The material here is just undigested stuff which doesn't fit into my website anywhere, yet. I am just trying to slowly get away from living in a room full of fire-hazard paper; papers that have been lugged from place to place, buried, dug up again, shuffled, pruned and copied. (Oh, and occasionally put in a pile and burned). Anyway - I found this Intro to one of Henry Miller's shorter pieces. Sorry if you think he is a sexist, sadly his portrait and his reputation got re-written in the 70s by people who never (apparently) read any of his stuff. Or just read the porn that he and feminist Nin wrote for cash. Hey ho. So here's the natural mystic.

STAND STILL LIKE THE HUMMINGBIRD Henry Miller (1962)
"No, things have not changed a whit since Tropic of Cancer days, unless for the worse. La vie en rose is definitely not for the artist. The artist - I employ the term only for the genuine ones- is still suspect, still regarded as a menace to society. Those who conform, who play the game, are petted and pampered. Nowhere else in the world, unless it be in Soviet Russia, do these conformists receive such huge rewards, such wide recognition for their efforts.

So much for the dominant note. As for the subdominant, the thought is don't wait for things to change, the hour of man is now and, whether you are working at the bottom of the pile or on top, if you are a creative individual you will go on producing, come hell or high water. And this is the most you can hope to do. One has to go on believing in himself, whether recognised or not, whether heeded or not. The world may seem like hell on wheels - and we are doing our best, are we not, to make it so? but there is always room, if only in one's soul, to create a spot of Paradise, crazy though it may sound.

When you find you can go neither backward nor forward, when you discover that you are no longer able to stand, sit or lie down, when your children have died of malnutrition and your aged parents have been sent to the poorhouse or the gas chamber, when you realize that you can neither write nor not write, when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous."