Sharing a piece from Anais Nin's "House of Incest" - one section that had a particularly strong impression on me for its haunting and evocative imagery
"Lost in the colors of the Atlantide, the colors running into one another without frontiers. Fishes made of velvet, of organdie with lace fangs, made of spangled taffeta, of silks and feathers and whiskers, with lacquered flanks and rock crystal eyes, fishes of withered leather with gooseberry eyes, eyes like the white of egg. Flowers palpitating on stalks like sea-hearts. None of them feeling their own weight, the sea-horse moving like a feather ...
It was like yawning. I loved the ease and the blindness and the suave voyages on the water bearing one through obstacles. The water was there to bear one like a giant bosom; there was always the water to rest on, and the water transmitted the lives and the loves, the words and the thoughts.
Far beneath the level of storms I slept. I moved within color and music as inside a sea-diamond. There were no currents of thoughts, only the caress of flow and desire mingling, touching, travelling, withdrawing, wandering - the endless bottoms of peace.
I do not remember being cold there, nor warm. No pain of cold and heat. The temperature of sleep, feverless and chilless. I do not remember being hungry. Food seeped through invisible pores. I do not remember weeping.
I felt only the caress of moving - moving into the body of another - absorbed and lost within the flesh of another, lulled by the rhythm of water, the slow palpitation of the senses, the movement of silk.
Loving without knowingness, moving without effort, in the soft current of water and desire, breathing in an ecstasy of dissolution.
I awoke at dawn, thrown up on a rock, the skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails."
"Lost in the colors of the Atlantide, the colors running into one another without frontiers. Fishes made of velvet, of organdie with lace fangs, made of spangled taffeta, of silks and feathers and whiskers, with lacquered flanks and rock crystal eyes, fishes of withered leather with gooseberry eyes, eyes like the white of egg. Flowers palpitating on stalks like sea-hearts. None of them feeling their own weight, the sea-horse moving like a feather ...
It was like yawning. I loved the ease and the blindness and the suave voyages on the water bearing one through obstacles. The water was there to bear one like a giant bosom; there was always the water to rest on, and the water transmitted the lives and the loves, the words and the thoughts.
Far beneath the level of storms I slept. I moved within color and music as inside a sea-diamond. There were no currents of thoughts, only the caress of flow and desire mingling, touching, travelling, withdrawing, wandering - the endless bottoms of peace.
I do not remember being cold there, nor warm. No pain of cold and heat. The temperature of sleep, feverless and chilless. I do not remember being hungry. Food seeped through invisible pores. I do not remember weeping.
I felt only the caress of moving - moving into the body of another - absorbed and lost within the flesh of another, lulled by the rhythm of water, the slow palpitation of the senses, the movement of silk.
Loving without knowingness, moving without effort, in the soft current of water and desire, breathing in an ecstasy of dissolution.
I awoke at dawn, thrown up on a rock, the skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails."