Nexus. Henry Miller

Voici le dernier de la trilogie "The Rosy Crucifixion" qui est l'autobiographie d'Henry Miller. Un livre d'anthologie qui m'a scotché des heures absorbé par les mots et la justesse des concepts. C'est simple je ne sais pas si j'ai déjà lu un livre d'un tel génie !

"We do not surrender to life, we struggle to avoid dying. Wich means not that we have lost faith in God but that we have lost faith in the life itself. To live dangerously, as Nietzsche put it, is to live naked and unashamed. It means putting one's trust in the life force and ceasing to battle with a phantom called death, a phantom called disease, a phantom called sin, a phantom called fear, and so on. The phantom world! That's the world which we have created for ourselves."

"As for those who govern the world, there you have the most dishonest, the most hypocritical, the most deluded and the most unimaginative beings imaginable. You pretend to be concerned about man's fate. The miracle is that man has sustained even the illusion of freedom."

Plein et honnête, sans traversions ni enrobage inutile, Miller nous mène de scène en scène et nous installe dans son cortex. Il épluche ses impressions devant nos yeux ébahis, les tombe nues et crues et c'est comme si lui et nous le vivions en synchrone. Les mots sont faibles pour décrire la puissance de cette oeuvre. Dans ce cas il convient de laisser place à l'auteur.

"The very notion of crime is an awesome one. It has such deep, tangled roots {…}. Crime isn't merely coeval with law and order, crime is pre-natal, so to speak. It's in the very consciousness of man, and it won't be dislodged, it won't be extirpated, until a new consciousness is born."

"Once upon a time I thought that everything had to be expressed poetically, or musically. I did not realize that there was a place, and a reason, for ugly things. For me the worst was vulgarity. But vulgarity can be honest, even pleasing, as I discovered. We do not need to raise everything to the level of the stars. Everything has its foundation of clay. Even Helen of Troy. No one, not even the most beautiful of women, should hide behind her own beauty…"

"The sight of the dark, oily waters below comforted me. Into the rushing stream I emptied my turbulent thoughts and emotions."

Dans l'évolution du récit on ressent très bien la quête de Miller qui se cherche en tant qu'écrivain, bataillant pour trouver le déclic qui se cache sous la montagne de savoir qu'il détient. Personne ne m'a jamais parlé de Dieu ni des auteurs russes de cette manière. Sans métaphysique ni rhétorique, il énonce les paradigmes du haut de son prétoire.

"Looking back towards the shore, how like toy blocks appeared the skyscrapers which overshadowed the river's bank! How ephemeral, how puny, how vain and arrogant! Into these grandiose tombs men and women muscled their way day in and day out, killing their souls to earn their bread, selling themselves, selling one another, even selling God, some of them, and towards night they poured out again, like ants, chocked the gutters, dove into the underground, or scampered homeward pitter-patter to bury themselves again, not in grandiose tombs now but, like worn, haggard, defeated wretches they were, in shacks and rabbit warrens which they called "home"."

"The tragedy, for the hero of love, resides in the awakening, often a brutal one, to the fact that beauty, though and attribute of the soul, may be absent in everything but the lines and lineaments of the loved one."

" It was all clear now. Clear as the ace of spades. What I could not see, however, was myself writing it. I could never write it in words. It had to be written in blood."

"I had come face to face with the source, with authorship itself, one might say. And how utterly different this was, this quiet flow from the source, than the strident act of creation which is writing! "Dive deep and never come up!" should be the motto for all who hunger to create in words. For only in the tranquil depths it is granted to us to see and hear, to move and be. What a boon to sink to the very bottom of one's being and never stir again!"

"Strange how things fall out sometimes. You may curse and pray, gibber and whimper, and nothing happens. Then, just when you're reconciled to the inevitable, a trap door opens, Saturn slinks off to another vector, and the grand problem ceases to be. Or so it seems."

"The only way I can be myself is to smash things. I'll never write a book to suit the publishers. I've written too many books, sleep-walking books. You know what I mean. Millions and millions of words - all in the head. They're banging around up there, like gold pieces. I'm tired of making gold pieces. I'm sick of these cavalry charges… in the dark. Every word I put down now must be an arrow that goes straight to the mark. A poisoned arrow. I want to kill off books, writers, publishers, readers. To write for the public doesn't mean a thing to me. What I'd like is to write for madmen - or for the angels."

"Writing! It was like pulling up poison oak by the roots. Or searching for mangolds."

"A dog, properly inspired, can make an ass of a queen. Besides, if I wished to ridicule a current idea which was anathema to me all I had to do was to impersonate a mutt, lift my hind leg and piss on it."

"Chaos! We know nothing of chaos. Silence! Only the dead know it. Nothingness! Blow as hard as you like, something always remains. When and where does creation cease ? And what a mere writer create that has not already been created ? Nothing. The writer rearranges the grey matter in his noodle."

A la fin de son livre, le lecteur ne fait qu'un avec Miller, ses mots sont limpides et justes, il a atteint la plénitude de la pensée. Tout le monde, lui y comprit, ressent la puissance de son analyse et sa sincérité implacable exempte de tout sentiments l'érige à la droite de Dieu. Nexus finit de modeler un génie de la littérature, tout simplement !

"Nobody asks you to lock yourself in all day. You"re a free man. If by becoming more careless and negligent you grow happier, who will blame you ? {…} Always treat yourself well. If you feel like a worm, grovel; if you feel like a bird, fly. Don't worry about what the neighbors may think. Don't worry about your kids, they'll take care of themselves."

""You sit there with your thoughts and you're the king of the world." This innocent remark of Reb's had lodged in my brain, given me such equanimity that for a spell I felt I actually knew what it meant - to be king of the world. King! That is, one capable of rendering homage to high and low, one so sentient, so perceptive, so illumined with love that nothing escaped his attention nor his understanding. The poetic intercessor, in short. Not ruling the world but worshipping it with very breath."

"I never said I was a failure. except to myself perhaps. How can one be a failure if he's still struggling, still fighting ? Maybe I won't make the grade. Maybe I'll end up being a trombone player. But whatever I do, whatever I take up, it'll be because I believe in it. I won't float with the tide. I'd rather go down fighting… a failure, as you say. I loathe doing like everyone else, falling in line, saying yes when you mean no."

"I don't mean senseless struggle, senseless resistance. One should make an effort to reach clear, still waters. One has to struggle to stop struggling. One has to find himself, that's what I mean."

"You think there's an answer to everything. It never occurs to you that maybe there isn't, that maybe the only answer is you yourself, how you regard your problems. You don't want to wrestle with problems, you want them eliminated for you. The easy way out, that's you."