The Writer Nearing the Heart of Truth
A few years back this Henry Miller quote was shared to our group by Cynthia.
Who I am grateful for finding this gem that resonates deeply for my own experience and names so much.
“I haven’t the slightest idea what my future books will be like, even the one immediately to follow. My charts and plans are the slenderest sorts of guides: I scrap them at will.
I obey only my instincts and intuitions, I know nothing in advance. I put down things which I do not understand myself, secure in the knowledge that later they will become clear and meaningful to me…
A man is revealed in his style, the language which he has created for himself. To the man who is pure at heart, I believe that everything is clear as a bell, even the most esoteric scripts. For such a man there is always a mystery, but the mystery is not mysterious, it is logical, natural, ordained and implicitly accepted. Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it. I would like my words to flow along in the same way that the world flows along, a serpentine movement, through incalculable dimensions, axes, latitudes, climates, conditions…
One gets nearer to the heart of truth, which I suppose is the ultimate aim of the writer, in the measure that he ceases to struggle, in the measure that he abandons his will.
He moves effortlessly, giving the illusion of perfection, from some unknown center which is certainly not the brain center but which is definitely a center, a center connected with the rhythm of the whole universe…
I believe that one has to pass beyond the sphere and influence of art. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. All art, I firmly believe, will one day disappear. But the artist will remain and life itself will become not “an art,” but art.…It [art] is only a substitute, a symbol-language for something which can be seized directly. But for that to become possible man must become thoroughly religious, not a believer but a prime mover, a god in fact and deed. He will become that inevitably. And of all the detours along this path, art is the most glorious, the most fecund, the most instructive.
The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one. And the trend is towards awareness, toward that blinding consciousness in which no present form of life can flourish, not even art. ” ~ Henry Miller