From The Diary of Anaïs Nin
As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the
light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful
woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face
so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I
tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just
such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long
ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the
evennes of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like
someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her,
I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded.
She was color and brilliance and strangeness. By the end of the
evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my
admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak,
posturing. She lacks the courage of her personality, which is
sensual, heavy with experience. Her role alone preoccupies her.
She invents dramas in which she always stars. I am sure she creates
genuine dramas, genuine chaos and whirlpools of feelings, but I
feel that her share in it is a pose. That night, in spite of my
response to her, she sought to be whatever she felt I wanted her to
be. She is an actress every moment. I cannot grasp the core of
June. Everything Henry has said about her is true.
I can understand, when I listen to him, the Oriental fear of
letting others paint you or photograph you.
"I want firsthand knowledge of everything, not fiction, intimate
experience only. Whatever takes place, even a crime I read about, I
can't take an interest in, because I already knew the criminal. I
may have talked with him all night at a bar. He had confessed what he
intended to do. When Henry wants me to go and see an actress in a
play, she was a friend of mine at school. I lived at the home of
the painter who suddenly becomes a celebrity. I am always inside
where it first happens. I loved a revolutionist, I nursed his
discarded mistress who later committed suicide. I don't care for
films, newspapers, 'reportages,' the radio. I only want to be
involved while it is being lived. Do you understand that, Anaïs?"
He is fascinated with the sound of words.
Perhaps when she talks so much about the others who love her,
it is not to conceal whether she loves them or not, but
because this is what interests her. Her desire to BE loved.
I wanted to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty and
say: "June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never know
again who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty
has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part
of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved
me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I
wished for your existence. You are the woman I want to be. I see
in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your
childish pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization
of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender
my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same
fantasies, the same madnesses."
Do I feel my own self definite, encompassable? I know its boundary
lines. There are experiences I shy away from. But my curiosity,
creativeness, urge me beyond these bondaries, to transcend my
character. My imagination pushes me into unknown, unexplored,
dangerous realms. Yet there is always my fundamental nature, and
I am never deceived by my "intellectual" adventures, or my literary
exploits. I enlarge and expand my self; I do not like to be just
one Anaïs, whole, familiar, contained. As soon as someone
defines me. I do as June does; I seek escape from the confinements
of definition.
When we walked the streets, bodies close together, arm in arm,
hands locked, I was in such ecstasy I could not talk. The city
disappeared, and so did the people. The acute joy of our walking
together through the grey streets of Paris I shall never forget,
and I shall never be able to describe it. We were walking above
the world, above reality, into pure, pure ecstasy.
I may be stopped on my course by all kinds of thoughts, pity,
consideration for others, fears for those I love, protectiveness,
devotion, sense of duty, of responsibility. But as Gide says,
thought arrests action and being. So June is BEING. Nothing can
control her. She is our fantasy let loose upon the world. She
does what others only do in their dreams. Mindless, the life of
our unconscious without control. There is a fantastic courage
in this, to live without laws, without fetters, without thought
of consequences.
I want to enjoy the summer day. Words are secondary.
I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all
half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance. Letters which
give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from
their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers. I am aware
also that I am becoming June.
If we could only write simultaneously all the levels on which we
live, all at once. The whole truth! Henry is closer to it. I
have a vice for embellishing.
...at least truth is possible in the confessions of our insincerities.
...the old Chinese definition of wisdom: wisdom being the destruction
of idealism.
June and I were walking together over dead leaves crackling like
paper. She was weeping over the end of a cycle. How one must be
thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap the most
difficult to make--to part with one's faith, one's love, when
one would prefer to renew the faith and re-create the passion.
The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the
inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final
portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation
of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might lean
as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle
against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without
finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being...
Who is the liar? Who the human being? Who is the cleverest? Who
the strongest? Who is the least selfish? The most devoted? Or
are all these elements mixed in each one of us?
"Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone.
Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it
comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the
world I wanted to live in opened to me."
Artaud. Lean, taut. A gaunt face, with visionary eyes. A sardonic
manner. Now weary, now fiery and malicious.
The theatre, for him, is a place to shout pain, anger, hatred, to
enact the violence in us. The most violent life can burst from
terror and death.
He talked about the ancient rituals of blood. The power of contagion.
How we have lost the magic of contagion. Ancient religion knew how
to enact rituals which made faith and ecstasy contagious. The
power of ritual was gone. He wanted to give this to the theatre.
Today nobody could share a feeling with anybody else. And Antonin
Artaud wanted the theatre to accomplish this, to be at the center,
a ritual which would awaken us all. He wanted to shout so people
would be roused to fervor again, to ecstasy. No talking. No
analysis. Contagion by acting ecstatic states. No objective
stage, but a ritual in the center of the audience.
You knew, but beyond my words, and not because of them.
How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me,
all possibilities? Allendy may have said: "This is the core,"
but I never feel the four walls around the substance of the
self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space. ....
I have accepted a self which is unlimited. What I imagine is as
true as what is. I want to get lost in mystery again. Wisdom
engulfed by life.
I had always lived not to be my father.
"I have known motherhood. I have experienced childbearing. I have
known a motherhood beyond biological motherhood--the bearing of
artists, and life, hope, and creation." It was Lawrence who had
said: Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion
to those already born.
But I feel alive only when I am living for or with others! And
I'll be a great artist in spite of that. And if I am not a great
artists, I don't care. I will have been good to the artist, the
mother and muse and servant and inspiration.
My father writes me:
....Qualities I consider taken for granted and, anyway, most of them
are acquired; whereas faults neither our logic nor our will were
able to modify or correct--they are the real expression of our
primitive selves, natural selves, in the state of absolute purity.
Poisson d'Or. Tziganes. Three aristocratic Russian women, beautiful, with
two wealthy men. Seven bottles of champagne. Ordering gypsy singer to sing
for them at their table. Russian painter seated in front of me. Stares at
me. When I dance with my escort, we collide and he kisses my neck. Orgy of
singing and dancing. The three Russian women weep, quietly, with enjoyment,
voluptuous satisfaction. The painter and the host almost fight because a man
breaks lumps of sugar while the gypsy sings. Musicians sing and dance for the
angry man as if to soothe him. The painter smiles subtly at me. Lady in white
also begins to dance in front of him. The painter is whisked away by his
partner who makes a scene. Irony, with the deep emotional music going on.
The feeling that when I handed my coat at the check room, I handed over my
identity. I become dissolved in the atmosphere, into red curtains, champagne,
ice, music, singing, the weeping which the Russians love to do, the caress of
the painter's eyes. Everything sparkles and exudes a warmth and a flowering.
I am not like Jeanne, fragmented into a thousand pieces. I am at one with a
sea of sensations, glitter, silk, skin, eyes, mouths, desire.
I must learn to stand alone. Nobody can really follow me all the
way, understand me completely.