Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  I talked with Gonzalo. We talked about madness. I said: "No one becomes mad except from loneliness. While there is someone near you who sees what you see, hears what you hear, you do not go mad. So many artists were saved from madness by the faith of a wife, when all the world was against them. See, Gonzalo, the lamp hanging there has the color of the moon. Yes, it has the color of the moon you say, then you see it too and we are both sane, but with the artist often he is one against the whole world."

  The rain is falling. I am faced with money problems, debts, even though Henry got paid 3,000 frs. royalties on Cancer and Kahane gave me a part of what I paid for the printing of it. Henry gave Osborn 100 frs., gave Reichel 100 frs. on account for a painting he is buying, paid a debt to Edgar, 300 fr. debt to Durrell, bought a shirt and a tie, and when I arrived two days later Henry was eating red beans for lunch, heavy red beans. When I met Betty Ryan at the Dôme I told her about the red beans and ordered Vichy. How we laughed! I never worry about money, but I often have to play desperate tricks, like pawning every pawnable object, borrowing, juggling. And at the blackest moment, something happens, a check comes, a patient from New York pays me, debtors relent.

  I don't know why I cannot feel humanly close to Hélène. At moments we do. When she is at home, quiet and serious, sitting in an armchair covered with a tiger skin, and we talk about our lives. But soon I feel as I did with Jeanne, that we are playing a game. I see the colored balls of our fantasy floating over our heads, I see the non-human eyes, and I do not trust her. People sense the non-human in her, and are afraid of her, as one is of a person who ultimately does not feel for others, and only obeys its own obsessions. Yet she talks about her life in tragic terms, but it does not move me. She does not move me. She seems unreal. A brilliant, multicolored Medusa, capable of destruction. A vampire, one feels, who takes one's substance to nourish herself. Yet her conscious role is maternal, she is generous, imaginative, creative. She really has two faces: one at home, sewing, serious, tragic, the Catholic woman who is afraid of sinning, and the other outside, with mocking eyes, a sardonic mouth, a daring and voluptuous appearance. This aspect freezes people, or amuses them. "Which is my real self?" she asks me. Absolute duality. As there is in me. But perhaps what is frightening is that the different aspects of her personality are like women on a revolving stage, there is a wall between each rotation. If you are enclosed with one, the other does not hear you. Her heart is not there. There is only an actress, bent on seducing you. One could not call out to this Hélène in a moment of distress.

  Her tallness, her statuesque proportions, her larger-than-nature head, strong neck, her green eyes, her powerful voice, give a feeling of strength and invulnerability.

  Henry is all paradoxes. He loves the ordinary, the natural aspects of Paris. He is disillusioned when he travels because nothing is extraordinary as he expected it to be. I tell him his search for the natural, the ordinary, stands in the way of his finding the extraordinary. This he does not understand. One finds the extraordinary in proportion to one's rebellion against the ordinary. It would seem as if Henry fears the extraordinary, dodges it, in order to be forced to caricature the ordinary, or to create the extraordinary. I seek it unashamedly, and I find it Rank, Moricand, Jeanne, Hélène, Carteret, Gonzalo, Fez. Henry enjoys the familiar and fears the unknown: Corfu, Durrell, etc. The extraordinary in life makes him uncomfortable, he does not recognize it, he does not like it until it becomes familiar, human, natural. You cannot have great adventures and your bedroom slippers at the same time. I am at home in the marvelous. Absolutely at home. The unknown, the mysterious, the exotic, the strange, the never-lived-before, the difficult I am uncomfortable and paralyzed in the common. The common is unfamiliar to me. What Henry enjoys are the people who are not picturesque, not striking, the common street, the face of a clock, a homely house, a sloppy café, mediocre people. Faced with the marvelous in life it frightens him. I think now that June was like André Breton's Nadja, only Henry did not accept her. He tormented her for being a mythomane, yet he is a mythomane in writing.

  Gonzalo and I, leaning over the parapet, saw the hoboes asleep under the trees, the Seine undulating.

  I was telling him about Albertine, the Mouse, as I call her, how nothing I could do or say would dispel her fear, her suspicion of my friendliness. When she breaks a dish she laments: "Madame will take it out of my salary." Gonzalo thought she must have been ill-treated in the past.

  Gonzalo talked about rituals. The sumptuous Catholic rituals in Peru. When he is describing this, and the Indian rugs and tapestries, the colors on the textiles and pottery, the rules of courtesy, I feel I am recovering a lost world.

  When Gonzalo raves against the vulgarity of the Western world, I understand. When Gonzalo says we are tainted with self-consciousness, unable any longer to dream, or to enjoy beauty, to achieve communion with nature, and the Peruvian Indian's collective humanism, I understand.

  I try to live out this sense of ritual in my life, by the way I dress, the places I live in, by the symbolism of my gifts, by my power to dream, to move out of realism by exaltation, away from violence, into the unconscious. A sumptuous world of grandeur and hierarchy, of faith and worship, which the Western world has lost. A lost world. Religion as poetry. Artaud attempted to recapture symbolism and ritual, to break with realism in the theatre, but I think he had too much anger. He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?

  Helba took a black cat under her protection. The cat vomited a worm. Helba went into convulsions. I saw her with her face twisted and her eyes protruding. "The worms are inside of me. That is why I am sick. They have eaten into my intestines and the food does not nourish me. Take the cat away." Worms. Fear of death. She does not recognize me.

  At the same moment Osborn haunts Henry's studio. He lies on the couch and sticks his tongue out, and tries to chew the tip of it. Or he stands before the mirror cutting his hair with his left hand and contemplating his unshaved face. Or he comes out with his sex in his hands showing it to Henry and Edgar saying: "It looks quite healthy, doesn't it, it doesn't look like syphilis." And later: "Henry, how would you go from Littlefield, Connecticut, to Boston?"

  He has built a legal case against an imaginary man who has stolen his manuscripts, sold them for a fabulous price to a Hollywood producer. He thinks he was ejected from his job because he drank Per-nod, frequented Montparnasse and had a mistress. He wants Henry to hold his money and deal it out to him in small sums.

  Henry is haunted, uneasy about Osborn. He wants to leave Villa Seurat. He hides. He is afraid to type because Osborn might hear him and insist on coming into the studio. Yet he will not go to Corfu where Durrell invited him. I have to hold the money for all of them. Henry hands it over to me. He does not trust himself. I have to send envelopes with a hundred francs to Osborn by way of other people. Osborn is staying in some squalid hotel.

  Henry looks tired and serious. He wants to eat in restaurants quite far from Villa Seurat.

  I get tired of Edgar's acrobatics. Henry likes mental acrobats. Henry urges me again to talk. I stop as soon as I feel misunderstood. Edgar, like Fraenkel, talks geometrically, mathematically, in abstractions. I do not understand abstractions. I am not ashamed of that.

  What I failed to say to Edgar was: "Self-analysis is destructive. It only generates introspection. It is usually based on a false premise. It is paralyzing. Analysis of you by a professional healer is objective, dynamic. It unifies. Self-analysis dissects and disintegrates. Analysis should only be used by professionals. Self-analysis is anti-creative. It is passive."

  Gonzalo says: "Strange, the effect you have on me. Although you drug me with poetry, you have a dynamic effect on me. I want action." I helped him once to take a firm attitude towards a man who was a politician and who wanted to use Gonzalo's romantic revolutionary spirit. I help him with clairvoyance about people.

  Waiting in the café, I write these words: "On being the womb." And it unleashes a tremendous feminine univer
se. I am completely divorced from man's world of ideas. I swim in nature. On being the womb ... englobing. My pity looks like love, and often is taken for love. All the artists, intellectuals rushing to find their blood rhythm in war and revolution. I go wherever there is life-pulse. Nothing can shatter my individual world, no collective action. No storm on earth. Communism they call it.

  But to me it is the drama, the poem, and rhythm of personal hatreds, desires, lusts, and war, passions, greed. Someday, these same downtrodden workmen will become the tyrants, the same greedy inhuman "bosses."

  My madness is that of perpetual identification with others. As human beings, not as members of races, parties, or classes. People mingle within me. There is a flow between them all, an absence of separateness.

  Carteret and I went to the place where they question madmen when they first are brought in. A psychiatrist does the questioning. A few students, a few friends of the doctors make up the audience.

  They brought him in in a strait-jacket, with legs tied together. His hair, which was very thin at the top, was damp with perspiration. The doctor was smiling at his clear eyes, at the childish mouth, at the puzzled way he looked down upon his crossed arms and his bound legs.

  "Why are you so violent? Why were you afraid of coming here?"

  "You are going to take my strength away, you had everything ready to take my strength away."

  "Why should I want to take your strength away?"

  "Because of the merle blanc [white sparrow], which is born every hundred years. The merle blanc is the friend of the good. And the man with the white tie who warned me of the danger, was of the order of the merle blanc. The white sparrow is now inside of me and the aigles fins [foxy eagles] are envious, the foxy eagles are the friends of evil, and they are against me. They come, six of them in grey suits, and they pursue me. I see them sometimes in a coach, that is when it was a long time ago, in a print I saw; of course today they come in an automobile. The President died today, or else I would not have been brought here."

  "The President did not die today."

  "Not he, perhaps, but then the other, the one who is like him."

  "There is one like him?"

  "Yes, just as there is one who is exactly like me, who thinks everything that I think, it is a girl, it is my betrothed, but I can't find her."

  "Does she know you are here?"

  "Not yet."

  "Who else goes after you?"

  "A monk who is castrated and who sometimes takes the form of a woman."

  "Where do you see this personage?"

  "In the mirror."

  "Do you see anything else in the mirror?"

  "This monk who was castrated and who sometimes takes the form of a woman."

  "You know I don't wish you any wrong, don't you?"

  "Yes, yet I know you had everything ready to take my strength away, like Abélard."

  "Why should I want to take your strength away?"

  "Because I desired my fiancée, this girl who thinks as I do."

  "How often do you see the white sparrow?"

  "It is born only once in a hundred years so you see there are many more aigles fins than there are merles blancs, and so the good is always persecuted and followed by six men dressed in grey in a coach as in the print I saw, or if you prefer, in an automobile as it would be today."

  "How do you recognize the white sparrow?"

  "By my thoughts."

  "You tried to commit suicide did you not?"

  "Yes, because nobody loved me. I was sent to live the life of Musset and as you know he suffered a great deal and nobody loved him, and as you know he drank a great deal because nobody loved him. I was sent to live the life of Musset and explain the prophecy he made in the café before he was hanged."

  "He was hung?"

  "Yes, nobody knows that and I have to save his honor."

  "How can you save his honor?"

  "By explaining the prophecy he made in a café before it was closed which I got from him as I stood in front of the mirror waving a white rag at the sound of the ángelus."

  "The angelus?"

  "I was born at noon when the ángelus was ringing. White is the color of the merle blanc, and the aigles fins think they are superior to him, they think they have all the power, but this power is in me now, and that is why you want to take my strength away."

  "That was why you got so violent when I wanted to bring you here?"

  "No, that time it was just to show off to you because you expected it, you were expecting it so I did it, because I know all that I tell you you think comes out of a detective story, and you know it is true that I have read one hundred thousand novels."

  "Why did you want to die?"

  "I have the blue love, the blue of love, because the woman who was in every way reciprocal to all that I thought did not love me, so I threw myself into the Nile in Egypt. She wanted to know where my strength came from. I have many enemies."

  "Why?"

  "Because when one is white like the white sparrow and the others are black, one has enemies. It is always the same. It is the white sparrow you want to take away from me."

  The doctor turned away from the man in the strait-jacket to his audience: "You see," he said, "nothing that he says makes any sense whatsoever. There is no logic and no continuity. It is a clear case of schizophrenia, with disconnected statements, chaotic and meaningless dissociation of ideas, and an obsession with persecution."

  He watched the man in the strait-jacket, who was laughing softly and who said: "I knew you would think it was a detective story but I knew all this would happen to me and I had seen it in the mirror, I took the warning of danger from the man wearing a white tie, and so all you take away from me you cannot take away because I am living the life of Alfred de Musset, which was full of suffering, and there is a monk in the mirror who is now watching the six men in grey suits who wanted to shoot me."

  The two aides, who were there to see that the madman did not become dangerous, stood beside him. The doctor bade him good-bye and said he could leave the room. The madman got up. The two aides, who knew his feet were bound and that he could not walk without help, looked at him and made no gesture to support him. They let him make two steps by himself on his way out of the room. The doctor turned towards his student audience with an ironic twinkle in his eye, an accomplice look which seemed to say: how intelligent I am, the doctor, and how intelligent my students, how superior to this degenerate.

  The madman took two steps and fell forward. He was permitted to fall. And the doctor sat there with a leer on his mouth, with pride in his lucidity and logic, and he was permitted to smile, and the gods permitted the madman to say deep things, things which a poet could understand, which any poet could have deciphered for the doctor, and everything was permitted, this mockery of a man lost in his unconscious labyrinth, asking for the way, and being treated with contempt.

  After hearing this, Carteret and I walked away from the Palais de Justice (Justice!) along the Seine. Would human beings ever learn the meaning of symbolism? Poets and dreamers and madmen, using a language which was clear, clear, clear. A language necessary to the life below our consciousness.

  We commented on the cruelty of the doctor who thought him self so superior, and on the poetic imagination of the madman, and how meaningful his fantasies were. If symbolism were something to be banished, then why does everyone dream in symbols?

  Jean Carteret.

  His face reminds me of the faces I saw in Fez. The brow, the eyes, almost always beautiful, and the cheeks, chin, mouth, almost totally ruined with pockmarks, the smile ruined with gold teeth. Like faces carved in stone part of which is ruined by weather. Jean's brow, eyes, eyelashes, with a spiritual beauty, illuminated as one imagines Rimbaud's brow and eyes. But the rest of his pock-marked face revealing anxiety, and the smile sorrow.

  He loves zippers on all his pockets, which are full and inexhaustible. He carries books, photographs, notes, magazines, pipes. He lives li
ke a heavily loaded snail. His eyes are innocent, pale blue, yet he attracts and seeks underworld characters, adventurers, circus performers, guides to Paris at night, people from the Fair, sharpshooters, gamblers, prostitutes, pimps. He arrives late for everything. He cannot finish anything, realize or fulfill his wishes. An overcrowded, chaotic life. Every day new explorations, new appetites, new enthusiasms. Everything is interesting. He writes letters he never mails, promises visits he never makes.

  But Gonzalo has initiated me to this world of unkept promises, of great literary productions volatilized in talk night after night in cafés. Gonzalo says: "I will fix your radio. I will show you what I wrote on House of Incest." I have learned not to believe it, not to wait. For I am the kind of dangerous dreamer who executes all his reveries, wishes, words, promises, plans. The wildest and the lightest. A wish for me is not a game: it's a creation. If I lie on my bed and dream of the pointed sea-shell necklace I might sew on my black dress, I have to get up and sew the sea-shells.

  One has to walk very lightly on the waves and vibrations o£ ecstasy to keep the mood of poetry, with eyes half-closed not to see deterioration, ravages, illness, ugliness. This is a state easily achieved by the gurus in Tibet. They can walk barefoot over the snow. Can I not walk without seeing pockmarks and gold teeth. The merle blanc of the poor madman was singing in our ears, for he was right; there are many enemies eager to destroy purity, innocence, or the visionary who sees what they cannot see. And if their vision were faulty? The doctor limited in his vision?

  Carteret falls away, lost in the traffic, waving from his bus, and I am sitting in a café with Gonzalo, who is describing the tortures inflicted upon the communists in Peru, how they were left standing in water until their flesh cracked, the blood coagulated, the legs swelled, and the men went mad with pain.