Anaïs Nin: House of Incest

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through. Lean over me, at the bedside of my madness, and let me stand without crutches.

I am an insane woman for whom houses wink and open their bellies. Significance stares at me from everywhere, like a gigantic underlying ghostliness. Significance emerges out of dank alleys and sombre faces, leans out of the windows of strange houses. I am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost and which I cannot forget; I catch the odors of the past on street corners and I am aware of the men who will be born tomorrow. Behind windows there are either enemies or worshippers. Never neutrality or passivity. Always intention and premeditation. Even stones have for me druidical expressions.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.

I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution. I cannot tell the truth because I have felt the heads of men in my womb. The truth would be death-dealing and I prefer fairy tales. I am wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul. As if the lies I tell were like costumes. The shell of mystery can break and grow again over night. But the moment I step into the cavern of my lies I drop into darkness. I see a face which stares at me like the glance of a cross-eyed man.

I remember the cold on Jupiter freezing ammonia and out of ammonia crystals came the angels. Bands of ammonia and methane encircling Uranus. I remember the tornadoes of inflammable methane on Saturn. I remember on Mars a vegetation like the tussock grasses of Peru and Patagonia, an ochrous red, a rusty ore vegetation, mosses and lichens. Iron bearing red clays and red sandstone. Light there had a sound and sunlight was an orchestra.

Dilated eyes, noble-raced profile, willful mouth. Jeanne, all in fur, with fur eyelashes, walking with head carried high, nose to the wind, eyes on the stars, walking imperiously, dragging her crippled leg. Her eyes higher than the human level, her leg limping behind the tall body, inert, like the chained ball of a prisoner.

Prisoner on earth, against her will to die.

Her leg dragging so that she might remain on earth, a heavy dead leg which she carried like the ball and chain of a prisoner.

Her pale, nerve-stained fingers tortured the guitar, tormenting and twisting the strings with her timidity as her low voice sang; and behind her song, her thirst, her hunger and her fears. As she turned the keys of her guitar, fiercely tuning it, the string snapped and her eyes were terror-stricken as by the snapping of her universe.

She sang and she laughed: I love my brother.

I love my brother. I want crusades and martyrdom. I find the world too small.

Salted tears of defeat crystallized in the corners of her restless eyes.

But I never weep.

She picked up a mirror and looked at herself with love.

Narcisse gazing at himself in Lanvin mirrors. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding through the Bois. Tragedy rolling on cord tires.

The world is too small. I get tired of playing the guitar, of knitting, and walking, and bearing children. Men are small, and passions are short-lived. I get furious at stairways, furious at doors, at walls, furious at everyday life which interferes with the continuity of ecstasy.

But there is a martyrdom of tenseness, of fever, of living continuously like the firmament in full movement and in full effulgence.

You never saw the stars grow weary or dim. They never sleep.

She sat looking at herself in a hand mirror and searching for an eyelash which had fallen into her eye.

I married a man, Jeanne said, who had never seen painted eyes weep, and on the day of my wedding I wept. He looked at me and he saw a woman shedding enormous black tears, very black tears. It frightened him to see me shedding black tears on my wedding night. When I heard the bells ringing I thought they rang far too loud. They deafened me. I felt I would begin to weep blood, my ears hurt me so much. I coughed because the din was immense and terrifying, like the time I stood next to the bells of Chartres. He said the bells were not loud at all, but I heard them so close to me that I could not hear his voice, and the noise seemed like hammering against my flesh, and I thought my ears would burst. Every cell in my body began to burst, one by one, inside of the immense din from which I could not escape. I tried to run away from the bells. I shouted: stop the bells from ringing! But I could not run away from them because the sound was all round me and inside me, like my heart pounding in huge iron beats, like my arteries clamping like cymbals, like my head knocked against granite and a hammer striking the vein on my temple. Explosions of sounds without respite which made my cells burst, and the echoes of the cracking and breaking in me rolled into echoes, struck me again and again until my nerves were twisting and curling inside me, and then snapped and tore at the gong, until my flesh contracted and shriveled with pain, and the blood spilled out of my ears and I could not bear any more… Could not bear to attend my own wedding, could not bear to be married to man, because, because, because…

I LOVE MY BROTHER!

She shook her heavy Indian bracelets; she caressed her Orient blue bottles, and then she lay down again.

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort which I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

But Jeanne, fear of madness, only the fear of madness will drive us out of the precincts of our solitude, out of the sacredness of our solitude. The fear of madness will burn down the walls of our secret house and send us out into the world seeking warm contact. Worlds self-made and self-nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters.

Knowing only fear, it is true, such a fear that it chokes me, that I stand gaping and breathless, like a person deprived of air; or at other times, I cannot hear, I suddenly become deaf to the world. I stamp my feet and hear nothing. I shout and hear nothing of my shout. And then at times, when I lie in bed, fear clutches me again, a great terror of silence and of what will come out of this silence towards me and knock on the walls of my temples, a great mounting, choking fear. I knock on the wall, on the floor, to drive the silence away. I knock and I sing and I whistle persistently until I drive the fear away.

When I sit before my mirror I laugh at myself. I am brushing my hair. Here are a pair of eyes, two long braids, two feet. I look at them like dice in a box, wondering if I should shake them, would they still come out and be ME. I cannot tell how all these separate pieces can be ME. I do not exist. I am not a body. When I shake hands I feel that the person is so far away that he is in the other room, and that my hand is in the other room. When I blow my nose I have a fear that it might remain on the handkerchief.