anaïs nin
the past couple of nights, i have had time to do a little leisure reading, and so i finally was able to get started on a new book:
henry and june: from "a journal of love" - the unexpurgated diary of anaïs nin (1931-1932).
this book is a compilation of all the entries from anaïs nin's diaries that tell the story of how she met henry miller and his wife june mansfield in paris, france, and carried on passionate relationships with them and also how they inspired divine artistic desires within her.
june mansfield miller
nin's writing is absolutely beautiful.
i've read a set of nin's diaries entitled nearer the moon before, but that one is a broader volume containing all of nin's diary entries within a particular time-frame. the henry and june book focuses specifically on nin's love for the millers and thus contains only those pertinent diary entries, and it really is a fantastic, romantic, passionate, mesmerizing read.
but in all addition to telling those love stories, nin also writes passionately about the art of writing itself, and it seems a fantastically timed fate that she and henry miller, a man who understood that overwhelming, all-consuming, superceding desire to write, should meet and begin their tempestuous affair just based on that mutual desire and need to write alone.
reading it makes me have faith and believe in the power of writing again. nin is a tremendously amazing writer, and to her, she has no purpose in life if she cannot write. thus, she was a frequent writer, generating tens of thousands of pages of diary entries, numerous letters, sensual stories, and she even often re-wrote and revised her own diary entries. i am finding myself reconnecting with that passion i felt myself years ago, when i discovered that overwhelming need to perpetually write. it was a time when i felt so alone in a myriad of ways.
but writing saved me during those tough times. it lifted me up when i was down. it infused me with a sense of invincible power when i felt powerless. it allowed me to spell the blood of my soul into black and white text and reconcile the mish-mash of complex emotions i felt raging in me when i felt lost and confused.
older nin
it was around that time, when i was discovering just how much i needed writing that i discovered the raw, decadent beauty of henry miller's tropic of cancer, then nin's collection of erotic short stories, delta of venus. i then began researching and collecting as many texts by and about them as i could get my hands on, and during the course of that, promising new horizons appeared in my mind. thereafter, the art of writing was just never the same for me ever again.
i have lost sense of this in recent years. i still write, yes. but not with the same intensity and sense of connectedness i had before. oh, it comes in waves here and there; every now and then, i can lose myself to the internal driving force and let my heart speak through the written word.
however, i think overall, i somewhere, somehow, stopped writing as a means to my own end.
i used to write letters that remained unsent. i would pour out all the emotions, good and bad, that were evoked by certain people, into words, and doing so allowed me to control the tempestuous emotions i felt about them – so that when i next saw them, i did not have all the emotions still raging, pent up and unreleased, inside. sure, they never saw my words. but nonetheless, the unsent letters were something i just had to do, else i would lose my mind over whatever emotions were raging in me.
i am glad to have rediscovered anaïs nin as my soul sister. it was amazing when i first felt that connection with her, as one writer to another. and i've only felt it once before, with henry miller's writing.
in a general way, they are quite similar as writers. they weave their words in unconventional ways, mixing unparalleled metaphors and descriptors, choosing verbs that renovate, reincarnate, and even mutilate conventional meanings. it is such a mind-blowing mind-fuck to read them.
henry miller
but stylistically, they are so different. henry miller, the writer, fucks your mind so violently and with such savageness, that you are left feeling powerless, helpless – but desiring of even more of his violence. anaïs nin, the writer, fucks your mind, too, but she makes love tenderly and with such a lingering longing that it leaves you poignantly aching.
brilliance. that is all i can say. :)
in at least one or two passages in henry and june that i've read thus far, nin writes about how she cannot fall in love or give physically of herself based on physical attraction alone; her heart and mind must also be stimulated.
it is also clear that she did not fall in love with henry until they began exchanging love notes within a few months of meeting each other. before then, nin had enjoyed his writing and been affected by the strength of the poetry in his prose but disliked him as a man. her dislike of him also stemmed from a sense of jealousy that this was the man who possessed june, a woman with whom she had by then fallen in love.
but one day, after june had long since returned to america and miller and nin began hanging out together and feeling the stirrings of a connection between then, miller confessed to her that he had written a love note to her. nin wanted to read it, and when she did in the privacy of her rooms later, she found herself surprised and touched by the sensitive, delicate sincerity of the love note -- enough to want to write one to miller in response.
and thusly, their love bloomed.
in her diary, nin states that she was seduced as much by miller's writings – in the form of his stories as well as his love notes – as much as anything else. and this is something i connected with as well.
i've fallen in love purely through the exchange of love notes as well. i believe that i can see straight to a person's soul through their writing alone in a way that i may not be able to in face-to-face communications. writing can convey many things the spoken word cannot. it requires the writer to focus and think about what she wants to say on paper, and the time it takes for the hand to write out what the mind wants it to is enough to make each word purposeful and deliberate – which makes, say, the exchange of a love note all the more compelling.
in recent years, i have wondered if there is something wrong with me. i am such a complete machiavellian in real life. because it's so easy for me to flip a switch and be whoever and however i want to be, depending on who i'm interacting with, it leaves me kind of jaded, and i can sometimes feel so disengaged from everyone, even i'm in a roomful of people.
that's why when i fall in love with someone, it can never be based purely on face-to-face interaction. i tend to fall in love with the words that the person can weave. words ensnare me. but i am willing prey. i want to be ensnared by words. it is thus no wonder that when i've fallen in love, i've fallen in love with writers, people who captured my attention and mind with their prose.
i feel good now. no shame in the fact that i can be moved and swayed by a person's ability merely to string words together in such a way that leaves me heady and breathless. and there is nothing wrong with the compulsion to write that leaves you incapable of continue to engage with your daily life until you have satisfied the urge to unleash the words burgeoning in your mind.
no shame in it whatsoever.
i think the art of writing gets so lost sometimes, so unappreciated – especially these days. writing is not a means to an end. it's not even just a mode of expression. there is something even more elevated about the written word than most people give it credit for.
but i am being so verbally peripatetic.
i guess what i really feel like saying, in short, is that . . . .
i just really, really like good writing.
:-T
