by Anais Nin
He is a German Jew. After we talked a while, he asked the nurse to leave us alone. And then he said to me: "I trust you. I don't know what I am doing here. I was in a concentration camp. Do you think they are trying to harm me? What is the meaning of all these contraptions around me?"
Fortunately the nurse had told me that he had had a prostate operation, and I was able to explain about the bag, the intravenous feeding. I was able to reassure him that this was a hospital, that surgery here was intended to cure, that he would soon be well.
But I could see in his faded blue eyes the remains of doubts and fears. His experience in the concentration camp had scarred him deeply.
When we talked about art, his mind was clear. He was an art critic and a historian. But every evening I had to come and visit him alone, to reassure him that no harm was being done to him.
When it came time for me to go to the hospital for surgery, a few people remarked, not without malice: "Now that is one event you cannot make exciting or glamorous." At last, they felt, I was caught in a brutal experience which could not be enhanced.
But my persistent desire to transform experience and not resign myself to its ugliness made me take with me my red wool burnoose. Wearing this while being wheeled to the X-ray room was enough to spread some rays of amusement in the hospital, to startle the other patients and cheer them. Then the gods, who sometimes listen to the defiance of the artists, decided to listen to my prayers for a little beauty to cover the stark events. The king of the gypsies was having surgery at the same time! According to their laws, the whole tribe must stand by, stay at his side. They planted their tents in a nearby parking lot next to the drab old hospital. All day they walked through the drab corridors, traveled in the drab elevators, squatted outside the king's room, and no amount of hospital discipline could drive them away. There were about six hundred of them. My whole stay at the hospital was changed into a spectacle of their faces, costumes, animated behavior. I was convalescing in a gypsy encampment. I read their history, and inquired about their life.
They were believed to have come originally from India, and their dress might confirm that. The long dress, and the sarilike head covers, the profusion of colors, and the dark skins. There are different legends about them. For centuries they were persecuted in various ways. They lived by reading cards, making prophecies, and stealing. They were inbred, for their religion allowed no marriage outside their own people.
In the south of France they congregated every year to pay tribute to a black virgin, the "weeping virgin" as she was called. Blaise Cendrars was one of the few white men they accepted as a brother. They lived near the ragpickers, outside the gates of Paris, in their wagons.
In America they say there are fifty thousand of them. In Greenwich Village, where there were shop fronts for rent, they would hang their rugs and tell fortunes. And in the hospital, for ten days I had the joy of their company and talked with them. They particularly loved my red wool burnoose, which I wore in the hallways for my walks. My recuperation was hastened by their presence. And by my plan to visit Yucatán.
When I looked out of the hospital windows at the end of the hall, small, narrow, and barred, giving on an ugly courtyard, I turned my mind and my will toward Yucatán. I wanted to see Chichén-Itzá. I was reading about it. My spirit was already there. All my body had to do was to pick itself up and follow.
As the physical body healed, I became aware of the psychic illness once more: the fact I cannot face is that I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely neglected.
I had to pay for the printing of Spy in the House of Love, done by an inexpensive printer in Holland.
The artists know the secret of freedom. June only found freedom by living in a world of fantasy. But Varda made his fantasy come true. His life is the one I admire. When I left San Francisco he had already acquired a ferryboat from which the motors and wheels had been extracted, leaving a poollike center to look into. He was beginning to make windows for the deck. With time the ferryboat grew in beauty. It is moored in Sausalito, and attached to it is a sailboat. Everything is made with his own hands, with little or no money. He makes a little income by teaching at an art school. But he does not need much. He wears jeans, takes showers army bucket style. If money is low he does not hesitate to serve only fried potatoes and wine. He cooks in an enormous frying pan from the flea market, with enormous wooden spoons from Mexico. He is a poet, sublime ragpicker who turns everything into an object of beauty. He taught me, in San Francisco, to admire a chair which had been whitewashed by the sea to a pure bone color.
Another life I like is Len Ly's. He has a house by the waterfront in New York, on West and Tenth Street. It is an old house (1800). When they scraped the paint off they found beautiful wood underneath. He has his studio in the cellar, and plenty of rooms above. Several artists have bought houses on the same block. It is a community. It is near cheap workmen's bistros, Spanish restaurants, Dutch restaurants, Irish bars, and near the market where they buy fresh and cheap food. I admire those who live graciously with little money.
Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you.
What I dislike in New York is that life is dominated by achievement, activity, and the constant game of personalities. They are all played in terms of: this is the playwright of the moment, acclaimed; this is the actress of the season, acclaimed; this is the best-selling author; this is the best composer; this is the notorious Z or the toast of the town proclaimed by Vogue or Harper's Bazaar. The others do not exist at all. What one is does not count.
What makes my work so difficult to understand? I do not accept ready-made patterns, I do not practice the accepted integrations, the familiar synthesis. I am evolving a more fluid, flowing life, living out each fragment, each detour without concern for the conclusions. And it all ends, life and writing, in a deeper correlation, interconnection, not synthesis.
[Spring, 1953]
Max underlines the "comedy" of love, as most cynics do, forgetting that the moments of illusion and passion are the highest moments of life, are those one remembers. To dwell so much on the disintegration of passion when tested by human reality is merely to assert that death ultimately triumphs over our bodies, but this does not mean that we should refuse to live or love. These philosophers discount the duration of the passion, its euphorias and ecstasies, to observe only its dissolution. If we are unable to make passion a relationship of duration, surviving the destruction and erosions of daily life, it still does not divest passion of its power to transform, transfigure, transmute a human being from a rather limited, petty, fearful creature to a magnificent figure reaching at moments the status of a myth. My moments of courage and divination were all born of passion. The deserts which follow I do not dwell on.
What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion, but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life, that it is in this way that poetry becomes the greatest truth, by intensification, condensation of experience. While poetry is considered by most as illusion and delusion, it is the only reality, the moment when we are completely alive.
The problem I have to solve is how Stella, Djuna, Lillian, and Sabina arrive at a moment of transformation of their personality, without describing analysis. It is the writer who must do the analysis. He must do it in such a way that it seeps into the writing separate from the personality of the analyst. Many confessions are made without priests. The difficulty is that nothing will give the awareness we get from psychoanalysis. No friendship or love, even when there is a vital exchange, can go as deep and have the power to alter the consciousness, or the power to alter the course of our life. I can tell Jim all about himself.
Relationships cannot reverse the process. To k
now is not sufficient to change, to act. What few understand is that analysis is not intellectual, it is a reliving of situations, like psychodrama, so that one re-creates the feelings, and confronts them. I can analyze others, or my characters, but the power to alter, to change and be transformed is not within pure analysis alone but the long psychoanalytical reliving of experience, so as to detect the feelings which created our tragedy. In the old classical novels deep changes did not take place, or they were hasty and unconvincing. There were re-forms, abdications, sacrifices, renunciations, withdrawals, but few complete transformations. Oh, yes, from alcoholism to sobriety, from Don Juanism to monogamy, from one political affiliation to another, from bourgeois to man of the people or the other way round, but such changes were superficial, not profound, they were done by the will, through external pressures, not organically, from within, from an evolution. I am trying to say that changes by an evolution of awareness are rare in the classic novel.
If Lila decided with the help of AA to cease being an alcoholic, by a great, shared communal effort at discipline, it is not the same change as she is working on now with an analyst.
She confesses that when she read a few portions of the diary she realized that alcohol was only one of the ways by which she eluded experience (by anaesthetizing pain, reducing awareness, subduing hungers, dissolving activities). "I used to go dead for long periods, when I felt nothing at all and I see now what it is to be emotionally alive all the time, as you were, and aware." Sobriety was not enough of a change. It could have made Lila's life a simple dedication to rescuing other alcoholics, a world of service and sacrifices. But the other change is more positive, there is a Lila beyond alcoholism and sobriety, which neither alcohol nor dedication to the rescue of other alcoholics could give birth to, a Lila not yet born, one she may have caught a glimpse of in heightened moments of passion or awareness, aspired to, pursued. When so extremely ill with rheumatic fever, she sought my work through Gonzalo, reaching for other forms of expression.
In the unconscious lies not only man's demons (as we feared), the primitive, the instinctual, the uncontrollable forces of nature, but also this creative, expanded force which connects with the universe, found in such great figures as Beethoven, Einstein, in painters and writers of value. Man's love of these figures reveals his own dreams to reach the heights of man's achievement.
Dear Lila:
I had to wait for the right moment, and to read the manuscript twice. I think you have achieved exactly what you set out to do, to produce the mystery play, the intimation of truths by the most abstract process possible. This creates what I call the diamond phrases, but must be read carefully. It is beautifully done, in language and in conciseness. It evokes a mood, the most obscure as well as the most precise happenings,'abstraction and, at the same time, impressionism of blurred emotions. It is, of course, the work of a poet. I pick out again the same perfect climax phrases: "All fertility rites begin in death," which in a way is the underlying theme of the whole. The shattering of the glass is a wonderful substitution for the shattering of the fortune-teller crystal, and a gesture against the intoxicants which no longer intoxicate. I like: "Not anybody ... a watcher, writing a foaming history in her head." The poet-spectator, the essence of both. A wonderful image. You succeeded as in modern painting, in seizing upon the inner structural design, the premeditated and irrational, without subjecting it to a reorganization of experience by consciousness. It is a perfect image of the senseless, broken, shattered action which takes place between human beings, when all the threads are cut, and the substance corroded by neurosis. It is a very contemporary image of chaos, chaos designed and planned by a game which delights ultimately in confusing the issues, destructively so. It is true to that design of chaos, not a false one as we taw in Tennessee Williams. The game of scholars is the supreme irony, for the game turns to be a game of the irrational, arranged in a supreme disarrangement, and finally exploded.
Women are wearing short hair and huge Ubangi earrings, crinolined skirts, ribbons in their hair, ballet slippers, and shawls. A sleek model with heavily painted eyes wears a cotton dress and carries a country basket.
I wear a leopard-fur belt over my white dress and leopard-fur earrings.
Analysis is like a shock treatment, it throws you back into childhood in order to recapture the reparable elements, to reconstruct the personality. To reconstruct the personality it is necessary to find the original wound. You have to revaluate the past so it will not remain an incubus or succubus.
For example, I look at others with my own eyes, my own values, I evaluate them by my own standards, but when it comes to looking at myself, I look at myself through my father's eyes. I judge myself by his standards, and in his eyes I was not beautiful, I had daws. He found and saw only the flaws. His standards were superficial, vainglorious, purely external. Varèse spoke disdainfully of the early days in Paris when they met at the Schola Cantorum: "He was obsessed with le joli, always le joli."
***
I feel dimmed and slowed down. Is it convalescence or a new state? There is too much to synthesize. Peggy was shaping geometric figures with her hands in space, to express the need of limiting, encompassing. I was amused by the comedian Garner spoofing an orchestra conductor and equally "boxing off" into squares, and circles, the flowing music. The emotional life cannot perhaps retain the old forms it once used as a mold any more than music or the novel can use the old structures.
There must be a new architecture for our lives and works of art as well. At one point no one knew whether Debussy had merely lost his way and dissolved. Now we know he was discovering the fluid quality of emotion, just as Alban Berg discovered the language of our nerves. And now, writing here, where do I go? Which way? From where? Relativity is the key word. Flow. Is it only in America that there is such a denial of emotion? The diary was held together, was given its unity, by my being at the center. The novels? In whose consciousness does the whole appear? Shall I be there as Proust was, but invisible as a catalyzer?
After convalescence I felt detached from everyone. But when Peggy says: "There is a synthesis in every line you write; there is no need of a final one, in the old classical sense; continue fluid, continue to flow," I feel she is talking about the kind of life I have chosen, by its immensity, its many extensions, fullness; its integration must happen in every moment, in every fragment, a truth and wholeness in the moment.
We have learned all the separate functions of the body's separate parts, but we do not know how they relate to each other, we cannot see them in interaction while alive. I have learned all the separate functions of our emotional being but I do not know how they can be integrated. Relativity theme. These are my secrets. We relive different ages. Karma, they call it in the East. But the truth is they happen in one life, not necessarily in afterlife. All of our experiences extend as far back into the past as into the present and future. I may stumble upon a secret of our unconscious in which there is no time; past, present, and future are superimposed. We set up a false rational man. We had to rediscover the denied and powerful irrational, and learn not to suppress it but to control it by understanding. Meanwhile we need good deep-sea divers, we need adventurers, we need explorers. Synthesis, integration, are often replaced by absolutes. There is no danger of dogmatism in the way I work, only in conventional summaries, not in the open, indefinite continuum I practice.
I left Sierra Madre for Mexico, on a trip to Chichén-Itzá I had promised myself when recovered from surgery. In a Juárez restaurant a party of eight Americans bewildered by the waitress who did not speak English: "They can't talk," said the drunken, older head of the group.
Through Chihuahua, on the way to Aguascalientes. Courtesy toward the Mexicans obtains what money cannot. They give each other courtesy and respect it, and it is the only currency most Americans do not know the use of, even among themselves.
Such good rice and chicken soup, good eggs and black beans and fresh tortillas.
Learning
the names of new trees, new bushes, new flowers, new birds. Ocotillo. Hot desert drives. Crosses over mounds of stones by the wayside, as in the old West. Wonder how they died, those who died by the wayside.
Slept in a windowless adobe house which was once an oven. Hole in the center of the pointed ceiling. Granaries, cone-shaped. Whitewashed now, with dark Spanish furniture, and Mexican serapes on the floor. Dust towns. Deserted all day by the men working in the fields. A few women and children about. The women hidden in their shawls, in which they also carry the baby. Children curious and joyous. Streets of dust, which the wind blows about.
Vera Cruz. Shrimps sold at the café served on a piece of toilet paper. At the market an American girl asked for brains. The butcher took a cow head off the hook and shook brains into a market bag.
Squares, cafés, marimbas, bands of guitar players and singers all the way. Women with fans and red dresses. Even tombs are painted in joyous colors, laundry blue, pink, red. Waiting for the ferry on which the car will cross the river. A Mexican lies asleep on the seat of his truck. The same Oriental patience, quietism, facility for waiting, for reverie, I saw in Morocco. A philosophic acceptance of obstacles, delays, frustrations.
On the road to Coatzacoalcos. Little boys always seeking to earn a peso. We drive through jungle. Waterfalls. The thatched houses now have only roofs and no walls. They cook out of doors. They wash laundry by the riverside. Next to the huts, the rocks are painted yellow, green, blue for decoration. The laundry spread on the rocks and trees blooms like giant flowers of many colors. Strange, forlorn little hotel room. Shower inside of the water closet, shower drips on you, or when you take a shower it floods the water closet. Mirrors are cracked. The towels are so worn they cannot dry you. Beds uneven, tend to spill you. Mattress bumpy. Closets with nails which tear your clothes. Animals wander in and out of the courtyard, famished dogs and pigs. This in violent contrast to Chich£n-Itzi. Stones hand-carved and laid by artists have a beauty that will outlive modern Mexico. We do not know their names. But we know, as we watch the proud, arrogant pyramids and tombs, buildings, courtyards, wells, arches, that this beauty will live forever.
