My first Anaïs Nin experience. Here is a beautiful passage from A Spy in the House of Love:
“Whenever she felt lost in the endless deserts of insomnia she would take up the labyrinthian thread of her life again from the beginning to see if she could find at what moment the paths had become confused.
Tonight she remembered the moon-baths, as if this had marked the beginning of her life instead of the parents, school, birthplace. As if they had determined the course of her life rather than inheritance or imitation of the parents. In the moon-baths perhaps, lay the secret motivation of her acts.
At sixteen Sabina took moon-baths, first of all because everyone else took sun-baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous. The effect of moon-baths was unknown, but it was intimated that it might be the opposite of the sun’s effect.
The first time she exposed herself she was frightened. What would the consequences be? There were many taboos against gazing at the moon, many old legends about the evil effects of falling asleep in moonlight. She knew that the insane found the full moon acutely disturbing, that some of them regressed to animal habits of howling at the moon. She knew that in astrology the moon ruled the night life of the unconscious, invisible to consciousness.
But then she had always preferred the night to the day.
Moonlight fell directly over her bed in the summer. She lay naked in it for hours before falling asleep, wondering what its rays would do to her skin, her hair, her eyes, and then deeper to her feelings.
By this ritual it seemed to her that her skin acquired a different glow, a night glow, an artificial luminousness which showed its fullest effulgence only at night, in artificial light. People noticed it and asked her what was happening. Some suggested she was using drugs.
It accentuated her love of mystery. She meditated on this planet which kept a half of itself in darkness. She felt related to it because it was the planet of lovers. Her attraction for it, her desire to bathe in its rays, explained her repulsion for home, husband and children. She began to imagine she knew the life which took place on the moon. Homeless, childless, free lovers, not even tied to each other.
The moon-baths crystallized many of Sabina’s desires and orientations. Up to that moment she had only experienced a simple rebellion against the lives which surrounded her, but now she began to see the forms and colors of other lives, realms much deeper and stranger and remote to be discovered, and that her denial of ordinary life had a purpose: to send her off like a rocket into other forms of existence. Rebellion was merely the electric friction accumulating a charge of power that would launch her into space.
She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life’s physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moon-rays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courtesan depositor of multiple desires. The seeds of many lives, places, of many women in herself were fecundated by the moon-rays because they came from that limitless night life which we usually perceive only in our dreams, containing roots reaching for all the magnificences of the past, transmitting the rich sediments into the present, projecting them into the future.
In watching the moon she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.
It was this flame which began to burn in her, in her eyes and skin, like a secret fever, and her mother looked at her in anger and said: ‘You look like a consumptive.’ The flame of accelerated living by fever glowed in her and drew people to her as the lights of night life drew passers-by out of the darkness of empty streets.
When she did finally fall asleep it was the resless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.”
Published in 1954 she still manages to break through to the heart of our conveniences, the placidity of the structures of living we build around us.
I too was trapped in the division of time, the One path laid before me or which I felt I needed to lay before me. It is difficult, removing the numbers on the clock face, more difficult now because as soon as you do there are a hundred other modes of being that immediately swallow you up and prune away the unfashionable edges of your identity. Now it is not enough to live at counter-point, because living at counter-point is also a living that has been given to you. I am so innundated by these different flavours of life that it is now only in an active and constant form of rejection through which I can come to that undiluted, unpruned core of being. Come, but not reach. Each day is a battle. Each day we slog through the thousand things that would delimit us, draw our boundaries and check our speech. It is true, there is no rest for the wicked.
