Henry Miller is to writing what Tom Waits is to music. Guttural, gritty, bold in a visceral way. Each of them glistens with Life and something unreachable between the words.

Tom Waits pours out his world in throaty punctuations as if his next breath might stitch the world together. Henry Miller plows out his world in articulate and scathing detail, at times lurid or tranquil iterations of his here and now.

And this, about creating — writing in particular — a taste of the germinal drive:

“…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 disappears suffers no destruction; something which was already there, something imperishable, like memory, or matter, or [the divine]…is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig into 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….A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us…of all that is fluid and intangible…It cannot be understood, it can only be accepted or rejected. If accepted, we are revitalized; if rejected we are diminished. Whatever it purports to be, it is not: it is always something more for which the last word will never be said…”
~from “Sexus”, Book 1 of the Rosy Crucifixion

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