Compiling a few quotes from Anais Nin Collages, book that @ M Sarki recommended here:
Lips of statues
But Renate, having been trained for years to read the unmoving lips of statues, heard the words which came from the perfect modeling of Bruce’s lips.
The message she heard was: “What does one do when one is fourteen times removed from one’s true self, not two, or three, but fourteen times away from the center?”
She would start with making a portrait of him. He would see himself as she saw him. That would be a beginning
Love that.
Orange Flower
She drove to Puerta Maria by the sea where they were exhibiting her paintings. And the image of the night tree with its flowers of poison was replaced by her first sight of a coral tree in the glittering sunlight.
It eclipsed all the other trees with the intensity of its orange flowers growing in tight wide bouquets at the end of bare branches, so that there were no leaves or shadows of leaves to attenuate the explosion of colors.
They had petals which seemed made of orange fur tipped with blood-red tendrils. It was the flower from the coral tree which should have been named the passion flower.
As soon as she saw it she wanted a dress of that color and that intensity. That was not difficult to find in a Mexican sea town. All their dresses took their colors from flowers.
She bought the coral tree dress. The orange cotton had almost invisible bloodred threads running through it as if the Mexicans had concocted their dyes from the coral tree flower itself.
The coral tree would kill the memory of a black gnarled tree and of two figures sheltered under its grotesque branches. The coral tree would carry her into a world of festivities. An orange world.
Red dye south america came from blood of Cochineal insects, which live on cacti in Latin America.
There’s something in here I want. About her way of discussing nature. And relates it to magical realism as a descriptive tense. As far as being allowed full stop to explore visionary at its intensities.
Magical Realism Turning Dark
Every day the dress became more brilliant, drenched in sunlight and matching its dazzling hypnosis. But Renate’s inner landscape was not illumined by it. Inside her grew a gigantic, tortured black tree and two young men who had made a bed of it.
People stopped her as she passed, women to envy, children to touch, men to receive the magnetic rays. On the beach, people turned towards her as if the coral tree itself had come walking down the hill.
But inside the dress lay a black tree, the night. How people were taken in by symbolism! She felt like a fraud, drawing everyone into her circle of orange fire.
She uses everything to draw a picture of it. And lets have its own what, consummation as an intensity, becoming aware of its own inner bend toward symbolism as writes itself, relentlessly vivid, beautiful and yet, as nature itself can be, intriguant and disgusts her.
She throws it back at itself, with blunt relief…
Sun and Meteorite
Later when they were having a drink, the sun descended like a meteorite of antique gold and sank into the sea.
“Ha,” breathed the man, smiling. “I’m glad it’s cooler now. The sun is not good for my car.”
She can take the smallest of exchanges and blow them into the whole point. In that way lets banal and beauty construe, be shared, and observed, in ferocious detail.
Sailing and sinking
“From now on our travels will have to be inner voyages. You are only fit to be the captain of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre.”
Thanks for the mention. I really love Anais Nin. Her diaries are very good too.