Liberté, Égalité, Sexualité!

Most People are not free. Freedom frightens them. They follow patterns set by their parents, enforced by society and by a constant inner dialog that weighs duty against desire and pronounces duty the winner. "Lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau called such existence, though today's version is noisy desperation.

Occasionally, a visionary comes along who seems to have conquered the fears in himself, living with bravado and courage. People are at once terrified of such a creature--and admiring. They are also envious.

Someone who has conquered human fears is recognized as a hero or heroine. We are provoked by the example, but we are also inclined to blame ourselves for living too timidly. So the hero or heroine is often attacked--even killed--because of the envy of ordinary mortals. If we could see the hero as embodying our own aspirations, we would not need to destroy him or her, but could rather emulate and learn.

Henry Miller was such a hero. He did not start out fearless, but he learned to overcome his fears. He wrote a book, Tropic of Cancer, that breathed fresh air into American--and world--literature. The freedom, to those who would take it in, was like pure oxygen. For the others--the fearful, the envious, those who refused to breathe--Miller had to be discredited as a pervert or sex maniac because his message was too terrifying. Life is here for the taking, he says. And those who refused to live fully had to blame him for their own failure.

Like Byron, Pushkin, George Sand and Colette, Miller became more than a writer. He became a protagonist and a prophet, the prophet of a new consciousness. His writings and his life mingled to create a larger myth, a myth that embodied the human attraction toward--and fear of--freedom.

Miller's writing, without a doubt, is full of imperfection, bombast and humbug. Sometimes its slovenliness makes it hard to defend. But the purity of his example, his heart, his openness, sets him apart from most American writers.

At present, Miller's reputation still hangs in the balance. Even those who have defended him remain uncomfortable with him.

Miller remains among the most misunderstood of writers, seen either as a pornographer or a guru, a sexual enslaver or sexual liberator, a prophet or pervert. All the questions his life and oeuvre raise about the role of a writer in society, the impact of books on sexual politics, the impact of sexual politics on books, the threat of censorship to free speech and written expression, unfortunately, are as fresh today as they ever were.

In his decision to be explicit whatever the price, Miller stands in a tiny crowd: James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and William Burroughs. What did sex mean to Henry Miller and why was he willing to risk everything to describe it in his books?

He answers the question clearly in the first edition of The World of Sex:

Sometimes in the recording of a bald sexual incident great significance adheres. Sometimes the sexual becomes a writhing, pulsating facade such as we see on Indian temples. Sometimes it is a fresco hidden in a sacred cave where one may sit and contemplate things of the spirit. There is nothing I can possibly prohibit myself from doing in the realm of sex. It is a world unto itself.... It is a cold fire which burns in us like a sun. It is never dead, even though the sun may become a moon. There are no dead things in the universe--it is only our way of thinking which makes death.

For Miller, this cold fire of sexuality is equivalent to the life force. That is what Miller had in common with Lawrence and why he labored so long (nearly five decades) and so maddeningly over his book about Lawrence. He shares with Lawrence the pagan sense of sex--sex as primal flux, sex as the code of existence, the matrix of all creativity. Miller uses the word sex in a cosmic sense, not a genital sense. And he is almost surprised to discover that the whole world did not see it that way as well.

He did not start at this point, of course. He started in Brooklyn, suffering from the same sexual neuroses and inhibitions that bedeviled many of his contemporaries. Perhaps he even suffered more than his contemporaries, which was why he was so keen to free himself. Only the most enslaved of us longs with such intensity to be free. Working his way through letters and vignettes, through Clipped Wings, Moloch and Crazy Cock and on to the new life of Tropic of Cancer, he liberated himself to partake of the cosmic sexual dance and thereby to understand that only by such participation in the dance of life could freedom be won.

Henry could only write, finally, by listening to the dictation of the Voice. He had to write what the Voice dictated or write nothing at all. He did not choose his subject matter; it chose him. He discovered he was nothing but a medium, a channel, and he let language flow through him.

To Miller, sex is the seeming chaos out of which all life springs. If he suppressed it, he would suppress all expression. He had no choice but to write about sex.

Miller's book The World of Lawrence, written and rewritten in the early Thirties, abandoned sometime after the publication of the Tropic of Cancer and finally published as his last book (rather than his first, as it was meant to be) in 1980, gives us many clues to his understanding of sex and its role in his writing.

Is Lady Chatterley's Lover obscene? If so, how is obscenity justified? No justification is necessary, Miller concludes:

Life is obscene and miraculous, and neither is there any justification for life. Obscenity is a divine prerogative of man and is always to be used carelessly, heedlessly, without scruple or qualms, without religious or aesthetic defense. When the body becomes sacred, obscenity comes into its own. Purity of speech is as much bosh as purity of action--there is no such thing. Obscenity is stomped down when the body is degraded, when the soul is made to usurp the body's proper function.

In discussing Lawrence, Miller surveys the history of civilization and its varying attitudes toward sexuality. He notes how sex went from openness to hiddenness as Christianity overtook the pagan world. He blames Christianity and its dualism for our culture's rejection of the body and all its wants.

"Obscenity," he notes, "figures large and heavily, magnificently and awesomely, in all primitive peoples." Miller observes that in so-called primitive cultures, religion and ritual always have a strong sexual element, as well as a strong element of death. Why? Because sex and death evoke our deepest pleasures and our deepest fears.

Why is sex important? The answer is so obvious that it needs immense obfuscation and denial to be ignored. Sex is important because it is the root of life.

"The savage is not a sick man," Miller writes. "The savage retains his sense of awe, mystery, his love of action, his right to behave like the animal he is."

And the animal puts no veil between itself and sex, between itself and death. Sex just is, namelessly. And therefore, so is death. "Sex is the great Janus-faced symbol of life and death," according to Miller. "It is never one or the other; it is always both. The great lie of life here comes to the surface; the contradiction refuses to be resolved."

Fear of sex is also fear of death, because when we embrace sex, we symbolically embrace our own mortality. For many men, the fear of woman is equivalent to the fear of mortality. It is woman's fecundity that reminds men of the everlasting dance of birth and death.

These ideas have been reinforced in our time by the plague of sexually transmitted diseases that announced itself after the so-called sexual revolution was touted. A causal connection was made between sexual freedom and disease, a connection few ever stopped to question. The sexual revolution was blamed for the AIDS epidemic because such causation fits perfectly with our puritanical notions of retribution for pleasure. Sex has again become the root of all evil--and with it comes a ferocious backlash against women, gays, blacks and Hispanics, against all those who do not conform to a white male ideal of sexless and bloodless spirituality.

Miller understood that the fear of sex projected onto women was one of the major ills of society. Both sexes, Miller felt, were equally to blame for the sexual degradation of modern life. He partook of this fear himself, but then he transcended it. He is really speaking of himself when he says of two of his predecessors:

[August] Strindberg remained a misogynist, whereas Lawrence (perhaps because of his latent femininity) arrived at a higher or deeper understanding. His abuse goes out equally to man and to woman; he stresses continually the need for each to accentuate their sex, to insist upon polarity, so as to strengthen the sexual connection which can renew and revive all the other forces, the major forces that are necessary for the development of the whole being, to stay the waste of contemporary disintegration.

To Miller, both sexes were equally to blame for the sexual degradation of modern life: "The real cause lies deeper than this surface war between the sexes," Miller writes. "It issues from the evil seed of the Christian ideal."

In this aperçu, Miller prefigured such feminists as Mary Daley (in Beyond God, the Father and other books), who analyze the whore--Madonna split (continued on page 86)Sexualité!(continued from page 80) that has fed the fires of the sex war between woman and man. This divisive way of thinking has led our culture to a puritanical rejection of both sexuality and woman as merely screens for death.

A new paradigm is in order, one that sees women and men holistically rather than as battling armies. Such paradigms exist, but they have been buried for centuries, buried by Judeo-Christian brainwashing--and now by Moslem brainwashing, too.

No one is really looking at the problem in terms of root causes. Our worldview must change before we can change the world. This is why I fear that the reductive antisexual view of Miller's work--whether by male chauvinist prudes or feminist prudes--is merely another symptom of the distorted worldview he was seeking, above all, to change.

Miller offers his own definition of sex by revealing Lawrence's definition of sex: "A sensuality rooted in a primitive apprehension of one's relation with universe, with woman, with man. Sensuality is the animal instincts, which he wanted to bring out again; sexuality, the false cultural attitude which he wanted to overthrow."

Perhaps we should call that primal force Sex (with a capital S) to differentiate it from the smarmy world of porno parlors and stroke books with which, in our puritanical, sexomaniacal culture, it is nearly always confused. It was the chief irony of Miller's life that he sought to change this debased sort of sexuality and bring it into cosmic perspective. Instead, it was his fate to be confused with this debased sexuality, as if there were no difference at all between his revolutionary writing and the frivolous titillations of sex for sale. Writers are often accused of doing exactly what they are attempting to change.

Miller's cosmic view of sex has never been more needed. We have gone through a decade of backlash against the sexual revolution, against gay rights, against women's rights. During this decade we have also experienced a population boom and a widespread attack on reproductive freedom.

The tide has begun to turn. This decade already looks like a decade of social ferment, change and feminism. Let us not make the mistakes we made in the last decade of social ferment--the Sixties. Let us not equate sexuality with a narrow promiscuity. Rather let us learn to see it in a cosmic Millerian sense as the very dance of life. It is critical that we expand rather than narrow our notions of sexuality. And Miller can guide us. Sexuality need not only depend on an exchange of bodily fluids. It can be an attitude of openness to the world and to the cosmos beyond.

What shall we do with our sexophobia? It manifests itself on both sides of the political spectrum--from Women Against Pornography to the fundamentalist right. Our sexophobia impedes medical research for contraception, impedes needed reforms of women's health care, even impedes our ability to prepare teenagers to enjoy their sexuality safely in an overpopulated world.

When I was 14, kids were terrified of sex because one could die of a backstreet abortion. Now my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are terrified of sex because of AIDS. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Must we conclude that we have made a society in which teenagers are compelled to hate their most powerful urges, their own bodies, their own drives? Must we conclude that the excuses vary but the sexophobia remains constant? Must we conclude that on some deep level we indeed want such a world?

Sexophobia is with us, ever present, stronger every day. We are creating a sexually tormented generation just as our grandparents and great-grandparents did. We no longer say that masturbation causes blindness. We merely say that sex causes death.

Miller saw this sexophobia as early as the Twenties and related it, even then, to money, consumerism and war. As we all know, money drives out sex. The anxiety about getting and spending is an antiaphrodisiac. The more we focus on money, the less free we are, the less lusty and the less revolutionary. As Miller himself said regarding Tropic of Cancer, "The problem of the author was never one of sex, nor even of religion, but of self-liberation."

Miller's self-liberation is sexual in the cosmic--not the genital--sense. Yes, Miller wrote of genital sexuality in Tropic, in Black Spring, in The Rosy Crucifixion. But as he explains in The World of Sex, the sexual is the first step toward the spiritual:

In that first year or so in Paris, I literally died, was literally annihilated and resurrected as a new man. The Tropic of Cancer is a sort of human document written in blood, recording the struggle in the womb of death. The strong sexual odor is, if anything, the aroma of birth, disagreeable, repulsive even when dissociated from its significance. The Tropic of Cancer represents another death and birth, the transition, if I may say, from the conscious artist to the budding spiritual being which is the last phase of evolution.

Miller was wise enough to know that the sexual and the spiritual were as close as twins. He was wise enough to know that by flinging ourselves with utter abandon into the sexual, we find the spiritual beckoning. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," as Blake said. Or, as Miller said on a similar theme, "Like every man, I am my own worst enemy, but unlike most men, I know too that I am my own savior."

What does sex have in common with salvation for Miller? Both partake of liberation. Miller often said that his only subject was self-liberation. He was right. The sexuality of his books points the way to self-liberation. So does the spirituality.

What is it about sex that is so freeing? It is an affirmation of I am; an affirmation of life, and at once an affirmation of flux. Miller writes:

We go along thinking the world to be thus and so. We are not thinking, of course, or the picture would be different every moment. When we go along thus we are merely preserving a dead image of a live moment in the past. However, let us say we meet a woman. We enter into her. Everything is changed. What has changed? We do not know precisely. It seems as if everything has changed. It might be that we never see the woman again, or it might be that we never separate. She may lead us to hell or she may open the doors of the world for us.

It is this transforming power of sex that led Miller to focus on it in his books. Transformation interests him, and, above all, transformation is what the world of sex offers.

Sex galvanizes the individual spheres of being that clash and conflict. It makes the external world shed its deathlike folds. It affords us glimpses of that stark, durable reality that is neither beneficent nor cruel.

(concluded on page 143)Sexualité!(continued from page 86) In The World of Sex, Miller writes:

If men would stop to think about this great activity which animates the earth and all the heavens, would they give themselves to thoughts of death? Would a man withhold himself in any way if he realized that dead or alive this frenzied activity goes on ceaselessly and remorselessly? If death is nothing, what fear then should we have of sex? The gods came down from above to fornicate with humankind and with animals and trees, with the earth itself. Why are we so particular? Why can we not love--and do all the other things which give us pleasure, too? Why can we not give ourselves in all directions at once? What is it we fear? We fear to lose ourselves. And yet, until we lose ourselves, there can be no hope of finding ourselves.

This is a message not so different from Dante's, who also found himself lost in a dark wood in the middle of his life and who also emerged to see the stars, having discovered that love is what moves them.

Miller is more mystic than pornographic. He uses the obscene to shock and to awaken, but once we are awake, he wants to take us to the stars.

"I did a service to people," he said to Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. "That was my motive in writing. I was beating down the barriers."

He did not mean linguistic barriers or publishing barriers; he meant barriers to self-liberation. A real sexual revolution--as opposed to the bogus sexual revolution we had in the Sixties--would recognize this liberation as the most important role of sex in our lives. It would accept it as one of our great revolutionary forces, a force that has the power to open eyes and souls.

Is there a place for such sex in the so-called age of AIDS? Of course there is. But not if we see sex only as a sort of compulsive acting-out, as an accumulation of meaningless experiences and deadly viruses. If we are open to our own sexuality in the cosmic sense, we will also be open to our creativity, our religious sense and our sense of self-liberation.

Back in the days when Fear of Flying was the new sensation, I used to argue in vain that I was not advocating promiscuity but rather an openness to erotic fantasy. The novel itself concentrated more on the heroine's erotic daydreams than on her escapades, which often proved hopelessly disappointing because her swains proved impotent or clumsy or mechanical. But the idea of an erotically motivated, actively fantasizing woman was, in itself, so shocking that my protests fell on deaf ears. My denigrators were sexophobic and attacked me for persisting in my belief that sex is a force for life.

How may we be sexual in the age of AIDS? Let me count the ways. We live in a time when telephone and computer sex, costumes, role playing and mutual masturbation are proliferating--along with (good grief!) monogamy.

Hot Monogamy screams the recent cover line on a woman's magazine. Apparently, you can get off even with your own spouse if you have a vivid enough imagination. Human sexuality is dazzling in its variety. I know a dominatrix who advertises and sells safe sex--with no exchange of bodily fluids--because the clients can only look and sniff and whip or be whipped. The Sixties equation of sexual revolution with quantitative promiscuity was too innocent. If we are open to the world of fantasy, we can liberate ourselves with one partner or no partner at all. Nicholson Baker's recent novel Vox describes a man and a woman who have telephone sex that is, if anything, hotter than sex in the flesh because there is no reality to block the fantasy.

Eventually we will have virtual reality, which will enable us to simulate sex with any famous lover of the past. Women will be able to choose anyone from Mark Antony to Shakespeare to Casanova to Byron, and men, like Dr. Faustus, will have their Helens of Troy. "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" they'll ask their computer screens.

The mind has an infinite capacity for self-liberation and is, after all, our main erogenous zone. Miller himself would have agreed.

"What is it about sex that is so freeing? It is an affirmation of I am; an affirmation of life."

"A real sexual revolution would recognize liberation as the most important role of sex in our lives."