[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.My style suffers when I seek freedom, when I feel too strongly.My writing will have to learn to support the weight of my vitality.I guess I'm still a little young, in writing.But window-breaking brings in oxygen and I am full of oxygen just now.I should caricature my weakness.I want to master my tragic sense of life and achieve a comic spirit.I want to be less emotional and more humorous.Certain events happen very close to me, others are dim.Some are vital and warm, some have a dreamlike quality.With my father the relationship is unreal, like something happening in a dream state.I awakened in a courageous mood.I had on my list three difficult things to do, three ordeals to face.Visit to Rank.Reconciliation with Bernard Steele.Visit to Edward Titus to ask for the money he owes me.I wondered which one I would tackle.Decided first to bring Steele out of his jealous sulking, his anger that I did not stay at his home for the weekend but left with Artaud, his jealousy of Artaud and Henry.He was out.Edward Titus was in the south of France.[November, 1933]When you know someone from his writings you think he will live forever.I considered Otto Rank a legend even after Henry visited him.He was a legendary character until I came across a list of his works in the Psychoanalytical Library and saw on the card, on the left-hand corner, the dale of his birth, and on the right-hand corner, a blank left for the date of his death.This shocked me into awareness of his temporary presence.His life span was already over half spent, and I must talk to him now.He was not eternal.On the right-hand corner of a library card lay the inescapable proof of his inescapable fate.His books, big, heavy, and substantial, would always be there, but I felt I must talk to him now.The library card also gave his address.He lived overlooking the park.There were other reasons.I felt torn apart by my multiple relationships, and I would have been able to live fully in each one, had enough love and devotion for all of them, but they conflicted with each other.All of my father's values negated Henry's: all his exhortations and his influence were spent on eliminating from my life Artaud, Allendy, psychoanalysis.I felt confused, and lost.It was not a father I had found, in the true sense of the word.It was a foggy afternoon when I decided to call on Dr.Rank.At the subway station near his home, there was a small park with benches.I sat down on one of them to prepare myself for the visit.I felt that from such an abundance of life, I must make a selection of what might interest him.He had made a specialty of the "artist." He was interested in the artist.Would he be interested in a woman who had lived out all the themes he wrote about, the Double, Illusion and Reality, Incestuous Loves Through Literature, Creation and Play.All the myths (return to the father after many adventures and obstacles), all the dreams.I had lived out the entire contents of his profound studies so impetuously that I had had no time to understand them, to sift them.I was confused and lost.In trying to live out all of my selves.There were always, in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who only wanted to bring beauty, grace, and aliveness to people and who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.Should I come and say, Dr.Rank, I feel like a shattered mirror, or mention my book on D.H.Lawrence and the other books I was writing?He considered neurosis a failed work of art, the neurotic a failed artist.Neurosis, he had written, was a manifestation of imagination and energy gone wrong.Instead of a fruit or a flower, I had borne obsessions and anxieties.It was this concept which appealed to me, that he did not call it an illness, but, as in nature, a misbegotten object which might have equal beauty and fascination as the relatives of more legitimate and noble birth.Neurosis was Spanish moss on a tree.Which self should I bring him? The Anaïs who could be swept off her feet in the middle of a busy street and experience an emotional levitation? Street, people, incidents, words: all acquired a poetic diffusion, dissolving all sense of obstacle, fatality, crystallization, finite conclusions.It was an abstract drunkenness, druggedness, like the illuminations of the poets.Or should I tell him about my crash landings?I had no in-between existence: only flights, mobility, euphoria; and despair, depression, disillusion, paralysis, shock, and a shattering of the mirror."I am one of the artists you are writing about, Dr.Rank."It was Dr.Rank who opened the door."Yes?" he said, in his harsh Viennese accent, wrapping the incisive, clear French words in a German crunch, as if the words had been chewed like the end of his cigar instead of liberated out of his mouth like a bird out of a cage.French words were sent out to fly in the air like messenger doves, but Dr.Rank's words were chewed, spewed.He was short, dark-skinned, round-faced; but what stood out were his eyes, which were large, fiery, and dark.I singled out his eyes to eclipse the short Dr.Caligari body, the uneven teeth."Come in," he said, smiling, and led the way to his office, which was a library, with bookcases reaching to the ceiling, and one large window overlooking the park.I felt at home among the books.I chose a deep chair and he sat across from me."So," he said, "it was you who sent Henry Miller to see me.Did you perhaps wish you could come yourself?""Perhaps.I felt that Dr.Allendy's formulas did not fit my life.I have read all your books.I felt that there is more in my relation to my father than the desire of a victory over my mother."By his smile I knew he understood the more and my objection to oversimplifications.He asked me for a clear, full outline of my life and work.I gave it to him."I know the artist can make good use of his conflicts but I feel that, at the present time, I am expending too much energy trying to master a confusion of desires which I cannot solve.I need your help."Immediately I knew that we talked the same language.He said, "I go beyond the psychoanalytical.Psychoanalysis emphasizes the resemblance between people; I emphasize the differences between people.They try to bring everybody to a certain normal level.I try to adapt each person to his own kind of universe.The creative instinct is apart.""Perhaps it is because I am a poet, but I have always felt that there is something beyond Lesbianism, narcissism, masochism, etc.""Yes, there is creation," said Dr.Rank.When I mentioned the brief psychoanalytical formulas he smiled again, ironically, as if agreeing with me as to their insufficiency.I felt the expansion of his thought beyond medicine into metaphysical and philosophical universes.We understood each other quickly."What I want to know is what you created during periods of extreme neurosis.That will be interesting to me.The stories you wrote as a child, which all began with: 'I am an orphan,' are not to be explained, as Allendy did, merely as criminal desire to do away with the mother out of jealousy of the father, out of an inordinate love of the father.You wanted to create yourself, you did not want to be born of human parents."He was neither solemn nor grave.He was agile, quick, as if each word I uttered were a precious object he had excavated and was delighted to find.He acted as if I were unique, as if this were a unique adventure, not a phenomenon to be categorized
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]