(“The Moors the prairie, two ducks and Boo’s ears”–image provided by the author)
introduction
(Behold the first ever Guest Writer Week in Saragun Springs. This Month we feature our friend Dale Williams Barrigar. Dale is a first rate essayist, writer and poet. This is the first of five works Dale has graciously sent to the Springs for this week.
I’ve met and known many writers and artists and few have displayed the passion Dale has for the arts. “Passion” is an over-used term anymore, inasmuch it tends to not carry the weight it should when attributed to high calibur persons such as Dale. But I think that the readers will agree that it is a perfect word to describe this writer and friend with.
Without further delay, I welcome all to his world…
Leila)
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“No coward soul is mine.” – Emily Bronte
Henry Miller is a vastly underappreciated writer, so much so that he can stand as a representative, or symbol, of the misunderstood, unappreciated writer in our time. Miller’s best work has zero to do with the pornography he was sometimes paid a pittance to type while struggling to keep his head above water as person and writer in the Paris of the 1930s.
Miller was the creator of a prose style at least as impressive as that of Hemingway or Faulkner. He was a painter and visual artist whose best pieces have a Picasso-like light, humor and beauty to them. He invented a new kind of fiction based directly on the life of the writer. And he was as dedicated to the independent press and its spirit of rebellion and freedom as Charles Bukowski was, except that Miller did it first (and for longer).
His best work is probably the nonfiction collection Stand Still Like the Hummingbird; his book-length study of poet/prophet/rebel Arthur Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins; and vast stretches of Tropic of Cancer as well as quite a few other essays, some of which are surrealist in nature.
Artists of the word such as William Carlos Williams, H.D., Anais Nin, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, and Cormac McCarthy, among many others, all cited Miller as an influence on their own work or expressed extremely strong approval for Miller’s work.
Miller’s number one subject was always writers and the writing life, which was why he so often focused on himself. But just as often, he wrote directly about the lives and works of other writers, as in his book on Rimbaud and essays on Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, D.H. Lawrence, Feodor Dostoevsky, and many others.
In an era when we are being sold the nightmarish LIE that we don’t need human writers any more because computers can do the job just as well, the work of Henry Miller assumes a new importance. Computers and robots can’t suffer or feel pain, they can’t laugh or console or commiserate, and so, no matter how seemingly clever to the ones with blinders on, robots can’t create beauty, not human beauty (because they aren’t human). Anyone who can be consoled by a robot has a mental problem, and almost all great writing is about consolation, one way or another.
Think upon it. What great writing is there that isn’t about consolation one way or another?
Henry Miller said that Jesus was the greatest artist of the word who ever lived, and also the greatest artist, period.
Emily Bronte was the spiritual center of a genius artistic family. She was also the biggest outsider in the family, as both writer and person. She was fierce in everything she did, and was both a believer and an unbeliever at the same time: a believer in faith and the spirit of life itself; and an unbeliever in schools, creeds, dogmas, churches with their rituals and hierarchies.
In the spirit of Henry Miller’s writings on writers and the writing life, but without knowing it, I wrote a poem about the Bronte family. I recognized, only after the fact, that this poem had been influenced very heavily by all the countless hours I spent reading Henry Miller when I was in my teens, twenties, and thirties. (I discovered his work when I was 19 while riding on a train from Chicago to Milwaukee; it felt very much like a life-changing experience.)
Miller sometimes called himself “THE ROCK,” which for him meant The Happy Failure.
It took me less than fifteen minutes to write the first draft of this poem while standing in a field in northern Michigan, and which I later called “Visionary Children.”
It took me five years (very much off and on) to finish this poem. What took so long? Getting the words right. Whether it’s true or not, I have the feeling now that not a single word of this poem of 131 words in 55 lines can or should be changed. As with any poem, every word is meant to be savored – and returned to.
Visionary Children
The Bronte kids
they lived alone
out in the wilds
of England.
With a loving but
too-distant dad.
Mother had passed
on.
And so
they grew
up as haunted
kids.
As kids
who loved to haunt
ghostly places.
Like lonely hilltops,
Single streaming trees
or moss-strewn
boulders,
or rainy graveyards
in storms.
Sometimes looking
for mother.
Later they learned
to write
haunting
poems,
novels,
stories,
and other
amazing things.
But they also worked
as governesses
and tutors.
Branwell too, only son,
lovable laudanum
addict.
Working hours were
6 AM to 11 PM.
Six days a week.
But there was
the gigantic house
they inhabited,
free food,
big, windy
windows.
And the wild
nature
of the roaming,
redeeming
imaginations
humming and singing
the songs that kept
their brains sane…
– dwb
D.W.B. is an ex-professor and current literary scholar from Chicago and environs. At the ripe young age of 46, he was magically transformed into a poet via a mixture of personal circumstances he both would, and would not, wish on anybody.
Saragun Springs 
Hello Dale
It depends on which view whether Boo’s ears are still visible. but to all Boo was more assuredly there.
Thank you for this one and all the ones a coming! I think readers will see you entertaining yet informative writing in the prologues as well as your excellent poetry!
Leila (will add more, still attempting to wake up)
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Ah the Brontes. My gran was born in Haworth and so of course we have had the delight of visiting. But apart from that one of my most favourite poems every is Remembrance – I absolutely love that phrase ‘Fifteen wild Decembers’ it speaks of moors and wind and the wild, I think. I watched a film about them ages and ages ago and the vision of Charlotte alone walking around the table in the Parsonage was haunting. I have visited Anne’s grave in Scarborough which was rather sad as it sits alone and looked rather neglected, I thought. This was a great post by Dale, thoroughly enjoyed it and it gave me cause to revisit one of my favourite pieces of poetry, though I know it pretty much by heart anyway. Thank you – dd
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Dear Diane
Thank you so much for sharing all these experiences you’ve had with and of the Brontes; your descriptions and commentaries are fascinating, inspirational, and very much appreciated. Thanks again! If I ever make it to England I’ll head straight for the Bronte area first.
Dale
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LA
Thank you so much!
For work like this to appear it takes a very special Editor, and Friend, for this to happen and you are that Person! Thanks for understanding this quirky (personal) work and for hosting it all week this week in The Springs.
The Springs is a wildly imaginative and eternal place that is a mirror for the world and its own world.
Couldn’t be prouder to appear here, one massive reason being that I know The Readers here are GOOD Readers: not just casual or transactional readers.
Dale
“…was I…just off somewhere / or maybe just too high…/but I can’t remember / if we said / goodbye…” – Steve Earle
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Hi Dale
Such an impressive piece! Your writing always draws me in. Starting with the picture. “The Moors the prairie, two ducks and Boo’s ears.” I think of Hemingway when you mention Northern Michigan. The Moor’s and Boo’s ears are a great touch. I’ve seen ducks on patches of water like this many times.
Thank you for the introduction to Henry Miller. This author I want to read, for sure. I love these articles on different writers and the “Writer’s Life.” I’ve watched YouTube autobiographies of writers and their lives are as interesting as their work. Henry Miller sounds influential.
Your Poem, “Visionary Children.” I like the Bronte kids haunting lonely places, “Lonely hilltops” ( I ‘m not sure if I’ve consciously thought of a lonely hilltop.) But I have been on a few and there is a haunting feeling. Once in Colorado I was on a vast Ridge-line with a cold wind blowing up from the other side and it was the quietest place on earth. Lonely too… So I thought that was a very original line. You put words to what it’s like. When you’re in a place like this you are haunted, and you might want to be.
“or rainy graveyards
in storms.”
Wow those are great lines! It sets a tone, like E.A.Poe.This poem captures so much of nature, and the spirits of these famous sisters, and the addicted brother. I think your picture of “The Moors,” translates well and also sets a tone of the Bronte children in England. CS Lewis might see them in this same light.
This poem makes me want to investigate the Bronte’s.
I see the shadows and the light and it contrasted so very well! Applause!
Christopher
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Hi Christopher!
Thanks for stopping by! I’ll be here all week!
Your commentary justifies my work, and that’s an amazing boon.
Hemingway is always an influence (even when I don’t want him to be) and Miller is definitely worth checking out. Not sure which one of them was wilder…maybe Hemingway because Miller lived to be 88.
Really like and understand what you mean about wanting to be haunted. That encapsulates the nature of the writing life in a few good words.
Thanks for picking up on the Poe tone and the nature poetry aspects of this. CS Lewis is a great reference. If I’m not mistaken himself and JRR Tolkien used to go hiking together, both while chain smoking (pipes probably).
Stop by again tomorrow if you can…
It doesn’t get any better than this, but it’s just as good.
Including a Lou Reed song, “The Last Shot.” And a picture which depicts the spiritual warfare with a Robot Monster (like against a Kafkaesque machine or even Philip K Dick…)…and a poem about growing up in the Midwest that JD Salinger would have loved (just kidding).
Thanks again for everything! As always! And happy M Day…
Dale
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Hi Christopher!
I placed some inspired commentary under your story “The Campground Dog” on Literally Stories today, inspired because I was so inspired by your great, and subtle, story, “The Campground Dog.”
And it’s kinda uncanny in a very cool way, because your short story “The Campground Dog” from today is almost like a companion piece to my poem “Flight and Song” here in Saragun Springs from today…The settings and the narrators have a lot in common in many ways. One is about family (yours) and one is about friends (mine) but both are about growing up in the Midwest (AND America itself), and both have a narrator-main character who is isolated, troubled, connected, highly intelligent, perceptive, and ultimately resilient, and transcendent.
Great job to both authors (you and me), say I!! We also both write in a “simple” style that catches many nuances and much subtlety and could only have been achieved through years of dedication, reading, study and practice!!
Dale
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