You Get Me Closer To God

While reading Henry Miller, I’m always amazed at how he uses sex not as a plot point, but something more akin to a time out. As Miller plods along through his memoir-as-a-novel catalogue – sex is prevalent throughout. Yet, the books aren’t about who he fucked (Cliff Note’s version: everyone), they are more about the thoughts and philosophies that are born from a carnal understanding of the world. Perhaps a more contemporary, a far more succinct, version of this would be Trent Reznor in Nine Inch Nails: “I want to fuck you like an animal….. You get me closer to God.”

The Un-United States of America that we live in today is centered around sex; some people call it religion; some people call it morality; but at the end of the day – it’s all sex. Who you marry. Who controls your body. What closets your trapped in. What pleasures are you depriving yourself from. Miller knew this. He captured these thoughts in so many places, but the passage from Sexus in my recent post makes me draw parallels to today’s world and the world of Miller. How many of us don’t know what we want out of life because we restrain ourselves? How many of us purge the Id from our lives in order to conform? And because of this restraint – in it’s myriad of forms, do we strive to destroy others that aren’t haunted by these phantoms. Are we simply smashing ourselves in this hall of mirrors that we call life?

If Miller can eloquently find the pressure points of human nature in the 1940′s, during the “Greatest Generation,” and they are so mirrored by today’s world – can we even claim progress? The more and more I read thinkers from the past, the more I see how things don’t change. That is both a comforting thought and one that unnerves me to no end….