Tidbits

A scrapbooky type of post.

You are The High Priestess

Science, Wisdom, Knowledge, Education.

The High Priestess is the card of knowledge, instinctual, supernatural, secret knowledge. She holds scrolls of arcane information that she might, or might not reveal to you. The moon crown on her head as well as the crescent by her foot indicates her willingness to illuminate what you otherwise might not see, reveal the secrets you need to know. The High Priestess is also associated with the moon however and can also indicate change or fluctuation, particularly when it comes to your moods.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

**************

“There are continents and seas in the moral worlds, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals … than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.”
~ Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwahl
(Thanks to Rena for this quote)

******************

Anais Nin quotes for Dan, because he asked, and the passages about the diary in particular for Rena …

    “Now he [Dr Allendy, Nin’s therapist] is probing the splitting of personalities, the imaginative poetic writing on the one hand, and the realistic writing in the diary. He begins to sense the importance of my work. Meanwhile I am saying to myself that he is telling me little that I do not know, little that I have not written already. But this is not true, because he has made clear to me the idea of guilt, of guilt and punishment.”

“Never have I seen as clearly as tonight that my diary-writing is a vice. I came home worn out by magnificent talks with Henry at the cafe; I glided into my bedroom, closed the curtains, threw a log into the fire, lit a cigarette, pulled the diary out of its last hiding place under my dressing table, threw it on the ivory silk quilt, and prepared for bed. I had the feeling that this is the way an opium smoker prepares for his opium pipe. For this is the moment when I relive my life in terms of a dream, a myth, an endless story.”

“Rank [a later therapist of Nin’s] wanted to free me of the compulsion to write everything in the diary, and so little in the novels. He encouraged an intermittent notebook, not the need of describing everything. Yet when I gave him what I wrote about him, he was pleased. As Henry was. Kill the diary, they say; write novels; but when they look at their portrait, they say: “That is wonderful”.”

“The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I wanted my diary as one wants opium. I wanted nothing else but the diary to rest upon, to confide in. But I also wanted to write a novel. I went to my typewriter and I worked on House of Incest and Winter of Artifice. A deep struggle. A month later I began the portrait of Rank in a diary volume, and Rank did not feel it was the diary I had resuscitated but a notebook, perhaps.
The difference is subtle and difficult to seize. But I sense it. The difference may be that I poured everything into the diary. It channeled away from invention and creation and fiction. Rank also wanted me to be free of it, to write when I felt like it, but not compulsively. “Get out into the world!” Rank said. “Leave your house at Louveciennes! That is isolation, too. Leave the diary; that is withdrawing from the world.”

“Allendy is mistaken not to take my imagination seriously. Literature, adventure, creativity are not a game with me. I am touched by his paternal protectiveness, but I laugh too. The absolute limited sincerity of men like Allendy is not interesting to me. It is humanly comforting but it is not as interesting as Henry’s insincerities, dramatics, lies, literary escapades, excursions, experiments, audacities, rascalities.
I may be basically good, human, loving, but I am also more than that, imaginatively dual, complex, an illusionist.
Allendy talks, perhaps, to ease his own doubts. He stresses my frailness, naivete; whereas I, with a deeper instinct, choose friends who arouse my energy, who make enormous demands on me, who are capable of enriching me with experience, pain, people who do not doubt my courage, or my toughness, people like Henry and June who do not believe me naive or innocent, but who challenge my keenest wisdom, who have the courage to treat me like a woman in spite of the fact that they are aware of my vulnerability.”

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvellous.
I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.
But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living”