Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 2

by Anais Nin

  I dreamed that my father was conducting an orchestra. There was no one to play the harp. I offered to play it. But the harp was really a spinet with loose notes, one white, one blue, one black. My father said I had only to play the three notes at every silence of the orchestra. It seemed very simple, but when I was about to do it the notes disappeared. I found them later in a box. They were gambler's roulette chips.

  Helene said good-bye with electric-eyed sincerity, tearless. A toy is taken away, one of the dream personages, a large Chirico woman against a blue canvas, half statue, half movie actress, an amazon, but one afraid of burglars and sex maniacs, pouting when she could not get what she wanted. Why are some people like dream personages one cannot become emotionally attached to? Moricand is another. We part at the subway, but I could swear Helene has never entered a subway train. She merely vanished.

  Gonzalo and I were watching candles in his apartment, watching them tremble. I asked him why candles trembled so much and he answered: "Because they are anxious."

  Jean Carteret understands my life, and I his. "We deny reality. We seek only the dream." I see him untrammeled, fluid, free, magical. But he confesses he is only free in spirit. In every other way he is in chains. He is blocked. He cannot be an artist, a lover, a husband, a lecturer, a traveler. He plays at all of them, partially. What I seek is the Vie Féerique, when all things happen as in a dream. Not comfort but the smoothness of magical happenings. Not luxury but the stage illusions of beauty. Not security but the drug effects of harmony. Not order but the unreal arrangements of objects as in the dream. Not perfection but the illusion of perfection. Not clock time but the instantaneity of miracles. Not labor but the realization of all wishes. Not service but an immediate answer to all formulated desires. Not peace but the sequence of the dream. Not absence of death but the eternal life of the dream. Not rebellion against change, loss, death, passing of time, but the quest of the eternal in every moment. The transfusion of blood into dreams. The dream includes violence, murder, pain, but no end. In the dream one never touches bottom even after one dies.

  [January, 1938]

  I was face to face with my work. There was no more evading it. I began to work and today I am finished with the cuts.

  I gave Gonzalo all I had for his rent. It was not quite enough to cover extra charges, but he did not tell me. I was short of money. Gonzalo did not dare face his landlady that day without all of it, and so he slept in an armchair at Paix et Démocratie.

  Henry projected into space by his writing, away from all of us. Pale. Cold. Henry says: "I suffer like an animal. I am like an animal. No one can help. No one is strong enough."

  "But Henry," I said, "one can get help just by remaining humanly near to others. Strength is a rhythm. Each one of us has his moments of strength when he can rescue others, and his moment of weakness when he needs to be rescued. But you seem unable to stay near anyone." He is too far, at such moments. Too far to feel. I know what he is doing, and how it surpasses all of us.

  I am neurotic, every artist is, but when I feel the earth opening under my feet, I turn to human beings. I lean on them. I seek warmth and love. They save me. I fear Henry's moments of insanity. His equilibrium is tenuous. He has such grandiose ideas of himself and at the same time such doubts. Then a phrase out of Jouve unties the knots in Henry, and he is ready to write again. He is happy.

  At least, in pain, or in happiness, I am one who feels the constant rotations and convolutions of earth and of life.

  I am sitting at the Café Flore waiting for Gonzalo and he does not come. It is raining. I pick up a newspaper. Once he had said to me: "I picked up a newspaper and saw on the front page the photo of my best friend, murdered the night before by the fascists." That is how it could happen. Gonzalo could fail to come to meet me, and that very night ... At the table next to me, a man is mocking the madness of Artaud, who is locked up in Sainte-Anne. He parodies his speech, his fears, his délire de persécution. I turn to him and I say: "It is you who should be locked up and not Artaud."

  But what has happened to Gonzalo? It is nine o'clock. I have not eaten. Gascoyne comes into the café. He is drugged. I hear conversations, superimposed, intellectual, personal, literary, intimate. Gascoyne's Irish friend cannot bring him back with his Irish fancies. A friend of Artaud's stops us: "There is a man mocking him all over Paris, I want to kill him. Where is he?" One cannot protect anyone. But Henry is never in danger of dying.

  Gonzalo had been ill at home, without telephone. At midnight a friend of his came to tell me.

  I was so grateful that he was not lying in some gutter with three bullet holes in his body that I entered the Church of Saint-Germain, and though I can no longer believe in prayer I managed to convey gratitude. To what? To whom?

  In front of the church door an automobile was burning. The firemen were working at putting out the fire.

  My neurosis is utterly different from Henry's, or Artaud's, or Helba's, or Gonzalo's. It is as if by a fluid quality, a facility for identification with others, I became like water and instead of separating from others, as Henry does, I lose myself in others. If people say: "I hate the tropics, I hate the country, I hate red, or orange or black," I feel I am the tropics, Louveciennes was the country, red is my color, this person hates me. Then I get confused. This for me is the labyrinth. Identification, projection. My identification with my father which had to be broken. Myself in June. I see the double, the twins of others. Is it this deep psychological truth I will explore to the limit, and make the base of my Proustian edifice? It is at the basis of my life, analogy, interchange of souls, of identities. Doesn't love mean just that, this growing into the other like plants intertwining their roots, this interchange of soul and feelings. Not an abyss then, but a new world. Not madness but a deep truth. A principle moving us, our inner fatality. We do not act as ourselves. We act. We are possessed. These are the multiple miracles of the personality.

  When I was fifteen I wanted to create the black tulip which Alexandre Dumas wrote about. So I invented a formula. I found symbols, I invented signs, a language, and a chemical mixture. I applied it. But I had invented signs without keeping the key or the code to their meaning. I didn't know what elements would produce a black tulip. It remained an esoteric mystery, but for me, the discoverer, too.

  Jean Carteret's life is expanded, dilated to the point of abortion. When we meet, the blood rushes to his face, and he falls into a dream. We have lunch together when he is on his way to the Sorbonne. While I waited for him, the waiter said to me: "The young man who looks like Christ was here earlier looking for you." Jean reads me what he is writing on horoscopes, or analysis of handwriting, or his conference on Lapland. He is full of curiosity and wonder. He is floating in vast reveries.

  Moricand joins us at the Café Flore, he is writing a book called "The Story of a People who went Mad." At the bar of the Martiniquaise one gets coffee with rum. It is a smoky place where the phonograph plays dance music constantly. The café is full of pimps, lesbians, Negroes, prize-fighters, homosexuals, prostitutes, jazz musicians. I like the atmosphere. It is dense like a jungle, diffuse, dissolved.

  Gonzalo meets two of his friends, the ones he used to go around with constantly. Malkine is stupefied with drugs, his face is haggard, his eyes sunk, his eyelids swollen. Gonzalo is startled by his disintegration. He no longer understands this dying in life, this feeding of the funeral worms long before real death. Malkine is far from his friends. I ask Gonzalo: "You were drawn to death, to disease, destruction before we met?"

  "Yes, I was, but not really. I'm more drawn to life. All that was literary. It was not the real me."

  They talked about Artaud.

  Gonzalo is far away from death, he is soaring. He is full of fire and activity.

  All these changes are mysterious and beyond me. I change too. Gonzalo has initiated me to his gypsy ways, his timelessness, silences, Bohemian recklessness, his nonchalance. I swing with him into a musical disorder of strewn clothes, s
pilled cigarette ashes, indolence, into regions of chaos and moonlight. I like it there. It is the light of the moon, of subterranean life. It is wordless. I like the silences of Gonzalo, meditativeness, reverie. It is the most beautiful expression of Gonzalo, the silence of earth itself, the silence of animals.

  When he buys shoes they are so heavy, so strong, they seem like the hoofs of the Centaur.

  I feel that I am trying to live out Henry's poverty, Helba and Gonzalo's poverty, to come closer to their life. I give so much that I often find myself without a cent. Going to the pawn shop. Thinking: Gonzalo has been here. Henry came out of himself once to play at analyzing people, to become me. Moricand and Jean understand this split feeling, this wanting to be others, live other lives, abandon the self. By compassion, by great love, by communion, to reach the dédoublement of the mystics. In sorcery this is dispelled by reintegration into the self. We all reintegrate ourselves by creation.

  Sullivan writes on Beethoven:

  Beethoven had come to realize that his creative energy, which he at one time opposed to his destiny, in reality owed its very life to that destiny.... To be willing to suffer in order to create is one thing, to realize that one's creation necessitates one's suffering—is to reach a mystical solution to the problem of evil. In these moments of illumination Beethoven had reached that state of consciousness that only the great mystics have ever reached, where there is no more discord. And in reaching it he retained the whole of his experience of life: he denied nothing. So he turned from his personal and solitary adventure ... this is the last occasion on which Beethoven addresses his fellow men as one of them. Henceforth he voyaged in strange seas of thought, alone. What he had now to express was much more difficult to formulate than anything he had previously expressed. The state of consciousness with which he was concerned contained more and more elusive elements, and came from greater depths. The task of creation necessitated an unequalled degree of absorption and withdrawal. The regions within which Beethoven the composer now worked, were, to an unprecedented degree, withdrawn and sheltered from his outward life. No external storms could influence his work. The music of the last quartets comes from the profoundest depths of the human soul that any artist ever sounded.

  Henry seems to be in the world still, but not really. He is suffering from the tremendous travail of the Capricorn synthesis. He says that when he looks at his notes he gets all confused as to what happened in reality. It is no longer his personal life. Creation in him is so clearly an art, transmutation. In reality Henry cannot remember dialogue, or exactly what he said, or what was said by others, as I do. He does not remember. And now for his greatest flight, he is liberated of his notes, his realism. He swims in a mutated, synthetized, transformed world. He is driven by a force greater than himself. A while ago he looked ghostly, pale, dazed.

  This state, which I understand and admire as an artist, or in other artists, I am unwilling to undergo. I want to stay inside of untransformed human life.

  Moricand speaks of continuous or alternating currents, of communion, of adhesion, of resonances. Of the moment when he felt himself going mad he says: "I was skidding." In his eyes people have the eyes of animals. "She had squid eyes." He speaks of hermaphroditic nights. "To look at my drawings of perverse children you need dark glasses." Then he spoke at length about the fact that no matter how violently I live, or where, nothing has yet awakened me from the state of the dream.

  Jean, because of his vast, dimensional living, clutches at objects. He has a lust for exploration, change, novelty, a tapeworm of the imagination as Henry has, but he must have objects which prove where he has been, a lock of hair from the woman he slept with, objects from other countries. He lives in and for the public. He has to write in cafes, and talk all his interior life away, disperse it all night in talk. He has to be out. He evaporates in endless talk, volatilizes his energy in constant movement. He lives with waste, confusion, and an absence of memory. He seeks the one who is like him, his twin soul.

  Gonzalo now says he feels the need of an austere life and devotion to the Spanish cause. I have awakened in him the desire to serve a purpose and to live for others. Why is this, when I thought it was me who wanted to be awakened to a more realistic, more lower-depths life, more Bohemian life than I ever knew with Henry. Was I seeking chaos, mindless living, adventure?

  Gonzalo was deeper in life than Henry. He did not belong in the art world. He lived an untransformed, wordless, night-life. And now he takes up the stark, bare, rigid realism of Marx.

  We do not touch at all points. Two people understand each other's dreams, enter each other's dreams as Gonzalo and I did, but then each one manifests the effect of this in paradoxical ways. I wanted to write more, Gonzalo wants action.

  Jean keeps House of Incest on his desk. He cannot read English but finds he can write his dreams for Allendy by placing a page of transparent paper over my own writing. While I am talking to Gonzalo at the Café Flore, Jean sits at a table nearby working on his lecture.

  On Beethoven [Sullivan]:

  His growing consciousness, that what is called the human life, was withheld from him. This emotional and passionate man was condemned to a fundamental isolation. Personal relations, that should give him a sense of completeness and satisfy his hunger, were impossible. Separation from the world was the entry into a different and more exalted vision.

  Gonzalo lives with half of himself in darkness. The opposite of Henry, who exposes everything, leaves nothing unsaid. Gonzalo does not try to formulate, does not live naked. Was this the life which poor D. H. Lawrence longed for? But he was a writer, cursed with formulation.

  Notes on dreams: note fragments of dreams, the edges, the dark spaces around them. Chirico. Vast deserts. Only a few objects in sight (Tanguy). Mutilations. Variations of color and tempo. Some musical, some silent. Note recurrent themes and personages like motifs in a symphony. Note moods, anguish or euphoria, diminutive or giant aspect. Timelessness. Awareness comes sometimes before the drama has taken place. Primeval innocence. No recollection.

  Walked with Gascoyne along the river. Worked five hours on the diary to the accompaniment of L'Oiseau de Feu. Restless. The other night, walking with Moricand and Jean. We passed a shop of wooden objects. I said: "I have wooden dishes." Jean said: "I have wooden spoons from Lapland." I said: "I have wooden glasses from the Philippines." Jean said: "I have a wooden pitcher from Panama." I said: "I have wooden soup bowls from Japan." Jean said: "I have a wooden salad bowl from Africa." We said simultaneously: "Il faudra se mettre en ménage!"

  If I were rich:

  I would send Helba to a sanatorium where she might get well.

  I would give Jean a radio-phonograph because he too likes to write to music.

  I would give Henry rare Chinese art books he has been hankering for.

  I would pension old Lantelme so he would not work any more.

  Pension Moricand to be court astrologer.

  Sustain all Henry's publications.

  Buy a press for myself.

  Princess de San Faustino makes portraits of people with a few lines, an egg, a staircase, an arrow, a lightning rod, a ribbon, a serpentine, a knot, a firework, a tower, a circle.* Jean could read her symbols and describe the character of each personage. She asked him to guess mine. He selected one at random for: "La ligne droite, centrée, et les envolées dans l'air, mais fécondantes." Kay said: "Well, this is not Anaïs. I designed this one without anyone in mind. It was a portrait of what someone ought to be." The second time he did guess. He picked out: "L'envolée vers l'espace, comme des cheveux d'ange." Jean added: "If people melted away, this is what would be left of them on paper."

  Jean is dispersed, lost, confused except in his role of divination about others. Gonzalo looks at these games with the dark furies of Othello. Gonzalo has buried his drawings, his writings, his reveries, his ecstasies, his gypsy ways, his drunkenness, to serve the revolution. He rages at Jean's fantasies, Jean's ties with the Psychological Center.<
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  [March, 1938]

  Hitler marched into Austria. Franco is encircling Barcelona, and France, afraid of war, is not coming to its help. Gonzalo came to the houseboat and exploded: "I will kill myself if I have to live in a fascist world. I'll die in exchange for killing ten fascists."

  When the world becomes monstrous, and commits crimes I cannot prevent, I always react with the assertion that there is a world outside and beyond this one, other worlds, human, creative, to pit against the inhuman and destructive forces. I have learned no other remedy. Gonzalo was ready to kill himself, and Helba, and me, so we would not live in a fascist world. I could not accept his fanaticism and this solution. Suicide?