February 2011
23 posts
“Before I took the chemical called L.S.D., it was as if light, color, smell and touch could not reach me. It was as if I were outside looking through glass. But that day (I think it was the second time) I was finally inside. I looked at the rug on the floor and it was no longer a plain rug but a moving a swaying mass like hair floating on water or like wind over a field of wheat. The door knob ceased to be a plain door knob. It melted and undulated and the door opened and all the walls and windows vanished. There was a tremor of life in everything. The once static objects in the room all flowed into a fluid and mobile and breathing world. The dazzle of the sun was multiplied, every speck of gold and diamond in it magnified. Trees, skies, clouds, lawns began to breathe, heave and waver like a landscape at the bottom of the sea. My body was both swimming and flying. I felt gay and at ease and playful. There was perfect communicability between my body and everything surrounding me. The singing of the mocking-birds was multiplied as if I had a hundred eyes, a hundred ears, a hundred fingertips. On the walls appeared endless murals of designs I made which produced their own music to match. When I drew a long orange line it emitted its own orange tone. The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments and I felt myself becoming a full percussion orchestra, becoming green, blue, orange, gold. The waves of the sounds ran through my hair like a caress. The music ran down my back and came out my fingertips. I was a cascade of red blue rainfall, a rainbow. I was small, light, mobile. I could use any method of levitation I wished. I could dissolve, melt, float, soar. Wavelets of light touched the rim of my clothes, phosphorescent radiations. I could see a new world with my middle eye, a world I had missed before. I caught images behind images, the walls behind the sky, the sky behind the Infinite. The walls became fountains, the fountains became arches, the arches domes, the domes sky, the sky a flowering carpet, and all dissolved into pure space. I looked at a slender line curving over space which disappeared into infinity. I saw a million zeroes on this line, curving, shrinking in the distance and I laughed and said ‘Excuse me, I am not a mathematician.’ How can I measure the infinite? But I understand it. The zeroes vanished. I was standing on the rim of a planet, alone. I could hear the fast rushing sounds of the planets rotating in space. Then I was among them, and I was aware that a certain skill was necessary to handle this new means of transportation. The image of myself standing in space and trying to get my ‘sea legs’ or my ‘space legs’ amused me. I wondered who had been there before me and whether I could return to earth. The solitude distressed me, so I returned to my starting point. I was standing in front of an ugly garden door. But as I looked closer it was not plain or green but it was a Buddhist temple, a Hindu colonnade, Moroccan mosaic ceiling, gold spires being formed and re-formed as if I were watching the hand of a designer at work. I was designing spirals of red unfurled until they formed a rose window or a mandala with edges of radium. When one design was barely born and arranged itself, it dissolved and the next one followed without confusion. Each form, each line emitted its equivalent in music in perfect accord with the design. An undulating line emitted a sustained undulating melody, a circle had a corresponding musical notation, diaphanous colors, diaphanous sounds, a pyramid created a pyramid of ascending notes, and vanishing ones left only an echo. These designs were preparatory sketches for entire Oriental cities. I saw the temples of Java, Kashmir, Nepal, Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia, in all the colors of precious stones illumined from within. Then the outer forms of the temples dissolved to reveal the inner chapel and shrines. The reds and the gold inside the temples created an intricate musical orchestration like Balinese music. Two sensations began to torment me: one that it was happening to quickly and that I would not be able to remember it, another that I would not be able to tell what I saw, it was too elusive and too overwhelming. The temples grew taller, the music wilder, it became a tidal wave of sounds with gongs and bells predominating. Gold spires emitted a long flute chant. Every line and color was breathing and constantly mutating. The smoke of my cigarette became gold. The curtain on the window became gold. Then I felt my whole body becoming gold, liquid gold, scintillating warm gold. I WAS GOLD. It was the most pleasurable sensation I have ever known and I knew it was like passion. It was the secret of life, the alchemist’s secret of life. ”When I gradually returned from this dream-like experience I was in your studio. I looked around at your collages and recognized them. It was as if I had been there for the first time. I saw the colors, the luminosity and the floating, mobile, changeable quality. I understood all your stories, and all you had said to me. I understood why you had made your women transparent, and the houses open like lace so that space and freedom could blow through them.”
—Anaïs Nin (via her-rabbits)
“
I was sent to Venice to cover fashions for magazines. When the train approaches Venice, it seems to be running on water because there is water on each side of the rails. The dream begins even in the train, as one leaves the earth to enter a new plant. Venice at night. In the train, across from me sat an Italian with gray hair, such a warm-toned skin, and glowing eyes with resplendent teeth….. It was he who opened the window so I could see the first lights of Venice. The first layer of still water and the floating lights. When we reached Venice he helped me get on the motorboat, carried my bag… I smiled behind my veil and wished instead I could concentrate on my first sight of venice. Venice at night. Fluid, golden, all lights, and multiple reflections of lights, ghostly houses, a beauty one cannot seize at first because it is so subtle and intricate and has the evanescent quality of a dream. The laciness of the buildings, the sculptured modeling, the carvings, the statues, the trellises of shadows and white colonnaades and such a fusion of a city and reflections of a city that half of it seems sunk into water. The music of the water, the slapping sound of the wavelets as the boats pass, against walls, bridges, and stairways. The long gliding black gondolas, the rhytyhm, the voices mingling, laughter, everything softened, flowing, muted by the presence of the water…
This city striving to rise out of the water each day has the magic which only the sea can create for it, has the same pulse as that of our hearts and blood; it cradles emotions and the sense, it lulls them, enchants them, hypnotizes them. It is not a city but a drug.
In the sunlight the chalky colors are patined with gold, rocked by the rhythm of the tides which sway the houses and bridges. These are the canals of the womb. The sleep of the womb. The gondolas are so silky and quiet that you feel are swimming through the water. You are carried on a current of passivity and contemplation…
The wooden poles painted like banderillas are planted in the canal to chain the gondolas at rest,but they stll dance up and down, evenly, like a well-trained ballet…
” —Anaïs Nin (via gracearts)
“The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.”
—Anaïs Nin, House of Incest (via warmercorners)
I love your blog, I am totally addicted to it, thank you for creating it!
Anais Nin was a wonderful woman, she is a true inspiration for me, and her books are so amazing and enchanting and full of beauty and feelings...
Have a nice week fellow Anais' fan :)
About Anaïs, I couldn’t agree more. Thank you for following! I hope you have a nice week, too!
“I chose the house for many reasons. Because it seemed to have sprouted out of the earth like a tree, so deeply grooved it was within the old garden. It had no cellar and the rooms rested right on the ground. Below the rug, I felt, was the earth. I could take root there, feel at one with the house and garden, take nourishment from them like the plants.”
—Anaïs Nin, on Louveciennes (via visualblurb)
Fuck Yeah Women's History: This Day in Women's History: Anais Nin, a French-Cuban author famous for her journals and erotic literature, born in... →
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Nin is hailed by many critics as one of the finest writers of female erotica. She was one of the first women to explore fully the realm of erotic writing, and certainly the first prominent woman in modern Europe to write erotica. Before her, erotica written by women was rare, with a few…
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“…his type is the large, buxom woman, heavy on the earth, while I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”
—Anaïs Nin (via batsandcats)
“To be so aware of this, so fully aware , this is what is almost humanly unbearable. Human being cannot bear the knowledge of the future. To me, the knowledge of the present is just as dazzling. To be so acutely rich and to know it!”
—Anaïs Nin (via dropsofmystory)
“I am an excitable person who only understand the world musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
—Anaïs Nin (via mugginglace)
“I don’t wish power, only art —art and passion.”
—Anaïs Nin, Incest: From a Journal of Love
Submitted by: kruczynski
Submitted by: kruczynski
“You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.”
—Anaïs Nin (via crmerry)
“I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magic forces of the world.”
—Anaïs Nin (via itisnotthesea)
