it's a summer thunderstorm outside and i've got django on the record player and i've temporarily converted my hallway into a den. cold tecate in a can, windows open, serene really but for charles trying to rub her ass on me any way she can, writhing into backbends on the wood floor.
i feel bad for her, but no more than i do for myself.
i am still trying to get my head around the fact that anais nin edited her husband out of all her diaries. for such an exhibitionist to flaunt her diary (it is brilliant) and then hold private that huge aspect of her life... it's mind boggling. what are girls supposed to think? she steps over the most important part of a diary.
my diary, without my lovers, is no diary at all.
everything else, i put it out there, for you to read, you few who actually do. maybe if anais had a blog, she would put her words there, and save her notebook for her lovers. some of them undoubtedly show up in her erotica...
but it brings up a point. how much of yourself is your work, and therefore belongs to others, and how much is solely yours? maybe one day it will be a dilemma i face... to open fully to the world, or keep some part sacred.
i think only the ones who hold something sacred get by all right in the end. but keeping half of myself secret is a difficult task, and i don't know what it ends up accomplishing. you never know what parts of yourself are exposed to any given person.
i was reading about anais and they said some people speculate on how much her husband could have meant to her if she kept him out. i say just because she didn't publish it, doesn't mean she didn't write it. i'm sure there are endless volumes... that's just who she is. she's a writer.
and to be anais nin's husband, he must either be endlessly rich and boring, which would leave her time for all her lovers, or tragically dark and tempestuous, because those are the men she loves.
i guess from where i'm sitting at the moment, it's a wholly theoretical dilemma; just me and chazzy, in the brooklyn evening heat.
It's a very modern dilemma. What is privacy? And at what point to do we lose ownership of our thoughts...our intimacy?
ReplyDeleteWriting is a dangerous calling. I've always tried to embrace the danger, to break down the walls. But still, the dilemma arrises. I'm not sure what happens to secrets that are written and not shared. If they enter some other world, if they are more or less special.
The omission of the husband is baffling. In Henry and June, he is present, but she treats him like a fool. She minimizes him. Equally confusing is how passionately Nin wrote of Miller in her diaries, an affair I got lost in, lived inside of. And how little Nin was mentioned in Miller's work, never seen in full light or fawned over for more than the turn of a phrase.
Secrecy, privacy, point of view..all similar to lighting design, in a way.