What I wrote in my diary last week..

I'm staying out on my parents farm today. I love escaping here and the calmness I feel when I am here. I like sitting with the animals and talking to them and noticing them communicating back in their own way. I sat in the rain for ages listening to the birds and my music in the background feeling uplifted and more free than I have felt in ages. I know a lot of change is going to happen soon, a lot of heart breaking change but I think if I am able to hold onto this feeling of calm I can face and survive these changes without any black neurosis touching me.

I have just finished reading Anais Nin's diary volume one, here are some parts I loved.

"I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life. I see in the echoes and reverberations and transfiguration which alone keep wonder pure. Otherwise all magic is lost. Otherwise life shows it's 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"

I can relate to Anais's writing a lot. I also feel like I spend half my life in the real word and the other half within my dreams and fantasies. If I didn't have this dream world to escape to sometimes I feel that the mundane nature of reality would bore me down and eventually break me. So it is a necessity for me to read, write and indulge in dreaming to keep this world as part of me.

"Flesh touching flesh generates a perfume while the friction of words generates only pain and division. To formulate without destroying the mind, without tampering, without killing, without withering. That is what I have learnt by living, that delicacy and awe of the senses, that respect for the perfume. It will become my law in writing. All that was pushed into clarity and rationality, withered. The beautiful living and moving, dark things that I destroyed in passing from the nebulous realms off pure dreaming to the realization of the dream"

That is Anais writing about why she can not completely connect with the act of psychoanalysis.

Sometimes I think it is better to remain secretive in the way we think and act. To have everything we do rationalized and analytically picked apart for subconscious motives seems to kill the mysterious parts of ourselves. The parts we keep hidden behind veils, maybe these parts should remain behind veils? Sometimes it's just nice to watch a shadow move and dance without knowing what exactly that shadow belongs to and what is blocking the shine of the light.

I love how Anais says that as a writer you live twice, once while moving, speaking, interacting and later through introspective. It's true but not just through writing, we live lots of different lives through our memories and as they become hazy and stained with time who knows what we actually lived or what we dreamed, It all just flows into one beautiful mess caught in our mind's eye.

Dark Poet by Antonin Artaud

Dark Poet, a maid's breast
Haunts you,
Embittered poet, life seethes
And life burns,
And the sky reabsorbs itself in rain,
Your pen scratches at the heart of life.

Forest, forest, alive with your eyes,
On multiple pinions;
With storm-bound hair,
The poets mount horses, dogs.

Eyes fume, tongues stir,
The heavens surge into our senses
Like blue mother's milk;
Women, harsh vinegar hearts,
I hang suspended from your mouths.

Sometimes I just want to write to you and tell you about how I'm lost in all the mundane details that are blinding me from all light. Lines from books, the way the sky darkens, All that's musical, all that cuts me. The days seem longer now but in reality they're shortening with the chill I feel in the air. I wake up without you and wonder if you also feel the cold rising. I dreamt we were lost in a desert with the sand stinging our eyes and our mouths breathing out fire. We were searching for scorpions among the sand dunes convinced they held magic in their poison. Drunk on our delusions and mirages that spun around in our heads like a carnival ride that would not stop. These were our happiest moments dancing with dreams and fleeing from reality. We felt so radiant it was like we had drunk the moon and would glow for an eternity.

Coming down is like staring at yourself through shards of broken mirror, nothing quite fits together In a way you find familiar. The veiled parts of yourself rise up to the surface, nothing is hidden now.

"The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat, it was strangling me. I broke the thread that held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said I have just spat out my heart. There is an instrument called the quena, made of human bones. It owes it origin to the worship of a Indian mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating, more haunting sound than the ordinary flute. Those who write know the process. I thought of it as spitting out my heart only I do not wait for my love to die" Anais Nin on writing House Of Incest.

Sarah Jaffe

Love her voice.

Leon Spilliaert