Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  The day I went to see Renate for the first time, her ex-husband had just been there and Renate was disturbed. I entered saying: "We will exorcise him," and a half hour later we were laughing. Renate has the most inventive of vocabularies, her insights are so vivid and dramatized, there is a tragicomic quality to all she tells. At the door, what I first noticed were her eyes, at times blue, at times green, very large, with a full round orb so that when she looks down the eyelids appear very rounded as they do in Da Vinci's Saint Anne. Her skin has a warm, almost ruddy color; it is highly sensitive to change; the aliveness quickens the blood and gives her a blushing tone, or else the circulation is arrested by emotion and she turns pale.

  She laughs as she lives, openly and freely. Her anxiety propels her outward, into action, imagery, and fervor. Her emotional gyrations are full and complete, like a state of euphoria so natural it does not leave a hangover. At first I saw no descents, no lows, but soon I divined them. The price of flying over obstacles; and then collisions take place for which one is unprepared. She is illumined with high feeling and a capacity for empathy.

  Renate can penetrate any experience or role without dissolution of her self. They are extensions, dilations, expansions, not dissolutions. She can play various roles with none disconnected from each other. She is as fluid as mercury, which can move in all directions and yet not be divided. She paints, she decorates, she sews, she builds her own house, she nurses, cooks, analyzes, and incites others to create. She is a fecundator. Her ebullient and imaginative energy is contagious. No part of Renate has died under experience, she nourishes on it, and converts it to gold or honey, as you wish.

  Her house in Malibu is high on a hill, overlooking a wide expanse of sea.

  Her walls are hung with paintings by Cameron. Curtis, Kenneth, and Paul talked of Cameron as capable of witchcraft. She was the dark spirit of the group. Her paintings were ghostly creatures of nightmares. In connection with her, this was the first time I heard about Aleister Crowley. There is an aura of evil around her. Her husband was a scientist who delved in the occult. He was blown up during an experiment in his garage.

  Renate told me about her early love of animals. As a child she opened the cages of birds, of chickens in the marketplace, unleashed dogs. She felt affinities with them and abhorred domestication. This has become the major theme of her paintings, the coexistence of woman and animal.

  Renate's gift is a heightened mood which communicates itself to others. She creates a state of natural intoxication.

  Conversations become vertiginous; she gives wings of humor to all events, even the most tragic. One day her fireplace smoked and we were driven out of the house. It was raining. "I always dreamed of a picnic in the rain," she said.

  One of her greatest preoccupations is not to be dominated by man. She approaches love warily, as some jungle animals approach a suspected trap. She has a horror of being counseled, advised, instructed by anyone. Her independence is fiercely defended. Her impulses, thoughts, opinions are spontaneous and always a surprise. Nothing seems to have patterned her, and she grows like a wild flower, in any color or form she pleases.

  The only factor I can find which may have influenced her life is her love of her father and his words to her: "No man will love you as much as I do. Do not trust man, and above all, never depend on him. We share one soul."

  Renate's story:

  When she was five or six years old her father took her to a doctor who had invented a psychological test, the precursor of the Rorschach test. He put on a record and asked Renate where the music came from.

  Renate meditated a moment, then pointed to her heart and said: "From here."

  Another story. At sixteen she wanted to be an actress. Her father took her to a famous teacher, who was also a famous Don Juan and taught his pupils far more than the art of acting. Renate knew this, and knew specific instances of seduction. When he saw her he said brutally: "You can't be an actress. Your mouth is too small." At this Renate grew very angry and she began violently to accuse him of all his seductions of his pupils. He grew red and was about to burst out in self-defense when Renate stopped herself short, bowed, smiled, and said: "Wasn't that good acting?"

  Paul. Angelic blue eyes, and a young boy's mouth. A little animal whose wish is to go around kissing everyone. But this nestling is homosexual. Renate suffers from his promiscuity. He does not protect her from the knowledge. He said: "A man must have cruelty."

  Once when Paul Mathiesen had a fit of asthma he asked Renate to read to him from Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji. Knowing the book, I could understand how it took his mind away from the present into a life of great beauty in the year nine hundred in Japan. The book itself by its symmetry, order, and stylized presentation of events created air and space to a degree unknown in the modern or Western novel. Every scene, every event is treated like a painting; it is a series of tableaux; even when the events are violent or treat of death or illness, there is something in the unity of tone, in the calm telling which gives a sense of harmony and peace. It must have been an extraordinary effort of art to contain the savagery of life in such a way that it appeared, to our eyes at least, to be controlled. It was in this strange isolation of the court, because the rest of the country was impenetrable, dangerous, filled with bandits and wandering predators, that they turned their energies to creating all the culture which we know of Japan, poetry, pottery, costume, the tea ceremony, painting, music, dance. I could well believe the Tale of Genji could be a cure for asthma, could make us forget that today we live openly in the jungle without such a secret haven of beauty to restore our battered selves.

  Paul and Renate thought of a masquerade to which we would come dressed as our madness.

  I wore a skin-colored leotard, leopard-fur earrings glued to the tips of my naked breasts, and a leopard-fur belt around my waist. Gil Henderson painted on my bare back a vivid jungle scene. I wore eyelashes two inches long. My hair was dusted with gold powder. My head was inside of a birdcage. From within the cage, through the open gate, I pulled out an endless roll of paper on which I had written lines from my books. The ticker tape of the unconscious. I unwound this and handed everyone a strip with a message.

  When we arrived the entire house was softly lighted with candles.

  Renate met us at the door. She was wearing a merry-widow hat, a waist cincher, and a black leotard. An iridescent scarf enveloped her. She carried two death masks on sticks. As she removed one mask, a second, identical mask was revealed. Her costume was inspired by José Guadalupe Posada's portrayal of voluptuous females with skulls for heads. Her madness was a conflict between sensuality and death. Her madness was: she is what she pretends to be.

  Paul's madness was to escape his angel blondness. He died his hair black and wore a black mustache. He appeared half pirate, half Spanish Don Juan.

  My escort was in a black leotard covered with plastic eyes. He carried two eyes on the tip of a wire projecting from his forehead. He had two eyes pinned on his genital region. He was all eyes, the spectator, the shy spectator.

  As I entered I found the walk covered with sumac branches, which made the bare rooms look like a forest. On them Renate hung Mexican masks of people and animals. They hung like strange fruit, and at times, in the shadows, the masks and the people's painted faces were intertwined and could not be distinguished. Incense was burning and people seemed to issue from smoke and vanish into smoke and shadows.

  Kenneth Anger was not there when we entered. He was waiting in the bedroom with a lighted candle and had asked Renate to let him know the propitious moment to make his entrance. Busy with guests, Renate forgot him. When she remembered, the candle was burnt halfway. But Kenneth Anger made his propitious entrance and everyone stood still to look at him as they had stood still when I came in.

  He was dressed as Hecate, goddess of the moon, earth, and infernal regions, sorcery and witchcraft. Only one heavily made-up eye was visible. His long black fingernails were made of black quills. The rest was
all a towering figure of lace, veils, beads, and feathers.

  Curtis Harrington was the somnambulist from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. He walked with his hands in front of him as if he had been hypnotized, and, slim as he was, looked the part. His madness was to be caught in an archetypal figure.

  Samson de Brier's madness was identification with an Eastern potentate. He was absolutely covered with jewels, and his fine dark Oriental eyes suited his fantasy.

  John Reed divided his body into two colors, white and black. Even his face was half white and half black. The madness of duality.

  Three persons I did not know stayed together all evening, sharing in one madness. One of them lay on a stretcher and was carried about.

  Kate Kadell came as Cleopatra, and she looked the part with her straight nose and slanted eyes. She was a gay Cleopatra, mischievous and witty.

  One woman held an open umbrella over her head, over which fell layers and layers of veils, scarves, jewels, like a waterfall. Her madness was the need of a secret hiding place, her need of security.

  Renate was dancing with Kenneth Anger. She stopped suddenly, out of breath, and said: "It is so tiring to dance with one's madness."

  At this I said: "You talk just like the women in my novels, and people still insist such talk does not exist."

  Happy because The Four-Chambered. Heart was sold to a Swedish publisher.

  Talk with Geismars about problems of publishing the diary. Aside from the human problem of those who have to be protected, there is also the problem that the diary is not finished. The condition of its continuation is secrecy. Exposure will kill the diary itself just as the exposure of a spy will put an end to his activity. My identity cannot be exposed or the diary ends. The public eye and spotlight will kill it.

  I discussed with Dr. Bogner the increase in my courage to be myself, rather than disguise myself into what others needed and wanted of me. The dilemma of opening the diary is a part of this need.

  An old friend said: "You have changed so much that for years I felt I did not know you, I felt I was not related to you."

  But that is because he refuses to make friends with the Anaïs of today. He still thinks of me as the Anaïs he first knew.

  At the Fourteenth Street Spanish shop I buy guava paste and a mantilla for my mother's birthday.

  Relationship with Jim Herlihy endangered because I cannot love his play Moon in Capricorn and he needs my total admiration. The slightest hint of unacceptance disturbed him deeply. The dialogue ceased to be sincere.

  ***

  During several trips to Venice, Ian Hugo again filmed everything which moved him, without any preconceived plan, and when he edited it he achieved an image of Venice never attained before, as it included the past, the present, the fantasy and the reality of Venice, in layers suggesting infinite dimensions.

  We are living in the age of the image but this means not only that we can register more perfectly with cameras the external image, but that we can now also penetrate and photograph our inner life as if with an undersea camera. Our unconscious life is composed of free associations of ideas, fragments of memories, musical flow of impressions, or symbolic scenes. In our dreams and in our fantasies we are all surrealists, impressionists, abstractionists, symbolists. The camera more exactly than words is capable of reflecting this inner life and revealing the metamorphosis which takes place between a realistic scene and the way our moods color, distort, or alter the scene as through a prism.

  The freedom of improvisation expressed in Ian Hugo's films corresponds to our emotional life, which is continuously projecting and retaining on our inner screen previous images. A face we are looking at will suddenly recall another face out of the past by way of a slight resemblance, and the image from the past will blur and interfere with the present face. As James Joyce tried to capture the form of our inner monologues which accompany but do not match the flow of our talk, Ian Hugo emphasizes the simultaneous levels of experience: a mixture of dreams, memories, and immediate impressions. He also seeks to capture how our thoughts jump from scene to scene in an apparently unrelated way, to better match the structure of our emotional life, which is fluid, symphonic, and composed on several levels at once. In this way these films do not represent merely the personal vision of Ian Hugo, his impressions of Mexico or Venice, but a way of seeing and remembering common to all of us if we caught our first flow of impressions before organizing them into an artificial chronology and pattern. A conventional rational sequence does not necessarily correspond to the way we feel or remember a journey or the events of our life. And if these dark and wayward realms of the heart seem dark and confused at times, it is only because we have not yet thrown enough light upon them. For example, we do not remember journeys or the events of our lives in chronological order, but as in the film Ai-Ye, the death of a man evokes the memory of a dead tree, and the dead tree evokes the image of a dead dog, until, as in a musical composition, the theme of death is completed. Placing images in this order, the order of feelings, brings out their inner meaning. Thousands of tourists have photographed the Mexican boys diving from high rocks into the sea, until that image becomes trite and dies. But when Ian Hugo places it as a recurrent motif it acquires a symbolic meaning and reminds us of our repeated plunges into the mysterious depths of our own selves as well as into the sea, the origin of life. By following such improvisations, assembling images according to the design of our emotions, we also enter this region below consciousness where experience actually takes place directly as music does, without interference from artificial cerebral patterns.

  Becoming more and more aware of this inner unconscious life we need a corresponding change in our art forms. The realization that fantasy and memory are not separate activities but the basic key to our secret life demands a change of focus, a freedom from old molds, a technique to encompass new dimensions of character and insight.

  The music, too, has to extend beyond familiar sounds and free itself of past structures, has to seek sounds which match our contemporary moods and sensations.

  The experience of Venice was captured by layered sequences of images, superimpositions, which combined memories of Venice's past with personal dreams of Venice, and the Constant presence of today's Venice in all its moods, working, cleaning, laundering, daily, homely Venice. Over all this the poetic, mythological tragedy of Venice as the bride of the sea (a ritual performed at the beginning of its history was the throwing of a wedding ring into the sea) and this sea perpetually striving to drag Venice back into its depths.

  [December, 1953]

  Kenneth Anger felt that the masquerade "Come as Your Madness" resembled a dream he had, which he had painted and which hung in Samson de Brier's studio. He decided to make a film of it [Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome], We were to come in the costumes we wore. He said to me: "I want you as Astarte, the goddess of light. You are a magic person. I want to capture that luminosity which startled everyone at the party. It is an inner light and so difficult to capture."

  We filmed in Samson's apartment from seven o'clock to one o'clock in the morning.

  Part of one room was painted, gold ceiling, black walls; another room was made to look like a cave, all gold and red, with beaded, iridescent curtains. There was a backdrop painted to represent a Venetian scene. Most of the colors were intensified and created by the use of gels. Under the floodlights, Paul looked like a blond Nordic god.

  Samson's apartment was ideal for the film, for he had trunks filled with costumes, textiles, costume jewelry, fans, lace, old photographs, gloves, scarves, veils, feathers.

  Kenneth was working in the same way as Maya Deren; he wanted to capture elusive aspects of our personalities, undirected, spontaneous, accidental. Renate stood in front of the backdrop with her large hat, looking very beautiful, laughing, laughing as only she can, so fully and unrestrainedly, abandoned and total.

  Peter as a little prince, shy, daydreaming, as if he were walking through a fairy tale. Peter, the gentl
e, dreaming boy, like a child from another planet. I thought of him as Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince. He has beautiful, liquid-blue eyes, a wistful face, and a manner so remote that he seems to be sleepwalking.

  Cameron, with a frightening mask of dead-white, chalky face and ink-black eyebrows and eyelashes, looked as if risen from the dead. A large voracious mouth and narrow slanted eyes. She is surrounded by an evil aura, which fascinates Paul, Curtis, and Kenneth.

  We worked all through a weekend. We all felt we needed to know the meaning of Kenneth's dream, so that we could act in it. But he did not confide in us. The scenes seemed disconnected, and the characters changed costumes and personalities. There was chaos because the theme was unknown. I stepped into the room through a window. Paul had wrapped me in yards and yards of blue muslin as in a cocoon. My head was in the birdcage I wore at the masquerade. My lace-stockinged foot slowly descended on a fur bench which seemed to bristle at the touch. The contact with the fur was sensual, the fur seemed to raise its hairs to encounter the foot.

  Paul said: "In the film Samson is the false man, the man of many faces, that is why he changes costumes and make-up all the time. The various women, Renate as sensuous romantic love, Joan as the virgin beauty, Cameron as the satanic woman, and you as the woman of light, all offer him gifts which he rejects. Curtis brings him the wine of ecstasy from the caves of the unconscious. They all drink and are transformed. You, Anaïs, refuse the drink. You have no need of it. You are Astarte, goddess of the moon. I, the romantic lover, reach in vain for the unreachable moon."