by Anais Nin
Tropical weather. Bliss. Well-being.
I did not describe well the exaltation which accompanied my talk with Artaud, the overflow of feeling, a transparent openness, those terrific moments of expansiveness, of emotion. Artaud's own intensity so exposed, his eyes so revelatory. But those moments when I feel carried away are so intimate that others may take for love what is a kind of passionate friendship. Too much warmth.
Loving loving loving as the artist can love, the poet in love with the world, with all his senses, adoring all that is alive, courting the whole world with songs, dancing, poetry, music, a huge passion for life, a passion for all its faces, phases, contents, aspects, for man, woman, child, the sun, nerves, pain, the perspiration of nervous agony on Artaud's face. Artaud watches the vessels of the clouds and stammers as he tells his early poems.
The fear of Artaud, the dream I have of lulling and consoling the men I tantalize during the day, loving the creations, the poems, the dreams of men ... loving.
I meet Artaud in a café, and he greets me with a tormented face. "I'm clairvoyant. I see you did not mean anything you said the other day. Right after our talk in the garden, you became aloof, your face impenetrable. You eluded my touch. You took flight."
"But there was no question of a human love ... as soon as I spoke, I felt you had given my words a human interpretation."
"Then what was it a question of?"
"Affinities, friendship, understanding, imaginative ties."
"But we are human beings!"
I forget the order of our phrases. All I knew was that I did not want a physical tie with Artaud. We walked. When he said, "We walk in step. It is heavenly to walk with someone who walks with the same rhythm ... it makes walking euphoric," then I began to feel it all to be unreal. I was no longer within my own body. I had stepped out of myself. I felt and saw Artaud watching me with delight. I saw him looking at my sandals; I saw my light summer dress trembling, ebbing back and forth to every breeze; I saw my bare arm and Artaud's hand on it; and I saw the momentary joy on his face, and felt a terrible pity for the sick, tormented madman, morbid, hypersensitive.
At the Coupole, we kissed, and I invented for him the story that I was a divided being, could not love humanly and imaginatively both at the same time. I expanded the story of my split. "I love the poet in you."
This touched him, and did not hurt his pride. "That is like mine, like me," he said. "Human beings appear to me as spectral, and I doubt and fear life, it all seems unreal to me; I try to enter it, to be a part of it. But you, I thought you were more earthy than I, your glidingness, your vibrancy. I have never seen a woman look so much like a spirit, yet you are warm. Everything about you frightened me, the enormous eyes, exaggerated eyes, impossible eyes, impossibly clear, transparent; there seemed to be no mystery in them, one thought one could look through them, through you immediately, and yet there are endless mysteries under that clarity, behind those naked, fairy-tale eyes..."
I was stirred, and Artaud pleaded: "Whom do you love? I know Allendy loves you, Steele, and many others, but whom do you love?
"Soft, and frail, and treacherous," he said. "People think I am mad. Do you think I am mad? Is that what frightens you?"
I knew at that moment, by his eyes, that he was, and that I loved his madness. I looked at his mouth, with the edges darkened by laudanum, a mouth I did not want to kiss. To be kissed by Artaud was to be drawn towards death, towards insanity; and I knew he wanted to be returned to life by the love of woman, reincarnated, reborn, warmed, but that the unreality of his life would make a human love impossible. Not to hurt him, I had invented the myth of my divided love, spirit and flesh never uniting. He said, "I never thought to find in you my madness."
Artaud sat in the Coupole pouring out poetry, talking of magic, "I am Heliogabalus, the mad Roman emperor," because he becomes everything he writes about. In the taxi he pushed back his hair from a ravaged face. The beauty of the summer day did not touch him. He stood up in the taxi and, stretching out his arms, he pointed to the crowded streets: "The revolution will come soon. All this will be destroyed. The world must be destroyed. It is corrupt, and full of ugliness. It is full of mummies, I tell you. Roman decadence. Death. I wanted a theatre that would be like a shock treatment, galvanize, shock people into feeling."
For the first time it seemed to me that Artaud was living in such a fantasy world that it was for himself that he wanted a violent shock, to feel the reality of it, or the incarnating power of a great passion. But as he stood and shouted, and spat with fury, the crowd stared at him and the taxi driver became nervous. I thought he would forget where we were, on our way to the Gare Saint-Lazare, to my train home, and that he would become violent. I realized that he wanted a revolution, he wanted a catastrophe, a disaster that would put an end to his intolerable life.
***
Henry amalgamated his Self-Portrait [Black Spring] and the dream book. He does a gigantic bulk of writing, but it has to be torn apart and placed, piece by piece, in its right setting. He confuses the critic, the philosopher, the novelist, the confessor, the poet, the reporter, the scientist, and the note-maker. There is always a big task of creative synthesis of his fragments, a struggle for unity. His work is chaotic, diversified, uneven, like a torrent that has to be contained at some point or it inundates, engulfs, drowns him. He appears to yield, is washed over, engulfed by his impressionability, responsiveness, expansiveness. But later he extricates himself. If he is jealous he can become cruel; if he feels secure he becomes human.
He was in a reminiscent mood, recalling his life with June and with his first wife. The music over the radio made him sob. "All literature does not make up to one for the tragedy of life, the struggles. They make literature pale." He was recalling his great concessions to sex, how divided he always was between the sexual hunger for a woman and a hatred of her, of her imperfections, limitations. "The humiliating abdication of one's integrity, the terrible haunting dissatisfaction..."
When Henry writes insane pages, it is the insanity produced by life, and not by the absence of life. The insanity of the surrealists, Breton and transition is in a void; whereas that of Henry is caused by the absurdities, ironies, pains of a surcharged over-full life. His life never ends in a crystallization, but in a fantastic spiral ecstasy, the motions of a top, turning forever.
When I meet Artaud, he stands nobly, proudly, with eyes mad with joy, the eyes of a fanatic, a madman. The triumph in his face, the lightning flash of joy and pride because I have come. The heaviness, the clutchingness, the strange despotism of his gestures. His hands only hover over me, over my shoulders, yet I feel the magnetic weight of them.
I have come dressed in black, red, and steel, like a warrior, to defend myself against possession. His room is bare like a monk's cell. A bed, a desk, a chair. I look at the photographs of his amazing face, an actor's changeful face, bitter, dark, or sometimes radiant with a spiritual ecstasy. He is of the Middle Ages, so intense, so grave. He is Savonarola burning pagan books, burning pleasures. His humor is almost Satanic, no clear joy, just a diabolical mirth. His presence is powerful; he is all tautness and white flames. In his movements there is a setness, an intensity, a fierceness, a fever which breaks out in perspiration over his face.
He shows me his manuscripts, talks about his plans, he talks darkly, he woos me, kneeling before me. I repeat all I have said before. Everything is whirling around us. He rises, his face twisted, set, stony.
"Allendy has told you that I take too much opium ... that sooner or later, you will despise me anyway. I am not made for sensual love. And this has so much importance for women."
"Not for me."
"I didn't want to lose you."
"You won't lose me."
"Drugs are killing me. And I will never be able to make you love me ... to hold you. You are a human being. You want a whole love."
"Gestures mean nothing. I did not want that kind of bond with you, but another, on another plane."
"You are the plumed serpent," he said. "You glide over the earth but your plume stirs the air, the mind. That small detail, of your coming dressed as Mars, that a woman should live thus in symbols, that alone is amazing to me. And your ecstasy, too, is strange and different. It does not come in spurts; it is continuous. You live continuously on one level, you use a certain tone and never depart from it. Your talk is unreal."
He identifies with Heliogabalus, the mad prince. But Artaud is more beautiful, a dolorous, contracted, tragic, and not cynical or perverse human being.
"I love your silences," he said, "they are like mine. You spoke of self-destruction as a holocaust. Then you were dying for a god?"
"For the absolute, one dies if one wants the absolute."
"I am proud and vain," he said.
"All creators are. You cannot create without pride and self-love."
Then he offered to burn everything else for me, to dedicate himself to me. I deserved a holocaust. What would Artaud burn for me? I did not ask. And I knew that, just as Allendy's magic was too white, Artaud's was black, poisonous, dangerous.
"Write to me. Every day of waiting will be torture. Don't torture me. I am terrifically faithful and terribly serious. I dread that you should forget me, abandon me."
Artaud's letter:
I have brought many people, men and women, to see the marvelous painting ["Lot and His Daughter"] but it is the first time I have seen an artistic reaction move a being and make it vibrate like love. Your senses trembled, and I realized that, in you, the body and the spirit are completely welded, if a pure spiritual impression can stir up such a storm in you. But in this incongruous marriage, it is the spirit which leads the body and dominates it, and must end by dominating it completely. I feel in you a world which waits to be born to find its exorcist. You yourself are not aware of this but you are calling for it with all your senses, your feminine senses, which in you are also spirit.
Being what you are, you must understand the great painful joy I feel at having met you, joy and amazement. I find filled, in all ways, my infinite solitude, filled in a way which frightens me. Destiny has granted me more than I ever dreamed of demanding. And like all things given by destiny, all that is inevitable, designed in heaven, it comes without hesitation, spontaneously, so beautiful it terrifies me. To make me believe in miracles, as if miracles could happen in this world; but I do not think that either you or I am quite of this world, and it is this, this too-perfect encounter, which affects me like a sorrow.
My own spirit and life are made up of a series of illuminations and eclipses which play constantly inside of me and, therefore, around me and upon all that I love. For those who love me, I can only be a continuous disappointment. You have already observed that, at times, I have swift intuitions, swift divinations, and, at other times, I am absolutely blind. The simplest truths elude me then, and one has to possess a rare understanding, an unusual subtlety, to accept this mixture of darkness and light when this affects emotions one has a right to expect from me.
Another thing binds us closely: your silences. Your silences are like mine. You are the only one before whom I am not ashamed of my silences. You have a vehement silence: one feels it is surcharged with essences, it is strangely alive, like a trap open upon an abyss from which one might hear the secret murmur of the earth itself. There is no fabricated poetry in what I tell you, you know it well. I want to express these powerful impressions, the real impressions I had. When we stood at the station and I said to you: "We are like two lost souls in infinite space," I had felt this silence, this moving silence speaking to me and it made me want to weep with joy.
You make me confront the best and the worst in myself, but before you, I feel I do not need to be ashamed. You inhabit the same domain as I do, but you can give me all that I lack, you are my complement. It is true that our imagination loves the same images, desires the same forms, the same creations; but physically, organically, you are warmth, whereas I am cold. You are supple, voluptuous, fluid, whereas I am hard like flint, calcined, fossilized. A fatality which is beyond us has thrown us together: you were aware of it, you saw the resemblances, you felt the good we could do to each other.
What I fear most is that you too should be blinded by destiny, that you too might lose contact with all these truths. I am afraid that during one of those periods when half of me is cut off from the other, you may feel such a disappointment and no longer recognize me, and that I may lose you then. Something marvelous has barely begun which might fill an entire life. I divine you with all the sincerity of my soul, all the gravity and depth I am capable of. In eight days my life has been totally transformed. I have a name which my mother gave me when I was four years old and which people call me when they are very close to me: "Nanaqui."
Artaud said:
With you I might return from the abysses in which I have lived. I have struggled to reveal the working of the soul behind life, beyond life, in its deaths. I have only transcribed abortions. I am myself an absolute abyss. I can only imagine my self as being phosphorescent from all its encounters with darkness. I am the man who has felt most deeply the stutterings of the tongue in its relation to thought. I am the one who has best caught its slipperiness, the corners of the lost. I am the one who has reached states one never dares to name, states of the soul of the damned. I have known those abortions of the spirit, the awareness of the failures, the knowledge of the times when the spirit falls into darkness, is lost. These have been the daily bread of my days, my constant obsessional quest for the irretrievable.
Before his eyelids come down, the pupils of the eyes swim upward, and I can see only the whites. The heavy eyelids fall on the white and I wonder where his eyes have gone. I fear that when he opens them again the sockets will be empty like those of Heliogabalus's statue.
To be touched by Artaud means to be poisoned by the poison which is destroying him. With his hands he was imprisoning my dreams, because they were like his. I have a love for the poet who walks inside of my dreams, for his pain and the flame in him, but not for the man. I cannot be physically bound to him.
Artaud and I walked along the Seine, pursued by the grotesque and riotous students of the Quatz Art Ball. The night I met them with Henry, they seemed like clowns, jesters, and we laughed at them. But tonight, around Artaud, they seemed like gargoyles grimacing and mocking us. We walked in a dream, Artaud torturing himself with doubts, questions, talk about God and eternity, wanting my sensual love; and, for the first time, I asked myself if his madness was not really like a Way of the Cross, in which each step, each torment, was described to make one feel guilt; and whether Artaud was desperate because he could not find anyone to share his madness.
Artaud said, "What a divine joy it would be to crucify a being like you, who are so evanescent, so elusive."
We sat in a café and he poured out endless phrases, like the phrases in his books, descriptions of his states, moods, visions.
"When you say 'Nanaqui' it sounds natural."
"It sounds Oriental."
As we walked along the Seine again, all the books and manuscripts we were carrying fell on the pavement and I felt a relief, as if this web of poetry, of the magic of words, would cease to enclose me. I was frightened by his fervor when he said, "Between us, there could be a murder." We were by the parapet and his books fell to the ground as he said this.
He had written: "I have chosen the domain of pain and shadows as others choose the radiance and weight of matter." The beauty and softness of the summer does not touch him. He disregards it, or fights against it. He said, "I have only known painful emotions."
But how little he knows me when he says, "Why do you make an impression of evil, cruelty, of seductivenes
s, trickery, superficiality? Is it an appearance? I hated you at first as one hates the all-powerful temptress, I hated you as one hates evil."
My father and I had agreed to meet at Valescure, but I left ahead of time to have a few days of quiet and meditation.
In the hotel, by the sea, I can add small touches to the portrait of my father. The hotel keeper says, "He is so gay." The hairdresser, "He is very vain. He has his hair tinted not to reveal his grey hair." The manicurist, "He loves beautiful women." He is extravagant, sent a telegram and flowers to greet me, telephones orders, preparations for his coming, a special room, a special bed, no noise. He was delayed by a serious lumbago. But he took the train just the same. "This carcass must be subjugated." He arrived at the station stiff, limping. He would not let me unpack his bag. He suffered in his pride. He immediately orders special fruit, special biscuits, special drinking water. For the garçon to come with the Flytox and exterminate every fly. "A fly can keep me awake." He organizes his surroundings, his day, his care of his health. The doctor is called. He ordains his world, must have everything immediately, at any cost.
We have meals in his room. We talk. He says, "We have constructed our own system of living. We cannot be true to human beings, but to ourselves. We have lived like civilized barbarians because we are primitive, you know, and highly civilized too."
Later: "The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism."
Later still: "You have created yourself, by your own efforts. You developed the blood cells I gave you. I consider that you owe me nothing."