On Love, Sex and War

Yesterday I finished the second volume of Anaïs Nin’s diary. As luck would have it, yesterday also brought the arrival of Henry and June, Delta of Venus and Eros Unbound (the last two being her erotic short stories … and oh boy, they are erotic!).

I am again utterly enchanted by her. I can see the fascination she held for both men and women. While her narcissism at times is repulsive, I can’t help but be intrigued. That narcissism, though, I’ve seen in other creative ‘geniuses’ that I know, true artists. Maybe it’s a prerequisite.

In Henry and June, though, because it is unabridged and she talks of her husband, and her love for him, Henry and June, and talks about her ecstasies, she becomes to me more of a burning flame. She lives as a woman with vulnerabilities, becomes more real. The letters between her and Henry Miller are so beautiful. He woke her up sexually and sensually. If only we could all be so lucky.

Such a wise woman. She was a healing, intuitive guide with a deep knowledge of what it is to be woman. What I deeply want to be myself. From the second volume, at the outbreak of WWII:

“When you live closely to individual dramas you marvel that we do not have continuous war, knowing what nightmares human beings conceal, what secret obsessions and hidden cruelties.”

…

“You give you faith, your love, your body to someone, year after year, and within this human being lies a self who does not know you, does not understand and is driven by motives even he cannot decipher. In one instant, all that was created between you, every word said in trust, every caress, every link as clear to you as a piece of architecture, an architecture born of feeling, of mutual work, of memories, is swept away by some inner distortion, a twisted vision, a misinterpretation, a myth, a childhood being relived. And this was the madness we were about to enter on a grandiose scale. For war is madness.”

…

I had the illusion that when one loves, just as when we create human children, we create a permanent image of love like an iron statue by a sculptor. I was horrified to discover that the image the other person carried within him bore no resemblance to one’s own, or that it could be annihilated by another love, or by a misunderstanding, or a distortion, or a failure of memory. This gave me a foretaste of death. We were not enshrined in the other’s heart, and the one we loved was often immured, alone, separate from us. The war destroyed our illusion of a strong, unshatterable intimate world of personal loves.

Other passages from the second volume that spoke:

“Gonzalo and Henry both arrive from the street with a glos on their faces. They come from the most innocuous places, a café, a talk with an anonymous, nondescript, colorless person, an exhibit of paintings. They denigrate what they have seen. But the glow is there. It is the glow of exercise, of motion, of pure physical circulation. It comes from flux and reflux, the waves. It is impersonal. It is the shoal-life pleasure, which woman cannot understand, because she gets this glow from intimate life. It is the health of collective exercise, of collective swimming. Woman looks for depth, and for intimacy.”

“It struck me again, that individual suffering should be merged into universal suffering. One should adopt the world’s troubles in replacement of one’s own. Of course, the personal life lived deeply always expands into truths beyond itself. My struggles with myself led me to understand the struggles of others.”

That last paragraph reminds me so clearly of something I learned and thought about in a lecture at the Anthroposophical Conference in Armidale. The eternal internal struggles I have, the cancer, the depression, the feeling of disconnection is so much a part of our time. It is the job of our time in evolution to learn to overcome fear, both on microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. Learning this, somehow, gave me great peace. Knowing that my sufferings are everyman’s sufferings, that I am not alone. That we ALL have to learn to overcome fear, however that comes to us individually, to spiritually progress for personal AND world evolution. And funnily enough, therein comes a feeling of beautiful connection with the rest of humanity.

Ah yes, I know this:

“Even today when I am most deeply installed inside of life, I cannot hear music and gaiety from a neighbor’s house without sadness, without feeling outside. To be inside or outside was my nightmare. I feel born on the rim of an eternally elusive world. When I was poor, when I was at an awkward age, when I was combing my long hair before the mirror of the pantry in the brownstone in New York, I can understand why the music that came from the house in front of us filled me with yearning, jealousy, envy, despair. It seemed to be inaccessible. It seemed to me to come from a forbidden, an impossible world. … There was always this being outside at some moment or other, alone, I could not remain inside, I did not live inside. The glow, the familiarity inside of music, with people and gaiety, was there, but so was the moon-glow of solitude, the pale-faced watcher. At first I was altogether the lonely girl watching and feeling unfamiliar, dépaysée. … Why must it come, the moment when I am thrust out on th eperiphery again, separated, and I hear the neighbor’s music, I hear festivities, I hear dancing of which I am not a part, and I am sad, still yearning as someone doomed to feel this edge, this rim, this distance. Everything will not happen in my own home. There is alwayus music coming from elsewhere, al.ways a yearning, always something imagined to be lovlier and warmer. Always a color that is inaccessible, a room that makes me feel poor and ragged, a music that makes me dance in the dark.”

“When I think of suicide I think of it only as a relief and an end ot sensibility. That is my disease, my only disease. That is what isolates me, separates me from collective life. I find happiness in the intimacy of friendships, when it is new, but then comes the world in which the friend lives, his other selves appear in relation to others, a different self, smaller, shabbier, poorer, weaker. I see them in the world, and it is not hte same person I live in intimacy.  Then comes the death of the friendship. I ask myself: Was it a natural death? Or was it a death hastened by my abnormal sensitiveness, my doubts of which is reality, which is the real person, the one revealed to me or the one acting in the world?”

“When a desire is blocked most people react with philosophy. But with me a desire defeated is a part of life which is killed.”

“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 his lifre 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 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 … Henceforth he voyaged in strange seas of thought, alone. What he had now to express was much more difficult to dormulate 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.”

(This reminds me of Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”.)

And to finish this scrapbook entry off (because it is primarily a ‘scrapbook entry’ of passages that caught me and I wanted to remember):

“In the infinite, there is no impasse.”

🙂