happenings down. Indeed, it would make no sense, for if men only stopped to realize it, who would be content with the counterfeit when the real is at everyone's beck and call? Who would want to switch in and listen to Beethoven, for example, when he might himself experience the ecstatic harmonies which Beethoven strove to register? A great work of art, if anything, serves to remind us, or at let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible. Which is to say, the universe. It canot be understood; it can only be accepted or rejected... Whatever it purports to be it is not: it is always something more for which the last word will never be said. It is all that we put into it out of hunger for that which we deny every day of our lives. If we accepted ourselves as completely, the work of art, in fact the whole world of art would die of malnutrition... The art of dreaming will be in the power of every man one day. Long before that books will cease to exist, for when men are wide awake anddreaming their powers of communication (with one another and with the spirit that moves all men) will be so enhanced as to make writing seem like the harsh and raucous sqwauwks of an idiot."

-Henry Miller, from Sexus