Free Collages by Anaïs Nin Page A

the opening. This condition was accepted. The
crowd came, quite a large one. His painting was the only one hidden behind a
curtain in a box, and the last to be exposed. When the curtain was finally
parted, the painting was a large square canvas, pure blank. Blank! The public
was outraged. There were insults: ‘Surrealist! Dadaist! Beatnik! Mutant!’ Then
the painter came forward and explained that he had painted a self-portrait and
that his dog had found it such an exact likeness that he had licked it all off.
But there had been a portrait, and this was merely the proof of the
faithfulness of the likeness. And so, dear daughter, for those who are
interested in progress, twenty years ago painting was judged by critics, and
today it is judged by a dog. This is the state of painting today.”
    Varda also had a theory on uncouth manners
which he told very often in the presence of his daughter’s sulky visitors.
    “This is a modernized version of the Princess
and the Dragon. Today she would be the Imperial Valley Lettuce Queen and the
young man could be any one of you. The dragon had to be killed before the young
man could marry the girl. The dragon had a corrugated skin, bluish and silvery
and scaly like a mirror broken into a thousand small pieces. His eyes wept
chronically. He spouted fire with the regularity of a lighter. The young man
turned off the gas first and then cut off the dragon’s head. He took the beauty
queen brusquely by the arm and pushing her ahead of him said in a Humphrey
Bogart style of speech: ‘Oh, come on, we’ve wasted enough time on the old
dragon. I’ve got a motel room waiting.’ The queen looked at the expiring dragon
weeping at her leaving, and suddenly she put her arms around the beast and
said: ‘I’ll stay with him. I don’t like the rough tone of your voice.’ And as
she encircled the scaly dragon, he turned into a young man handsomer and
tenderer than the one she had jilted.”
    His daughter shrugged her shoulders, blew into
her bubble gum of a pink Varda had never in all his life conceded to use,
counted her new freckles, and went back to her science homework.
    She was chewing the end of her pencil while she
studied a chemical which produced visions and hallucinations. She read to her
father in a flat-toned voice the effect of consciousness-expanding chemicals.
    “Colors breathe and emit light.”
    “But my colors do that,” said Varda.
    “Figures dissolve into one another and appear
at times transparent.”
    “As they do in my collages,” said Varda.
    “Someone saw whirling clouds, suns and moons,”
she read in the same voice as she might have read: “Imperial Valley produced
20,000 head of lettuce.”
    “As in the paintings of Van Gogh,” said Varda.
“What need of chemicals?”
    “But when you take a chemical you know it will
affect you for only a few hours and then you will return to normality. You can
control it, modify it, you can even stop its effects if you wish to, if you
don’t like what is happening to you.”
    “In other words, a return ticket,” said Varda.
    “The next day the world is back again in its
proper place, the real colors are back.”
    “Doesn’t that prove that when you remove an
inhibiting consciousness and let men dream they all dream like painters or
poets?”
    “But you dream all the time, whereas a pill is
more scientific.”
    Perhaps science would illumine his cautious
child. Perhaps by way of a chemical she might respond, vibrate, shine? He
watched the eyelashes pulled down like shades, the ears covered by hair, the
lips parsimonious of words.
    What had he absorbed through the years which
had opened these worlds to him which others sought in mushrooms? Where had he
learned the secret of phosphorescence, of illumination, of transfiguration?
Where had he learned to take the shabbiest materials and heighten them with
paint, alter their shapes with scissors?
    “What I wanted to teach you is contained in one
page of the dictionary. It