Free Collages by Anaïs Nin Page B
Authors: Anaïs Nin
is all the words beginning with trans :transfigure,
transport, transcend, translucent, transgression, transform, transmit,
transmute, transpire, all the trans-Siberian voyages.”
“You forgot the word transvestite.”
“When I was ten years old I made up my first
story.”
“I’m going to be late for my
expanding-consciousness lecture!”
“This is a very short story. It’s about a blind
old man who had a daughter. This daughter described to him every day the world
they lived in, the people who came to see him, the beauty of their house,
garden, friends. One day a new doctor came to town and he cured the old man’s
blindness. When he was able to see, he discovered they had been living in a
shack, on an empty lot full of debris, that their friends had been hoboes and
drunks. His daughter was crying, thinking he would die of shock, but his
reaction was quite the opposite. He said to her: ‘It is true that the world you
described does not exist but as you built that image so carefully in my mind
and I can still see it so vividly, we can now set about to build it just as you
made me see it.’”
His daughter remained neutral, and as silent as
her rubber-soled tennis shoes. She hung her long legs over the edge of the deck
and swung them like a boy. She dissected snails.
“Such cruelty,” said Varda.
“Not at all,” she said with a newborn
scientist’s arrogance. “They have no nervous system.”
Meanwhile Varda continued to make collages as
some women light votive candles. With scissors and glue and small pieces of fabrics,
he continued to invent women who glittered, charmed, levitated and wore
luminous aureoles like saints. But his daughter resisted all her father’s
potions, as if she had decided from the day she was born never to become one of
the women he cut out in the shape of circles, triangles, cubes, to suit the
changing forms of his desires.
And then one day after she had been away for a
few days she wrote Varda the following letter:
inside. I looked at the rug on the floor
and it was no longer a plain rug but a moving and swaying mass like hair
floating on water or like wind over a field of wheat. The door knob ceased to
be a plain door knob. It melted and undulated and the door opened and all the
walls and windows vanished. There was a tremor of life in everything. The once
static objects in the room all flowed into a fluid and mobile and breathing
world. The dazzle of the sun was multiplied, every speck of gold and diamond in
it magnified. Trees, skies, clouds, lawns began to breathe, heave and waver
like a landscape at the bottom of the sea. My body was both swimming and
flying. I felt gay and at ease and playful. There was perfect communicability
between my body and everything surrounding me. The singing of the mocking-birds
was multiplied, became a whole forest of singing birds. My senses were
multiplied as if I had a hundred eyes, a hundred ears, a hundred fingertips. On
the walls appeared endless murals of designs I made which produced their own
music to match. When I drew a long orange line it emitted its own orange tone.
The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments and I
felt myself becoming a full percussion orchestra, becoming green, blue, orange,
gold. The waves of the sounds ran through my hair like a caress. The music ran down
my back and came out my fingertips. I was a cascade of red blue rainfall, a
rainbow. I was small, light, mobile. I could use any method of levitation I
wished. I could dissolve, melt, float, soar. Wavelets of light touched the rim
of my clothes, phosphorescent radiations. I could see a new world with my
middle eye, a world I had missed before. I caught images behind images, the
walls behind the sky, the sky behind the Infinite. The walls became fountains,
the fountains became arches, the arches domes, the domes sky, the sky a
flowering carpet, and all dissolved into pure space. I looked at a slender line
curving over space which
transport, transcend, translucent, transgression, transform, transmit,
transmute, transpire, all the trans-Siberian voyages.”
“You forgot the word transvestite.”
“When I was ten years old I made up my first
story.”
“I’m going to be late for my
expanding-consciousness lecture!”
“This is a very short story. It’s about a blind
old man who had a daughter. This daughter described to him every day the world
they lived in, the people who came to see him, the beauty of their house,
garden, friends. One day a new doctor came to town and he cured the old man’s
blindness. When he was able to see, he discovered they had been living in a
shack, on an empty lot full of debris, that their friends had been hoboes and
drunks. His daughter was crying, thinking he would die of shock, but his
reaction was quite the opposite. He said to her: ‘It is true that the world you
described does not exist but as you built that image so carefully in my mind
and I can still see it so vividly, we can now set about to build it just as you
made me see it.’”
His daughter remained neutral, and as silent as
her rubber-soled tennis shoes. She hung her long legs over the edge of the deck
and swung them like a boy. She dissected snails.
“Such cruelty,” said Varda.
“Not at all,” she said with a newborn
scientist’s arrogance. “They have no nervous system.”
Meanwhile Varda continued to make collages as
some women light votive candles. With scissors and glue and small pieces of fabrics,
he continued to invent women who glittered, charmed, levitated and wore
luminous aureoles like saints. But his daughter resisted all her father’s
potions, as if she had decided from the day she was born never to become one of
the women he cut out in the shape of circles, triangles, cubes, to suit the
changing forms of his desires.
And then one day after she had been away for a
few days she wrote Varda the following letter:
inside. I looked at the rug on the floor
and it was no longer a plain rug but a moving and swaying mass like hair
floating on water or like wind over a field of wheat. The door knob ceased to
be a plain door knob. It melted and undulated and the door opened and all the
walls and windows vanished. There was a tremor of life in everything. The once
static objects in the room all flowed into a fluid and mobile and breathing
world. The dazzle of the sun was multiplied, every speck of gold and diamond in
it magnified. Trees, skies, clouds, lawns began to breathe, heave and waver
like a landscape at the bottom of the sea. My body was both swimming and
flying. I felt gay and at ease and playful. There was perfect communicability
between my body and everything surrounding me. The singing of the mocking-birds
was multiplied, became a whole forest of singing birds. My senses were
multiplied as if I had a hundred eyes, a hundred ears, a hundred fingertips. On
the walls appeared endless murals of designs I made which produced their own
music to match. When I drew a long orange line it emitted its own orange tone.
The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments and I
felt myself becoming a full percussion orchestra, becoming green, blue, orange,
gold. The waves of the sounds ran through my hair like a caress. The music ran down
my back and came out my fingertips. I was a cascade of red blue rainfall, a
rainbow. I was small, light, mobile. I could use any method of levitation I
wished. I could dissolve, melt, float, soar. Wavelets of light touched the rim
of my clothes, phosphorescent radiations. I could see a new world with my
middle eye, a world I had missed before. I caught images behind images, the
walls behind the sky, the sky behind the Infinite. The walls became fountains,
the fountains became arches, the arches domes, the domes sky, the sky a
flowering carpet, and all dissolved into pure space. I looked at a slender line
curving over space which