by Anais Nin
Her invocation to Astarte, her lyrical philology, her musical accompaniments frightened Jim. I saw him grow pale and knew that he wanted to leave. So we deserted her. We said we must leave. And we walked. Jim said: "I'm frightened. That is how I want to live, but I'm frightened."
"I'm frightened too, but I want to go back. I don't want to lose her. She is beautiful. It is like talking to Ophelia." Having reassured him we returned to the bar. She was not where we had left her. And I felt: "We lost her. We lost her through fear." But we found her in the back room. She was talking and singing to other people.
At this moment she looked like Vivien Leigh. Her black hair was in a disarrayed Grecian style. Her body was very thin but supple as a dancer's. Green, large, vague eyes, a perfect profile, finely curved lean cheeks, a tender, not too full mouth, beautiful teeth which she exposed to hiss through, with her index finger upon the center teeth, to emit a hiss, a breath, which she translated with the same finger on the table, pointed index finger forming a large'S, the infinite, she explained. "Julian does not want me to go out because he thinks I'm crazy."
"You are dreaming awake," I said.
The associations were too swift and Jim and I were lost but we surrendered to her performance as if it were a Japanese Noh play and we did not know the story, and occasionally a phrase we understood reached our ears, as when she said later, as we separated: "No, I'm not going to the Becks tonight. I love them but that is not my home tonight. I am at home everywhere, anywhere. I'm going to see Daniel and bring him this I had intended to bring him." The key phrase she repeated was "as if to say" or "that is, you might say"... I can't remember. It was a phrase which actually denied connections between her phrases. Jim recited the opening of House of Incest. We decided after minute examinations which of our eyes we could see best from, and which hand was the strongest. Nina was never angry or sad. She shuffled musicians and writers and people we did not know. "Silver Fox said to me: 'You have something to give to the earth and the earth has nothing to give you.' " Jim wanted to know who Silver Fox was. The answer was: "This took place in a bar in Provincetown." I watched the very carefully modulated words as she gave birth to them, the motion of her mouth. Perpetual movement. She only relinquished her absorbed, rhapsodic intensity focused on us to throw back her head, and it was only when she threw her head back and turned her eyes upward that she evoked insanity, for there is in insanity always a moment which is not human, and at no other time was Nina not human. Even when she did not hear what we said or did not answer, she held our hands or caressed us with her eyes. Even while passing through those changes from dancer to singer to actress and poet to Joycean puns and allegories, she was graceful, ritualistic, beautiful. She designed an abstract web of images and captured us and Jim wished she had seen Moon in Capricorn, his play, and he asked her: "Did you see my play The Moon in Capricorn?"She answered indulgently, while waving her shoulders as if to dismiss the superfluity of the question. Indulgent toward our limited use of words? Know Anaïs? See Jim? Such slow wits. "Of course I know the Moon in Capricorn. I was there. I was born August 24 in Leo. Leo is your middle name. Why do people separate religion, philosophy, art? They are all one." To make the three of us one she maintained a linking of fingers, touch, to maintain the hypnosis. For the same reason that Jim wanted her to have seen his play, hoping she would recognize his dreams as we recognized some of hers, I wanted her to have read House of Incest, as if I expected her to tell me: "I was born there."
She wore a shabby short cape of purple velvet, a dress of Indian print with small designs, which she had difficulty in holding up to her shoulders because her breasts were so small. Pinned where her breasts should have begun to protrude was an elaborate Indian silver pin which held a bell-shaped container (a ball of hashish?). She drank wine but when the glass was empty she held it, warmed it, caressed it against her cheek as if it were full, and I could swear she did not taste her drink.
Toward midnight she refused another glass but said she was hungry. Asked us if we had eaten. Paused to remember when she had. "Oh, yes, I ate this morning." So Jim ordered a sandwich. She ate it as if it were a wafer. The fact that it was big, an Italian roll, only amused her. The big mouthfuls she held as if they would not fit into her mouth, would not go down her slender throat. She looked mischievously at Jim as if saying: "You'll not be able to see it, but I will swallow it."
"You are very powerful," I said, "but I feel like protecting you."
We are always afraid when our dreams or our creations come to life. Her answer was: "That is right, that is the way everyone feels," as if for the first time we had said something completely wise. When Jim quoted House of Incest she behaved as if this were known to her already.
The radiance of her face was magnetizing.
Again we asked American reporter questions, heavy and clumsy, because we could not enter her dreams, especially the ones she whispered so low and swiftly to herself. "When did you begin to dream awake, Nina?" Her answer confounded us: "October 21, 1952. Today is September 14, 1955. My telephone is——and my address ——" Perfect accuracy. When we left she asked for the time although I am sure she did not care. It was a part of her exquisite politeness toward conventions.
It was my first encounter with someone more removed from reality than I am. She was among the dreamers, the one who had broken through the sound barrier.
She was Ophelia, a young and beautiful Madwoman of Chaillot. Jim was tense and quite aware of the vertiginous heights of Nina's tightrope and aware that there was no net to catch her. I believe we only went home because we felt our tightrope walking was not as perfect as hers. I didn't, as Jim often said, look at the ground, but oscillated on a tightrope of written words which I had not learned to say. I was struck mute by her fluency. I was not in her state of speaking grace. I was in a state of a sensitive paper receiving an imprint, and after sleep I opened my eyes to pull out of the chemicals the combined negative and positive:
NINA
She is Breton's Nadja but far more eloquent. She is Nijinsky before he plunged to earth pushed by his earth wife.
She took her bracelet off. She braided her hair. As if the street at midnight were her own chamber and she were preparing to sleep.
Jim could not bear to leave Nina wandering about at two A.M. and took her to his apartment.
Before that, Jim told me, they had seen some giant pipelines resting beside an excavated street. Nina bent over the opening and laughed into the drainpipe and then ran toward the other end of it to see if her laughter would come out of it.
Arriving at Jim's apartment she said: "The room is too small." Then she opened the window and said: "Oh, but there is so much more to this room than I thought. It is enormous."
Then Nina asked for silver foil. "I always glue silver foil paper on the walls to make them beautiful."
She wanted to mop the floor with beer. "The foam will make it shine."
"Do you want to sleep?" asked Jim.
"I never sleep," said Nina. "Just give me a sheet."
She took the sheet and covered herself with it and then slid to the floor saying: "Now I am invisible."
The next day she must have gone back to the Becks for we did not see her again.
Enjoyments. An evening of rock-and-roll at the Brooklyn Paramount, with an audience mainly composed of delinquents, who tear up the seats when displeased. High-voltage atmosphere. An evening at the Palladium, watching Mambo competitions, the women dressed in the new skintight fashion with a ruffle below the knee, revealing every ripple of the body. And Teddy Brown (who spent one New Year's Eve in Harlem at the Savoy dancing with me only), winning all the prizes, surrounded by beautiful girls all wanting to become his partner. When he saw me he said: "I'm sorry I saw you Anaïs, I will start dreaming about you again."
A teacher of dancing sat at our table. He diagnosed the trouble with the rock-and-roll crowd. "All the evil came out of dance halls becoming too expensive for the young. That is where they spent the
ir energy, in a place like the Savoy. When the exploitation of dance halls started they had no place to go. They could listen to jazz but not dance for a dollar as before. To listen to jazz or rock-and-roll and not be able to dance all night as I did when I was twenty is a way to prime human energy for destruction. We wore out our energy dancing."
I wanted to write the following science-fiction story: twelve persons who do not believe in astrology are invited to take a tour of the planets in a special rocket. At first their various characteristics are imperceptible. But as they draw near to each planet, the characteristic trait of that planet affects them, and then it becomes very obvious that one is a Libra, the other Jupiter, the other Mars, the other Neptune, the other Saturn and so on.
Freedom is an inner attitude, a habit easier to acquire than one imagines. Or. Bogner and I discuss the issue of time. I am always too early. This compulsion adds to general stress and anxiety. She feels it conceals my rebellion against appointments, organization, discipline. I am afraid of my own impulse, which is to disregard time, so I go early to make sure I do not yield to that. So that the feeling of constriction does not come so much from the duties I have to perform as from the clash between these duties and my anarchic self, whom I have to hold in check. The constriction is caused by my own destructive rebellions, which I have to control like a pair of runaway horses.
This small mechanical examination of reflexes was evidently important, because since I returned from New York I have had a feeling of ease. I have had no destructive, negative rebellions. And because I do not fight my duties, I do them more easily. Also because I do not fight them I can be more humorous about them and they do not seem so heavy.
Jim writes me:
Nina Primavera comes here now and then. Last Friday she arrived depressed and very silent, said that few people understood her, that she talked too much and to the wrong people. She was headed for the Phoenix Theatre to watch the French mime, Marcel Marceau, hoping to learn from him the art of silent conversation.
Second letter from Jim:
To bring you up to date on Primavera: took her to Isle of Goats(Tani, Uta Hagen, Ruth Ford, Lawrence Harvey). During the first act when Ruth Ford brings on cheese and bread, Nina pulls out a sandwich from a brown paper bag and whispers in my ear: "I think I'll eat with them." With this she began to devour a pickle and a slice of bread.
After the third act she asked me to take her backstage and introduce her to Lawrence Harvey, whom I don't know from Adam. So I took her back and introduced her to Ruth Ford, thinking that would suffice. After a moment she whispered in my ear: "Lawrence Harvey." Resigned, I took her to the star dressing room, where a Negro in uniform asked what I wanted. I announced grandly that Miss Nina de la Primavera was here to see Mr. Harvey. The Negro disappeared, returned in a moment to tell me that Mr. Harvey was undressed at the moment. Nina Primavera gathered her shawl about her, walked forward, brushing the Negro aside with a gesture, and disappeared into the room announcing: "That doesn't make any difference. I'll see him anyway."
The Negro shrugged his shoulders. I returned to Tani's dressing room. Later when I left the theater, Nina had disappeared, and so had Lawrence Harvey. Haven't seen her since!
To sum up the extraordinary change caused by analysis. A month without depressions, anxieties, or nervousness. Only occasional or less severe forms of it. I feel installed in the present. I give myself to it. I no longer feel anger, walls, hostilities with the world. My criticalness has relaxed. I enjoy what comes. I am not nervous beforehand. I drink, I am gay, I am free. The fears have decreased: the fear of being unable to earn a living, of losing those I love. There is less jealousy and less rebellion. Much more smoothness and lightness in living, an ability to throw off anxiety. There is no bitterness, no friction, no hostilities. My feelings have changed about America. I see people who are in trouble, not happy on a deep level. I want to help, to teach. To pass on the wholeness I feel, and the strength. It took me a lifetime to find happiness in quiet things—not only in the peaks of ecstasy or passion. I feel reintegrated into the human family. I have overcome the neurosis at last.
Ian Hugo spent months filming on Forty-second Street and finally produced Jazz of Lights. The title was inspired by James Herlihy's Jazz of Angels.
When we become too familiar with certain street scenes we no longer see them. We become a blind man walking through the streets. Ian Hugo filmed Moondog walking through Forty-second Street. Moondog is blind. He wears his hair long and has a beard and dresses like a Christ figure in a long flowing robe. He wears sandals, Ian Hugo photographs the rhythms and interplays of billboard lights without the words which prevent us from seeing their abstract beauty. When he photographs the Empire State Building upside down it is not to break the laws of gravity but to emphasize the upward sky-piercing thrust of it. By shooting the lights of Broadway from oblique angles, or upside down or in counterpoint motions, or in superimpositions, he reveals their rhythm and pulsations obscured by references to Kleenex or Planter's Nuts. Divorced from their function of selling, they create intricate patterns of form and color with a beauty of their own.
The basis is imaginative realism, that is, realism transmitted into fugitive impressions, an ephemeral flow of sensations. Ian Hugo manipulates with skill the elements which dislocate or blur objects to reveal new aspects of them as they are revealed in emotional states. He has added to the phantasmagorical qualities of film images special effects which have caused images to fuse together as if they were notes in a musical composition, to flow into one another and become pure image and pure rhythm.
***
I write Geismar in an effort to repair the friendship:
I am so glad you told me by what words I offended Anne, because I did not know and I could never have repaired the offense. So this letter is for Anne, too, and please let her read it. If I said politics are useless, I used a clumsy word I did not mean exactly. I may have distorted a belief I do hold, that we cannot cure the evils of politics with politics, and that fifty years ago if we had gone the way of Freud (to study and tackle hostility within ourselves) instead of Marx, we might be closer to peace than we are. That is what I meant. That is why I gave my devotion to psychology and not to politics or economics. I meant to say politics are ineffectual as we can see by the state of the world. And this Anne will understand, I know. And I hope she will forgive me, for I never intended to offend your religious devotion to politics. I truly believe there is no solution to war, tyranny, persecution, while we look for external remedies (systems, economics, social work) but only when man is faced with the personal hostilities he projects into larger issues. And in America the quest for personal growth is taboo ... so ... That is what I meant. Dedication to politics has not brought on civilization.
It was sweet of you to ask me to write something for The Nation. But I sincerely feel I do not belong there, and none of my readers are there, and at this moment I can't address the very people who did all in their power to sink me. I need my energy and the very little time I have left to finish my work and I need the tenderness of artists, not the harshness of The Nation's political obsessions and bias.
The absurd talk of the objectivists. Simenon is not in his books. He is objective. But of course he is in his books. In his choice of characters, in his obsession with the downfall, the crime, the pathology, the destruction. In his somberness. How few moments of joy, euphoria, of love. He truly paints the negative aspect. It is perfectly told, perfectly motivated. But it is always the catastrophe. In Coup de Lune, Africa. The injustice of the whites. Man's sexual bondage and no love. Of course Simenon is there. Always there. His disguise is cleverer, that is all.
The objectivists think they have liquidated the self, that it is an encumbrance, but they only disguised it under the cloak of politics, history, social problems.
As a result of this denial of the self, no one stands out. When I traveled three thousand miles I looked at people attentively, I spent hours watching them in buses,
in cafés and cafeterias, and they seemed like extras in a film from which the main character is absent. Nothing distinguishes them.
To give the workman three meals a day do we have to destroy every vestige of man's other hungers?
It is difficult to write to an empty hall, to know I will have to struggle to get the book published, struggle to sell it, and struggle against hostility.
Bella Spewack advises me to write like Bonjour Tristesse, to tell a story.
Malraux talks about the hero. I wonder if I can be a heroine, pursue my solitary way, fighting and not minding war, not minding being attacked. Keep my aim in sight. I have a very big, impersonal aim: to impart the discoveries I have made about character. I write about uncommon characters so that we may become them. Proust solved this. He wrote in depth about characters who did not have any depth. His characters swim in his own unconscious. They are ordinary people but Proust looked beyond them and at a collective depth and made profound deductions. Because I write about uncommon characters (particularly in America, where the artist is considered among the freaks with the Bearded Lady, the Fat Man, et cetera), I am under suspicion. Nobody understands that the commonness is but a façade and that what makes people uncommon is what is hidden from view.
I had just read Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception but it did not impress me as much as Gil Henderson's talk about the visionary effects of LSD. He had participated in an experiment with Dr. Oscar Janiger. He painted an American Indian doll before taking LSD and then again after the ingestion of the drug, and the difference between them was astonishing. The first version was rigid and photographic. The second impressionistic, emotional. Gil asked me if I wanted to participate in an experiment because Dr. Janiger was hoping a writer would be more articulate about the experience. There were to be two other subjects there, a biologist from UCLA and another painter. Gil would be my sober pilot, that is, a person who has taken LSD before and now stands by to help one and guide one if necessary.
