Tag Archives: journal

My dream place

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Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Ten years or so ago, I took a class on journal writing. I think that was the topic (I may have taken a separate one on nature writing). One exercise was to describe our dream house.

This was an interesting idea to me because, as an introvert who had lived in a mobile home for 18 years, then a shared dorm room, then a shared apartment, then a rundown studio at the time of the class, my dream was not of a specific house or style, but simply to live in one like “normal” people. To have an upstairs and a downstairs — my favourite concept. To have an attic and a cellar and the mysteries those imply. To have a front yard and a back yard — private outdoor space. To have some accessories, like a gazebo and birdbaths. I would have been happy, however, in anything that could reasonably be called a house.

Yet when it came to writing this piece, which was intended to be an exercise in free writing, that is, writing what occurs to you as it occurs without any imposed structure or editing, I could not think of a dream house. I could think only of a dream home, deep in an old forest — an old forest like those that haunted my favourite fairy tales.

I don’t think I have what I wrote any more; if I do, it would be hard to find. I do remember the idea, however, because it’s the same idea I’ve always had, yesterday, today, tomorrow.

There is an ancient forest. The trees are tall. Their canopies touch each other and the sky, blocking it out. It may be midday up there and in the outer world, if there is one, but here it is an eerie, quiet twilight.

The forest floor smells earthy, damp, and rich with decay. It’s black and cool and soothing, teeming with life and the remnants of death. If you look closely, you can see the soil move as the living processes the dead in a cycle of untold age.

Nearby, a brook babbles along over rocks, occasionally turning into a miniature waterfall. The canopy is not so dense along the edges of the brook, so the water brokenly reflects the midday sun and clouds. Still, there are many shadows and still pools. Like the soil, the water is cool, just right for wading as long as you watch out for sharp rocks. One of the best places to stand is at the top of one of the miniature falls, looking down, or at the bottom of one, feeling the refreshing water splashing your feet and up against your legs. There are fish-shadows darting about, while water striders delicately walk the surfaces of the still areas and mating dragon- and damselflies buzz over the surface. Once in a while, a frog leaps in surprise in the wet grass along the edge. A large cloud passing by overhead occasionally covers everything with its shadow and a temporary chill.

Not far from the brook the forest becomes dense with brush that is hard to walk through. It opens into a younger woods, with a pleasant walking path. It is still shady, but the ground is sun dappled. There are whisperings and stirrings as small animals and birds move about, and a snake sprawls carelessly across the empty path, warming itself in the sun. The woods are mostly quiet, though, but they will become noisy later in the afternoon with bird and insect song.

Suddenly the woods open into a meadow of tall grasses and wildflowers, awash with sun. Older trees with short, thick trunks surround it; they have not had to struggle for light and air like their deep-forest counterparts. The grasses are perfect for lying among; they are cool and hide their refugees well.

In the southeast corner of the meadow there is a small stone house. The doors, one on each side, are made of dark, heavy, weathered timbers. The windows are small and leaded, making the inside of the house feel cool and somewhat dim, but shafts of sunlight form pools of heat on the worn wooden floors and colourful rugs. There is a deep, comfortable chair, pulled up to an open window. An insect hum from meadow fills the room, almost but not quite drowning out the running water nearby. Sometimes the sound of a woodpecker drumming floats into the open window, which also draws in the cool, flavorful air of late spring.

There are wood, knotty shelves filled with books everywhere. Some books are piled on the floor in a few places as though someone had just been studying them, but most are arranged on the shelves. Some are leaning over a bit on their neighbours, as though they are tired of not being picked up and read.

In the kitchen, the plates are made of pewter, which is dented and worn from use. An Aga cooker dominates the small room lined with dark wood cupboards. A tea kettle and teapot look as they have just been returned to their places.

There’s a tiny dining nook with a heavy table brightened by an erratic bouquet of wildflowers from the meadow and woods. Two places are set, but one chair is more worn than the other. A short, dark hallway leads to a little bedroom, soon to be darkened by the shadows of the trees that both overlook and guard it.

A door from the hallway opens onto a path that heads into the woods. Although it’s a clear path, it’s not an easy one as it goes on. It’s tempting to follow any of the many side trails and to get lost in the depths, which are dark and cool and tangled. No one has ever found the end of the main path — if there is one. No one has explored all of the side trails. They wait for someone to find what they lead to — lakes, mountains, valleys, vast vistas, fairy lands.

It’s just past midday now, and it won’t be long before the surrounding trees throw their shadows over the meadow, transforming it into a pool of vague menace. The deepening darkness brings with it the sound of life — birds and other animals torpid with heavy breakfasts and noontime warmth slowly roused and becoming restless with timeless urges as the evening and night approach. They chirp, chatter, and rustle in discrete phrases, always sounding alone and lonely.

And then it is night, under the watch of the virgin white full moon.

2005

Book review: Henry and June

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Henry and June (from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931–1932) by Anaïs Nin. Recommended.

Henry and June (from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931–1932) by Anaïs Nin is a portion of the writer’s famous journal from October 1931 until October 1932 — the year in which she met Henry and June Miller and fell for Henry’s sensuality and June’s mystery, a year of writing, lies, deceit, sexual awakening, introspection, psychoanalysis, and “love.”

Nin is an evocative, poetic writer, if not a particularly substantive one. Henry and June, edited from her journal to focus on Miller and his wife, is beautifully written but, in the end, is devoid of meaning to anyone other than the participants. She obscures the truth of how much she writes. If the journal is accurate, then Nin had mastered deception — she lies to her husband, to June, to Henry, to her psychoanalyst, to her lover/cousin Eduardo, to virtually everyone she knows, all seemingly in an attempt to hide herself from them, and perhaps from herself. She writes frequently of costumes, makeup, jewelry, nail polish and how one can put them on to create a new self. It quickly becomes clear that, despite the introspection of the journal, despite the psychoanalysis, despite her complete focus on herself and how she relates to those people in her life, Nin is no more self-aware by the end of the year than she was when she met Miller, and the reader can’t be too sure, either, of where Nin ends and where the self-deception begins. When the obvious is pointed out to her — that she is still trying to find the “love” that she didn’t get from her father — Nin accepts it at first, but denies it as she talks more and more to herself. And while she may grasp that her father’s abandonment was harmful to her, she finds it easy to mistreat her husband, whom she portrays as psychologically simple and refers to as a “child” without relating how he might feel to how she felt about her father. She seems incapable of grasping the importance of another person’s feelings, no matter who that other person might be.

Nin writes of spending entire days and nights with Miller, of going from him to Hugo, her banker husband, with no suspicion on Hugo’s part. Hugo is jealous of Miller, although she repeatedly tells her journal she doesn’t know why he would be. She writes of not wanting to hurt the soft, weak, emotional Eduardo, but continues her sexual relationship with him until he is bound to be crushed by her sudden decision to end it. She tells Eduardo about Henry, Henry about Hugo, and her psychoanalyst about all of them. She writes of having sex with three of them in one day, ending with “What does that make me?” She does not want to know the potential answer to that question. She wants “experience” at any cost. She does not want to be hurt, but she hurts others freely. She believes she has deep insight into others, but does not understand at more than a superficial level what their thoughts and feelings may be. Much of what she attributes to the elusive, mysterious June are the shifting sands of her own personality.

Not having read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the book he was writing during the year of his relationship with Nin, it’s difficult for me to say how accurate Nin’s portrayal of him is. At times, she feels pity for him, for his weak eyes, for the mind-numbing work he does to support himself. At others, she describes him as “monstrous.” The sketch of Miller is less one of the man himself than of Nin’s infatuation with her own perceptions. At one moment he is the ultimate sensualist; the next, he becomes a gentle romantic. She also enjoys him largely for his worship of her as a writer and as a lover. The relationship is less about the dynamics of their interactions than about her ego and her relationship with herself. Miller is never much more than a two-dimensional, ever-changing character — Henry Miller according to Anaïs Nin. While Nin’s journal is certainly more thoughtful than those of most people, ultimately, it lacks the insight and depth that another writer could have brought to such an intense relationship. At the end, Nin and Miller are still strangers to the reader who has spent hours over dinner and in bedrooms with them. Perhaps it is Nin’s amorality that gets in the way of any true intimacy.

Nin has somehow become a model of a woman’s sexual awakening and awareness, perhaps because of the perceived candor of her journal and her desires for the depths and heights of sexual experience. It is as though such desires for such experiences are what should define a woman — a notion that may work for some women, but certainly not all who are sexually awakened in their own ways.

Henry and June is self-indulgent and even occasionally adolescent in its focus, obssessions, and attitudes. Perhaps because I find so little to relate to in Nin, I found her cold, uninteresting, and annoying — perhaps because I don’t like to be deceived. On the other hand, this will be a fascinating read for anyone who is deeply interested in Nin or Miller or anyone, like me, who would like to free themselves to speak freely in their own journals.

9 June 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf.