Toxico Cultura

“I began assiduously examining the style and technique of those whom I admired and worshiped: Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Hamsun. I imitated every style in the hopes of finding a clue to the gnawing secret of how to write. Finally I came to a dead end, to a despair and desperation which few men have known, because there was no divorce between myself as a writer and myself as a man. And I failed. I realized that I was nothing–less than nothing–a minus quantity. It was at this point, in the midst of the dead Sargasso Sea, so to speak, that I really began to write. I began from scratch, throwing everything overboard, even those other writers whom I loved most. Immediately I heard my own voice. I was enchanted: the fact that it was a separate, distinct, unique voice sustained me. It didn´t matter to me if what I wrote should be considered bad. Good and bad dropped out of my vocabulary. I jumped with two feet into the realm of aesthetics, the non-moral, non-ethical, non-utilitarian realm of art. My life itself became a work of art. I had found a voice, I was whole again. The experience was very much like what we read in connection with the lives of Zen initiates. My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it where, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and take a leap in the dark…. [...]…  I obey only my own instincts and intuitions. I know nothing in advance. Often I put down things which I do not understand myself, secure in the knowledge that later they will become clear and meaningful to me. I now have faith in the man who is writing, who is myself, the writer. I do not believe in words, no matter if it is strung together by the most skillful man: I believe in language, something which words give only an inadequate illusion of.”

-Henry Miller-