You’re soaking in it

I gave up. I was frantically looking for a bit from Henry Miller regarding the difference in attitude between the French and the Americans. Paraphrased, it goes something like this: In America, they teach their children that they can grow up to be president. In France, there is no such delusion. They grow up happier as a result, and more comfortable with who they are. Miller was quick to spot that romantic/pragmatic strain in American thought which brings with it the albatross of possibility, and the sinking feeling that remains when you don’t grow up to be president, and are forever doomed to be who you are instead of someone set apart, special, and above all different from everyone else. But I couldn’t find the quote.

I decided to soak in a tub instead. Something Mike Sanders said was bugging me. “Introspection must ultimately be done in private.” This is of course the hallmark of Wordsworthian romanticism, and goes along with the definition of poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

This delineation of introspection as constitutive of feeling and more significantly, that the feelings which come from memory are the most powerful ones of all, has colored Western society— feeling is taken as a private rather than public, reflective rather than reactive, individual rather than collectively consitituted response. This is deeply at odds with human appetites. Humanity is far more social than that. Coleridge, no matter how much he agreed with Wordsworth in theory, subverted it in practice. He was loquacious, providing a great deal of his introspection in public. Thinking of the contradictions of publicly generated privacy gave me a headache, and I really needed to soak my head.

The water was hot, and in the tranquility of the bathtub, I turned to contemplate the interface between my skin and the water. Getting in, I felt this surge of energy, of relaxation as the heat of the water transferred itself to me. I started to remember what it was like to stand in a drunken crowd while it was sweating and dancing— giving off kinetic, thermal energy. It was like a social bath. Friction gives off heat, even when you rub ice-cubes together. As long as the interaction persists, friction generates heat.

After a time, the water in the tub cooled. For a short, transparent, interlude its temperature matched my own. An equilibrium of sorts, a moment where the outside and inside become one. This can happen while you’re alone— but it can also happen in a crowd of people, though it never lasts. Balance shifts as the water cools, and your skin wrinkles and eventually you just have to get out. The pendulum swings from immersion to isolation, as you begin to give up more heat than you get in return. “Hell is other people,” as Sartre says.

Feelings that live only as memory are reconstituted with disillusionment and longing. Writing, as some would say, is born there— in suffering and frustration, in egocentrism and withdrawl— because while immersed in the heat of society, there is no time to think. There is only time to act. Yes, you too can be president, or a famous writer if you withdraw and jot down your thoughts afterward. My thoughts are a bit like Henry Miller’s:

“Life,” said Emerson, “consists in what a man is thinking all day.” If this be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night. But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in double harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man. (Tropic of Cancer 69)

I suppose I’d have to modify it a bit. I think of sex more than food and I wish for society more than I wish for solitude. No fantasies of the solitary (though famous) artist for me. I think about how long it took to divest myself of those conceptions of being a “real” anything. I suppose I’m fortunate, having gone through that chase to be a “real” photographer that I am totally unconcerned with being a “real” writer. Though staunchly romanticist in many ways, I also agree with Miller’s anti-romantic attitude toward creation:

People are always worried about the fate of the genius. I never worried about the fate of the genius: genius takes care of the genius in a man. My concern was always for the nobody, the man who is lost in the shuffle, the man who is so common, so ordinary, that his presence is not even noticed. One genius does not inspire another. All geniuses are leeches, so to speak. They feed from the same source— the blood of life. The most important thing for the genius is to make himself useless, to be absorbed in the common stream, to become a fish again and not a freak of nature.

The only benefit, I reflected, which the act of writing could offer me was to remove the differences which separated me from my fellow-man. I definitely did not want to become the artist, in the sense of becoming something strange, something apart from the current of life. (“Why Don’t You Try to Write?”)

The fringes are too crowded already. Too many people spouting “emotions recollected in tranquility.” I think I’d prefer a warm bath, and that feeling of my skin dissolving in the water, taking all that disillusion away. Genius can, and does, take care of itself. But more than that, I’d prefer the outrageousness of society, particularly of the sort described by Henry Miller. I lived in it for a time, and I do miss it:

Met William Carlos Williams the other night and had a rousing good time with him at Hiler’s place. Holty arrived with two dopey brothers-in-laws, one of whom played the piano. Everybody crocked, including Lisette. Just before all hands passed out someone yelled— “All art is local”— which precipitated a riot. After that, nothing is clear. Hiler sits in his drawers, with legs crossed, and plays “Believe it Beloved,” another hit of the season. The janitor comes, and raises hell— he was an avatar of Mussolini. Then come the Dockstaeder Sisters who write for the pulps. After that Monsieur Bruine who has been in America 39 years and looks exactly like a Frenchman. He is in love with a dizzy blonde from the Vanities. Unfortunately she got so drunk that she puked all over him while sitting in his lap. He’s cured of her now.
(Letter to Alfred Perlès)

Sounds like a party to me. You can keep the whole tranquility, solitude, and privacy thing. I’ve had enough of this splendid isolation. Imagination in private is fine, but imagination in public is much better. I’m getting impatient again. This always happens when I spend too much time alone.