DENNIS POTTER ON MURDOCH

 

DENNIS POTTER'S WORDS ON RUPERT MURDOCH 

1994

(His last interview before he died. With Melvyn Bragg)

"I call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it. 

Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time - in fact I've got too much writing to do and I haven't got the energy - but I would shoot the bugger if I could. 

There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life." 

Dennis Potter

Television Dramatist, Screenwriter and Journalist 

(BBC Documentary. The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty)

Intelligence + Critical Thought + Intellect. Words by Tariq Ali

 

.....A world that is treated virtually as a forbidden subject in an increasingly parochial culture that celebrates the virtues of ignorance, promotes a cult of stupidity and extols the present as a process without an alternative, implying that we all live in a consumerist paradise. 

A world in which disappointment breeds apathy and, for that reason, escapist fantasies of every sort are encouraged from above. 

Tariq Ali. The Clash of Fundamentalisms 

.....This is not to suggest that the House of Islam lacks its secular intellectuals and artists. 

The last century alone produced Nazim Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Abdelrehman Munif, Mahmud Darwish, Fazil Iskander, Naguib Mahfouz, Nizar Qabbani, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Djibril Diop Mambety amongst many others. 

But these are poets, novelists, film-makers. They have no equivalents in the social sciences. 

Critiques of religion are always implicit. Intellectual life has become stunted, making Islam itself a static and backward - looking religion. 

Tariq Ali. The Clash of Fundamentalisms

ARCHONTIC DECEPTION STRATEGY. LISA RENEE. ASCENSION GLOSSARY/ENERGETIC SYNTHESIS

ARCHONTIC DECEPTION STRATEGY

(DIVIDE AND CONQUER + THE SEXUAL MISERY PROGRAMME + THE MISOGYNY MACHINE OF HATRED OF WOMAN + CHILD RAPE + SLAVERY + MURDER) 

LISA RENEE

"Those that have the most knowledge, intelligence and conscious awareness of what is really happening in world events will have the most strategic advantage. Those that do not have access to accurate awareness of events or truthful knowledge, but instead are manipulated and deceived to believe false impressions and illusions, will be at a greater disadvantage." 

The psychological warfare approach of Divide and Conquer Tactics used by the Negative Alien Agenda (NAA) to condition anti-human values and erode integrity in the masses is called the Archontic Deception Strategy. 

The Archontic Deception Strategy is used to socially engineer the Death Culture, a culture of fear, dishonesty and deception. This is achieved through Pavlovian mind control conditioning that adopts extremely self-destructive behaviours as the standard model to guide human behaviour. 

Through conditioning these same behaviours repeat in mass media to manufacture Social Norms, it has produced a population of people that commonly display these Negative Ego qualities of fear, dishonesty and deception as an acceptable value system that guides their deepest motivations and interactions. 

People without a value system of Personal Integrity are easily corrupted and manipulated by mass Mind Control, producing unstable, erratic and destructive behaviours. 

COMPREHENDING SOCIOPATHIC MINDS

To be able to understand the sociopathic sick mind of Archontic Deception (AD) systems, one would need to better understand the general attitude of an Archontic Deception infected human or non human (Negative Alien Agenda), as having little or no remorse or empathy. 

If a technologically advanced extra-dimensional race has decided to implement a gradual takeover of a planet and its inhabitants, what kind of strategy would it use? First they would look to how they could maximise the efficiency of the invasion process and reduce the expenditure of resources that they have to generate themselves. 

To achieve this goal the secretive infiltration of the core societal organisational structures such as: religions, medical, financial and legal systems, would be ideal to shape the value systems that generate reality belief systems they want to control. Through the engineering of a labyrinth of self-enforced enslavement policies, based on fear and intimidation among the earth inhabitants, they would achieve the use of minimal "off planet" resources by piggy backing on the earth-human resources. 

The people on earth would effectively enforce their own enslavement as well as enslave their own global human family by giving up their rights and their resources. This is very effective for takeover and invasion with minimal resistance or revolt by inhabitants who are unaware they are being invaded. 

One question to always ask is who is benefitting from this anti-human strategy? 

Look for the source infection at the root cause, not its symptoms. 

SOCIOPATHY 

Sociopaths are masters at influence, Emotional Manipulation and deception. 

Very little of what they say actually checks out in terms of facts or reality, but they're extremely skilful at making the things they sound believable, even if they're just making them up out of thin air. 

Sociopathic people are masters at weaving elaborate fictional explanations to justify their actions. When caught red-handed, they respond with anger and threats, then weave new fabrications to explain away whatever they were caught doing. 

ARCHONTIC DECEPTION STRATEGY 1: DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Divide and conquer the inhabitants of earth by generating secret societies that are heavily rewarded with earthly power by infiltrating and establishing Archontic Deception programmes and behaviours among their influencers, which is enforced through Mind Control by off planet Negative Alien Agenda. 

By establishing bloodline spiritual relationships in the ruling classes, these humans are indoctrinated at birth to believe their elite status through bloodline, and that their god of choice, an Alien False Father God, will protect them and their families in the Luciferian or Satanic ideology. 

To be an apostate of their ruling class secrets is punishable by torture or death. The main tool for human Divide and Conquer is generating war, economic terrorism, poverty consciousness, Blood Sacrifice, sexual abuse, Mind Control and Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), to steal physical and energetic resources, generating all its combined power to feed back into a centralised system of control. The New World Order (NWO). 

ARCHONTIC DECEPTION STRATEGY 2: VICTIM/VICTIMISER

Indoctrination into the Archontic Deception Behaviours and their supporting organisations will require Mind control in repetition to repeat the regurgitation of dogma, and methods of intimidation to self-enforce those systems from human to human. 

This indoctrination must start at birth and be entrained by childhood for maximum conformity to accept Archontic Deception abusive behaviours and loss of personal dignity as a way of life. The goal is to start as early as possible to superimpose these Archontic Deception behaviours on babies and children. 

Introduction of the Victim-Victimiser abuser pattern as a Mind Control structure is implemented everywhere possible. 

When the baby or child is victimised by abusers, they grow up as adults that inflict abuse upon their victims, thereby switching their roles interchangeably. The indoctrinated and repeated patterns of abuse are cycled throughout and are medicated with mind altering and neurologically harming pharmaceuticals as soon as possible. 

The more advanced levels of the Victim-Victimiser programme is Satanic Ritual Abuse, which is more common than any sane person would like to know about. 

ARCHONTIC DECEPTION STRATEGY 3: SEXUAL ABUSE AND MISERY 

Sexual abuse and Sexual Misery are preferred by the Controllers Archontic Deception Strategy because it serves many purposes for torturing human beings of all ages into submission and ultimately, consciousness enslavement. 

Sexual Energies

The sexual energies can be stolen from the individual without their consent or awareness and used by the Black Magician or the sexual predator as a pain and pleasure reward system for classical conditioning automatic impulses and addictions that continue to carry out Archontic Deception Behaviours into the human culture. 

Rape 

Vaginal or anal rape can yield harvested soul energies that are being siphoned during the act and consequently bound to the perpetrator, which may be human or a demonic entity that has conspired with the human, and committed the act of rape. 

For the Negative Alien Agenda, raping children is the most productive way to set up the siphoning of soul energy and to further create traumatic soul damage in the child. As that child grows into adulthood without addressing or spiritually healing the sexual trauma, they have the tendency to mentally and emotionally fracture, becoming an adult with dissociative, split or narcissistic personalities. 

Many raped children suffer from ongoing spiritual trauma that is generated from the soul bindings, made to demonic and satanic entities, that can be both human and non human. 

The most common soul binding that is used in child rape and Female Genital Mutilation in Satanic Ritual Abuse is the demonic altar of Moloch. 

The Nature of Sexuality 

The dissatisfaction with the nature of sexuality and the dysfunctional fears that are generated within destructive sexual relations, create misery, pain and torment for many humans on the earth. 

When Sexual Misery patterns are not healed and resolved, these spiritual traumas erupt into a great many mental and emotional deviations, such as unnatural perversions and fetishes which are the set up, to further control human sexuality through whatever means that are ultimately harmful. 

Spiritually abusive behaviours and self rejection disconnects the person from their Soul, and then the great void of inner pain grows to generate Addictions. 

Addictive behaviours are coping mechanisms to deal with unresolved pain and trauma, many times that trauma is seeded within the sexual energy centres of the person who is desperate to experience relief from ongoing personal anxiety and persistent pain. 

In many cases this unresolved trauma and pain creates a split personality that automatically leads into a double life or living in duplicity. The person may appear to be functioning normally or reasonably well in their day job, and yet behind the scenes, when they are alone, they are addicted to some kind of deviant behaviour, which is used as an outlet for the buildup of mental and emotional anxiety. 

This profile of person will reach a breaking point, in which their personal anxiety will explode onto the surface, in some cases, reaching the breaking point has seriously violent ramification, while others may act out their trauma without outer violence. 

ARCHONTIC DECEPTION STRATEGY 4: CHILD ABUSE AND CHILD SACRIFICE 

The advanced level of Archontic Deception behaviours is that which is the realm of the Satanic Ritual Abusers. This level is in the caste system of Satanic priesthood, which is propagated by the Orion Group. 

These people and entities actually value the killing of children and believe in the necessity of child sacrifice killings if they can get away with it, without prosecution. Their most sick mind believes that the blood of a child is the most pure, and that they can extract vital essence and power from the blood sacrifice. 

When they want "more power" for material success or something to gain, or there is something to "cleanse", they believe cleansing it with a child's blood. Most commonly they will abduct a child, or a satanic family will give up their child to satanic ritual holidays. Orphanages are frequently pillaged for this reason. This is the most unbelievable, to the sane mind and loving heart, yet, we must know this exists in huge numbers to begin to protect the children of the earth from this sickness. 

Most commonly, children of extremely poor people are either used this way in ritual, or will be a sexual slave or prostitute to a satanic group of individuals. 

Child genital mutilation, child sex slavery, child porn, live sex with children on the internet is a billion dollar booming business. 

This is highly disturbing as we can see no one in government cares less about this global issue. We have to ask, who is benefitting from having sex with out children? It is not human. 

ARCHONTIC DECEPTION STRATEGY 5: MISOGYNY

The Archontic Deception behaviour is to promote hatred of the female principle in women and men on earth in most anyway possible. 

The female principle of intelligent energy is the spiritual principle and intuition access of the higher soul bodies. 

To access the soul, one must access the heart through the feminine principle, whether in a male or female body. 

All humans from the electromagnetic energy level (aura) are both male and female principle energies. The female energies have been crucified on earth, to stop generating spiritual energies or female principle advancement in the current Archontic Deception systems. 

The Archontic Deception controllers are patriarchal dominators, and have varying degrees in the way they express misogyny. 

Treating women as sex objects or breeders, believing women are inferior intelligence, treating emotional intelligence and intimacy as a stupid waste of time, believing women have to be beaten down to show who is "boss", honour killings of raped women, wearing burkas, punishable by death are all examples. 

Many men believe this even if they will not publically express it, because they know it is considered politically incorrect. 

One may note that the majority of all serial killers, rapists, child pornographers, financiers, world rulers, secret societies are male. 

When we look to the token females in world power, they are not balanced female energies. They are women, propped up in the patriarchy, devoid of female principle energy, indoctrinated into the Archontic Deception Behaviours. 

THE BIG FIVE ARCHONTIC DECEPTION STRATEGIES

So, the Big Five Archontic Deception Strategies to generate more Archontic Deception Negative Ego Behaviours and spread their anti-human value systems in the human public are: 

1. Divide and Conquer

2. Victim/Victimiser 

3. Sexual Abuse and Sexual Misery

4. Child Abuse and Child Sacrifice

5. Misogyny

SPIRITUALLY DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOURS 

The Core Archontic Deception Behaviours, designed to spiritually abuse and harm humanity, are generated from the above Archontic Deception Strategies:

1. Disassociation and Narcissism

2. Mental Rigidity

3. Emotional Fracturing

4. Carelessness

5. Deceitful

6. Dependence

7. False Reality Delusions 

8. Divided Competition

ANTIDOE TO ARCHONTIC DECEPTION BEHAVIOURS 

The antidote to Archontic Deception Behaviours is living in the Law of One and practising the God-Sovereign-Free Behaviour (GSF): 

1. Empathy and Compassion

2. Mental Openness

3. Emotional Stability 

4. Responsibility

5. Honesty 

6. Sovereignty

7. Reality Assessment 

8. Unified Cooperation 

Behaviours Discernment Guidine: 

Lets understand more about the Archontic Deception Behaviours and the Negative Alien Agenda Controller strategies, used to weaken Virtues and God Sovereign Free Behaviour, which allows for the Spirits of (Christos Sophia) Christ to thrive in the human race. 

NEGATIVE ALIEN AGENDA STRATEGIC INVASION METHODS

We have discussed many times the main areas of mind control, in the form of psychological and biological warfare, used against humanity. 

The Archontic Deception Strategy is employed to get humans to succumb to ownership, by the invading species. The main strategy is to download the Predator Mind, which is their alien thought form, and hybridise the human body to accept these Archontic behaviours as normal and socially acceptable behaviours. The more reptilian genetics you carry, the more acceptable it is to you to deceive, manipulate, take advantage of the less privileged, and even kill, murder, rape, and have sex with children. 

Total ownership of human beings as personal property and the domination of earth resources are carried out using these methods: 

1. Negative Alien Agenda uses Archontic Deception Strategy as Global Policy for Mind Control Enslavement that is enforced by mostly alien hybridised Power Elite. 

2. Human Hybridisation Hosting Programmes for Multiple Reptoid Species, in understand and off planet bases. MILABS and related Secret Space Programmes, co-operating with Negative Aliens that intentionally deceive, manipulate and experiment on the public. 

3. Genetic Modification, Augmentation, Pleomorphic Diseases and Technological Experimentation with the human genome. 

4. Alien Machinery, Implants, Synthetic Timelines, Consciousness Traps, Psychotronic Warfare Technology, Artificial Intelligence, created from genetic replication and hoarding, of off planet advanced technology. 

5. Spiritual Possession and multiple occupants of the soul(s) to harvest life force for a variety of Negative Alien Agenda purposes, on and off planet. 

PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE 

Psychological Warfare is the deliberate use of various manipulations, promotion and deception techniques, such as spreading propaganda and terror, to induce or reinforce attitudes that are favourable to gain strategic advantage over others, Sun Tzu, A Chinese Military Strategist, originally said that the best victory in warfare is the one in which you never have to fight your enemy in actual combat. 

In the past, such Machiavellian schemes were thought to portray the devious behaviour of criminals and despots, believed to have undesirable and even appalling human character traits. 

Today, these extremely negative behaviours are normalised and commonly applied in the business operations of the everyday world, by financially rewarding people that act as predators. 

Thus, the current terrain requires that we open our mind to comprehend the most common concepts of Psychological Warfare, because all of us are being exposed to it every day. 

What are the Predator Minds scheming? 

1. INVOKE FEAR

The purpose is to manufacture as much fear as possible to create dread and terror in the minds of the people, so that they will avoid rising in groups and instead become weaker and disabled. 

To maintain this continual state of fear buried in life's many stressors, as well as perceived threats to survival, means activating the fight or flight reaction in the human nervous system and brain. Eventually this takes a serious toll on the overall health of the body and sanity of the mind, as it rapidly breaks down immunity, increases disease states and drives painful mental imbalances. 

2. DIVISION TO CONFUSION

When the opponent group targeted for attack is large, cooperative and unified in their forces, by separating them from one another or separating them into smaller units, the entire group is more easily defeated and controlled. 

When the separation into smaller units is successful, the attack is then on their common bonds of unity. Seeking to confuse them with fear and misinformation so they will not know which way to turn, what to expect or who to trust. 

In the stewardship of any project or organisation, this is a critical concept to understand. 

3. DEMORALIZATION 

A process in psychological warfare with the objective to erode morale or dehumanise those perceived as the enemy. 

By intending to destroy their dignity and morale, it can encourage them to retreat, surrender, or defect rather than confront them or to defeat them in physical combat. Demoralisation and dehumanisation is most commonly implemented through various forms of fabricated propaganda to weaken people, while dehumanisation is commonly used by the satanic agenda to mock and defile human dignity or attack the spirit within the person. 

4. IGNORANCE VS. INTELLIGENCE 

Those that have the most knowledge, intelligence and conscious awareness of what is really happening in world events will have the most strategic advantage. Those that do not have access to accurate awareness of events or truthful knowledge, but instead are manipulated and deceived to believe false impressions and illusions, will be at a greater disadvantage. 

Knowledge of the truth is power. Managing intelligence and controlling access to information includes supplying the perceived enemy or opponent with disinformation, in order to trick them into making the wrong decisions based on lies. 

In the current warfare climate diminishing easy access to open source knowledge and sharing of information freely within the global community, it is an important concept to understand. 

5. OVERWHELM AND WEAR DOWN

Constantly use greater strength in applying heavy forces that overwhelm your opponent by creating never-ending issues that are designed to wear him (her) down and erode his (her) will power and resiliency. 

Bureaucracies, impossible compliance, insurance, tax and legal channels that keep people bogged down in never-ending paperwork, long lists and cues, under the threat of intimidation, or threat to financial security or persecution. 

This is also carried out in legal forms as 'death by 1000 papercuts', through the increase of overwhelming problems and burdensome bills. When people's hopes are crushed and their expectations for their life are confused and burdened, eventually they become so drained they have no energy to refuse the constant attempts of subjugation and just give up. 

How many of these tactics of psychological warfare that are normalised in our everyday society can you recognise that are currently impacting the quality of your life? Knowing that these strategies are being implemented, what can you do to change how you approach the control structures and the employed people that blindly follow a boilerplate that unconsciously reinforce these divide and conquer schemes? 

GLOBAL HUMAN SLAVERY 

Currently, the World Slavery system is used to parasitise soul energy but also to superimpose karmic exchanges on the masses, and is an important reason the Negative Alien Agenda fight so hard to retain their control and access over earth and the inhabitants. 

The humans controlled by the Negative Alien Agenda have Stockholm Syndrome, and have been dehumanised to such levels of fragmentation that they act like a feral animal cornered in a cage, defending their enslavement, not comprehending how they can exist any way else, but to be in the Mind Control matrix, enmeshed in a co-dependent Parasitism with these dark forces. 

LISA RENEE

ASCENSION GLOSSARY 

ENERGETIC SYNTHESIS 

 

The Female Illuminati. Michael Tsarion

 

The Female Illuminati. The Sisterhood of Death Exposed. Michael Tsarion 

(Transcription from Truth Warrior. 2015)

......Any work that I am doing now, is absolutely a carry on of what I have done before. It's not really breaking any traditions, it's not really turning any U turns or anything like that. 

I looked at the whole Goddess Tradition thing in a programme I've done before on the Divination Programme and the whole Goddess Tradition, in which we looked at the whole role that women play in civilization, and deeply on the esoteric side, we look at that. 

Also, we looked at the crimes that have been perpetrated against women. Anything I am doing on the Female Illuminati, people need to be aware of it. I am no misogynist who just happens to be hacking away because I've got nothing better to do on the criminal history of Womankind. This is a very serious academic work, that draws on the books and writings of the greatest feminists, and the greatest female psychologists and so on. 

And also, in my work, I have written and presented many programmes on the positive aspect of the role of females in civilization in general. 

But as I moved forward in time, from the 'Atlantis' book, what I've done is honed in - like I've done with 'Trees of Life' for instance, that two volume work, on trying to focus on the more cardinal Secret Society ideology and symbology. Because all through my work, it's been a dilution, distillation, I should say, of this etymology and the symbolism. Getting deeper and deeper and deeper. You start with one thing. Then you perfect it and go further and further, and so the Female Illuminati is nothing more than a carry on, on that journey, into the symbolism and into the etymologies, wherever that road may lead, and like in 'Trees of Life', that was a specific work which honed in on some specific, very important, occult symbols that the Elite are particularly fond of. And that other people may not even know, are that important. 

So, this was a master work. Almost 700 colour pictures, incredible research in that book, and then after that was written, then the process carries on again. So, the Female Illuminati is, again, going down, looking deeper and deeper into the various symbolisms. And the etymologies in the esoteric tradition, to again, tease out more of this occult. 

For instance, why did the Merovingians really have long hair? Why do they worship the skull? You get deeper and deeper into the Masonic symbolism, their genes, their serpent, one could go on, on that very matter. Why is America symbolised by a statue of Liberty, which is female, why do the presidents sit in an oval office, which is female, all of this kind of thing. 

Moving, just taking stuff that I dealt with, in the 'Atlantis' book and then continuing to tease and find out what is really going on. And then, what happened was that the core of the 'Atlantis' book was of course this phenomena in prehistoric times of the Nephilim, you know, the Fallen Angels, coming to this planet, interfering with us on so many levels, genetic, which is one thing that happened. They cause us, the human consciousness to be fragmented. There were actually about four or five things that contributed to this, but one kind of selfhood, one kind of consciousness was destroyed and that's what we dealt with in the 'Atlantis' book of how that happened, who perpetrated it and so on, and I was using terms in it like the 'Nephilim' and you know, 'The Sons of the Serpent' and all of this kind of thing. And the 'Tree of Life' figured very heavily in that research. 

And as did the ancient texts that speak of this very thing, because this is not an invention of Michael Tsarion, you know, there have been great scholars who have looked at this before, especially the matter of the cataclysm, and they have also looked into the whole matter of 'off world' beings, living on this planet, or interfering with us in certain ways and...but what had happened was they had never never spoken of, what kind of consequence that kind of visitation may have had on consciousness itself. 

This was...only broached by one author, whom I have mentioned in my book called Jack Barranger, he was the only one. And I know Jack. And we've talked about this. And his book launched this for me. 'Past Shock'. A small book, but a key book for me, because it did address, briefly, this concept of what might have happened to the psyche of man (humankind). 

He (She) wasn't sitting in some armchair when this whole hullabaloo was taking place, he (she) was absolutely, mentally and emotionally destroyed.

And so, then that was the start-off point. But central to that came the different texts. The different legends of the ancient peoples, the native American people and other, they also speak of this. Sometimes, they do it in a more cryptic way, others do it more clearly, but then you move onto even Biblical scriptures, scriptures that are accepted by modern scholars from...for instance, the Book of Enoch, the apocryphal works, but you can even turn to the Bible itself. Genesis 6 which mentions the coming of these beings and so on. 

That was then, I noticed this in the 'Atlantis' book, that in the famous descriptions, of the coming of the Nephilim, they're not really specific or not on whether those Nephilim were male or female. They just sort of hinted that they were all male. Like Lucifer and what have you and his coterie. But other works, for instance, what about the presence of Lilith and these kinds of characters and then when you turn to the Sumerian prototypes, this is where things start getting really interesting. 

All of the Biblical, all of the stuff of the early creations that you read in the Bible, and the coming of the Nephilim and all of this interference that they're talking about and the presence of Lucifer and the presence of Lilith and the Tree of Life. All of that is so much more unpacked. In the proto-typical Babylonian-Sumerian stories, but they are including a bevy of women! Indicating that the gods were not just male, they were androgenous, and also there was women, bona fide women...not only trying to assist mankind (humankind), but also trying to deceive mankind (humankind). And all sorts of other tricks. 

So then you start to say, well okay, what do we get, then maybe this Nephilim were maybe bi-sexual, or they had males and females. Then you look to the Book of Enoch and something came up that I thought was even more important...in order to investigate it at that point, when I was doing the 'Atlantis' book, it would take me off to millions and millions, all these diversions, with millions of other questions, and I just didn't want to do that. This was going to be my first book and there were so many interesting things, I am still getting emails today from people, saying, hey Michael, what about this and what about that, and I say, yeah, I know, I have my thoughts on that. I wanted to include it in the 'Atlantis' book but that would have just completely not been correct at that time. I needed to lay this down, that concentrated the readers attention on things that have happened on this earth and had to forgo, talking in speculative terms. 

Michael Tsarion

ERICA JONG ON HENRY MILLER

 

The Devil At Large. Erica Jong on Henry Miller.

Henry Hero.

Most people are not free. Freedom, in fact, frightens them. They follow patterns set for them by their parents, enforced by society, by their fears of ‘they say’ and ‘what will they think?’ and a constant inner dialogue 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 (herself) and seems to have conquered the fears in himself (herself) and seems to live with bravado and courage. People are at once terrified of such a creature – and admiring. They are also envious.

One who has conquered human fears is recognized as a hero – or heroine. But such a figure inspires mixed emotions. We are provoked by their example, but we are also inclined to blame ourselves for having lived too timidly. So the hero or heroine is often attacked, even killed, because of the envy of ordinary mortals. But if we could see the hero (heroine) as embodying our own aspirations, we would not need to destroy 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. And he wrote a book – Tropic of Cancer – that breathed fresh air into American – and world – literature. The fresh air he breathed was freedom. And it was like pure oxygen to those who would take it in. For the others, the fearful, the envious, those who refused to breathe, Miller had to be discredited as a pervert or a sex maniac because his message was too terrifying. Life is there for the taking, he said. 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 embodies the human attraction toward freedom. Miller’s writing is full of imperfection, bombast, humbug. Sometimes its very slovenliness makes it hard to defend. But the purity of his example, his heart, his openness, makes him unique among American writers. He will surely, however, draw new generations of readers to him. At present, Miller’s reputation still hangs in the balance and even those who have written about him seem to disapprove of him.

Miller is in many ways a world unto himself. One searches in vain for a contemporary to compare him with. Tropic of Cancer burst forth into the world in the same year, 1934, that gave us F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Edna St Vincent Millay’s Wine from These Grapes and Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks.

Not only is Miller’s characteristic style comparable to none of his contemporaries, but his spirit harks back to Whitman or Rabelais. In an age of cynicism, Miller remains the romantic, exemplifying the possibility of optimism in a fallen world, of happy poverty in a world that worships Lucre, of the sort of gaiety Yeats meant when he wrote of the Chinese sages in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, ‘their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay’.

I only knew Henry Miller in the last decade of his life. In a number of ways, he became my mentor.

I was a very young writer, very green and suddenly famous; he was a very old writer, seasoned in both fame and rejection, when we met – by letter – and became pen pals, then pals. I feel lucky to have known him, but in some sense I only got to know him well after his death. 

Miller was the most contradictory of characters: a mystic who was known for his sexual writings, a romantic who pretended to be a rake, an old-fashioned Victorian sexist who could nevertheless be enormously supportive and loving to women, an accused anti-Semite who loved and admired Jews and had no use at all for prejudice or political dogma. He was, above all, a writer of what the poet Karl Shapiro called ‘wisdom literature’. If we have trouble categorizing Miller’s ‘novels’ and consequently underrate them, it is because we judge them according to some unspoken notion of ‘the well-wrought novel.’ And Miller’s novels seem not wrought at all. In fact, they are rants – undisciplined and wild. But they are full of wisdom, and they have that ‘eternal and irrepressible freshness’ Ezra Pound called the mark of the true classic. 

In the profound shocks and upheavals of the twentieth century, from the trenches of World War l to Auschwitz to the holes in the ozone layer, we in the West have produced a great body of ‘wisdom literature’, as if we needed all the wisdom we could garner to bear what may be the last century of humans on earth. Solzhenitsyen, Primo Levi, Gunter Grass, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir have all written predominantly wisdom literature. Even among some of our most interesting novelists – Saul Bellow, Natalia Ginzberg, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Christina Stead, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Marguerite Yourcenar – the fictional form is often a cloack for philosophical truths about hte human race and where it is heading. The popularity of writers like Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, M.Scott Peck, and Robert Bly in our time also serves to show the great hunger for wisdom. We are, as Ursula LeGuin says, ‘dancing at the edge of the world,’ and it takes all our philosophy to bear it.

Henry Miller remains the most disturbing and misunderstood of prophets. Because even the STYLE of writing he discovered has become convention; it is hard today to grasp how electric his voice was in 1934. The feminist critique of the sixties came in to bury Henry under rhetoric-just as simplistic in its way as the simplistic rhetoric of male supremacy. But the feminist critique, valid as it is, neglects to address the main question Henry Miller poses: how does a writer raise a voice? How does a writer take the chaos of life and transform it into art? The raising of a voice is the red threat through chaos. The raising of a voice is the essence of freedom. It is where every writer, every person, must begin.

Can a woman writer learn anything from Henry Miller’s voice? Doesn’t his sexism invalidate his work? Shouldn’t we boycott his work because of its underlying politics? 

I don’t think so. Just as Shakespeare’s monarchism does not invalidate the beauty of his verse, Miller’s sexism does not annihilate his contribution to literature. Besides, if we proscribe all literature whose sexual politics we do not agree with, we shall have nothing left to read – not even the Bible, Homer, or the novels of Jane Austen (whose heroines are often happy to make conventional marriages). 

In fact, the freedom that Henry Miller discovered in finding his voice can inspire women writers as well as men. 

It is the voice of the outsider, the renegade, the underground prophet – and isn’t that, after all, what women still are? 

The problem of finding a voice is essential for all writers. It may be more fraught with external difficulties for women writers, because no one agrees what the proper voice of woman is – unless it is to keep silent – but it is still basically the same process of self-discovery. To define the self in a world that is hostile to the very notion of your selfhood is still every woman writer’s challenge. It was Henry Miller’s challenge too – for different reasons. In tracing his self-liberation, we can, by analogy, trace our own. 

I do not mean to minimize the differences between the male writer’s odyssey and the female writer’s. The pen, as so many feminist critics have shown, has been treated as analogous to the penis in our literary culture. This accounts for the trouble that feminists, myself included, have with Henry Miller. Henry liberates himself, becomes the vagabond, the clown, poet, but the open road he chooses has never really been open to women. Henry’s picaresque sexual odyssey was, for centuries, a male prerogative. Still, it is useful for writers of both sexes to trace the steps of his liberation. The freedom of Paris plust first-person bravado equals the voice twe have come to know as Herny Miller. 

Listen: 

'I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I AM. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. 

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.....I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing...'

Henry is retracing his steps as an artist here, telling us exactly what happened between his early, unsuccessful efforts at writing fiction, and Tropic of Cancer: he let go of literature. It reminds me of Colette’s advice to the young Georges Simenon: ‘Now go and take out the poetry.’ 

Good advice. A writer is born at the moment when his (her) true voice of authority merges at white heat with the subject he (she) was born to chronicle. Literature falls away and what remains is life – raw, pulsating life: ‘A gob of spit in the face of Art.’ 

For the truth is that every generation, every writer, must rediscover nature. Literary conventions tend to ossify over time, and what was once new becomes old. It takes a brave new voice to rediscover real life buried under decades of literary dust. In unburying himself, Henry unburied twentieth-century literature.

What was it about Paris in 1930 that enabled Henry Miller to find his voice? And what was it about New York that prevented it? 

The New York Henry left when he settled in Paris in March 1930 was nowhere as fraught as the New York of today, but it still bore certain similarities to it. In New York it was dishonour to be an unknown writer; in Paris one could write ecrivain on one’s passport and hold one’s head high. In Paris it was assumed (it still is) that an author had to have time, leisure, talk, solitude, stimulation. In New York it was, and still is, assumed that unless you fill up your time with appointments, you are a bum. More than that (and more important, particularly for Henry) was the American attitude toward the vagabond artist – an attitude that unfortunately persists to our day. ‘In Europe,’ as his friend the photographer Brassai says in his book on Henry Miller, ‘poverty is only bad luck, a minor unhappiness; in the United States, it represents a moral fault, a dishonour that society cannot pardon.’ 

To be a poor artist in America is thus doubly unforgivable. To be an artist in America is to be a criminal (its criminality only pardoned by writing bestsellers or selling one’s paintings at outrageous prices to rich collectors and thus feeding the obsolete war machine with tax blood). But to be poor AND an artist: this is un-American. 

Which of us has not felt this disapproval, this American rejection of the dreamer? ‘Poets have to dream,’ says Saul Bellow, ‘and dreaming in America is no cinch.’ 

In the last few years we have seen a dramatic replay of these attitudes in the debates over censorship and the National Endowment for the Arts. Our essential mistrust of dreamers leads us to cripple them with restrictions of all sorts. We seem not to understand that the basic riches of our country – wealth and emotional health – come from our creative spirit. Even with Japanese conglomerates buying our movie companies, even with statistics that prove our movies, music, television shows, and inventions are our biggest exports in real dollar terms, we still honour the money counters and money changers over the inventors and dreamers who give them something to count and change.

This is a deep-seated American obsession, and one whose historical genesis we must explore in retracing Henry Miller’s steps. It comes, of course, out of puritanism’s assumption that the dream life and imagination are suspect. And it results in a love-hate relationship with sexuality – a violent alternation between fascination and disgust which I call sexomania/sexophobia. We must understand how Henry was buffeted by these powerful forces and how he fled to Europe to be reborn. 

‘It was the scorn which ultimately Miller could not stand,’ says Brassai. ‘It was the scorn that he wanted to escape. Madness and suicide threatened him.’ 

‘Nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America,’ Miller writes in Tropic of Capricorn. 

Miller’s life as a protagonist, as a mythic hero – or antihero – is intimately related to this struggle between Puritanism and the life of the dreamer. Henry made a religion of art (as did his disciples). In doing this he was following in the footsteps of Whitman, his model of the American writer. 

There are at least two Millers in the books and articles that have been written about Henry. One is the real, historical Henry Miller, born in 1891 in New York, died in 1980 in Los Angeles – a character full of contradictions. The other is Miller the mythic hero or antihero, whose hegira is emblematic of the hegira of the American artist. 

Constrained by Puritanism, provoked by a society in which dreaming is no cinch, Miller the anti hero creates a way for an American – or anyone – to be an artist, and in doing so makes a path for all of us. One is continually struck by the interplay between these two Millers, but my interest is principally in the Miller who leads the way for a creator – particularly a creator who comes from a culture where creativity itself is suspect. Since I long ago gave up the Ph.D programme for the life of a professional author, I approach Miller with a writer’s rather than a scholar’s point of view. Like many storytellers, Henry was an outrageous self-mythifier and critics have pointed out the disparities between ‘the truth’ of his life and the grandiosity of his fictions. He tells the same story differently on every occasion, they complain. 

My point of view is necessarily different. In tracing the steps of another writer, I have empathy for the creative process itself and an understanding of its difficulties. I EXPECT  a writer to ‘lie’ in order to get at a deeper truth. I take for granted that imaginative writing exaggerates and rearranges ‘facts’ in the name of a higher fiction. I also understand how hard it is to survive one’s own fame. 

Henry’s writing is often misunderstood precisely because of the ways it parallels – yet deviates from – his own life. Since he uses the name ‘Henry Miller’ for his fictive protagonists, readers are thrown even more astray. This is a fate I know well because it has also been my own. Though I have called my heroines by different names, the parallels between my life and the mythic lives I lead in my novels have often had the effect of leading my self-appointed judges to attack me personally. Henry was one of the first to see this parallel between our fates, and as a result was enormously kind to me. Curiously enough, it fell in part to Henry to rescue my first novel from the obscurity that might otherwise have claimed it. And since I believe in the universal law by which circles get completed, I find it not at all odd that it falls in part to me to puzzle out the many contradictions of his posthumous reputation. 

A large part of the problem Miller presents to the literary critic comes from his perception of the chaos of life and his passionate need to reflect that chaos in his books. Henry Miller is the poet of what Umberto Eco calls THE CHAOSMOS. When he writes, he is in touch with pure desire – the desire to be one with the primal flux of creation, the desire to be as creative as a god. 

“I like desire. In desiring things no one is wounded, deranged nor exploited. Creation is pure desire. One possesses nothing, one creates and lets go. One is beyond what he (she) does. One is no longer a slave. It’s an affair between oneself and God. When one is truly rendered naked everything is done without effort. There is no recompense – the effort, the deed itself suffices. Deed is desire and desire deed. A complete circle.” 

How to write a coherent book about such a primal force? It is not easy, as all Miller’s biographers attest. Clearly Henry Miller did not WANT to be the subject of a biography and he spread confusion even as he scattered clues. He knew he had told many tales that were not true and he was nervous that someone might catch him in his lies. A good example of Henry’s ambivalent relations to the truth is the way he hated his pal Brassai’s rather accurate portrayal of him in Grandeur Nature, a book not yet translated into English, perhaps because Henry despised it so. He felt he had adequately chronicled his own life in his books, and wherever there was some fictionalisation that did not correspond to the ‘facts’ (in which, anyway, he did not believe), he was more than happy to provide chronologies, interviews, conversations that elucidated the truth, HIS truth, for his rapt listeners. (Some of these ‘documents’ also contain plenty of fiction.) he was an artesian writer, so overflowing with stories and ideas that to this day he still defeats bibliographers and biographers. Whenever you think you have read all the essential Miller, another pamphlet, brochure, treasure trove of letters, watercolour or print turns up with more Henry, ever more Henry. He embodied in both his writing and his life the paradigm of the writer as the giver of gifts, the voyager into the underworld who comes back with a boon for humankind. 

Ironically, Henry Miller is best known for his worst writing – the boastful graphic sexual scenes in the Tropics, Quiet Days in Clichy, and Sexus. These finally interest me less than the transcendentalism of The Colussus of Maroussi, his spiritual travel book about Greece. For me Maroussi is his central work and it stands squarely in the American transcendental tradition. It has a kind of perfection and purity that you can find in books like Walden. And yet, paradoxically, without the scandal surrounding the ‘sexual’ writings, Miller would perhaps not be known at all. 

That Miller was a transcendentalist in the indigenous American tradition of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, and Whitman he himself apparently knew. He referred to Whitman as an ancestor and influence. (He also regarded Maroussi as his best book). He was a mystic in the way of Thomas Merton and Lao-tzu, seeing in ordinary life the way into the extraordinary. Like many liberators who seek first to liberate themselves, he saw in sex one path of self-liberation-a way out of the body through the body. In this, he is not so different from Whitman or from Colette. 

He was always seeking ‘life more abundant’ as he says at the end of Colussus of Maroussi. Sex was one path toward abundance. Travel, another. Conversation, letter-writing, and painting were still others. He saw the world in terms of abundance rather than scarcity, and it often seems that this distinction is the most critical one of all where writers are concerned. Writers tend toward either free flow or toward agonised laconicism – Henry Miller being at one extreme and Samuel Beckett at the other. 

Henry Miller was as great a conversationalist as he was a writer. He was the primeval author, in the primeval cave, telling stories to keep the tribe awake and alive, safe from the sabre-toothed tigers outside. Like any shaman, he worked in a variety of forms: voice, watercolour, the photographs he posed for, the documentaries he conspired in. In many ways, he anticipates Cindy Sherman, Art Spiegel-man, and other postmodernist artists, using his own photographic or painted persona to create his own oeuvre. In other ways he is like Picasso, inventing and reinventing his wives and his muses in many of the different characters that appear in his books. All of them are Woman or Muse, just as Henry himself, the autobiographical protagonist who bears his name, is Everyman. To speak of him as the real historical Henry Miller is a mistake, for had he not elevated his life above mere autobiography and made it emblematic nobody would be interested in it but himself and perhaps a few enemies, relatives, friends. 

Because Henry Miller became his own protagonist, the appreciation of his work is further confused. Always, when a writer is transformed this way, it makes the assessment of the work more problematic, for some will inevitably see  him as a villain and in reaction others will plump for him as hero. We have seen both these responses to Miller in recent years and it is doubtful that either view has been accurate. 

This transformation is what all artists seek: to become like mythic heroes (heroines) – Prometheus, Achilles, Odysseus, Alcestis, Athena – so that we mortals can see our fates reflected in their journeys as we do in the journeys described in ancient myths. 

But Henry is not a hero to all. Many see him as a villain. His fate has not been so different from de Sade’s: either canonized by cultists or burned at the stake by puritans, either hailed by hippies seeing a hip father figure or dismissed by literary Anglophiles who would prefer that American literature consisted only of Henry James. 

Things are not so simple. Our apprehension of Miller, as of de Sade, implicates our entire apprehension of sexuality, our notions of sexual politics, as well as our notions of what constitutes literature. That is why he is such a pivotal and important figure. 

‘Life is that which flows..’ said one of Miller’s Paris roommates, Michael Fraenkel, in an essay about the composition of The Tropic of Cancer. The paradox for every creative artist is that life flows and art must stand still. But it must stand still like the hummingbird, as Miller would say. It must move and yet have form, because without form it is not graspable; without form it cannot be art. 

Miller’s art is always bursting the boundaries of form as we know it. It strains beyond the frame of the picture. This is partly its subject, and it also accounts for the difficulty a form-ridden commentator has with it.

Postmodernists have already discovered Miller as the artist of the future. But the artist who is ahead of his (her) time never has an easy job making a living IN his (her) time. Witness Vincent van Gogh. And Emily Dickinson. And Walt Whitman. Miller is an artist of similar protean and prophetic gifts. If he has to date received little literary consideration, it is because he cannot be formally categorized. But rather than seeing this as a fault – as many of his detractors do – I see it as his very subject matter. Henry’s ‘message’ was the message of all the Zen masters and mystics: that there is no stability, only flux. ‘The angel is my watermark!’ he writes in Black Spring. 

Henry Miller’s recent biographers try, willy-nilly, to fit him into pre-existing patterns; and when they fail, they blame HIM. But Henry’s very message is that life is formless, and that creativity partakes of the divine chaos. He struggles with this paradox in every book. 

Ironically, we live in an age when literary biography is more read than literature. Writers’ lives tend to have more commercial viability than their own books. In his most fertile time, Henry Miller could never have been published by a mainstream New York publisher, yet in his centennial year several vied to bring out books ABOUT him. I suspect that if Tropic of Cancer came upon us today, it would still have trouble finding a publisher despite our much vaunted (but essentially fake) ‘sexual revolution’. Yet Miller the protagonist continues to inspire books and films. 

What is it that we find in the lives of writers – particularly nonconformist writers – that thrills us, makes us identify? The story of a person inventing himself (herself)? The story of a person finding personal freedom in an age of corporate and totalitarian conformity? Has the myth of the nonconformist writer hitting the open road become a substitute for the initiatory ritual Robert Bly and others claim our society lacks? Why else do so many novels and movies about writers strike a resonant chord in readers who are not writers? 

Surely there is no more toilsome, self-flagellating profession than that of author. Ingrown toenails, Henry called us. Voltaire said, ‘The only reward to be expected for the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.’ But the average nonwriter seems to see in authorship a relaxing, hedonistic profession, affording ample time for travel, dalliance, and debauchery, an aristocratic profession carried out in dreamily scenic places, with lovely members of the opposite sex in attendance. The average nonwriter sees the writer as someone who has made ordinary life heroic. 

Contrary to popular myth, authors lead ‘a sort of life’ (the phrase is Graham Greene’s), imprisoned behind a desk. Painful solitude is required for the cultivation of literature, and even a bad book requires that one be good at cutting oneself off from other human beings in order to write it. A writer’s most ecstatic hours occur alone, yet the myth of hedonism persists. And the fact is that many writers ruin themselves trying to live up to it. Or maybe it is true that in a world where busy-ness and business drown out every spiritual pursuit, the writer’s solitude is the most envied pleasure of all. ‘A sort of life’ it may be, but vastly preferable to the kind of empty busy-ness that characterises most people’s lives. 

Miller was a happy man (for this he was and is also hated). He was generous and free of envy. Though he sometimes boasts of idleness in his books (as he boasts of lechery), he was in truth, never idle. He was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation-and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves. 

So we come to the paradox of biography – especially the biography of a writer who amply chronicled his own life in many forms. (Biography is one of the new terrors of death’, said Dr. John Arbuthnot, the poet Alexander Pope’s friend. And in 1891, in his The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the autobiography.’) Who can chart the events in a person’s life with accuracy and without distortion? No one. Not even the person himself (herself). That is why biographies must be rewritten for every age, for every new wrinkle in the zeitgeist. That is why biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier. 

With a writer who has already mined his (her) own life in letters, in novels, in paintings, and in films, the biographical problem becomes even more vexing. Even the most seemingly autobiographical writer changes, heightens, and rearranges ‘fact’ to make his (her) fictions. It is naive to read his (her) stories literally, but it is equally unsatisfactory to read them as if they had no connection to his (her) life. 

I hope I can make peace with all these paradoxes by writing about Henry Miller in the same spirit that he first wrote to me in 1974 – with complete candour and no hidden agenda. It will not be the last word on Henry Miller, but the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said. 

ERICA JONG. 1993

The Devil at Large. Erica Jong on Henry Miller