by Anais Nin
Cameron sat on a thronelike chair and took out a lifeless breast.
There was a cave, weblike, labyrinthian, in which I danced, in the light of red gels. Samson ate pearls, Paul drank from a goblet, Kate acted a Cleopatra gone mad.
Beads fell off one of the flapper costumes. We were cutting our bare feet on them. I picked up a broom to sweep them and Kenneth would not let me.
"You are Astarte," he said.
At first Astarte was illuminated in the film, shed her light, but Cameron became a stronger figure as evil, a hypnotic figure, and the mood of decadence and destruction won out. Renate, with her Austrian beauty, very much like Luise Rainer but more voluptuous, represented the joy of sensuality. I, the ecstasies of the dream. Paul struggled out of the grasp of orgiastic women to reach for Astarte.
Renate had made Samson up to look like the Great Beast. His mouth was made invisible by paint and another mouth appeared on his chin. A duplicate mask was designed on his chest. His nails were a foot long, made of lacquered cardboard. He shook them in people's faces and the threatening gesture frightened everyone. He frightened himself too. As a degenerate potentate greedily swallowing all his jewels he was the best actor among us.
Curtis Harrington was serving the drink which created ecstasy.
Kenneth Anger asked Peter to dip his finger in the goblet, touch his tongue with it, and fall into a deep trance.
Renate suddenly felt she did not want to see her child poisoned. She rebelled against this scene. For her it was not a symbolic act but a real danger. Kenneth argued that it was symbolic and that he was merely asleep. Renate was deeply disturbed and no one could convince her that she was confusing symbolism and reality.
After a long battle, she surrendered. The scene was filmed. To see Cameron sitting with one breast uncovered and Peter tasting the elixir was to feel a chill of fear that her witch's milk might be the source of the goblet's content.
Renate's interpretation of Kenneth's film was that it was an extension of the masquerade. It was a portrayal of people's madness. The reality and the madness mingled and that made chaos and confusion. The links were missing, as in madness.
There was a distortion. Love became hatred, ecstasy became a nightmare. Those who began with a sensual attraction ended by devouring each other. The elixir, which Kenneth said came from the unconscious, Renate saw as coming from infernal regions, whipping the madness to dizzying heights from which it would collapse. The whole feeling was out of balance.
I am making my peace with the earth.
What new loveliness is there in Molly carrying a bottle of milk which is half of her own size and knocking gently on my door for me to make her a chocolate drink. And how she sits under my arm to show me a bruise on her incredibly small elbow. The mother, I love too. She is sensitive, humorous, and thoughtful.
Loneliness increases as you ascend into a rarefied atmosphere. I am now able to live in both worlds, the human and the imaginative.
When it is too cold, I go to Sears Roebuck at Pasadena, to the tropical-birds department. They keep the place very warm; it is full of bird chatter and tropical plants and Rowers. It reminds me of Mexico.
Renate and Paul invented another masquerade. This one was to be "A Thousand and One Nights."
It was a story-telling party, gentle and soft.
I came as Scheherazade and told stories. I wore a nylon iridescent dress that seemed like water, and, as a headdress, a Christmas-tree ornament that looked like a fan, from which the waterlike, floating, transparent texture fell like a waterfall.
Samson dressed as a Persian potentate and read from the Kama Sutra.
Peter was dressed as a Persian prince from miniatures. He wore a turban with an ostrich plume, blue trousers, and boots. He wrote a special story for the evening.
Renate was a Persian princess and acted out the drowned women of the Sultan's harem whom he had thrown into the Bosphorus. It was from the story told by Lesley Blanch in The Wilder Shores of Love. Two hundred women he had grown tired of were tied together and pushed into the river, but the bodies did not disintegrate, and years later a diver found them standing, with their long hair undulating in the current.
Paul was a grown-up prince.
Rudi Gernreich and Galianos came in business suits. We were disappointed, because Galianos was a famous designer, and Rudi was already known as the first West Coast designer.
Renate and Paul designed a lantern of black paper with geometric cutouts, inset with many colored gels. They twisted the cord which held it to the ceiling, and as it untwisted it rotated and threw flickering colored lights on the walls and on us.
For the Roman masquerade party Renate and Paul set a huge center banquet table covered with geraniums, with pillows on the floor. There were candles, incense, and flowers and tin plates from Mexico. Each guest brought a Roman dish. We were expected to have read Pliny, the Roman naturalist of the year 23 B.C., and Pliny the Younger, who was a Latin author and orator.
Renate and Paul gave up all activities for survival and devoted three weeks to the preparation of the party. Paul painted a Roman mural of a belvedere. Renate baked a huge loaf of bread in the form of a phallus, stuffed with sausages and eggs. Many of this dishes were decorated with flower petals. Someone else brought dishes of jello containing insects.
I brought wine and said it was an aphrodisiac. Renate believed me and was afraid to drink it, fearing her passions would get out of control. We reclined on the pillows like real Romans while Paul lectured as if he were Pliny and demonstrated posters we had made of Pliny's anatomical theories. The lecture was a mixture of fantasy and fact. One was that brave men's hearts were covered with hair.
Because I came to the first masquerade with bare breasts, Joanne Carson said then: "I wish I had thought of that." So she came to this party bare-breasted and we all admired her gorgeous breasts.
I wore a pleated-nylon nightgown shaped like a Roman robe. Sprayed gold on my hair and dressed it in Roman style.
My handsome escort was dressed as a Roman soldier and the two of us took poses of Roman friezes against a white wall.
Someone else read about Heliogabalus, describing one of the parties he gave at which the ceiling opened and tons of flowers were poured over the guests. Four hundred persons suffocated.
Raimunda, a descendant of the Orsinis, brought ricotta and said it was made of the milk of the mythical wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus. I refused to eat it.
Samson de Brier, Curtis Harrington, Joanne, and Renate acted a mock orgy.
Each time the orgy seemed about to become too real, jealousies would flare up.
Raimunda played the guitar and sang Roman songs.
With Renate's childhood obsession with animals, and her desire to free them, it was natural that she should devote her painting to portraying the friendship between woman and animal. She paints a luminous woman lying peacefully beside a panther; a woman with blue-tinted flesh floating on the opening wings of a swan, a woman and a turtle, a beautiful naked woman reflected in a mirror and watched by a raven. She paints a woman feeding a flower to a goat, a woman on a beach watching a beautiful fantail pigeon with his wings spred; he is larger than she is.
It is the mythology of woman in relation to animals, wild or domestic.
All of them are figures from dreams. They are interwoven with nature, as the woman wrapped in a cloud by the seashore, this cloud covering three older women (duennas, ladies-in-waiting, mothers?), and the tip of the cloud sweeps the sky to touch a face reigning there.
The landscapes are lunar, or from other planets. In one a hand appears, alone, a death's head, a lake above the clouds.
The sun is a fiery figure with a sword who does not destroy the woman consumed by light.
One of my favorites is the actress. Her chest is a cagelike stage, in which three faceless figures appear in roles waiting to be performed.
I appear as Pisces, enwrapped from shoulders to feet by bands of paper with quotes from my work wri
tten on them, the ticker tape of the unconscious which I designed for the masquerade. I am surrounded by a collage of my book covers, and by Pisces fish swimming around me.
Renate's motorcyclist does not stay on the road, he drives with the hounds of heaven. Her women do not sit on the edge of the sea, they are born of it and take their skin colors from the shells.
[Winter, 1953–1954]
A man rushed in to announce he had seen smoke on Monrovia Peak. As I looked out of the window I saw the two mountains facing the house on fire. The entire rim burning wildly in the night. The flames, driven by hot Santa Ana winds from the desert, were as tall as the tallest trees, the sky already tinted coral, and the crackling noise of burning trees, the ashes and the smoke were already increasing. The fire raced along, sometimes descending behind the mountain where I could only see the glow, sometimes descending toward us. I thought of the foresters in danger. I made coffee for the weary men who came down occasionally with horses they had led out, or with old people from the isolated cabins. They were covered with soot from their battle with the flames.
At six o'clock the fire was on our left side and rushing toward Mount Wilson. Evacuees from the cabins began to arrive and had to be given blankets and hot coffee. The streets were blocked with fire engines readying to fight the fire if it touched the houses. Policemen and firemen and guards turned away the sightseers. Some were relatives concerned over the fate of the foresters, or the pack station family. The policemen lighted flares, which gave the scene a theatrical, tragic air. The red lights on the police cars twinkled alarmingly. More fire engines arrived. Ashes fell, and the roar of the fire was now like thunder.
We were told to ready ourselves for evacuation. I packed the diaries. The saddest spectacle, beside that of the men fighting the fire as they would a war, were the animals, rabbits, coyotes, mountain lions, deer, driven by the fire to the edge of the mountain, taking a look at the crowd of people and panicking, choosing rather to rush back into the fire.
The fire now was like a ring around Sierra Madre, every mountain was burning. People living at the foot of the mountain were packing their cars. I rushed next door to the Campion children, who had been left with a baby-sitter, and got them into the car. It was impossible to save all the horses. We parked the car on the field below us. I called up the Campions, who were out for the evening, and reassured them. The baby-sitter dressed the children warmly. I made more coffee. I answered frantic telephone calls.
All night the fire engines sprayed water over the houses. But the fire grew immense, angry, and rushing at a speed I could not believe. It would rush along, and suddenly leap over a road, a trail, like a monster, devouring all in its path. The firefighters cut breaks in the heavy brush, but when the wind was strong enough, the fire leaped across them. At dawn one arm of the fire reached the back of our houses but was finally contained.
But high above and all around, the fire was burning, more vivid than the sun, throwing spirals of smoke in the air like the smoke from a volcano. Thirty-three cabins burned, and twelve thousand acres of forest still burning endangered countless homes below the fire. The fire was burning to the back of us now, and a rain of ashes began to fall and continued for days. The smell of the burn in the air, acid and pungent and tenacious. The dragon tongues of flames devouring, the flames leaping, the roar of destruction and dissolution, the eyes of the panicked animals, caught between fire and human beings, between two forms of death. They chose the fire. It was as if the fire had come from the bowels of the earth, like that of a fiery volcano, it was so powerful, so swift, and so ravaging. I saw trees become skeletons in one minute, I saw trees fall, I saw bushes turned to ashes in a second, I saw weary, ash-covered men, looking like men returned from war, some with burns, others overcome by smoke.
The men were rushing from one spot to another watching for recrudescence. Some started backfiring up the mountain so that the ascending flames could counteract the descending ones.
As the flames reached the cities below, hundreds of roofs burst into flame at once. There was no water pressure because all the fire hydrants were turned on at the same time, and the fire departments were helpless to save more than a few of the burning homes.
Because all the men were away fighting the fire, I was asked to help answer the phone at the Ranger Station. I became annoyed at callers laughing at my French accent and started answering, "Foreest Serveece—Paris branch." A woman with a very thick French accent called to ask, "Eeze zis zee place to geeve clothes for Zee Zuni Indians?" (By this time many different Indian tribes had been brought in from Arizona and New Mexico to fight the fire). I answered in my best Parisian French, "You had better speak French as I cannot understand your English."
The blaring loudspeakers of passing police cars warned us to prepare to evacuate in case the wind changed and drove the fire in our direction. What did I wish to save? I thought only of the diaries. I appeared on the porch carrying a huge stack of diary volumes, preparing to pack them in the car. A reporter for the Pasadena Star News was taking pictures of the evacuation. He came up, very annoyed with me. "Hey, lady, next time could you bring out something more important than all those old papers? Carry some clothes on the next trip. We gotta have human interest in these pictures!"
A week later, the danger was over.
Gray ashy days.
In Sierra Madre, following the fire, the January rains brought floods. People are sandbagging their homes. At four A.M. the streets are covered with mud. The bare, burnt, naked mountains cannot hold the rains and slide down bringing rocks and mud. One of the rangers must now take photographs and movies of the disaster. He asks if I will help by holding an umbrella over the cameras. I put on my raincoat and he lends me hip boots which look to me like seven-league boots.
We drive a little way up the road. At the third curve it is impassable. A river is rushing across the road. The ranger takes pictures while I hold the umbrella over the camera. It is terrifying to see the muddied waters and rocks, the mountain disintegrating. When we are ready to return, the road before us is covered by large rocks but the ranger pushes on as if the truck were a jeep and forces it through. The edge of the road is being carried away.
I am laughing and scared too. The ranger is at ease in nature, and without fear. It is a wild moment of danger. It is easy to love nature in its peaceful and consoling moments, but one must love it in its furies too, in its despairs and wildness, especially when the damage is caused by us.
[February, 1954]
New York.
The plane landed in a snowstorm. It was six A.M. I wore no rubbers. I shared a taxi with several passengers; it was unheated and had a difficult time getting through the snow. All night I had felt such pains in my chest that I thought I would die. I was surprised to find myself alive in the morning. In the cold taxi I felt so weak I thought this was truly the end. I took a hot bath to warm myself. In the bath my sense of illness and weakness overwhelmed me. I wept. I went to bed. I got up at eleven to see Dr. Bogner. We arranged for a medical checkup the next morning. No heart trouble, no tuberculosis or cancer, just a low functioning of the thyroid. I was given pills. The pains continued for a few days but the anxiety disappeared. Once more I was repaired by doctors.
With analysis there is the pain of breaking through, of pushing out. It is a rebirth. Only it has to be done by one's self, not the mother. All the efforts come from one's own self. And there is the same shock of light, cold, when you thrust out too far into the world, take too many risks.
Party for Cornelia Runyon. As she is sixty-eight and belongs to one of the best and oldest families of New York, her friends and relatives appeared as if they walked out of a Henry James novel. I saw for the first time the Village's oldest inhabitants, who built the graceful, solid, small houses, sat under crystal chandeliers, and possessed courtesy and wit. A good vintage, a mellow wood, a mostly vanished civilization. The qualities disappeared as the old houses on Washington Square crumbled and deteriorated in the han
ds of fake bohemians, who painted the beautiful natural wood with slick, garish paint, who painted over the marble fireplaces, who let the backyard gardens dry up. The Stuart Montgomerys, who founded the Seamen's Bank, the Danas, the Alexander Bings, the Lewins, the Whitmans, the Hoffmans. They all owned the houses that now encircle the square. Great polish, mellowness, and grace.
The better artists scraped away the layers of paint, rediscovered the pure wood and the original fireplaces.
Santha Rama Rau came in her purple sari, saying she had shaken and trembled over the film Bells of Atlantis: "I re-experienced the birth of my child, even to the sounds I heard under anaesthetic."
Her husband, Faubion Bowers, writes beautiful books on the dance.
Suddenly I was in a mature world again, and its charm rediscovered. I was weary of children and their vulnerabilities, the fevers of adolescence.
I would have liked to know the real drama behind Mr. X, who "accidentally" fell from the fifteenth floor of the Gotham Hotel.
I no longer see people as the classified façade they wear: this one is a banker, this one a director of the opera. I see a human being who might have been anything else, one of Simenon's characters, with fears, doubts, regressions, defeats, sorrows.
It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment. The lapses from purity seem then like a crime against one's child or innocent self. Against one's own soul. And then one has the terror of being struck down with death, or old age, for in maintaining the soul's clear vision lies youth. Age is astigmatism, near-sightedness, a cataract of vision, born of impurities.
