on miller, and lust, and aimlessness

It’s certainly not the same as sitting at a rough notebook in Paris, but in all truth I do not believe in nostalgia so I won’t dwell in some non-memory. I am sitting at a desk as I do every day, opened to the office-tones of a soft document, typing, erasing and retyping words.

There’s a few things I need to write: a progress report, most pressingly, though my sense of ‘progress’ is unsuitably abstract at the moment. A redraft of an article that has been deemed ‘inappropriate’ to its readership (a task unappealing, to say the least). A skeleton of a chapter, most likely on the relationship between experience and experimentalism. Perhaps some more notes on Stein, or science, or sense-perception. Or perhaps a weighty missive to my friends now living in Port Moresby.

Yet my overwhelming desire is to sit in this space and write aimlessly.

I also need to write a piece about Henry Miller. I am uncertain what the piece will look or sound like. I am, by no means, a performance poet. A collage is what appeals to me, but they have uncertain rhythms. You cannot anticipate a collage. Miller spent a lot of time sitting and writing, and it seemed to make him angry. I could sit here for several hours and think enough to get angry, too. Most things make me angry if I pay enough attention to them.

But Miller was a man of three things: a brain, a groin and a gut. In his language, philosophy (it’s actually quite close to Bergson’s metaphysics, or ‘intuition’) fulfils similar bodily desires as food and sex. And food and sex – one often following the other – are talked about as sudden and wonderful gifts, rather than mundane quotidian expectations. A meal must never be taken for granted, nor a passionate encounter. Likewise, lucid thought is a precious gift to oneself. I have a deep sense of empathy for Miller’s triangular sensual materialism. It makes sense that letter-writing is so attractive to him: letters are the place to try out ideas, to describe lovingly the details of meals eaten and longed for, and to extrapolate lust. When written in a letter, a compendium of bodily pleasure is a noble, good thing.