Henry Miller - NEXUS

Fond of Oriental art, he had said. As I repeated Reb's words to myself suddenly the whole continent of India rose up before me. There, amidst that swarming beehive of humanity, were the palpitating relics of a world which was and will ever remain truly stupefying. Reb had taken no notice, or had said nothing if he did, of the colored pages torn from art books which also adorned the walls: reproductions of temples and stupas from the Deccan, of sculptured caves and grottoes, of wall paintings and frescoes depicting the overwhelming myths and legends of a people drunk with form and movement, with passion and growth, with idea, with consciousness itself. A mere glance at a cluster of ancient temples rising from the heat and vegetation of the Indian soil always gave me the sensation of gazing at thought itself, thought struggling to free itself, thought becoming plastic, concrete, more suggestive and evocative, more awe-inspiring, thus deployed in brick or stone, than ever words could be.

As often as I had read his words, I was never able to commit them to memory. I was hungry now for that flood of torrential images, those great swollen phrases, sentences, paragraphs—the words of the man who had opened my, eyes to this stupefying creation of India: Elie Faure. I reached for the volume I had thumbed through so often—Vol. II of the History of Art—and I turned to the passage beginning—For the Indians, all nature is divine ... What does not die, in India, is faith ... Then followed the lines which, when I first encountered them, made my brain reel.

In India there came to pass this thing: that, driven forth by an invasion, a famine, or a migration of wild beasts, thousands of human beings moved to the north or to the south. There at the shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain, they encountered a great wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite; in its shadows they lived, loved worked, died, were born, and, three or four centuries afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed the mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hollowed out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand horrible or charming figures, gods without number and without name, men, women, beasts—a tide of animal life moving in the gloom. Sometimes when they found no clearing in their path, they hollowed out an abyss in the center of the mass of rock to shelter a little black stone. It is in these monolithic temples, on their dark walls, or on their sunburnt facade, that the true genius of India expends all its terrific force. Here the confused speech of confused multitudes makes itself heard. Here man confesses unresistingly his strength and his nothingness...

I read on, intoxicated as always. The words were no longer words but living images, images fresh from the mould, shimmering, palpitating, undulating, choking me by their very excrescence.

...the elements themselves will not mingle all these lives with the confusion of the earth more successfully than the sculptor has done. Sometimes, in India, one finds mushrooms of stone in the depths of the forests, shining in the green shadow like poisonous plants. Sometimes one finds heavy elephants, quite alone, as mossy and as rough skinned as if alive; they mingle with the tangled Vines, the grasses reach their bellies, flowers and leaves cover them, and even when their debris shall have returned to the earth they will be no more completely absorbed by the intoxication of the forest.

What a thought, this last! Even when they have returned to the earth ... Ah, and now the passage...

...Man is no longer at the center of life. He is no longer that flower of the whole world, which has slowly set itself to form and mature him. He is mingled with all things, he is on the same plane with all things, he is a particle of the infinite, neither more nor less important than the other particles of the infinite. The earth passes into the trees, the trees into the fruits, the fruits into man or the animal, man and the animal into the earth; the circulation of life sweeps along and propagates a confused universe wherein forms arise for a second, only to be engulfed and then to reappear, overlapping one another, palpitating, penetrating one another as they surge like the waves. Man does not know whether yesterday he was not the very tool with which he himself will force matter to release the form that he may have to-morrow. Everything is merely an appearance, and under the diversity of appearances, Brahma, the spirit of the world, is a unity ... Lost as he is in the ocean of mingled forms and energies, does he know whether he is still a form or a spirit? Is that thing before us a thinking being, a living being even, a planet, or a being cut in stone? Germination and putrefaction are engendered unceasingly. Everything has its heavy movement, expanded matter beats like a heart. Does not wisdom consist in submerging oneself in it, in order to taste the intoxication of the unconscious as one gains possession of the force that stirs in matter?

To love Oriental art. Who does not? But which Orient, the near or the far? I loved them all. Maybe I loved this art so very different from our own because, in the words of Elie Faure, man is no longer at the center of life. Perhaps it was this leveling (and raising) of man, this promiscuity with all life, this infinitely small and infinitely great at one and the same time, which produced such exaltation when confronted with their work. Or, to put it another way, because Nature was (with them) something other, something more, than a mere backdrop. Because man, though divine, was no more divine than that from which he sprang. Also, perhaps, because they did not confound the welter and tumult of life with the welter and tumult of the intellect. Because mind—or spirit or soul—shone through everything, creating a divine irradiation. Thus, though humbled and chastened, man was never flattened, nullified, obliterated or degraded. Never made to cringe before the sublime, but incorporated in it. If there was a key to the mysteries which enveloped him, pervaded him, and sustained him, it was a simple key, available to all. There was nothing arcane about it.

Yes, I loved this immense, staggering world of the Indian which, who knows, I might one day see with my own eyes. I loved it not because it was alien and remote, for it was really closer to me than the art of the West; I loved the love from which it was born, a love which was shared by the multitude, a love which could never have come to expression had it not been of, by and for the multitude. I loved the anonymous aspect of their staggering creations. How comforting and sustaining to be a humble, unknown worker—an artisan and not a genius!—one among thousands, sharing in the creation of that which belonged to all. To have been nothing more than a water carrier—that had more meaning for me than to become a Picasso, a Rodin, a Michelangelo or a da Vinci. Surveying the panorama of European art, it is the name of the artist which always sticks out like a sore thumb. And usually, associated with the great names, goes a story of woe of affliction, of cruel misunderstanding. With us of the West the word genius has something of the monstrous about it. Genius, or the one who does not adapt; genius, he who gets slapped; genius, he who is persecuted and tormented; genius, he who dies in the gutter, or in exile, or at the stake.

It is true, I had a way of infuriating my bosom friends when extolling the virtues of other peoples. They asserted that I did it for effect, that I only pretended to appreciate and esteem the works of alien artists, that it was my way of castigating our own people, our own creators. They were never convinced that I could take to the alien, the exotic, or the outlandish in art immediately, that it demanded no preparation, no initiation, no knowledge of their history or their evolution. What does it mean? What are they trying to say? Thus they jeered and mocked. As if explanations meant anything. As if I cared what they meant.