Some authors are prophets. Their writing cuts through the sonority of literature with a tone of absolute honesty. They predict the future not in the way of the astrologer or even the astronomer, but by looking through the prism of the human condition and foreseeing the results of humanity’s ventures. D.H. Lawrence’s novels anticipated the widening divide between man and nature. Walt Whitman spoke of insupportable materialism and the floundering ideals of liberty and freedom in America. Their writing transcended traditional verse. Honesty in literature is prophetic.

Henry Miller was brutally honest. He revealed secrets which most were afraid to tell. They were filthy truths that offended the preponderance of American society, which preferred the self-deluded artifice of suburbia.

His books were banned in the United States until 1961, 27 years after Tropic of Cancer was first published in France. Miller’s studies on America are as apposite now as they were 60 years ago: high crime rates, vast pockets of poverty, bleak office buildings filled with monomaniacs turning the gears of capitalism. When finally made available, his novels gave this country an author who spoke the language of the lower-middle classes, a voice which offered a sincere look at life, the real thing full of every pockmark and pleasure known to man.

As America has grown economically, so has the relevance of Miller’s writing. He predicted that the proliferation of skyscrapers and warships would come at the expense of America’s poor. His novels remind us that, even if the Mayans do spare us on the 21^st of December (the end of their long count calendar cycle and the date some theorists have predicted as the end of the world), America will not have made it through unscathed. By writing with absolute honesty, Miller’s prose read like prophecy, for he revealed to the world an unstoppable process of cold-blooded capitalism which could only have resulted in the America of today.

Why is Henry Miller important at the precipice of time? For America, he tempers hysteria by putting the notion of apocalypse in perspective. His writing proposes that, culturally speaking, this country has continually been bludgeoned by a social system designed to prohibit “whatever does not lend itself to being bought or sold,” as he wrote in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. The artist, thinker and dreamer in America has suffered catastrophes far more calamitous than death or apocalypse.

Miller’s novels are testifying witnesses to an ongoing decay of culture in this country. As a voice of the masses, they are invariably credible. Much of his source material was drawn from a cross-country road trip he made in 1939 after a decade abroad. His Buick was the crystal ball through which he peered into America’s future, the notes from his trip eventually becoming The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a blistering and timeless commentary on modern America.

In that novel he wrote, “I wanted to have a last look at my country and leave it with a good taste in my mouth. I didn’t want to run away from it, as I had originally. I wanted to embrace it, to feel that the old wounds were really healed, and set out for the unknown with a blessing on my lips.” He returned with every intention of finding an America closer to his heart, likely considering the possibility of having to remain in the country for an extended period of time as a result of World War II.

Miller, however, could not reconcile himself with the nation’s passion for commercialism and growing sense of xenophobia. If he found an interdependence of humanity abroad, he uncovered in America a fetish with individualism and a political and economic system which capitalized on society’s divisions. There was the claim of progress, but a petty progress, a nation “cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful,” as he stated in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

He foresaw America on a course toward cultural obliteration, a country that, if it survived, would be forever divided. He later wrote in the novel, “we have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.” It’s likely that America woke up on December 21, 2012, and found its citizens cheating, stealing from and murdering each other in pursuit of the American dream. Wars will be waged at home and abroad. Mediocrity will be the aspiration of millions. All this will occur despite the end of the Mayan calendar cycle. Miller taught us long before this latest doomsday hysteria that death and destruction will prevail on the last day of the Mayan calendar. Why? Because it’s an average Friday in America.

It’s not a contradiction to say that Henry Miller offers hope. If he had absolutely no faith in the American or the Christian or the Republican or the Democrat, he had every bit of hope for the human being, the man devoid of countries, mass movements, religions, causes or institutions. Only poets, men of vision could wrought a new world. He wrote in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, “a new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values.”

History had proved that our leaders would fail the common man. Dishonesty from those in power was an inevitability, decisions were made in the backroom, freedoms and liberties were mortgaged for sake of profit and the soul of the politician was always for sale. Miller railed against these corruptions but did not try to alter them through his work. In his view, this was simply the way things were. There was no social message in Miller’s novels. He did not urge the masses to revolt. Instead, he glorified their distance from the self-proclaimed righteousness of America’s institutions, contending that virtue only existed at the lowest levels of American society because that was where men, for better or worse, were still honest with one other.

He wrote in The Black Spring, ''What is not in the open street is false, derived...” Miller’s sense of spirituality was culled from the Fourteenth Ward in Brooklyn and later from the seedy arrondissements in Paris where he lived among those who were truly living life as opposed to simply participating in it. Miller forged a sense of spirituality from the gutters and a cyclical interpretation of life and time devoid of heaven, hell and every modern sense of the idea of God.

Yes, he foresaw the cultural destruction of America, but he also saw the moment as an opportunity for transformation or rebirth, a necessary course to start afresh. When a similar doomsday hysteria to the Mayan one we are confronted with presently pervaded American society at the outset of World War II, Miller—although opposed to American involvement—stated in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, “war can bring about a change in the spirit of people. And that is what I am vitally interested in—a change of heart, a conversion.” Unfortunately, every opportunity for change in this country has been quickly followed by reaffirmation of the status quo. To Miller, the reason for this was simple: we look to our institutions and conventions for direction, for we fear what we might find if we look within.

What we find in Miller is the wrath of the prophet of doom, but a prophet that affords us every hope, every chance to avoid our fate. Unlike the Mayans or other previous doomsayers, Miller juxtaposes the world approaching apocalypse with a world untouched by society’s destructive tendencies. To reach the latter, all man must do is have the courage to listen to his heart and correlate that tone with the greater pulse of nature and humanity or, as Miller wrote in The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud, to “commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe.”

Author Bio:

Steven J. Chandler is a contributing writer at Highbrow Magazine.