“I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life. I see in the echoes and reverberations the transfigurations which alone keep wonder pure. Otherwise all magic is lost. Otherwise life shows its deformities and the homeliness becomes rust. My drug. Covering all things with a mist of smoke, deforming and transforming as the night does. All matter must be fused this way through the lens of my vice or the rust of living would slow down my rhythm to a sob”
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Leila alone was satisfied to be born free of man’s tyranny, to be free of man. But she did not realize that imitating man, was not being free of him.
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- Anais Nin; Delta of Venus
” Flesh touching flesh generates a perfume, while the friction of words generates only pain and division. To formulate without destroying with the mind, without tampering, without killing, without withering. That is what I have learned by living, that delicacy and awe of the senses, that respect for the perfume.”
” When caring ceases, when one no longer struggles to build solidity, indestructibly, no longer erects cathedrals of faithfulness to the past, cathedrals of emotion, when one enters the realms of laxity, areas of ironic indifference and resignation, letting life slow with a certain emotional negligence, one may attain staes of nirvana, dreaminess, beatitudes of another kind.”
Shit is about to get real.
“Quietism always reached by immolation. That was always my cure for anxiety. I have rejoiced inwardly when I have taken my revenge, but for myself only. I have no need to exteriorize or celebrate my cruelties. It is a game for myself only, for a secret, inner equilibrium. It is my own private, little, malicious world, with secret laughter and ironies, no need of spectacular manifestations. The pain I give is only like homeopathy, to heal the pain given me, but it is not a blow to be given. Insidious and subtle.”.
“The generative, fruitful principle of analysis lies in the reconstruction and reconstitution of the individual drama as an artist achieves it - with enthusiasm for it’s development, a passion for it’s expression, color, and ramifications. It this attitude which is necessary to ones salvation.”
“To come close to others I had surrendered many of my beliefs and attitudes. But closeness achieved by such compromises and abdications is not genuine.”
” He (Otto Rank) considered Neurosis a failed work of art, the neurotic a failed artist. Neurosis, he had written, was a manifestation of imagination and energy gone wrong. Instead of a fruit or a flower, I had born obsessions and anxieties. It was this concept which appealed to me, that he did not call it an illness, but, as in nature, a misbegotten object which might have equal beauty and fascination as the relatives of more legitimate nobel birth. Neurosis was spanish moss on a tree.”
I am walking into a Coney Island trick house. The ground gives way under my feet. It is the ironies which swallow the ground and leave one dizzy and stranded. Irony of loves never properly timed, of tragedies that should not be tragedies, of passions which miss each other as if aimed by blind men, of blind cruelties and even blinder love, of incongruities and deceptive fulfillments. Every realization is not a culmination but a delusion. The pattern seems to come to an end and it is only another knot.
“But why awake?” I asked. “Why? I prefer my dreaming world, my nightmares, to reality. I love those houses which fall into the river.”
After we laughed, we became serious. I said to Marguerite: “The queston is, have men died today because they have tampered with the sources of life, or do they tamper with the sources of life because they are dead and wish to find its springs again, to create an artificial control of the sources of life?”
“Talking with Henry I experience the sensation that there will come a time when we will both understand everything, because our masculine and feminine minds are trying to meet, not to fight each other. June could only be perceived by the way of madness. The territory of woman is that which lies untouched by the direct desire of man. Man attacks the vital center. Woman fill out the circumference.”
- Although in more recent decades, I do believe it has much less to do with gender, and more to do with personality. The point is forever valid.
no woman - ever.
