Haters, Lovers, Writers

So many of the books I read (and if my obnoxiously bloated vocabulary hasn't already given me away, I read a lot of books) speak no love for humans. Kurt Vonnegut does his best to portray us without flashy glamour, and still ends up loathing us all. Milan Kundera, for all his humor, seems drawn more to people's weaknesses and failings than anything else. Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe is the only voice of a reason in a city of self-serving shitheads, and even he falls for a pretty dame with a pistol in her purse in every other novel. And don't get me started on Yukio Mishima.

At the moment, I'm over halfway through Black Elk Speaks and my stomach has turned and turned and turned and now refuses to turn another inch. Wasichus shooting Lakota children and Lakota children scalping Wasichus. The warriors casually debating whether or not to eat the slain white men who are brutally and unjustly chasing them out of their land. Whatever.

Humans suck. Why are all the books I read about the suckage of humans? As an unusually literate elementary school student, I developed a raging misanthropy pretty fast. I was betrayed by my own lexicon, and turned myself into a target. Communication was impossible. I was a social outcast from day one. How many other people, unable to form bonds with their peers, vented onto the page instead? Literature seems to be a logical niche for words without ears. The people who'd deride you for writing it would never pick the damn thing up in the first place.

Ah, art. Secret communication in broad daylight. Maynard Keenan once posed an interesting question: Would Freddie Mercury have been half as interesting to listen to if he could have just come out and said he was gay? Would he have written Princes of the Universe? We Are the Champions? Fat Bottomed Girls?

But they're not all misanthropic hermits. Tom Robbins may rail against institutional authority in pretty much all his books, but he also fills them with assertive, playful magicians. Bonanza Jellybean has my heart and she can keep it. I remember reading Another Roadside Attraction on a long interstate bus ride to nowhere in particular and deciding that I would try as much as possible to be like John Paul Ziller. Polyrhythms. Polyamory. Polytheism. If there's one thing this world needs, it's more assertive, playful magicians.

But when the magic fades, and the numb wall of indifference has hardened almost completely, Herman Hesse taps a crack in the eggshell. Sometimes hinting, sometimes nudging, sometimes dragging the petulant mope from the darkness into the light. He tells simple secrets in a river, in a beautiful woman, in a board game, in a pointless, gleeful war between motorists and pedestrians; always a mask for an inescapable Is-ness to which we all perpetually bow and to which we all eventually return.

Henry Miller: another champion of mankind's virtues. Scratch that. Mankind's vices, and the nastiest of them at that. The Dao of Henry Miller is just about the dirtiest Dao there is, exalting both the gaping mouth and the yawning asshole, the starving belly and the exuberantly screaming mind. He could get as excited about Matisse's Joie De Vivre as he could about a prostitute with crab lice. Miller rambles for pages and pages; a leaky faucet of life's praises.

And it's Miller's acceptance of all creation's odd and jagged expressions that reminds me: yes, I do find pleasure in misanthropic writing. I love to creep through nightmares, just as much as I adore wading through wet dreams. The sin isn't cynical hatred, nor purile joy, but stunted expression. A thriving weed means more to me than a wilted tulip. And there is a special place in my heart for the pruned but persistent rose, the blade of grass poking through a crack in the sidewalk, Kundera ducking the Communists, Robbins flipping off the man, Mishima silently screaming his oppressed homosexuality, Vonnegut insisting on the personal identities of every resident of Midland City, Miller scrounging for enough change to survive another day, Chandler leading Marlowe closer and closer to an ever elusive justice, Hesse letting life slip through his fingers like so many rushing drops of water, and Freddie Mercury, who doesn't belong on this list of literary figures at all, who kept on fighting to the end.