I’m having a love affair with a love affair.

Henry Miller and Anais Nin transfix me. I love their love. When I started reading A Literate Passion, I became maddened with their love—I couldn’t get enough of it.

“Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on. A scene in a movie, a voice, a phrase was not for them volcanic. I never feel the breaks. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy.”

~ Anais Nin

I want to challenge us to never feel the brakes. To swim through the deepest pools of life and to flow, incandescently.

Henry Miller and Anais Nin go back and forth with the concept of white heat. The white heat is what they live by and it’s what they love by. It is the now and the pulse and the present blush of your cheeks against the fire. Then once that’s passed, it’s the little bouts of heat left to linger in the air.

This is how we must live. This is how we must love.

One may ask if living in the “white heat” is endearing or positively maddening. I say, is there a difference? And if there is, I want to be maddening—I don’t want callous whispers; I want sharp stabs of everything. I want to feel it all. I don’t want to enjoy clarity. I want to ruffle through the muck and into the vast, vast sea of life. I want to embrace the unknown with sunken arms, tired but true, ready to hold it all up as high as I can.

I want gargling sobs and silhouettes that hang in the dusty corners of my mind. Like spiders, feigning to spread across some greater sky.

I want the electric fur, the shocking fuzz of first love and all the cheap radio songs. I want the obesity of it all.

I want this life to break me, leave me spiraled and hunched, but still radiating white heat. We can’t limit ourselves to living in tinted frames or to love in starving boxes. We need to be hungry for the chance to bleed into each other. I don’t want to hover above the coal and melt, I want to ignite with the heat of every flame, of every tiny flicker.

So please, take my words as if I was your very own Henry Miller or your own Anais Nin:

I want you to spin and spin until you are dizzy with the drowsiness of every shade of life imagined. Then give yourself one more twirl and dance into a bright gold that blinds the rest of the dance floor. And if it’s true that nothing gold can stay, then we can lighten the hue and illuminate the sky with a silky mixture of bright yellow. Either way, we’re going to win. We’re going to live in the white heat, exhausting every feeling. Every hurt, every triumph, every desire, every whim. I want you to hold it all over your head and shine a little light upon it. Follow your own white heat, even if you have to pull it all out, strand by agonizing strand.

Let it all happen to you, and let yourself be burned by it.

This is how we must live. This is how we must love.

Julie Garcia believes that every living thing is entitled to common courtesy and decency and that people are mostly good, mostly misunderstood, mostly terrified and beautiful. She is a lover of the written word, bursts of passion and bright-eyed wonder. She believes that if at the end of day, all she has to show for herself are millions of scribbled words and too many memories to hold onto, she’ll feel utterly accomplished. She’s also certain that your story matters and would love to hear it.

 

 

 

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Ed: Bryonie Wise