The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  “Didn’t you often wish to be a man?” asked the Voice.

  “Yes, often. I envied my father. When he told me about his adventures—and he always gave me the fullest details—I used to feel what he felt as he talked about women. I was aroused by his stories. I used to envy him his enjoyment of woman. I felt being born a woman was a curse. I could take a woman, but not the same way… I didn’t feel I could possess her. Very often I had dreams in which I was a man. If only you would come to my concert!”

  “Why?”

  “Because you alone make me feel I am a woman. I feel that I get confused, lost, that somehow or other I butt my head against obstacles, blunder, but that you can take all this and direct it, transform it; that you lead me out of this great disorder. I fall into fears. Will you come? I will feel that you are the director, not I—you conducting me. Mischa is playing a solo—he wants you to come too.”

  * * *

  Lilith came to Djuna’s room, shed the long, white cape, and sat pulling the petals of her flower open. She could not bear buds. She would take the closed flowers and open them completely, like the flowers Djuna had seen floating dead on the river.

  Lilith filled her room with perfume, turned around it several times as if it were too small for her.

  “Come with me to the concert.”

  “I am too tired.”

  “You have a secret. You’re expecting some one.”

  “No, Lilith. But it’s true, I have a secret. I have an opium. It’s the dream. I go to bed thinking: will I dream to-night? I await the dream with the same impatience as the lover.”

  “Hans is not coming?”

  “Not to-night.”

  “Come to the concert.”

  “Not to-night.”

  “You mean the dream, the dream means so much to you? It isn’t that you love me less?”

  “No, Lilith.”

  Djuna locked her door: Will I dream to-night? Turned out the light. What will I dream to-night?

  Awareness hurts. Knowingness hurts. Ideas hurt. Lucidity hurts. Relationships hurt. Life hurts. But to flow, to drift, to live as nature, does not hurt. Her eyes were closing. She was drifting, drifting. Drunkenness. It was not the Hotel Chaotica which had many rooms, but she, Djuna, when she lay on her bed, folding them all together, the layers, and all the things that she was not yet.

  When she entered the dream she stepped on a stage. The lights cast on it changed hue and intensity like stage lights. The violent scenes happened in the spotlight and were enveloped by a thick curtain of blackness. The scenes were cut, interrupted, cut out in sharp relief, or broken with entr’actes. The mise en scène was stylized, and only what had meaning was represented. And very often she was at once the victim and the observer. She was on the stage and at the same time sitting before the stage and watching. She was at times aware that it was only a spectacle, and at other times engulfed by the images, so that she was one with them, and then one with the nightmare.

  When she sat and watched what was happening to her on the stage of the dream she felt a deeper anguish, like that of a passive, chained prisoner watching out of a cell window. If she was in action, even when tortured, she felt less pain. In passion and drama there was no time for anguish.

  The dream was composed like a tower of layers without end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of the earth. When it swooped her into its undulations, the spiralling began, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no vault, and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there were themes repeating themselves with exactitude.

  If the walls of the dreams seemed lined with moist silk, and the contours of the labyrinth lined with silence, still the steps of the dream were a series of explosions in which all the condemned fragments of herself, the cemeteries of the murdered fragments of herself, burst into a mysterious and violent life, with the heavy maternal solicitude of the night ever attentive to their flowering.

  On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness. She could still see the daylight between the fringe of eyelashes. She could still see the interstices of the world. This was not altogether the dream, nor was it daylight. It was the penumbra, the frontier, the edge of the world where the thoughts were inlaid in the filaments of lightning. It was the place where the lights were arranged like foot lights, where the images and gestures were delicately filtered and separated, and their silhouettes thrown against space. It was the place where footsteps left no traces, where laughter had no echo, but where the hunger and fear were immense. It was the place where all the sails of reverie could swell and yet no wind was felt.

  The light was stained with bright colors brought into being by the friction of the eyelid upon the eyeball, and this eyeball turning on its axis threw the light full on a buried world. The air was different, it was saturated with knowingness, it transmitted perception. The vegetation no longer concealed its breathing, its sleepiness, its lamentations, its shrivellings.

  The sand no longer concealed its desire to enmesh, to stifle; the sea showed its true face, its insatiable craving to possess; the earth yawned open its caverns, the fogs spewed out their poisons. The dreams were full of danger, like the African jungle. The dream was full of animals. All the animals killed, stuffed, imprisoned by man, walked alive in the dream. The faces mocked all desire to identify, to personalize: they changed and decomposed before her eyes. They were evocative only. They puzzled and baffled, exposing only the identity of a whim, altering perpetually, eluding continuity.

  There was no time: events passed without leaving a trace, a footprint, an echo. They left SPACE around them. Even a crowded street lay perpendicular between two abysses of blackness, as if it belonged to a planet without gravitation, reposing against space.

  The dream was a filter. The world was never admitted. It was a stage surrendered to fragments, scenes telescoping, slices interweaving, with many pieces left hanging in shreds…

  On the tip of the spiral she felt passive, felt bound like a mummy. She was lying down, with chains and bands of cloth around her. As she descended these obstacles loosened, the body moved. At first she was voiceless, numbed, feeling only the descent into the dream and a blanket covering the face.

  The loss of memory was like the loss of a chain. With all this fluidity came a great lightness. Without memory she was immensely light, vaporous, fluid. The memory was the density which she could not transcend.

  She was not lost, she had only lost the past. Sand passing through the hour glass which never turned. Passing.

  By day, as if obeying a command, she followed the dream, step by step, blindly. She felt lost and bewildered if the day did not bring its replica. She felt compelled to recover a flavor, a color, to recapture the personage, the moment, the place. If she found it she remembered it. But at the same moment she became aware of the part of the dream which was missing. The missing fragment was unrecoverable. Yet she felt its presence. It was lying under the earth. It was like the broken arm of a statue, lying near the statue, but buried in the earth. The mutilated structure loomed in vivid colors, but static. So it presented itself during the day, attended with an uneasy, yellow aura of incompleteness.

  If she could find the missing fragment of the dream in the daylight she might reconstruct the entire tapestry. She was seeking a window she had seen in a dream. She was walking through the city at night, looking for the window, and she found it. It was the window of a house open on two avenues. In the dream it was the window of Proust’s house. It was also the window of a house she had lived in, she could not remember wheity at nt she was certain that she had already known the feeling of standing at this window looking down at the two avenues like opened legs. She was certain that she had stood many times hesitating between these two avenues. Her route constantly split in two, the whole structure of her life constantly splitting open into two sections. The nature of her mind running like a double river. She could never make a choice. She would fol
low the avenues until the pain of being thus quartered became ecstasy and the two avenues fused together into a point of absolute sorrow. The drama was this window opening on the dual aspect of existence, on its dual face. The drama was this window she had seen in a dream, which was the window of Proust’s house when he was writing the endless book in which he made no choice, but followed the contours of the symphony and the labyrinth of remembrance. She had chosen as an answer to the dream this pursuit of the dream without memory. Yet she left behind her a ribbon of memory which wove itself inexorably and slowed up her walking and dreaming. But while she followed the dream she was free.

  At some point the pattern of her life hung like a frayed cloth and the street of dreams turned into blackness.

  That is why she left certain places in great precipitation. She was following a dream. She was in a hurry. When she entered certain rooms filled with people she had never seen in the dream, she became instantly aware that THIS WAS NOT THE PLACE. The need of flight was imperative, compulsive.

  When she found the place, she sat very still and satisfied. She sat in a trance remembering the dream and seeking to recapture the lost pieces. She had caught her dream. Or her nightmare. Caught up with it. Then it seemed to her that all the clocks in the world chimed in unison, for the hour of the miracle. As the clocks chimed at midnight for Cinderella, for all metamorphoses. The dream was synchronized. The miracle was accomplished. All the clocks chimed midnight for the metamorphosis. It was not time they chimed for, but the catching up, catching up with the dream. The dream had a way of always running ahead of one. To catch up with it, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. The life on the stage, the life of the legend dovetailed with the daylight, and out of this marriage sparked the great birds of divinity, the eternal moments.

  When the dream fell to one side, wounded, and the daytime into another, what appeared through the cracks was the real death. The crack of daylight between the curtains, the slit between night and day was the mortal moment, for it killed the dream. The soul then lost its power to breathe, lost its space.

  Nights when she awaited the dream, as one awaits the ship that is to take one far away, and the nightmare came in its place, then she knew she had something to expiate. The nightmare was the messenger of guilt. The nightmare brought her whatever suffering she had rejected or eluded during the day, or given to others. The dream was the refuge which permitted her endless voyages; the nightmare imprisoned and tortured her.

  Now it was not altogether the dream, nor was it daylight. It was the place where many of the effects were due to shadow, to silences and to space. A marvellous mise en scène, such as human beings knew nothing of when they awakened. It was the moment when one was more than awake, a million times awake, awake backwards and forwards, with a circular fever faster than the rotation of earth, awake with a million eyes and a mouth that had said everything and was now struck with silence; a place so high that breathing ceased and divination began.

  It was the twilight of mercury.

  The room was turning black. She was splitting herself into two women, and she felt the half of her that was standing up and the half of her that was lying down.

  It was here that everything happened to her. The daytime was only a sketch. In the daytime all the gestures were thickened by obstacles, by remembrance. Only in the dream was the loved one wholly possessed, only in the dream was there ecstasy without death. Life only began behind the curtain of closed eyelashes.

  The woman who walked erect during the day and the woman who breathed and walked and swam during the night were not the same. The woman who breathed and walked during the day was like a cathedral spire and the opening into her being was a secret. It was inaccessible like the tip of the most labyrinthian sea shell.

  But with the night came the openness.

  The day body made of rigid bones, made rigid with fears and dissonances, was set against yielding. At night it changed substance, form and texture. With the night came fluidity. With the night there ran through the marrows not only blood which could always commingle with other bloods, but a mercury which ran in all directions, swift, mordant, uncontrollable, spilling and running in star points, changing shape at each breath of desire, spilling and dispersing without separating.

  With the night came SPACE. No crowded city. The dream was never crowded. It was filtered through the prism of creation. The pressure of time ceased. Joy lasted longer and suffering less, or else all the feelings were telescoped into a second. Time was arranged and ordained by feeling. Fear was eternal, anger immediate and catastrophic. Sifted and enveloped in a mineral glow, each object of the eternal landscape appeared on the scene with space around it. The space was like an enormous silence in which there was no sword of thought, no rending comments, no thread ever cut. She walked among symbols and silence.

  She ceased to be a woman. The secret small pores of the being began to breathe a life like that of plant and flower. She went to sleep a human being and awakened with the nervous sensibility of a leaf, with the fin knowledge of fish, with the hardness of a coral, with the sulphurous eyes of a mineral. She awakened with new finger tips, new tendrils, new wings, new legs, leaves, branches. She awakened with eyes at the end of long arms that floated everywhere and with eyes on the soles of her feet. She awakened in strands of angel hair with lungs of cocoon milk.

  With the night came a multiplied breathing and new cells like honeycombs filled with a strange activity. Filling and refilling with white tides and red currents, with echoes and fever. Cells, beehives of feelings, inundated with new forms of life dissolving the outline of the body. All forms became blurred and the woman who was lying there slowly turned into a heavy sea, carrying riches on her breast, or became earth with many fissures of thirst, drinking rain.

  With the night came the boat. This boat she was pushing with all her strength becase it could not float, it was passing through land. It was chokingly struggling to pass along the streets, it could not find its way to the ocean. It was pushed along the streets of the city, touching the walls of houses, and she was pushing it against the resistance of earth, of cobblestones, of sand, of lava. So many nights against the obstacles of mud, marshes, garden paths through which the boat labored painfully.

  She was not altogether asleep. The night was like a very black silk curtain, but there was still a slit of daylight. She felt the approach of the dream. But while there was a slit of daylight there were words floating around her. They were sharp, they cut like knives into the feelings, they separated, they scalped, they uncovered the skin, they exposed, they killed the feelings. The moment words cut into the dream, into the feeling, they cut into the pulse and the pulse ceased to beat. The slit of daylight was made of steel.

  The boat was passing through the city, unable to find the ocean that transmitted its life voyages.

  The light cut into the bones with bony words that could not commune with anything or change substance for communion.

  She recognized him. He was the transformable man. He was the man without identity. He came into the dream and acted like a lover. He took her, but if she looked at him a second time he was no longer the man she had given herself to, he was changed. He was not the lover, he was the father. Or if it was the father who first came into the dream now he turned into the Voice, or oftener still into a woman with dishevelled hair as in moments of love. And the woman, when she was approached, turned out to be the long-haired Mischa. She could not hold the identity for more than a moment. The faces changed. All the personages were constantly altering, and the moment she recognized them they become some one else.

  She was wearing a light, airy green dress. She was expecting the Voice, but it was Hans who came. She felt his tongue in her mouth. He began to embrace her but then he vanished. She felt a great despair. The atmosphere was yellow and heavy. When she came back the Voice had killed himself with a knife. He lay crumpled up and he looked like a child. She begged him to come to life.

&nbs
p; In the corner, watching, was the father. She was embraced and possessed by Hans, but when she looked at him it was the father. The father had more sperm than any man. The richness of the father in sperm was frightening. He said: “My daughter, I have no more god. I have no more god.” He was the god. His embrace awakened her because she had come to an unutterable place. She was struck blind. She had no more feelings. She let this inhuman, this impossible flow of sperm into her from the god and she became blind. The other women around him wept because the daughter was being loved by the father.

  She was going to the father with her face tattooed with needles to impress him with her beauty. She felt very beautiful with all the needles in her face. But when she returned home and looked at herself in the mirror her face fell apart, in triangular pieces, shattered. She rushed to her mother: “What shall I do?” The mother took out a comb with great simplicity and began combing her hair, which was silver white. She said: “This is all you do, just comb your hair gently.”

  Te father was reconciled to the mother. They wrote messages to each other on a pad. She read what was written on her father’s pad: “Thou shalt love thy daughter, it is written in the Bible.”

  She was beautifully dressed, with gold and jewels, a long cape of brocade, with furgloves, and she entered a hall where the music came out of the walls. It was the King who wanted to dance with her and who whispered adoring phrases in her ear. She was laughing and the laughter trickled through the walls. The King put his ear against the wall and said: “Instead of listening to the sea in sea shells I listen to your laughter. We will dance to it.” She did not feel the ground under her feet. She said: “We are inside the music, that is why we don’t see the musicians.”