by Anais Nin
When I ascend into illusion Gonzalo calls it a negative solution. What irony! How much I have created out of the terror and tragedy of life.
One day, when I returned to the houseboat, I had left on my desk a page from my diary written long ago, but which still seemed to apply today.
This diary is my drug and my vice. This is the moment when I take up the mysterious pipe and indulge in reflections. Instead of writing a book I lie back and I dream and talk to myself. A drug. I turn away from a brutal reality into the refracted. The driving, impelling fever which keeps me tense and wide awake during the day is dissolved in abandon, in improvisations, in contemplation. I must relive my life each day in the dream. The dream is my only life. I see in the echoes and reverberations the transfigurations which alone keep wonder pure. Otherwise all magic is lost, and I awake to touch my prison bars. Otherwise the homeliness, the deformities, the limitations, gnaw into every gesture like rust. This is my diary and my drug. Covering all things with the utter fluidity of smoke, transforming as the night does, all matter must be fused this way through the lens of my vice, or the rust of living will slow down my rhythm to a sob.
Gonzalo read this and wrote the following and left it on my typewriter:
You refuse to put the blame where it belongs, you prefer to draw a veil of fantasy, beauty and forgiveness on an unbearable reality. Anaïs, as human being, is vital and constructive, to care for others have been the words on her escutcheon. But Anaïs the artist flies from the world and seeks the transmutations which might make reality bearable. This paradox between the two Anaïses is caused by the present social system, plutocratic bourgeoisies, exploitive and infamous. I prophetize that one day, there will come a day when Anaïs will see that these prison bars are precisely made of dreams, that she is imprisoned in a prison of dream. And her jailers will keep her there, feeding her on fantasy which will prevent her from turning into a rebel.
Everybody who could had left during the week of panic. The trapped ones, who could not move because they had no money, were glad to see me staying on. Fred, Moricand. Moricand was copying notes on mythology in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Henry is talking about going to America.
Durrell will publish Winter of Artifice in February.
In House of Incest I wrote about June: "She would tolerate no bars of light on open books." This is true of Gonzalo. He became so embittered, so violent about the books which keep me in a prison of dreams, so convinced that they were preventing me from entering the struggle for a new world, that one day, in exasperation, I said: "Very well, we'll burn them all."
Gonzalo took me seriously, and started a bonfire on the quay, where people burned trash from the houseboats. I began by selecting the books I did not care about. But Gonzalo became fanatical, like an Inquisitor. He added to the pile. It seemed like a barbaric ritual, burn the books which taught me to dream. Gonzalo's eyes were burning with a fierce pride. The greatest sacrifice I could offer to his faith: if I stopped dreaming and being merely the nurse to the wounded, I could help to transform the world. His wild faith impressed me. It was like the ritual of San Juan, in Spain. Every year they made a huge bonfire of the contents of their attics, as if to get rid of the past in order to live in the present.
The books burned slowly. The last to be added to the pile were my favorites. There were so many books, and it took so long, that Gonzalo lost patience, and walked away.
When he had gone, it was dark. I rescued the books which had not caught fire. Those were the books of the great unrealists, Strindberg"s Inferno, Carlo Suarès' La Procession Enchaînée, books on surrealism, Rank's Art and Artist, Artaud's L'Art et la Mort, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Giraudoux!
Jean Carteret is in Lapland, working like a farmer. He lives in a wooden house. When he developed a toothache, the Laplanders all gathered around him, made him drunk, and pulled the tooth out. He witnessed the throwing of the blessed cross into the frozen river and the Laplanders plunging into icy waters to retrieve it, to gain privileges in heaven.
And I let Gonzalo burn my books, as a symbol of giving up my opium! The individually created world.
Meanwhile the news is tragic again. Gonzalo came the other evening, sick with the horror of having had to expose and judge a traitor. He described the scene. A South American who had worked for the Marxist revolution and then betrayed it. Gonzalo had to question him, break him down, extort his real name and finally confront him with the proofs of his treachery. When the man broke down and sobbed and groaned, this is what he said: "I thought the revolution was going to take place immediately. I was full of faith. I endured so many days in jail, so much anxiety, the suffering of my family, and all this waiting, my exaltation died ... I needed money..."
Gonzalo's humanity made him feel pity for the man. Condemning him was the hardest thing he had ever had to do. He could not sleep, thinking of him. "I would rather have been shot in his place." He vomited, he was physically ill at the realities of politics.
***
Henry says he has some accounts to settle with America, and that the time has come for this. He has been withdrawing from external life, condemning many of his activities, what I once described as the vice of constant motion. He dreams of Tibet. He says in four years he will retire to Tibet and become a monk.
Henry and I are traveling inversely. I am entering a world of action and violence which Henry abandoned long ago.
Gonzalo condemns my artist's power of staying alive in a cell within a cell within a cell which protects creation from universal destruction, but he never condemned those who take alcohol and drink as inferior forms of escape from reality. He needed drugs to rise into the infinite, above pain. Henry may go towards spiritual worlds, but I am becoming more and more incarnated to live my life fully on earth, as a woman, incarnated by love, in the present. Human life on earth.
Remember it is a dreamer who is traveling in the Métro next to an old woman covered with eczema, who is walking up a muddy hill to a public hospital, who is handing Helba the bedpan, changing the cotton, listening to her detailed recital of the operation. Helba does not try to disguise anything. She exhibits all her pains and sores. Her face is yellow and her hair stringy. Next to her lies a woman of skeletonic thinness, at first I thought she was old, but then I realized she was a young woman, prematurely aged by illness. She was sitting up, and she had made up her face, combed her hair, and tied it with a ribbon. Helba told me she was a prostitute, and that she was dying of syphilis. I looked at her with an admiration I did not have for Helba. To meet death, this young woman powdered and painted her face, wore a ribbon, and I admired her effort to confront reality with a touching effort at defeating its ugliness.
How long will I hold the secret drug which does not destroy me, which permits me to hold on to the ecstasies, to turn away from Helba, who makes everything uglier?
I felt it coming while I walked. It always happened when I looked at the monstrous aspects of life. It was a strange emotion, like drunkenness. It caught me in the middle of the street like a tremendous wave, and right then and there a numbness passed through my veins, the numbness of the marvelous. I knew it by the current power of it, the manner in which it seemed to lift my body, the air which seemed to pass under my feet, I knew it by the force of it, its delicacy, by its effect on my eyesight, a kind of blindness, blurredness. The street became suddenly illuminated. An uncapturable mood passing, which I could not retain or fix forever. A vision, a state, a sleep, which the next moment would be lost. It was as if I had learned to fly over the street, and was permitted to do so for a number of hours, and then, without cause, the obstacles I had transcended suddenly crystallized again and arrested me. Collision. With this drunkenness which made every object, every color, every voice, every passer-by, every incident, every caress extraordinary, marvelous, there was also a fear, a fear that it would not be sustained or continuous. It was a state of grace, only I could not discover what made me fall away from it. Perhaps if this state cont
inued, this state of joy, this joy which enveloped the body and raised me into musical spheres, this joy would make me breathless and ultimately kill me, from excess of pleasure.
The danger lies in flying low, in awakening. There are days I feel the descent, from a sphere where motion and flow are never interrupted, to one where gestures are broken.
Here everyone seems to be living behind prison bars. The air is charged with dust. People aspire to reach the planets, when the world about them becomes intolerable, but it is an unnecessary voyage. There is a certain way of breathing, of walking, of seeing, which transports the being into space. In this space the same spectacle of the street exists, but it undergoes a transformation. The outer aspect, the sores, the cancers, miseries, poisons appear on the crust only. And what dazzles the eye and blinds one to them is the extraordinary brilliance of the games people are playing in space, beyond themselves. Le jeu intérieur. They were able to play because they believed the cruelty and horror were intermittent, would pass. They did not see any impasse. In the infinite there is no impasse.
There are various forms and states of ecstasy. Some are musical, one is possessed by sound, as if one lived inside of a vast bell. There are white ecstasies caused by beautiful objects, paintings. There is ecstasy achieved by immobility, others born of excess of feeling.
I know the secret. I have retained the sense of wonder of the child. I cannot wake up. When I cook I do not expect to get burned. I am surprised when I am burned. When I go out I do not expect rain. I dress gaily and I am caught unaware by the rain.
We say it was God's punishment when lightning struck the Edison monument, which attempted an eternal flame. What do we say when a train is wrecked which was full of monks returning from a pious visit to Our Lady of Lourdes of the Miracles?
There is a whorehouse for the blind, and the prostitutes are blind too. Must write a story about that.
There are limitations to Durrell's understanding of my work. He believes in objectivity, which anyone who has gone deeply into study of motivations cannot possibly believe in. He believes in respecting forms already established for the novel. I believe in a form which is constantly mutating.
Moricand says he identifies me with the myth of Arethusa. Arethusa, unable to reach for an impossible fulfillment in love, turned into a fountain, nourished others with her tears. This made me laugh. A rather ridiculous personage, Anaïs, as ridiculous as Don Quixote. Moricand says the fountain is the diary.
Jean writes from Lapland:
The reindeer is not absolutely silent, but he won't eat anything touched by man's hand. The Laplander must wear gloves. Later we're pushing on behind the fjords of the Arctic Ocean, to Utsjoki. We may meet wolves, there are a lot of them and they love reindeer and men when they get hungry. Having no revolver I will have to push them away as the postman does, by throwing behind the sled lighted matchboxes.
[January, 1939]
At midnight on New Year's Eve the most terrific sadness at the state of the world.
A mute blank pain.
I find a little door open, tiny, on the infinite. I will write another book, about the houseboat. Helba in her rags, sewing, taking buttons out of a box marked OVARIAN SUPPOSITORIES. Albertine, the mousy maid, and her abortion in the little cabin. The foetus I had to throw away into the river. Her valise with a child's reader in it. My father's shipwreck. Postman afraid to walk up the pas-serelle to the houseboat. On the quays the man with the wooden leg stamping on a fallen five-franc piece someone else wanted to pick up. High tide. So many stories to write. Only in creation can one fashion a world without failures, death, war.
Proofreading Capricorn with Henry. Transported by the writing in it.
Henry writes: "I must either go home immediately and write a book or begin an absolutely new life. As I cannot begin an absolutely new life it will have to be a book."
A book which will begin: "I am behind the bar of a prison. I am a prisoner. Always looking at a free life I wanted and could not have."
But of course, I had the dream, this blessed drug which is given to all prisoners of distinction. Only dreams did not calm my hunger because my dreams did not lead me away from life but towards it, always guiding me towards realization, so that I always collided with a wall: I wanted to live out my dream. It was not enough to be illuminated. I always awakened to the presence of the barred window. I had a gift for freeing others and not myself, because I took on the responsibility of setting them free.
Because of the million webs of protection I threw out, so that Henry could write, Gonzalo could propagandize, Helba could fight for health, send money to her mother, so that Joaquin could give his concerts, Gonzalo get eyeglasses for his failing eyesight, Henry go to London, Lantelme not worry about what will happen to his wife, Moricand eat, for all these reasons I am trapped as no one was ever trapped. I cannot escape from my vulnerability and my compassion. I made a prison out of devotions, fraternities, indebtedness, loyalties. Henry did not free me. Gonzalo awaits the revolution as a solution to everything.
What is this prison? The difference, the violent contrast between what I dream, wish, and the reality which diminishes, shrinks, interrupts, shrivels all things.
E. Graham Howe:
So as we wait for the impossible, it Is not surprising we sometimes feel that life is not worth living.... The law of reality keeps us balanced and holds our omnipotence in check. We have a ladder ascending into Heaven and another descending into Hell, and the one which is ascending into Heaven is tangential on the plus side of this ascending scale. If we keep the rhythm of life we have our ups and downs as travelers do. But if we want all the ups and none of the downs, we prefer to go up the ladder to Heaven, where there is to be no frustration or resistance and no experience of the negative at all. In this way many people succeed in living a life which is almost entirely one of fantasy. But if they do, the price they pay on the balance is that they are excluded from a life of reality. No matter how they may seek to avoid it, Hell will be pursuing them all the time, if they must have their Heaven of As You Like It.... The expression which is known as depression can be more clearly understood as coming to those who are not willing to be depressed, i.e.: to fall down according to the falling rhythm, or to let go when the time has come to lose. Depression is characteristically associated with over-conscientiousness, and so it is particularly liable to befall virtuous people. This is because they feel it is their moral duty to hang on to all good things, fixing them forever against the moving law of time.... Fantasy I would define as imagination used as a means of flight from reality ... as distinct from the make-believe of the creative imagination (which is towards life). The make-believe of fantasy is away from it.
Gonzalo said: "The Indian is not a mystic. The Indian is a pantheist The earth is his mother. He has only one word for both. When an Indian dies they put real food in his tomb, and they keep feeding him. At night, in the immense solitude of the mountains I used to come upon one of their cemeteries. And there they were, by the light of torches, eating a banquet right over the tombs, and practicing orgies to share these real pleasures with the dead. When bodies are not placed in coffins a combustion takes place, small explosions of blue flames. The sulphur burns. These small lights seen at night, weird and frightening, like witchcraft, led the Indians to believe it is the soul departing from the body."
We are all in deep despair over the tragic fate of Spain. Barcelona about to fall into the hands of the fascists. Persecution of the left-wingers in France. Gonzalo wondering where he will go.
My father is selling his furniture and his marvelous collection of books on music to go back to Cuba, to the refuge of his cousin's home, the place he had tried to escape from for thirty years. Back to his starting point.
Meanwhile Joaquin is giving a concert in Havana before sailing for America.
Thorvald is all alone in Bogotá, separated from his wife and children.
Meanwhile I am metamorphosed into a sponge, absorbing all the tea
rs of the world, accumulating sorrows, unable to erase anything. An ocean of sensations, enough to quench the thirst of several human beings.
In the houseboat story there will be a phantom lover, dreamed, not seen, who comes every night out of the river with a noise of chains and splash of waves, when the candles are lit and the incense burning, and who is gone when she awakens.
In 1938, in the diary, I wrote about mirrors and metamorphoses, and found similar descriptions in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In this book they are called "bardo" states, leading to rebirth, second birth, but the atmosphere, images, visions, hallucinations are the same. Also affinities with my labyrinth story:* "When I was eleven years old I walked into the labyrinth of the diary," etc., in which I annihilated sense of time and reappear at the end of the labyrinth the same little girl.
All this exists then, metaphysically, whereas the attacks on my writing dealing with my subjectivity, and writing things which could not have meaning for anyone, from Durrell, Henry, made me feel at times that I had carried my fantasy so far that it was inexplicable to others. Today I recognize their metaphysical authenticity. Writing like House of Incest, and all the fantasies for which I will not be loved, contain the purest essence of my meaning. It comes from the distillation of my experience, and are descriptions of states which the Tibetans understood.
I have been humanly the least lonely of women, live surrounded by family, friends, all those I love, but there is a world into which I go alone, a Tibetan desert.