by Anais Nin
“I have the fear that everyone is leaving, moving away, that love dies in an instant. I look at the people walking in the street, just walking, and I feel this: they are walking, but they are also being carried away. They are part of a current. Each moment that is passing takes them somewhere else. I confuse the moods which change and pass with the people themselves. I see them carried into eddies, always moving out of some state they will never return to, I see them LOST. They do not walk in circles, back to where they started, but they walk out and beyond in some irretrievable way, too fast, toward the end. And I feel myself standing there, I cannot move with them. I seem to be standing and watching this current passing and I am left behind. Why have I the feeling they all pass, like the day, the leaves, the weather, the moods of climate, into death? “
“Because you are standing still and measuring the time by your standing still, the others seem to run too fast towards an end, which, if you were living and running with them, you would cease to be aware of. The death you are aware of is only in you because you are watching.”
“I stand for hours watching the river downtown. What obsesses me is the debris. I look at the flowers floating, petals completely opened, the life sucked out of them, flowers without pistils. Rubber dolls, punced, bobbing up and down like foetuses. Boxes full of wilted vegetables, bottles with broken tops. Dead cats. Corks. Bread that looks like entrails. Torn envelopes. These things haunt me. The debris. Well, when I watch people it is as if at the same time I saw the discarded parts of themselves. Detritus. And so I can’t see their motions except as acts which lead them faster and faster to the waste, the end, to the river where it will be thrown out. The faster they walk the streets, the faster they move toward this mass of debris. That is how I see them, caught by a current that carries them off. “
“Only because you are standing still. If you were in the current, in love, in ecstasy, the motion would not show only its aspect of death. You see what life throws out because you stand outside, shut out from the ferment itself. What is burnt, used, is not regretted by anyone who is the fire consuming all this. If you were on fire you would enjoy throwing out what was dead. You would fight for the lightness of your movements, loving, hating, dancing, caressing. It is not living too fast and abandoning oneself that carries one towards death, but not moving. Then everything deteriorates. When parts of yourself die they are only like leaves. What refuses to live in you will become like cells through which the blood does not pass. The blood must pass.
“There must be change. When you are living you seek the change; it is only when you stop that you become aware of death. Death and abandon. Death and separation.”
Djuna walked out in the street, blind with the rush of memories. She stood in the center of the street eddies, and suddenly she knew the whole extent of her fear of flowing, of yielding, of depending on another. Suddenly she began walking faster than whoever walked beside her, to feel the exultation of passing them. The one who does not move feels abandoned, and the one who loves and weeps and yields feels he is living so fast the debris cannot catch up with him. She was moving faster than the slowly flowing rivers carrying detritus. Moving, moving. Flowing, flowing, flowing. When she was watching, everything that moved seemed to be moving away, but when moving this was only a tide, and the self turning, rotating, was feeding the rotation of desire.
* * *
Djuna no longer watched death. She was dancing, and she was dancing away from Hans, and back to him, leaving more space and air between them. But thinking of him, attentive to her returns. Thinking constantly of Hans but dancing into new lives. Alert, and a little impatient, aware of time (to be there when he returns). She opened many doors. (I am not here to stay. He must not be kept waiting.) He is behind every move she makes. She is still swallowing food for him, looking at women with his eyes, feeling the sensuality of the day through his skin. She laughs his laughter, feels all the currents passing through him.
Could anyone help her to forget Hans for an hour? Could Edgar help her, Edgar with his astonished eyes saying to her: “I cannot tell what you will be to-morrow, that is why I love you. You feed on miracles and transformations. You may have been afraid but you never died.” The whiteness of his room like the whiteness of the streets. The world excluded from his room. They met in quietness and elation. Elation in royal blue and whiteness.
Out in the snow again she does not feel her body. She is afraid of becoming a saint. Edgar might save her, Edgar waiting for her every day carrying flowers in silver paper. Flowers in silver paper! With this bouquet in his hand the world loses all its insensate rotation and askewness.
She has a fear of becoming a saint. She feels her body slipping away from her.
She is dancing with Edgar in the luminous turning disk in a shower of changing lights, but when her dress opens a little at the top she can smell the mixed odor of herself and Hans. She still feels Hans’ moisture between her legs. But she is still afraid of being lured back into the whitest corners of the dream, afraid of the nun’s wings like small ship sails. She likes to feel other desires around her. She would like many men to come and take hold of her, so her body would cease slipping from her. She finds herself so far from her desires, so far from her own flesh, this flesh, these feet walking over wet snow in sandals because she has so strong a sense of wonder she cannot believe her feet will get wet, her throat ache. Her love for Hans spilling over in multiple desires to be made woman many times over again, to remain woman at his side, to stay in his world because it is his world and he is in it. She sees the dirty snow, like the soiled bandages of a crippled city. She loves the world too much, it is implanted in her like man himself; no hatred pours from her, yet she is grateful to Edgar because his desire, his hand on her, the flowers in silver paper, everything that is simple, life-like. Ordinary, like his words ‘I love your gaiety, you’re a thoroughbred,’ because the place the dog tied at the entrance with the coats and hats, the waiter’s smile, the snow brought from the street marking the dance floor with stains, all this can arrest this ascension in her, this vast rotation in space, this proximity to all forms of departure. He said she was a thoroughbred, and not a saint. She had been made woman by Hans. Hans alone held in his hand all the roots of her being, and when he pulled them, in his own motion outward, he inflicted a torture which destroyed all the roots at once and sent her into space. Edgar wanted to come close to her, and she would let him, while imagining Hans’ pain. She would be Hans observing her own severance from him. A meeting of eyes, a silence, a blind meeting with Edgar, covered with flowers in silver paper, in a world that stood still. Below the level of feeling where Hans could watch the scene and be in turn transfixed to the pain of stillness while the nightmare enveloped and pierced him: and so Hans saw the clothes falling, heard the music, witnessed the scene of a Djuna lying down and saying: Why do you leave me so alone, through what fissure between us does this stranger penetrate and approach me? I am quiet and yielding like a plant. Unafraid and full of joy at feeling your pain, Hans. You are the man of the crowd and of the street. Here I lie with a stranger covered with ordinary flowers in silver paper. I am punishing you for being different, I am removing myself to permit you to breathe. What makes me lonely, Hans, are the cheap and gaudy people you go with. I lie here untouched by this stranger, who is only caressing you inside of me. He is complaining like a woman: you are not filled with me. This was a meeting like a curse in a dark, chaotic world to learn to put space between you and me.
* * *
It is as if she were in an eleva shooting up and down. Hundreds of floors of sensations varying faster than temperature. Up into the sun garden, no floors above. Deliverance. A bower of light. Proximity to the stars. Faith. At this height she finds something to lie on. Faith. But the red lights are calling: Down. The elevator coming down so swiftly brings her body to the concert floor. But her breath is caught midway, left in midheaven. Now it is music she is breathing, in which all anger dissolves. It is not the swift c
hanges of floor which make her dizzy, but that parts of her body, of her life are passing into every floor, into the lives of others. All that passes into the room of the Voice he pours back now into her, to deliver himself of the weight. She follows the confessions, each anguish is repeated in her. The resonance is so immense, resonance to wind, to lament, to pain, to desires, to every nuance of sensibility, so enormous the resonance, beyond the entire hotel, the high vault of sky and the black bowl of hysteria, that she cannot hear the music. She cannot listen to the music. Her being is brimming, spilling over, cannot contain its own knowledge. The music spills out overflows, meets with the overfullness, and she cannot receive it. She is saturated. For in her it never dies. No days without music. She is like an instrument so tuned up, so exacerbated, that without hands, without players, without leadership, it responds, it breathes, it emits the continuous melody of sensibility. Never knew silence. Even in the darkest grottoes of sleep. So the concerts of the Hotel Chaotica Djuna cannot hear without exploding. She feels her body like an instrument which gives its strongest music when it is used as a body. Ecstasy reached only in the orchestra, music and sensualitly traversing all walls and reaching ecstasy. The orchestra is made with fullness, and only fullness rises to God. The soloist talks only to his own soul. All fullness rises.
Like the fullness of the Hotel. No matter what happened in each room, what contortions, distortions, growls, devourings, murders, when Djuna reaches the highest floor, the alchemy is complete. Music rises. Ecstasy rises. Like the fullness in herself. No cord untouched, no cells closed, no nerves silent: at the tips of her nerves a million eyes, and her moisture dripping in snow white drops everywhere.
* * *
The telephone rang and announced some one waiting downstairs to see the Voice. It was urgent. And this some one came, shaking an umbrella dripping with melted snow. She entered his room walking sideways like a crab, and bundled in her coat as if she were a package, not a body. Between each word there was a light gasp of hesitancy. Ineach gesture a swing intended to be masculine, but as soon as she sat on the couch, looking up at the Voice, flushed with timidity, saying shall I take off my shoes and lie down? he knew already she was not masculine. She was deluding herself and others about it. He was even more certain while watching her take off her shoes and uncover her very small and delicate feet. Not that the feet were an indication, but that he felt the woman in her through her feet, through her hands. They transmitted a woman current. The simple act of taking off her shoes betrayed that her caresses were those of a girl, girls in school arousing but the surface of each other’s feminine senses and believing when they had travelled on lakes of gentle sensation that they had penetrated the dark and violent center of woman’s response. All this he knew, and he was not surprised when she opened with “I find it hard to confess to you, I’m a pervert. I’ve had a lot of aff with women.” He wanted to smile. He could have smiled, she could not see him, but he could see her passing her delicate girl hand through the strands of her heavy hair with gestures meant to be heavy with disaster and dark implications. She could not, with any of her words, charge the atmosphere of the room as she meant to, with the darkness of her acts. The atmosphere continued delicate like her hands and feet. No matter what she was saying about her last love affairs, about her spread the smell of herbs. She spoke breathlessly, with little repetitions and light gasps of awe and surprise at herself:
“I loved Hazel so. I was swallowed up by her, just as before that I loved Georgia, and she could do anything with me. I would even help her to see her lovers. I would do anything she asked me. She got tired of me, and I went off alone to Holland, and I could not play the violin any more, I wanted to die. I made love to other women, but it was not the same. What terrible things I have done in my life, you can’t imagine. I don’t know what you will think. I can’t see your face and that bothers me. I can’t tell you because maybe you won’t want to see me any more. Georgia told me one lies down and talks, it is like talking to oneself except that this Voice comes and explains everything and it stops hurting. I feel fine here lying down, but I am ashamed of so many things and I think they are very bad things I did, this sleeping with women, and other things. I killed a woman who got married. It was in my birth place, in the South. She got married and then died the night of the wedding, and I did it. I thought all the time before the wedding that she ought not to love a man, there is no tenderness in men, and then I thought of the blood, and I prayed she should die rather than be married, and so I wished it, and she died. And I am sure it was my fault. But there is something much worse than this. It happened in Paris. I was working at the violin. I remember. My room was on the level with the street and the windows were open, and I did not realize the windows were open; I was playing away, and suddenly, I don’t know why, I looked at the bow and looked at it for a long while and I was taken with a violent desire to pass it between my legs, as if I were the violin, and I don’t know why I did it, and suddenly I saw people laughing outside… I nearly died of shame. You will never tell this to anyone? I can’t see your face. I can’t tell what you are thinking about me. When I don’t know what people think I always imagine they are laughing at me, criticizing me. I don’t feel that you condemn me, I feel good here, lying down. I feel that at last I am getting some terrible things out, getting rid of them maybe. maybe I will be able to forget them, like the time I gave a little boy an enema with a straw, and I thought I had injured him for life, and a few years after that he got sick and died, and I didn’t dare walk through the town because I am sure it was the enema that did it. Don’t you think it was? I don’t know why I did that. I wish I could see your face. I want revenge above all, because I was operated on, and I was not told why, I was told it was for appendicitis, and when I was well I found out I had no more woman’s parts, and I feel that men will never want me because I can’t have a child. But that is good. I don’t like men, they have no tenderness. Not being able to have a child, that means I am a cripple, men won’t love me. But I’m sure I wouldn’t like it with a man, I tried how it felt once with a toothbrush, and I didn’t like it. I had the funniest dream just before coming to you; I had opened my veins and I was introducing mercury in them, in each vein at the finger tip. Why can I never be happy? I’m always thinking when I’m in love that it will come to an end, just like now I think if I don’t find more things to tell you, I won’t be able to come again, and I am afraid of this coming to an end, afraid you will not think me sick enough.”
* * *
A week later, ten days later, she is lying down and talking to the Voice:
“Last night I was able to play. I felt you standing like an enormous shadow over me, and I could see your large signet ring flashing, and what was stranger than all this, I smelled the odor of your cigar suddenly in the middle of the street. How can you explain this, walking casually through a street, I smelled your cigar and that made me breathe deeply: I always walk with my shoulders hunched up, you’ve noticed it, I walk like a man, I am sure I am a man after all, because when I was a child I played like a boy, I hated to dress up in pretty things and I hated perfume. I don’t understand why the smell of your cigar, which reminds me of my talks with you, made me want to breathe deeply. It’s very funny. I haven’t thought about Hazel for the last few days; maybe I don’t love her any more, I only feel I love her when we are separating, when I see her going off on a train; then I feel terrible, terrible. Otherwise I am not very sure that I love her, really. I feel nothing when she is there, we quarrel a lot, that is all. With Georgia it was different, she made me feel she was there: Lillian, do this for me, Lillian, do that for me, Lillian, telephone for me, Lillian, carry my music. She was always deathly ill, I had to run around for her all the time; she was always dying, but always well enough to receive lovers. Always clinging to me, talking about her great loneliness, her love affairs. This talking to you is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. How strange it is to talk absolutely sincerely, as it comes, t
o say everything in one’s head, not to have to think beforehand. I am getting well, but I don’t want you to send me away. When I was a child I always wanted to go to Africa. I had a scrap book all about Africa and maps, time-tables, boat sailings, information, pictures of airplanes, trains, of the ships that could take me there. My school was very far away, I had to walk for two hours, and I called it Africa. I would set out for it all prepared as for a trip. I liked going to school because it was Africa, and I thought about it at night. And then they built a new school right next to my home, five minutes away, and I never went to school again, I never learnt anything; I was expelled and I made a mess of it, my father never forgave me, he was so mad he threw a knife out of the window and it hit our mare in the leg and that made a terrible impression on me, it was my fault too. Yesterday when I left you I was thinking about God, and what do you think happened to me? Walking out of the hotel I stumbled on the steps and I found myself kneeling on the sidewalk, and I did not mind it at all, it was wonderful, so many times I have wanted to kneel on the sidewalk, and I had never dared, and now thinking about you and what I could say to you the next time so you won’t think I’m cured yet and send me away… There is something I have now which you can’t take away from me, ever since I came here I have a feeling so warm and sweet and life-giving which belongs to me, I know you gave it to me, but it is inside of me now, and you can’t take it away. There was another time when I was thankful and I wanted to kneel in the street and that time I pretended to lace my shoe and I just kneeled there, and everybody let me, thinking I was lacing my shoe.”
