Henry Miller spent a whole book talking about his connection to his parents. I don't remember right now whether it was in Nexus, which would make sense, or Plexus, both part of his self-obsessed multi-volume collection he labeled The Rosy Crucifixion, composed of seven titles all told. I read all of them a long time ago, what seems like at least two lifetimes and many border crossings ago. Not because I, like Miller, was obsessed with all things sex and self at the time, although I was, but because he was a writer who just seemed to let loose.Execrable he was to decent folk - not a word or sentence structure that appears in most blogs. He was generally detested. Too wordy and rambling as a writer, too quick to make everything into an opportunity to fornicate or eat, too facile an imagination with his own history. His books were banned in the U.S. for straightforward lewdness up until just a couple of decades before last. What's not to like? Henry walked in many of those borderlands I have only imagined, certainly international in scope (he wrote and published mostly in Europe) if extremely local in topic. Libido, I would argue, is a local and very subjective map.
As it happens, the apex of my Miller reading occurred in the Four Corners borderland near Telluride, Colorado, in the late '70s. I think. I share a soft memory of timeline with Henry, but the town was still mostly a rundown former mining settlement just starting to be a ski town then. I just posted a story on the sister non-blog to this one you might enjoy. Or you might not, what the hell. It does touch on fornication though, if you're interested.
I've mostly moved away from fornication and Miller to death and Julian Barnes and Jules Renard. Fornication and death are sometimes compared with a small equal sign. I am not yet old enough to know why but I'm of an age to find the latter more interesting than the former. I've got a different take on Across the Borderline, the song written by Ry Cooder, John Hiatt and Jimmy Dickinson for a movie called The Border about Mexican drug trafficking. This is one of those songs that grows to mean much more. It expands to easily fit the proportions of a Roland Barthes 'Myth' with a capital M. It was sung right by Willie Nelson on the album of the same title. You just listen to Willie sing the first verse and the chorus and you have the death thing pretty well nailed. And the Rio Grande flows easily into the waters of Lethe.
