Whenever I read anything written by Anais Nin, I want to sit right beside her; share a blanket and a glass of wine with her and talk about life. Her perspectives on love, inner-personal relationships and pain are perspectives worth inhaling, in my opinion. No one reads Anais Nin at the trailer park. This is disturbing to me in the most sacred of ways..what I mean is a kind of disturbance much like the abundance of Bud-Light cans in front of the laundry room on any given Sunday morning after a wild Saturday night in the park or the donation bags of "literature" left in the "community room" which include paperbacks by Nora Roberts, James Michener and several copies of the King James Bible. LOL! I stopped looking for Anais Nin's Diaries in those bags quite some time ago!!!
Ms Nin was a French-born novelist, passionate eroticist and short story writer, who gained international fame with her journals. (1903-1977) She had a long-time affair with American writer Henry Miller. When the affair with him had cooled off, she accused him of reducing all women to "an aperture, a biological sameness." I think this is one aspect of Nin that draws me close to her...causes me to "sit" with her and pour her and I another glass of wine!
Men love her erotic tone that weaves through most of her writings no matter what format or genre...but I love Nin for the self-educated feminist that she was.
She disassociated herself late in her life from the more political forms of feminism, believing that self-knowledge through journaling was the source of personal liberation. She did not have faith in exchanges in systems, "because systems are corruptible", and advocated journal keeping as a preliminary requirement for a liberated self. "So I feel the great changes in the world will come from a great change in our consciousness," she wrote. The last volumes of the diaries appeared posthumously in the 1980s. In one excerpt she wrote, "I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life."
It is not at all an accident that Nin has re-surfaced for me at this moment in my life. Just last week, after seeing The Pat Tillman documentary, I had a small epiphany at a local coffeehouse in Monterey: The explosion that happens inside of me with regard to politics, governments and general mayhem of corruption and greed detracts from the fire I have inside of me to be a writer!
I have been drained, depleted and hung out to dry for years now due to my own energy going to the political spewage that exists, and not to nurturing myself as a writer. Nin writes, "And then the day came where
the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
IT IS TIME FOR THIS TRAILER PARK GIRL TO BLOSSOM! The bud has been way too tight for way too long! Every second lost in political gibberish and powerless thought and voice, could be directed toward self-exploration, documentation and creative analysis.
Hallelujah! "Anais! (We are on a first name basis now.) I hear you calling me!"
It's sort of like 'what will be will be' or 'move over baby and make room for what's important.'
You know I wonder how long I can sustain this way of focus...this path to myself through my writing...this understanding of the written word and the forms mine may or may not take?
We shall see. Several things need to fall into place: 1. Turn off the fucking television. 2. Visit several used books stores and stock up on my "wine buddy's" books and journals. 3. Just let the trailer park go to hell in a handbag! 4. Write.
"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness, for I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation." -Anais Nin
Thanks for reading! -tpg
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