"Normality is the paradise of escapologists"

From the always enlightening Brain Pickings, I knew that Henry Miller and E. Graham Howe didn't need me trying to paraphrase their words.  As if.

“On how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.”

Henry Miller (1891-1980) — voracious reader, masterful letter-writer, champion of combinatorial creativity, one disciplined writer — spent a good portion of his career freelancing for various literary periodicals. In April of 1939, Modern Mystic magazine commissioned him to write a piece about the work of psychoanalyst E. Graham Howe. Two years later, the essay was republished in the eponymous volume The Wisdom of the Heart (public library) — a collection of Miller’s short stories, profiles, and literary essays.
In the piece, like in all memorable profile writing, Miller uses the synthesis and critique of his subject’s ethos as a springboard for his own and, ultimately, for broader commentary on the culture of the time and the universality of the human condition.


Life, as we all know, is conflict, and man, being part of life, is himself an expression of conflict. If he recognizes the fact and accepts it, he is apt, despite the conflict, to know peace and to enjoy it. But to arrive at this end, which is only a beginning (for we haven’t begun to live yet!), a man has got to learn the doctrine of acceptance, that is, of unconditional surrender, which is love.
Later, Miller turns to the illusory nature of what stands between us and this complete surrender:

‘Normality,’ says Howe, ‘is the paradise of escapologists, for it is a fixation concept, pure and simple.’ ‘It is better, if we can,’ he asserts, ‘to stand alone and to feel quite normal about our abnormality, doing nothing whatever about it, except what needs to be done in order to be oneself.’
It is just this ability to stand alone, and not feel guilty or harassed about it, of which the average person is incapable. The desire for a lasting external security is uppermost, revealing itself in the endless pursuit of health, happiness, possessions an so on, defense of what has been acquired being the obsessive idea, and yet no real defense being possible, because one cannot defend what is undefendable. All that can be defended are imaginary, illusory, protective devices.

Pass the potato salad at the Picnic of Chaos

It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.

Henry Miller in Of Art and the Future

Once again, Brain Pickings and Literary Jukebox boil it down to the bones.  Flux, we keep meeting like this.

My dreaming last night/this morning was of an estate on a river.  At first the river seemed slow and narrow but I walked with dream companions to other points where it was waterfalls, deep still pools and wide expanses with swift currents.  I thought about rivers when I woke up.  Water - flowing, changing, moving - and the closest I can come to a connection is that the river equals all of this, life as we live it out here in the world and inside, the universe(s) we contain and constant, continual metamorphosis.

I think at least some of our peace comes from letting go of the oars or tiller, acknowledging that we are of and with the flow of things much more vast than we.  In looking over our shoulders to be certain that whatever we just left is still there, fixed and unchanging, we find instead that the water is too fast, the point is much too far behind us and even if we could see it, it would be different than we expect.

This is not information I grew up knowing or even imagining.  Yet what I suspect is on a level of deeper awareness, this is not really news.  I have tried for much of my life to nail everything down, each corner, all the sides.  I've held the image of the picnic tablecloth spread on the ground, pegged down every two inches to keep any corner from lifting or the whole thing from taking flight.  The combination of denial and wishful thinking that I constructed has been evaporating until now only the memory of it remains, along with the reasonably enjoyable Picnic of Chaos, not really all that bad once you admit it is what we have, it is all we have.