Anaïs Nin, a writer I have read and admired over the years.. She was not afraid to embrace her sensuality….and mostly she was proud to be a woman…making no excuses for the way she felt and expressed love and lust….These are some of my favorite quotes of hers…
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[The Diary of AnaAs Nin, Volume 1: 1931-1934]
"Am I, at bottom, that fervent little Spanish Catholic child who chastised herself for loving toys, who forbade herself the enjoyment of sweet foods, who practiced silence, who humiliated her pride, who adored symbols, statues, burning candles, incense, the caress of nuns, organ music, for whom Communion was a great event? I was so exalted by the idea of eating Jesus's flesh and drinking His blood that I couldn't swallow the host well, and I dreaded harming the it. I visualized Christ descending into my heart so realistically (I was a realist then!) that I could see Him walking down the stairs and entering the room of my heart like a sacred Visitor. That state of this room was a subject of great preoccupation for me. . . At the ages of nine, ten, eleven, I believe I approximated sainthood. And then, at sixteen, resentful of controls, disillusioned with a God who had not granted my prayers (the return of my father), who performed no miracles, who left me fatherless in a strange country, I rejected all Catholicism with exaggeration. Goodness, virtue, charity, submission, stifled me. I took up the words of Lawrence: "They stress only pain, sacrifice, suffering and death. They do not dwell enough on the resurrection, on joy and life in the present." Today I feel my past like an unbearable weight, I feel that it interferes with my present life, that it must be the cause for this withdrawal, this closing of doors. . . I am embalmed because a nun leaned over me, enveloped me in her veils, kissed me. The chill curse of Christianity. I do not confess any more, I have no remorse, yet am I doing penance for my enjoyments? Nobody knows what a magnificent prey I was for Christian legends, because of my compassion and my tenderness for human beings. Today it divides me from enjoyment in life."
p. 70-71
"As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startling white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evenness of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded. She was color and brilliance and strangeness. By the end of the evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak, posturing. She lacks the courage of her personality, which is sensual, heavy with experience. Her role alone preoccupies her. She invents dramas in which she always stars. I am sure she creates genuine dramas, genuine chaos and whirlpools of feelings, but I feel that her share in it is a pose. That night, in spite of my response to her, she sought to be whatever she felt I wanted her to be. She is an actress every moment. I cannot grasp the core of June. Everything Henry has said about her is true."
I wanted to run out and kiss her fanatastic beauty and say: 'June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never know again who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. 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 existance. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childlike pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses"
Anaïs Nin
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Risk
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And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.
(Anaïs Nin)
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Anais Nin
(1903 - 1977 )
Anaïs Nin on writing
"Why one writes is a question I can never answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me – the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.
...
"We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely … When I don’t write, feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."
('The New Woman', 1974)
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Anais Nin
(1903 - 1977 )
Letters with Anais Nin
She took off her dress. She had long black hair, a pale face, slanted
green eyes, greener than the sea. She was beautifully formed, with high
breasts, long legs, a stylized body. She knew how to swim better than any
other woman on the island. She slid into the water and began her long easy
strokes towards Evelyn.
Anais Nin, Mallorca
Letter from Anais Nin To Sean
Every stroke is like the foundation
of Adam you pound and twist.
Make your cock shift from inner
to outer space. That way when you lift
you are not empty, while the air
above your sex has a crisp outline
--movements down inner thigh
easy to sway, a lilt almost, dark
reservoir where you are satisfied
before it happens, as you wait
anticipating that several blink.
Letter from Sean to Anais
When i kiss, my lips are tender and nibble
and my breath sweet can be heard in
that autumn forest as a river runs
down your spine; you are a mouth that licks
the back of my hand nibbling on my fingers
while I find the crease of your vulva
and liberate the edges. You're a lovely,
fertile reef where impossible swans
hold my cock within the fireworks
spoken as light storms remember
the reflected grace of your mouth
and eyes when we stare into that abyss
that never stops so wonderful sex
rides our back to an ancient sea
forgotten when the tide pools break.
2. Anais
She had long black hair and when she spoke
the hair covered her eyes, and you cleared them
by brushing the strands back, slipping your ideal
into her mouth, her long legs drawn against your
anticipation of some deep distress when you finish
later, a great shark of a ship hunting the strokes,
spliting the pearl clam open with your
simple breathing foaming hurricanes,
when they reach half-way suddenly still --
the anchor falls through the splash
raging down our street released
to an undetermined depth
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You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.”
― Anaïs Nin
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As my desire to bloom arrived, I flourished
No longer fearing the journey it takes to truly open and unfold
Deeply I breathe in as my breath is taken away
I found my voice, yet even as it lay dormant in the quiet
As I stumbled in the sometimes darkness and fell
Standing back up brushing off the bruises
I knew…..I had found my way …
~
“and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud
was more painful than the risk it took to bloom
Sex….by itself, it is not passionate or exciting…skin on skin is where sex begins but no where near where it ends…
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“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
“It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before… to test your limits… to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.”
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“Too late for changes, too late perhaps for explanations and ideological webs, but the love goes on, the love goes on, blind to laws and warnings and even to wisdom and to fears. And whatever that love is, perhaps an illusion of a new love, I want it, I can’t resist it, my whole being melts in one kiss, my knowledge melts, my fears melt, my blood dances, my legs open.”
“Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.”
Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman’s womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.
[The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One]
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“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin
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