Anaïs Nin and the Secret Self: From Blindness to the Mountaintop

Henry Miller

In the last few years one sees quite a few either writings about you or quotations from you about dreams and the dream life and I feel that they haven't really understood what you mean about this. I don't think you want people to be living in a dream state while conscious, do you?

Anaïs Nin

No.

HM

But you mean that dream has its uses, its effectiveness in life afterwards.

AN

No, I meant something else, I meant that what we could arrive at a state where what we dream at night would be the blueprint for what we wish to fulfill, or to reach, and if we understand the dream then we know what the secret self is and then this secret self we can fulfill.

The Henry Miller Odyssey, 1:02:20

Anaïs Nin, whose literary renown is most prolifically exampled in her posthumously published diary writing, is also respected and admired for her role in encouraging and stimulating the work of Henry Miller. Her opening preface to the Tropic of Cancer, Miller's first book, is one of the most incisively written dedications to the literary spirit that I have ever read. Her quotations on dream, are poignant in their truth and magical in their realism, vibrant in their imagination and open in their accessibility. 

Similarly as with Carl Jung, both Nin and Miller drew liberally from interpretations between Western psychoanalysis and the traditional religious learning, thought and practice of Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist cultures. As highly creative minds, who lived richly balanced in heart and mind, stood for a conscientious human being, who through developing thorough self-awareness comes naturally to be a part of compassionate change in the creative universe. 

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living,” said Nin, in a comment that affirms the dream psychology of Jung, who considered the dream life, or the life of the imagination, of the mind and of creativity as more real, meaning a more direct form, or manifestation, of experience, than the life lived through the senses. Thus, Nin determines, “Dreams are necessary to life.” 

Indeed, Nin would press ever on into conceiving the dream life as integral to meaning, to holism and self-truth. She asserts, “Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.” Further, one might add that when woven together, the dreamer, as artist-visionary-thinker-writer, becomes the seer, as in the mystic of unmediated experience, of eternal unity in the present, of enlightenment in non-being. 

Eventually, dreams are life, as life is certainly made of dream, and that we are the substance of dream, as the subtle nature of perception, meaning, truth and self-knowing. In reaching the transformation of necessity to becoming, in the paradigm shift of dream action fulfilled in daily living, is for Nin, a miraculous occurrence, likened to the rare and precious goal of enlightenment. She reminds, “The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.”

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Night in the forest, like soot and anger, under a flattening sky. I fell from Paradise into History in the moment of a sting, the lunging insect-antennae, electric, lunged into my paranoid flesh. Hooked under the stark and opaque canopy, obscuring starlight into the bitter and directionless flood of need, anxiety and hope. I sprang from the petrified mud to the swaying vegetable maw of a blind quake, a wild charge.

Georges Lacombe, La forêt au sol rouge

Extinction moved in the sad, ghastly wave of moonlight over frostbitten leaves. Bone-white spears upended my eyes, as I dodged a full-grown bull. Adrenaline-shocked, I sped, scanning the immobile trunks, weighing the Earth down with inhuman strength. And the soil broke in a jarring flash of bestial rage, as another bull, of sturdy, muscular build, spun me around, my heart waning of life.

Bull's head, painting by Johann Heinrich Baumann

I tore through the endless nothing. Then, one bull split my body from the waist up the gut. Marching on my hands, stomping and cracking bone with its merciless strength, adrenaline rushed and spilled out into the open air as I climbed back to my feet, nearly wasted by the crushing jeer. Countless bulls encircled, as I fled, bleeding, the pain yet to reach my brain, grabbing for low-hanging anything, my stomach burning, my feet turning to knee-splitting daggers and brain-flushing mush.

Animals in a Landscape (aka Painting with Bulls) by Franz Marc

Pit against an escalating fever and white with near-mortalizing blood loss, I fainted under the powerless impression of my death, only steps from the forest edge, still besieged under the sightless underground forest of the human Earth. A single house stood at the edge of a rock face, and I was carried to its door. From a window fogged with subzero condensation, I could make out the moonlit peak, and with every second that my mind ascended, my body shrank with fear, and I gasped for each breath as my last.

Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds by Caspar David Friedrich

Staring at the summit, and then was enshrouded by cloud-cover, my eyes closed, I stole beyond the body, and time, beyond death and need, beyond blood and truth, beyond the waves of human flesh that rode on this belligerent tidal sway of hope and tragedy, to summit the Everest flight of dream, and survive through this tyrannical flood of mortal reality.

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Emerging Local Creativity: Literature, Music and Art Create Community

Matt Hanson, Calgary Working Group (photo: Drew Anderson)

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down."

“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”

Kerouac

How did you get involved in trying to start a local media co-op?

I was corresponding with Montreal Media Co-op founder Dru Oja Jay and he expressed a kind of interest in the idea of a local in Calgary. I had been a member of the media co-op for about two years, the national. As I was more active, I was just more interested in what that means to be local. How they operate in Montreal, Halifax, Vancouver and Toronto — how they operate and what that might mean for Calgary. I started to put the word out there and it was very well received by Dru. He basically encouraged me to get together with others and talk about the idea and consider what is independent media in Calgary. Basically what I found is that many people are interested in their own projects, in terms of starting their own papers, but the difference here was that I was interested in connecting that kind of activity with a national co-operative site.

So, what’s set up right now?

Basically right now there is a Calgary Working Group as part of the Media Co-op and that has about 130 members, since 2009. All different kinds of stories have come from that. But in the past two years since I was writing with the Media Co-op, I found not many people contributing to the Calgary Working Group. I was just wondering about where is that understanding in Calgary in terms of this great engine of independent media and this source for people to get involved in media activity. So I went to different people who were involved in co-ops, like co-operative housing, and I talked about the idea and started to get it out there and I posted flyers and things about meeting with people. Initially I got three people that were very actively engaged in promoting and organizing the idea. Those were Melissa Manzone, she’s from Montreal but she lives in Calgary and she has a masters in journalism. Then a journalism student at MRU who has a certificate from SAIT in journalism and he’s still a student, and then another young woman named Chelsea Pratchett, who has done a lot of multimedia work — she has alternativemediayyc.com. Basically the next step was I applied for a small grant through the Arusha Centre, a Take Action Grant, that I received. I just started, DIY, working with Melissa who was editing articles with me, and also doing video interviews with people, and then through Alternative Media YYC I was organizing podcasts as weekly contributions. This small amount of funding is just an encouragement to the people here that might consider the idea of a local media co-op in Calgary.

How so? Would you use that money to pay them?

Yeah. The money has been used to pay contributors. Encouraging people with honorariums. To pay editors. To pay people organizing even. If they’re putting dedication into that, we consider that and we want to value their efforts. It’s a very free grant that I received.

How are decisions made? I come from more traditional media where decisions are made by editors. Who makes decisions in a co-op?

I’m really learning myself because I’m new to the co-operative sphere. But I’ve been really trying to figure out in terms of how the application of the co-operative organization works in relation to this. How we want to organize it is in a way that everybody has a share of the company, the collective. For me, this is really a learning process, in terms of how a co-operative organization works. Part of the funding I received, I’m putting into going to a conference to learn about worker co-operatives in Edmonton. Part of the forward process of this idea is really generating that structure. Right now, we’re at a very initial stage.

Why do it? A response to the media that exists? Do you think the media isn’t doing its job?

I think, to me, there’s that. I don’t want to be too reactive. I think it’s more about having a sense of imagination and taking things into your own hands, and really learning by doing in a way where the kind of media that I want to see is one that doesn’t just tell you about something, but incites you to action. The page is not the end of the matter.

So more of an activist slant.

Yeah, more of a fact that this is part of being more involved. Journalism should be about being involved.


This piece, also published for The Media Co-op, is an excerpt from this week's Your Face Here interview featured in Fast Forward Weekly on October 31

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War zone. Huddled under protection of stone, the dusty clamour of steaming trucks file past, carrying explosives, ammunition; the all-potent death of armed men. The sky burns under a 40 degree desert sun, magnifying the light of illusion with the bitter disbelief of guts strewn in the angry heat. The moonlit fox scatters beyond the floodlit path, and I sit, knowing I'm under the eye of a flagrant bomb pattern, patiently scanning the sky for my fate. 

Cpl. Alicia R. Giron

Down the gravelly road, an older man, built strong and lean, walking assuredly through hell's gate. In this valley, the shadow of death casts invisibly, as the omnipotent fear, that cutting vibration that pierces as it electrifies. Every last medieval hell of our wildest imagining is child's play in comparison. The daytime moon fills my mind, obscuring the passion of escape into the dizzying architecture of mythology, roasting in this Middle Eastern world fire.

Collateral Damage by James Miller

The black fly of fire-bomb death squeals past overhead, and I run, sliding my fingers along the desert rock, the stone crumbles into rough sand. My fingers, mysteriously blackened, feel into the stone. A black liquid seethes. Viscous, thick, it's oil. I realize I can't leave. The desert spring overpowers my body in a storm of evil lust. I treasure the root of all fleshly worship in this age of fire as the swarm of madness overcomes, and in a blinding instant, the stone implodes, my hand flits to dust, the Earth gives way to pools of ash, and I sink in the quicksand of eternal war, condemned to modern night. 

On the Impacts of the Iraq War, Read COMMON DREAMS

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For an ecstatic and mesmerizing experience, listen to this album while watching SAMSARA. There are new waves of sound yet to break on the open mind who might stand to listen on these ancient shores.

Delighting Destiny: Selections of our best during a live performance with audience. All proceeds from this album sales will go towards producing future performances and future recordings. Thank you for your continued support.

Dream Interrogations and Literal Family Torture from Montego Bay

Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor by Georges Seurat

Why are waking notions of the word dream a synonym for something to attain…where as in the notion of a subconscious dreaming, the word dream connotes a separate reality. Where is the relationship between these two associations? Is the difference between waking and subconscious perspective or in the idea of dream itself?

I am sitting at my grandmother’s couch in coastal Massachusetts. She shows me a pop can with Chinese characters on it, and mentions something about Hawaii. Next, my mother offers my wife and I a trip to the Caribbean. Through a song of my uncle about Montego Bay, I imagine I am in Montego Bay. The hotel resort is as one would typically imagine an upscale hotel resort in the Caribbean to appear. In my hotel room, however, my toes and fingers and parts of my chest and head are being wired to a torture device that my stepfather is operating. I attempt an escape from the hotel resort, but it turns into a kind of Cretan Labyrinth, where the Taurus is my own family. 

Dream of the Enlightened Persian

Arriving at an idea upon which all may Dream

Original story of an initial arrival

To Canada! Without place or concrete plan to find one, he begins with the simple purchase of a vehicle, to roam the entirety of this vast nation without foresight or reckoning with fate.

First night in Montreal, a dream;

An Aboriginal elder, playing his frame drum in the dream fog of a striking, celestial presence, tells him repeatedly "...this is the land of the Buffalo." He repeats, "Respect this, the land of the Buffalo."

Out of all destinations, traveling throughout the country, without ever having even known anything about Canada, he arrives in Calgary to live. Calgary is an auspicious place with respect to the Buffalo. The traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes Calgary and the surrounding region, bespeak a plains culture which has honored the Buffalo like none other. The last herds still roam in the northernmost regions of this province.

He goes on to talk about his travails as a boy of only 10 years when the Iranian revolution began. He tells of how he was forced to read in the dim light of a locked vault; a tunnel wherein subversive books were protected by his family. Therein he caused such foment in his mind that would have never been possible in the veiled reality of the Shah's theocratic mental confinements. So, as a true seeker, artist, visionary and dreamer within his growing heart, cultivated by the creation of literary might found in the truth of so many ingenious ghosts unveiled by sanctimonious literary iconoclasm. He remained trapped as it were, underground, with thoughts hailed as mystery in the whisper of a clouded heart.

Yet, his traumatic devotion to the tunnel-enclosed vault gave seed within the dank depths of his early budding mind. With practiced devotion he went to the darkest places in the world, hidden under inhumane truths silenced by war, poverty, corruption, hypocrisy, and censorship. In Canada, specifically in Calgary, he was led to the traditional womb of our Mother Earth among the plains Buffalo culture. Led, as it were, unaware, under the inverted belly of the Buffalo. The hide blanket of the Sweat draped over his unknowing spirit and found in him a place where to confront his mental wound, to rise from that vaulted literary wisdom, and see an inner light reflecting from within his own self as the sensory magic of spiritual knowledge. Upon exiting from the womb, blinded, suffocated, and nearly maimed with the burn of volcanic rocks aflame, his healing journey had commenced, and the vault of his childhood swung wide in the clear open before him as never before as he entered a newfound paradigm of artistic awakening through the dream of a music-theatre production with us all.

As a man who has experienced Sufi tradition in the mountains of Kurdistan, the poetry of my new friend has proclaimed a clear vision directed to all who may listen. In his voice is a uniqueness, an artistic dreaming forged by a soul strengthened and clarified within the tight impasse of as yet unraveled knots of complex human suffering. His voice reminds us of places beset with burdens so immense as to drown many a human heart in endless sorrow. Still, in his voice is a passion enduring with deft creativity and boundless truth-seeking that is infectious and empathetic in its wisdom. He now seeks shared visionary exploration, a lyrical orchestration towards a lasting expression of a public dreaming.   

His story was shared in the name of the passing artist and Sufi healer through the music of Sayed Khalil Alinejad; who was recently killed by the still repressive government in Iran. His murder is an outcry of world shame, an example of absolute heresy against the human spirit by the glowing red eye of a deeply traumatized society, living earnestly, without repose in the recesses of a hellbound subconscious blur. This honest-hearted musician and spiritually expressive man was told before the incident by a fellow Sufi that he would burn in hell, a few weeks later, he was burned in his home with his son. To a person of spirit, we have to wonder, how in life he spoke through music, and how Death became the last tone vibrating through the soul of his forever respectful listeners.

It is said that the character of the American Buffalo, unlike all the other animals and creatures of the North American plains, would charge headlong into an oncoming blizzard, while all others will flee. The American Buffalo will find its way through the worst of storms, earnestly engaged in the collective healing met between the spirit of the storm and the spirit of its own animal nature. With the strength of the Buffalo, he passes through to the bounty of a naked Earth on the other side. We have to wonder if people like Sayed Khalil Alinejad have tasted an ardour similar to that of the American Buffalo, braving the worst of storms, and have become as a message of this near-vanquished Spirit to the people of the Earth and Sky.

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