Now that I've finished Henry Miller's Rosy Crucifixion trilogy and also reread Tropic of Cancer and am now embroiled in a collaborative storytelling endeavor with six friends of mine over the internet I am really seeing that writing can not but be the fruit of mindfulness.
Now, I have kind of known this before. But let's just say it is becoming crystal clear to me.
By "writing" I don't mean writing a report for work or for a class, or writing a technical piece on how something works or the history of something or some doctrinal explanation of something. I don't even mean just writing a simple narrative - whether fictional or nonfictional.
What I mean by "writing" is what Henry Miller apparently meant by it - an artistic reproduction of his observations and impressions of life as it is lived moment to moment. Just like a painting tries to capture a scene in color and light and shape, or a song or poem tries to convey a mood through rhythm, cadence, vivid images, and even rhyme (or not), good writing like that done by Henry Miller, James Joyce, Neil Gaiman, and other 20th century writers is meant to convey a sense of the full picture of all things as cystallized in a momentary impression of scene, character, and flow of events.
Henry Miller's writings travel, sometimes in a single paragraph, from the crude and raunchy to the transendent and sublime - and he does this because that is how life is actually experienced - at least by the artist who is open enough, aware enough, and courageous enough to experience life that way - open to all ten worlds as we Buddhists might say. Henry Miller was about liberation, and not just sexual liberation as the pruriently obsessed can't seem to get beyond, but the liberation of all the senses to see, hear, taste, touch, smell, feel and even more to let go and move gracefully to the next thing.
Consequently, however, Henry Miller was, or portrayed himself as, a totally irresponsible anti-social libertine. I don't think that is necessary though to experience life that way. But perhaps it took someone like that to be able to reproduce life in literature in such a raw, dynamic, and challenging way. Fortunately for all of us the Supreme Court in the 50s (or was it the 60s) were sophisticated and educated enough to give Henry Miller his due as a writer of literature.
Anyway, in finally doing some creative writing of my own I find myself having to draw upon every resource to reproduce an impression of life as it is lived, to give a sense of versimilitude to even a fanastic setting and chain of events, and to give life to a host of mind born characters. I do not claim to be doing so in a literary way (I do hope to make it available someday) but I am getting a sense of how it feels to try, and what it takes to try to do it well, or as well as I can.
What it takes is mindfulness, heart, and courage.
It takes mindfulness because one must be aware of how things are to reproduce how things are. One must be aware of how things might be - even if it is an experience you have never had or a perspective you have never and would never share. One must take in sights, sounds, and all other sensory impressions and contemplate their feeling tone and rearrange them into a new sensible order to give the right impression and bring a scene to life. This also requires research - which is not how Buddhists traditionally think of mindfulness practice - but in researching one must know what to look for, and at the same time have an open awareness to catch important details and take advantage of serendipitous discoveries.
It takes heart because one must really explore what it is to feel a certain way, and how others given their peculiar circumstances might experience any given thing. It means to imagine the other perspectives - to live many other lives - even those one finds at odds with one's own convictions or even repellant. That is actually not as hard as imagining what it might be to have a more sublime and exalted view than one has yet reached oneself and then to reproduce that. Is imagining such a perspective to share in that thing? Is imaginatively descending into the depths actually going there? Here, one must embrace the lower in compassion as a writer, and hold forth the higher as realizable vision that can be shared in writing. This is how the writer, or at least this writer, finds the mutual possession of the ten worlds in action.
And finally it takes courage - because a true writer can't help but reveal him or herself. I very much understand why some like Anais Nin would not want her writings revealed until after her passing. I can understand why Thomas Aquinas would say, towards the end of his life, that all he wrote was worth nothing more than straw - shame for the paltry nature of his past expressions. Henry Miller at least was a true artist with the courage of his convictions, even if he was a coward in so many other ways, or at least portrayed himself as such. Even in his stark revealing of his cowardice there is shown a courage that few would even aspire to. Henry just let loose a torrent of image, scenes, dialogue, observations, ridiculous daydreams, and an uncensored stream of dialogue that puts the writer right in his place and time. If one reads his works looking for a coherent narrative one will miss the point, as I did the first time through. But if one reads for a courageous gush of life as it is lived - then one will see why Henry Miller is considered one of the great writers of the 20th century. He stripped the flesh off his bones, broke those bones into quills, used his blood for ink, and engrained his marrow on every page. That is courage, and without it there is no art.
I don't, btw, have the guts Henry Miller had by a long shot. However, in writing creatively one can't help but populate the writings with snippets of people and characters, and dialogues, and perspectives that one has encountered or imagined or otherwise harbored in one's own heart and mind and this is all one can draw from.
It is important to to remember that these other lives, these countless rebirths and redeaths one harbors in the storehouse of mind are not necessarily the direct flow of one's current causal flow, the current karmic identity one has taken on. That is where people get scared of their own shadows, and are frightened by the shadows cast off by the artst. They think the artist, the writer, the singer are themselves the cold blooded killer, the rapist, the executioner, the victim, the unborn child that is being presented. But it is not them - it is their shadow - and the shadow (whether bright or dark) of all the impression that have seeded the compassionate, courageous, and imagintive mind ground of the artist.
P.J. Harvey, for instance, is not an unseelie fey living in a dank cave or a lonely moor. She has not been taken to the riverbank and murdered, or pimped on the streets of New York, nor as far as we know has she ever aborted the child of an unrequited love. But her heart is undoubtedly quite large, soft, raw, and above all courageous.
I find it interesting that the very qualities which seem to make for a true artist are also indispensable to the bodhisattva, or is it vice versa, or both, or neither?
It is in the end just mindfulness, heart, and courage - one scarecrow, one tin man, and one lion.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
Actually no, I really don't.
I've been reading Henry Miller again lately, I just finished his Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus) and am now onto Tropic of Cancer. Great stuff. Hilarious but they are also filled with wonderful insights and very touching portraits of people and places. They are also filled with a lot of ugliness and raunchiness (esp. Sexus). Henry was very much trying to paint the entire spectrum of human experience as he experienced it with words.
I think that is the key to appreciating Tropic of Cancer because I remember feeling very impatient, confused, and dismayed the first time I read it. It doesn't have even the halfway narrative nature of the Rosy Crucifixion, there is no plot, and the book just meanders from one observation, rant, and diatribe to another. Still, even the first time, I was drawn in by Henry's way of playing with words and images. It's a travelogue, a dreamscape, and a rambling stream of consciousness - maybe not so much a stream as a series of perilous rapids. The first time I read it I was looking for something more structured and for a more coherent record of Henry's life in Paris. But this time I am really appreciating it for what it is - a series of verbal landscape paintings.
Now last night I picked up Brad Warners new book Zen Wrapped in Karma and Dipped in Chocolate, though I am thinking of it as The Continuing Adventures of Brad Warner. I am very much enjoying this one - and it is much more coherent than Henry Miller, insightful in a much more down-to-earth and prosaic way, and is much easier to devour in a couple of sittings. But it is not really ART the way Henry Miller's books are art. Reading Brad's books, for me, is like sitting around shooting the shit with one of the guys.
Reading Henry Miller is like being thrown head first into someone's raw and gushing impressions of life as it is with all its squalid ugliness and all its blazing beauty.
Did I mention that towards the end of his life Henry Miller heard of and then chanted Namu Myoho Renge Kyo? Well, he did.
I've also taken to doing some of my own writing. As I've said elsewhere, I've finally gotten sick to the gills of Buddhist pontificating. I've stored up quite a load of impressions, feelings, opinions, bile, and even amrita myself - and the rather dry abstract way I write about Buddhism (unlike Brad's in your face style) doesn't express any of that. So it just sits neglected and unused, festering. So to vent all that in a creative way I've set up a play be email Dungeons and Dragons game (actually using the Pathfinder rules but with the old Greyhawk campaign world as the basis for the setting). Actually I think of this project as collaborative storytelling because it is not just my writing by also the contributions of the players and the gestalt that is created by everyone's contribution.
Now I readily admit that I am a rank amatuer at this writing business. Firstly I write terribly livid purple prose because I have been too heavily influenced by people like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft and even Harry Harrison, not too mention all the other pulp novels I've taken in over the years. I will even admit that I love purple prose - I think its hilarious the more over the top you can get - even when dealing with serious themes - maybe especially then. And of course when I am not writing purple prose I write dialogue for my characters that if full of pontification and sermonizing - I can't help it. But at least I feel more free to be more blunt or take on different opinions than my own. There is a great sense of freedome in being able to speak my piece and even to express the pieces of others - the way I hear them. And since it's just fiction no one had to take it too seriously or be too grossly offended because afterall they are just characters in a fantasy game world. This is the freedom that I have long since lost as a Buddhist priest who has to be sure not to offend or alienate anyone unceccessarily. The freedom to let the Id and various alter-egos express themselves in a creative, channeled, and safe way.
This does not mean that every character I write about or write dialogue for is just an alter ego or an expression of my own true feelings. Some of what I express through these fictional characters and situations emerges from people I have known who made an impression on me (for better or worse), or from fears I have, or things that annoy me, or things I admire, or pastiches of characters from other books, movies, or graphic novels, or t.v. shows or whatever that really struck me. Or sometimes they are opposites or at least very different types than myself and I want to see what it would be like to be that - for better or worse. I think many people can't understand this - I think many people (even people older than myself) still have only a tenuous graps on who they themselves are. To project themselves into another kind of life is inconceivable to them, even terrifying. So be it.
Related to this - I remember that P.J. Harvey has commented on how silly she thinks it is that people think the songs she writes and sings are somehow secret revelations about her own life, and how people imagine (based on her music) that she lives in a dark cave on the moors or something. P.J. Harvey seems to be able to separate fiction or artistic expression from reality, but apparently there are critics and other listeners who cannot separate fiction from reality.
Personally, I think that I have a more acute sense of the difference between fiction and reality than most people - and I think it is why I more deeply appreciate how fiction and even fantasy and sci-fi fiction can present very accurate reflections of reality while other people are lost in the fantastic.
Anyway, that's enough for today. Once more I have said nothing worth saying, but I wanted to keep my hand in here.
If anyone is looking for some nugget of Buddhist wisdom I will only offer this:
Chant Odaimoku until your jaw drops off.
Of if that puts you off then just sit down and shut up.
Smell the roses, get a cup of coffee, think about the fact that in a 150 years everyone here now will be dead. What did you say your problem was?
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei