Henry Miller: Think, feel and see in an uneducated way

"The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring."

Author Henry Miller:

I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them. Nobody can drown in the ocean of reality who voluntarily gives himself up to the experience. Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge. ‘No daring is fatal,’ said René Crevel, a phrase which I shall never forget. The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring, i.e., in creating from the flimsiest, slenderest support. In the beginning this daring is mistaken for will, but with time the will drops away and the automatic process takes its place, which again has to be broken or dropped and a new certitude established which has nothing to do with knowledge, skill, technique or faith. By daring one arrives at this mysterious X position of the artist, and it is this anchorage which no one can describe in words but yet subsists and exudes from every line that is written.

Source: Henry Miller on Writing and Life

More good words from Miller below…

If you are an artist, that means that you are denuding yourself more and more, that by the time you die you are stark naked and your bowels turned inside out.

…

Somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself.

…

Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.