by Anais Nin
When Gonzalo read House of Incest he said several times: "Qué sensual, qué sensual." He responded to the sensations and the images directly. For Henry House of Incest is "esoteric." He responds to the language; he is fascinated as by something very far from him. He likes the images as an artist. But he does not feel them. Gonzalo feels how deeply I am swimming, with gestures he tries to explain from what submarine regions I write. He knows. He senses things intuitively, as June did.
But the adventurer in him is tired, finds life too hard, too bitter, too terrible.
There is in him an anarchist, a naive child who trusts and forgives, a Bohemian who does not care a damn, a fanatic who is ready to kill for Marxism, a drunkard who forgets all his responsibilities at a bar, a religious mystic who falls into a trance at Notre-Dame, an Indian with his secrets from all white men, his melancholy and inertia, a violent Moor, a Catholic nursemaid to Helba, an Indian slave, an Indian rebel. He has a lashing, Voltairian tongue when he is angry, he has sudden miraculous generosities, nobilities, he will give his life for a friend, for the weak, yet his own life is filled with mishaps, and at times great storms of bitter anger which take the form of long tongue-lashing monologues.
The only flaw I find in Proust is his generalization. If only he had written the following as a personal experience: I understood the frustration of love. We imagine that the object of it is a being who is lying before us, enclosed in his body. Alas, it is the extension of this being in all the points of space and time which he will occupy. If we do not possess a contact with such a place, at such a time, we do not possess our love. And it is impossible for us to contact all these various points. If at least they were indicated to us, perhaps we could stretch ourselves towards them. But we fumble and cannot find them. And from this stems jealousy, suspicion, persecution.
If only Proust had spoken for himself, without saying: "lovers, jealousy, all suspicion, all lovers."
We can share all his moods, insights, and experiences because he is a great artist. But they are his. Every human being has a different way of achieving closeness, and of experiencing separation. Henry's is purely physical. It was centered on June's sexual activities, because his own relation to women is usually only sexual. His jealousy was centered on proofs. He only believed facts. Separations for Henry were caused by simple infidelities. But in Proust, Henry's opposite, separations were caused by his own intimate malady of doubt.
If only he had always said: "the cheek of Albertine," or "the color of the Verdurin's sunset," but he would always start with an individual experience and from it generalize. Every jealousy, every fear, is different. In Proust himself there was an activity which constantly created unreality: one was hyperanalysis, the other self-doubt. So he spins the unreality from which he suffers. He dissolves life.
I want to describe the physical image just long enough to preserve it, but not long enough to reach dissolution.
Gonzalo touches the realms of creation, philosophy, psychology with occasional intuitions. There are moments when he understands everything. But he does not live there, he does not sleep, eat and walk there, he does not inhabit them continually. He gets on his horse and enters the forest. He quarrels, drinks, talks with workmen at bistros, fights for his ideals, can spend whole evenings with ignorant barroom white trash, just as Henry does. I cannot do this. I cannot spend a day with empty friends without a sense of waste. I can't give myself to ordinary people. Henry says: "But I don't give myself. That is why I can seem so human—just because I am not."
But I have scruples. I feel guilty for the part of myself which I cannot share with just anyone. I feel guilty because being with them does not make me happy, but sadder. Humanly I do not get pleasure or comfort as Henry and Gonzalo do from ordinary exchange. Small talk at the bar, at cafés. I have no criticism. I have regrets, I would like to be near and like everyone. Woman is more alone than man. She cannot find the "eternal moments" in art as man does, as Proust did, even if she is an artist.
Reading Modernes by Seurat, I take note of all he has to say about sensations. All he says about modern man's quest of "sensation" applies to me, except the boredom which follows upon their fulfillment, from exhaustion. I have never known ennui. Perhaps because of the more meaningful quality of my sensations. They do not wither or die in me. I do not suffer from hangovers. My sensibility, response, vibration, exultancy, enthusiasm are the same or deeper than when I first began to live. Ennui, which haunts modern man, is unknown to me. I only pray at times to feel less, to find peace and repose.
I awoke this morning with a song in my head, a poem of Éluard sung like a bird's song, the mechanical bird of paradise which was wound up by the handle of a phonograph. That which dies in modern man never dies in me, because my senses are alive, married to my feelings and to meaning, because my earth has roots in the infinite. It is the emptiness of their sensations which causes ennui.
I live so intensely for the other, I am so abnormally aware of others' feelings that I have fallen into the habit of lying about what I enjoy. I never say, for instance: "I am seeing Hélène tonight because I enjoy seeing her, because we have such a mad, fantastic way of talking together." I say: "Hélène wants to see me tonight, she is so much alone and she gets depressed." As if I were merely submitting to her need. This is meant at times not to hurt anyone by seeming to enjoy anything more than their presence, it is meant to convey: all my pleasures are here, with you. The rest is duty. But there is a deeper reason for all this. I live so much to give pleasure to others that after a while I am confused myself as to whether I see Hélène for her sake or for my own pleasure. The truth is that there is such a vast sum of things I do not do for myself that it has become the dominant impulse. True identification with others and the desire to give is erroneously confused with masochism in psychology. Psychologists say we give out of guilt, out of atonement, we give to suffer. But no account is taken of the divine pleasure which attends the giving and makes it a natural function of the pleasure-loving. I am far from Catholic hypocrisies, but I am returning to religion. Gonzalo last night was talking about Catholicism and the sensual life. He said: "You're a true Catholic. You love sinning, and confessing, and obtaining absolution, and having regrets and then sinning again."
Today I have to console Gonzalo for his great sorrow at hearing that his own elder brother in Peru runs a "fascist" newspaper and is considered the valet de plume of capitalism.
"The house in which she lives," says the mystical German writer, "is for the orderly soul, which does not live on blindly before her, but is ever, out of her passing experience building and adorning the parts of the many roomed abode for herself, only an expansion of the body; as the body, according to the philosophy of Swedenborg, is but an expansion of the soul. For such an orderly soul, as she lives onward, all sorts of delicate affinities establish themselves, between her and the doors and passageways, the lights and the shadows, of her outward abode, until she sees incorporated into it—till as last, in the entire expressiveness of what is outward, there is, for her, to speak properly, no longer any distinction between outward and inward, at all; and the light which creeps at a particular hour on a particular picture or space upon the wall, the scent of a flower in the air at a particular window becomes for her, not so much apprehended objects, as themselves powers of apprehension, and doorways to things beyond—seeds or rudiments of new faculties, by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends a matter lying beyond her actually attained capacity of sense and spirit."
***
Watching the fish swim in the turquoise waters of the aquarium I experienced a suffocation. I had watched so intently, I had been so absorbed by their breathing, I had forgotten to breathe for myself. I had been so breathlessly attentive to their breathing, to imagine what it felt to breathe through one's flanks, through one's own groin, to breathe through a slit behind one's ear, to breathe through a slit on each side of one's neck, through an opening in one's ribs, to breathe with a wing of flesh open, to brea
the with a part of the flesh curling up like the antennae of a sea anemone, to breathe with arms, trunks, legs, that I had forgotten to breathe for myself as the woman who stood there watching the aquarium. I had passed into the water, into the body of the fish. I was the fish breathing with my belly, and I discovered the multitude of cells inside of me which breathed in light, and sound, and color, when I was asleep. I felt all the brusqueries of climate changes, all the incisions of colder airs, of hotter currents, of changes of level, of rarefied waters, of waters surcharged with air bulbs; and in passing into the fish I forgot to breathe as a woman. This happened to me so many times when I was watching the sorrows of others, their crumbling lives, the debris of their creations. I forgot to breathe as a woman, and for myself. I began to live the life of others, to gather the ashen fragments together, to weep at their despair, to share their rebellion, to enter into their struggle and fatigue, and I felt at times in the dark, the same suffocation of my forgotten self watching the aquarium. It is part of the Zen religion, to become what you are meditating upon, a tree, a flower, a human being in trouble.
The kiss in the taxi is the kiss which remains in the memory as perpetually unfinished and to be sought out again, for as the taxi moves it gives to the moment that physical proof of insecurity and ephemeralness of adventure, over swift, arousing resonances which cease at the first stop, the taste upon one's lips is a quick, deep lancination arrested by the sudden stop of a machine. The interference of the traffic is the recall to reality. Eyes out of the crowd rummage into the taxi to catch that flash of vertigo, that open mouth, the drunken look in the eyes. The street lights are the searchlights, opening crude ways into the smoky clouds of cigarette smoke, breath and perfume. And now the taxi is rolling again, the kiss is broken by fear of its termination. When the taxi stops, the adventure is broken. One steps on the pavement with a sound of a body falling from heaven. One pays with the sound of a harlot bartering. One opens one's foggy eyes to look for one's house, wishing an earthquake had devoured it and with it all sense of time. The adventure continues in the head, in the body. It evaporates, for it happened in mid-air, in unknown places, while in motion, there is no trace of the kiss, no surroundings to retain the flavor of it. It is uncannily removed from daily life. Perhaps it never happened. We were embarked and disembarked between midnight and dawn and perhaps we were asleep, as others were. Until the next taxi ride no kiss will have that flavor of life and time slipping by, uncapturable, unseizable. The thrust it made into us is unique, impossible to repeat. The taxi was moving towards an end, the kiss had no tomorrow, left only a wound of regret and the sound of a closed door.
I will write someday a long Promenade en Taxi describing all that takes place in a taxi. The reveries in anticipation of what is about to happen, the preparations, rehearsals to act, and then the retrospective analysis and reveries on what has happened, the moods of relief at escape, detachment, the exaltation and ecstasies relived, noted. The shift between levels of life, like a change of speed, gear shifts, now slow, now fast, now warm, now cold, now dissolved into others, now alone, now a thousand persons in one, now one. Such states cannot be achieved in subway or bus. Such isolation of the virus of life under a microscope.
One night I sat in Henry's studio pasting press notices of Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring. Henry was jubilating over them. It was a tangible proof of his progress as a writer, his communication with the world, recognition.
***
Henry is not in harmony with himself. He is full of confusion and paradoxes, and the conflict in him is so continuous that he projects it on all those around him. Each day he destroys what he has said the day before. He attacks the very qualities he praised the day before.
If a person is tranquil, he goads them to aggressivity. If they are aggressive, he squelches them. He is a sea of discord and contradictions.
He attacks my lack of interest in slang. Well, it is not my language. It would be phony for me to use it. I have found my own language.
Esther Harding's comments, in her book, The Way of All Women, apply to him:
Certain men seem to be dependent, almost like women, on the change in their inner feelings. The rational Logos functions have been relegated to the background, while the feminine part of the psyche, which is usually concealed, comes to the fore and forces their changing moods into undue prominence. This change results from a domination by the anima, the feminine spirit in man, which, however, should not rule the conscious but the unconscious. Consequently the domination by the feminine spirit has a peculiarly unpleasant quality. For such men are not really ruled by changes in the non-personal Eros, but by moods and whims which have as their chief characteristic that they are exceedingly personal. Domination by the anima produces a curious womanish quality, a dependence on personal likes and dislikes, on moods and feelings to the exclusion of all capacity to react with adequate feelings in accordance with any judgment of fact or the validity of an impersonal truth. This situation is a travesty of the woman's submission to her inner law of change.
Gonzalo's language is the key to his nature. His favorite words are: "Atmosphere," he liked or disliked the atmosphere (a word or feeling Henry could never use, because he is not sensitive to atmosphere, a more subtle climate). "It has no quality," says Gonzalo. "No tiene calidad." Another word Henry never uses. He does not make such distinctions. Gonzalo says it even of a body, a body without quality. "Calidad espiritual." Prodigious. "Prodigioso." He uses extremes of enthusiasm. "Que prodigio!" He has a sense of wonder, of the fabulous, of the miraculous. He often uses the words: "unreal, vital, mystical."
Gonzalo too is full of contradictions and confusions. He worships the old, he hates science, the machine, yet he embraces communism. He is religious, and he loves beauty, yet he goes to inaugurations, political meetings, he can listen to hackneyed speeches, sentimental speeches, he can go to mass meetings, walk the streets with workmen who will one day destroy all art, all aesthetics. He hates realism, but he makes naturalistic drawings of bums, prostitutes, drunks, hoboes. He loves beauty but he draws only deformities, cripples, etc. He loves poetry, and magic, but he does not believe a human being can be affected by a sorrow, a loss, a defeat, become blind or deaf for emotional traumatic reasons. He is aware of time passing; he can say it is five o'clock without looking at a dock, like all men who lived in nature, but he cannot arrive on time. He knows scientific statistics and he lives in chaos. He worships delicacy and quality yet he destroys everything around him. He lacks equilibrium, psychic or physical. He cannot draw a straight line (I can draw a perfect circle without a compass). He cannot frame a picture straight, he cannot cut a cardboard without mangling it. He cannot organize his day: he can make several trips through the city caused by lack of planning.
Henry never suffers from "unreal" anxieties. Only from realities. His greatest neurosis is the fear of being left without food, so that to calm his anxiety I have to keep his closet stocked with provisions for a week ahead. He never fears the loss of a loved one, death, solitude, illness.
Esther Harding:
The moon-like character of the woman's nature appears to men to be dependent only on her whims. If she changes her mind, it never occurs to him that she changes it because of changed conditions within her own psyche, as little under her control perhaps as a change in the weather.... Woman's nature is cyclic ... apart from her personal or egoistic desires. The nature of woman is non-personal and has nothing to do with her own wishes, it is something inherent in her as feminine being and must not be regarded merely as something personal. The life force ebbs and flows in her actual experience, not only in nightly and daily rhythm as it does for man, but also in moon cycles, quarter phases, half phases, full moon, decline, and so round to dark moon. These two changes together produce a rhythm which is like the moon's changes, and also like the tides whose larger monthly cycle works itself out concurrently with the diurnal changes, sometimes increasing the swing of the tides and at others working against the t
idal movements, the whole producing a complex rhythm hard to understand.
Neurosis, sickness, the malady consists in remaining fixed in a trend of thoughts which is destructive, a wallowing in all the negative, frustrating aspects of one's life. For example, dwelling on what one cannot obtain, on one's defeats, on a desire for unlimited power.
What is this malady which makes me dwell on the people who did not understand House of Incest rather than on Durrell's glowing letters? Meditating on my failures rather than my triumphs, joys, possessions, pleasures. Is it destruction which I do not carry out in life which expresses itself in self-destruction? In life I never destroy, I do not criticize, attack, punish, hurt others. Then this source of energy installs itself inside of my breast like some gnawing animal I am trying to keep locked inside and who tears at me. Would it not be better to free it, as Henry has freed his demons, and let it cause its ravages, to rebel as Henry does, to destroy the past, to hate, to spit on old fidelities, to plunder, to kill parents with words? How to liberate this demon of destruction I carry in my breast because I refuse to let it do others harm? It eats into me when I cease being active or living at a feverish rhythm. Solitude is forbidden me. Would creation feed the monster? Must I write with my demons?
Dreams, dreams. I arrive in a dilapidated taxi because I knew nobody else would take such a taxi. The floor of the taxi was so worn the street showed through the cracks. I could have counted the cobblestones. I wondered whether in the end I would fall through and be left sitting in the middle of the street like a newborn baby fallen out of a crib, or an egg from a hen. And there would be the street, suddenly, without time to have prepared my self for adventure. I was a believer in preparation. I liked to sit in a taxi and watch myself in the little mirror in front. I would talk to myself: 1 would say I need greatly to have heavy objects put on myself, on my head and feet, something like lead chains and boots. That way I would not leave the earth so easily. It is amazing with what facility I outdistance things, with what ease I float away, and soar away, and am carried thousands of miles from the spot where I stand, in such a way that I assure you I don't hear what is being said to me, I do not see the person who is there, and I am not aware of myself any more. I feel so light, so light at times, vaporous, like steam on a window which can be erased with a careless finger. Put a lot of heavy things on me so that I will stay on earth. Put warm blankets on me because heat attracts me and makes me want to stay where I am. Turn on a strong warm voice. A strong voice which comes from the stomach also makes me want to stay on earth. As a matter of fact, there are many things which might detain me, hold me down, like the smell of coffee in the morning and a mauve glass bottle with a neck like a man with a goiter, and the moment in the taxi when I am going somewhere and I have time to imagine what this somewhere will be like, time to invent it, time to prepare myself for it. I was going to say this to him, with a strange face in which the features do not seem to belong together, a face where the eyes seem to spark away from each other and the radiance of the cheeks depart in many directions, like a broken halo, and the smile falls apart. I made this face in the mirror, just like the face, I thought, you see sometimes on people when they are about to go insane. It is all unrelated. The eyes are not connected to the meaning of the phrase which is spoken, and neither does the expression conform to the contents of the phrase. There is a kind of panic through it all, they are all wavering as if in a panic, and each is saying a different thing. The eyes do not reflect the mood of the moment, but that blanketlike past hovering behind the present eternally, like the traces of an ancient disease, and the voice has in it still the terror of many years ago and not the courage of today. It is all confused, while the woman is saying with today's mood: I will say to him I happened to come here because when the bottom of the taxi fell out I found myself in front of your house. I would like life to be always as casual as that. There would never be any engagements. I dropped in here like a package left at the con-signe. Will you give me a receipt please, give me a receipt. I have no confidence, you see, I like to hear from people what they think of me, how I look to them, even what I have said to them. You would have to write on the receipt at this hour there came a woman who looked exotic and talked with a foreign accent. I don't mean that she was born elsewhere, in another country, but that she has the intonation of never having been born at all to our language, to the language of other women. I received from her very grave words said in a bantering tone, a bantering uttered with a sadness I cannot understand. It was all very foreign because she made one feel so. She herself must have enjoyed feeling not at home. She liked to have the illusion of the uncommon, the never-lived-before. I really think she believed it. Now this receipt will prove to me that at five o'clock I was in your house and we did exchange words which you pretended not to have heard before, this receipt would be a great comfort to me. I will fold it and wear it against my breast. It is like a certainty. I would like also when you love me you should note it all down. I feel that from the very beginning life played a terrible conjurer's trick on me. I lost faith in it. It seems to me that every moment now it is playing tricks on me. So that when I hear love I am not sure it is love, and when I hear gaiety I am not sure it is gaiety, and when I have eaten and loved and I am all warm from wine, I am not sure it is either love or food or wine, but a strange trick being played on me, an illusion, slippery and baffling and malicious, and a magician hangs behind me watching the ecstasy I feel at the things which happen so that I know deep down it is all fluid and escaping and may vanish at any moment. Don't forget to write me a letter and tell me I was here, and I saw you, and loved you, and ate with you. It is all so evanescent and I love it so much, I love it as you love the change in the days. I would prefer to move away where I could not sense the movements of life passing, somewhere in space and distance where I might divine that ultimately it is I who will abandon life and separate myself from it, not life leaving me, and it will be like the old taxi that was falling apart and dropped its contents like an egg, and maybe this egg is a book, and not me, and I am safe behind paper and ink and words and stories and only counting cobblestones, not having arrived anywhere yet because of the painstaking preparations involved, for you see in the mirror I am practicing a certain expression and when I arrive it is generally not needed. For the person is another from the one I invented, and I have to adapt my soul anew.