Musings...............writings

From The Diary of Anaïs Nin

As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evennes of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded. She was color and brilliance and strangeness. By the end of the evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak, posturing. She lacks the courage of her personality, which is sensual, heavy with experience. Her role alone preoccupies her. She invents dramas in which she always stars. I am sure she creates genuine dramas, genuine chaos and whirlpools of feelings, but I feel that her share in it is a pose. That night, in spite of my response to her, she sought to be whatever she felt I wanted her to be. She is an actress every moment. I cannot grasp the core of June. Everything Henry has said about her is true.


I can understand, when I listen to him, the Oriental fear of letting others paint you or photograph you.


"I want firsthand knowledge of everything, not fiction, intimate experience only. Whatever takes place, even a crime I read about, I can't take an interest in, because I already knew the criminal. I may have talked with him all night at a bar. He had confessed what he intended to do. When Henry wants me to go and see an actress in a play, she was a friend of mine at school. I lived at the home of the painter who suddenly becomes a celebrity. I am always inside where it first happens. I loved a revolutionist, I nursed his discarded mistress who later committed suicide. I don't care for films, newspapers, 'reportages,' the radio. I only want to be involved while it is being lived. Do you understand that, Anaïs?"


He is fascinated with the sound of words.


Perhaps when she talks so much about the others who love her, it is not to conceal whether she loves them or not, but because this is what interests her. Her desire to BE loved.


I wanted to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty and say: "June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never know again who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childish pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses."


Do I feel my own self definite, encompassable? I know its boundary lines. There are experiences I shy away from. But my curiosity, creativeness, urge me beyond these bondaries, to transcend my character. My imagination pushes me into unknown, unexplored, dangerous realms. Yet there is always my fundamental nature, and I am never deceived by my "intellectual" adventures, or my literary exploits. I enlarge and expand my self; I do not like to be just one Anaïs, whole, familiar, contained. As soon as someone defines me. I do as June does; I seek escape from the confinements of definition.


When we walked the streets, bodies close together, arm in arm, hands locked, I was in such ecstasy I could not talk. The city disappeared, and so did the people. The acute joy of our walking together through the grey streets of Paris I shall never forget, and I shall never be able to describe it. We were walking above the world, above reality, into pure, pure ecstasy.


I may be stopped on my course by all kinds of thoughts, pity, consideration for others, fears for those I love, protectiveness, devotion, sense of duty, of responsibility. But as Gide says, thought arrests action and being. So June is BEING. Nothing can control her. She is our fantasy let loose upon the world. She does what others only do in their dreams. Mindless, the life of our unconscious without control. There is a fantastic courage in this, to live without laws, without fetters, without thought of consequences.


I want to enjoy the summer day. Words are secondary.


I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers. I am aware also that I am becoming June.


If we could only write simultaneously all the levels on which we live, all at once. The whole truth! Henry is closer to it. I have a vice for embellishing.


...at least truth is possible in the confessions of our insincerities.


...the old Chinese definition of wisdom: wisdom being the destruction of idealism.


June and I were walking together over dead leaves crackling like paper. She was weeping over the end of a cycle. How one must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap the most difficult to make--to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and re-create the passion. The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might lean as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being...


Who is the liar? Who the human being? Who is the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who is the least selfish? The most devoted? Or are all these elements mixed in each one of us?


"Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me."


Artaud. Lean, taut. A gaunt face, with visionary eyes. A sardonic manner. Now weary, now fiery and malicious.

The theatre, for him, is a place to shout pain, anger, hatred, to enact the violence in us. The most violent life can burst from terror and death.

He talked about the ancient rituals of blood. The power of contagion. How we have lost the magic of contagion. Ancient religion knew how to enact rituals which made faith and ecstasy contagious. The power of ritual was gone. He wanted to give this to the theatre. Today nobody could share a feeling with anybody else. And Antonin Artaud wanted the theatre to accomplish this, to be at the center, a ritual which would awaken us all. He wanted to shout so people would be roused to fervor again, to ecstasy. No talking. No analysis. Contagion by acting ecstatic states. No objective stage, but a ritual in the center of the audience.


You knew, but beyond my words, and not because of them.


How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities? Allendy may have said: "This is the core," but I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space. .... I have accepted a self which is unlimited. What I imagine is as true as what is. I want to get lost in mystery again. Wisdom engulfed by life.


I had always lived not to be my father.


"I have known motherhood. I have experienced childbearing. I have known a motherhood beyond biological motherhood--the bearing of artists, and life, hope, and creation." It was Lawrence who had said: Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.


But I feel alive only when I am living for or with others! And I'll be a great artist in spite of that. And if I am not a great artists, I don't care. I will have been good to the artist, the mother and muse and servant and inspiration.


My father writes me:

....Qualities I consider taken for granted and, anyway, most of them are acquired; whereas faults neither our logic nor our will were able to modify or correct--they are the real expression of our primitive selves, natural selves, in the state of absolute purity.


Poisson d'Or. Tziganes. Three aristocratic Russian women, beautiful, with two wealthy men. Seven bottles of champagne. Ordering gypsy singer to sing for them at their table. Russian painter seated in front of me. Stares at me. When I dance with my escort, we collide and he kisses my neck. Orgy of singing and dancing. The three Russian women weep, quietly, with enjoyment, voluptuous satisfaction. The painter and the host almost fight because a man breaks lumps of sugar while the gypsy sings. Musicians sing and dance for the angry man as if to soothe him. The painter smiles subtly at me. Lady in white also begins to dance in front of him. The painter is whisked away by his partner who makes a scene. Irony, with the deep emotional music going on. The feeling that when I handed my coat at the check room, I handed over my identity. I become dissolved in the atmosphere, into red curtains, champagne, ice, music, singing, the weeping which the Russians love to do, the caress of the painter's eyes. Everything sparkles and exudes a warmth and a flowering. I am not like Jeanne, fragmented into a thousand pieces. I am at one with a sea of sensations, glitter, silk, skin, eyes, mouths, desire.


I must learn to stand alone. Nobody can really follow me all the way, understand me completely.

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