I just went through one of my worst pain sagas and I feel like I’ve lost time. Or lost track of time. Through the intensity of the days and hours and the cruelest and mist sadistic pain with pulsations like a heart beat. Like being whipped. Endlessly for hours without one minute of stopping. Like ….it was about ten days I lost in that
I didn’t make compromises. I didn’t do the perfect angel pact it was too in primal raw horror and agony so more clarity? Honesty. No bull shit. And why the rage against the storm?
Fuck the storm —I am an island; this is my island
I guess I found the bitch in me
the one that went through three days of labor with no drugs and almost died during it —medieval sunrise
I am me. I do what I want. And I clearly do not fit this wacky society so maybe my freak show of weird fetishes is whatever rule or law I decide because the normal people don’t make sense. Do I care, did I ever care in fact I want to go full freak queer but not how anyone else would do it.
It was something which allured me to Anaïs Nin first when I stumbled across her lavender volume 2 early diaries at the bookshop I worked at. I was 21. I was vacuuming the store which I did every morning. I was a peon then. So I bumped the bookshelf, when the vacuum hit the case and the big heavy book fell on my foot. It also dented the soft trade paperback cover.
I was not aware of Anaïs as yet. How did thst happen? I was extremely sheltered.
I remember stopping to examine the book. It looked so …. anonymous ….like those erotica books with no names. The ones thst I always caught older men in the back doing things they should not be doing in stores as they read the sticky pages.
It was her diary. Her life stories. And —with the hat on her head and her unusual features looking from the photo from a bygone time had me spellbound. I had to know all about her because I had the oddest sense i had stumbled upon a human who was a lot like me. Her triangle relationship with Henry Miller and his wife, her frustration of not being content in the role of the ordinary wife with the ordinary banker husband she was married to when she craved art, and arty people or people of a city with a heartbeat; her incestuous relationship with her father thst lasted years.
She could never fit with society and she learned to create her own one through her illusions and books and embraced a new society and make it hers.
For a month I obsessed about that book. It was expensive and I was still living at home. I was a bit worried if it would be discovered first that I’d bent the cover. But second, if I bought it, if my parent found it as this was the author who was known as ‘the Mother of Erotica’
Each day I’d vacuum there. I remember exactly how it looked on the shelf. Where exactly too. I’d walk by it every day to make sure it was still there; nobody bought it. I think there was also the Henry Miller biography there too so, I got to sort of get a scope of their drama. I was completely intrigued. It was like a drug.
What became the final decision making moment was when it came up on a returns report. Which is when a book does not sell, the retailer sends it back to the publisher.
Yikes. I had to work up the nerve to buy it. But from who? Who would be the least judgie there? Fern, the store manager watched over me like a chaperone—too embarrassing. Mary, however was literarily illiterate—and I do mean that literally. She had zero finesse or interest in fine literature! I know! In a bookstore! She was Fern’s assistant. So I bought the book from Mary and she didn’t even bat an eye putting it in the shopping bag with my receipt. The bag was importsnt too because my then known as father was putting me up from work in Greenvale and we lived in Huntington so concealing my purchase was important. He already was accusing me of any number of weird and twisted things —though he never got it right
So I reverted during pain to my 21 year old mind and started to remember what my actual dreams in life were Its funny but in most ways I’m more on the path than not ….
The main difference with Anaïs and myself is — maybe it’s just astrology—as an earth sign, I need solid meaning or earthy balance of life structure which reading her was like an experiment documented which seemed cautionary tale at times when she became heartless to people during her sexual addictions. It made me look at her pictures differently. I felt sad for Hugo.
But repression does that, you know? If things are kept repressed they go moldy in the dark. So I found her endless secret lovers got a bit boring but it was how she adapted, she was a sex addict which is ok up until it controls you. Does destructive things. It can make people mean. And would I know of sexual addiction? I come from a family of them and yet everyone of them hypocrites about it. And would I know of sexual addiction? I confess that is why I should have left the last one sooner and about ninety percent of why I stayed as long as I did
I guess I took from her life the lust for living an artist’s life—which I followed through on; every dream place I thought of got me out of there from Long Islsnd to another entire state my parents didn’t know of or come near; I broke away and so much of my boho dreams came too from her words and set me on my path
A level away from the Salon or Keats or the Bloomsbury Set and as well as Oscar Wilde and the PreRaphaelites but yeah, it’s part of their same conversation—I mean, it must be because; if you can read the English and interpret how kinky Shakespeare reveals himself in dialogues that are so constantly and overtly suggestive
Instead of being heartless to undeserving people —as i emerge from my week of pain I feel a reversal of perspective is required. Everyone who keeps me from feeling ~my~ artistic freedom of individuality is essentially heartless to me—and I’ve got to let them go; they are crashing my chi and setting me backwards; I’d rather be me than try and fit a costume that throws a tarp over everything I have chiseled and refined and achieved.
