Delta of Venus: Erotica
18 November 2008
by: Anaïs Nin
This book I bought in Maarssen, The Netherlands, when my journey first begun. I had been to Maarssen many times before when I was young, but the narrow bookshop so near to where my family lives was a revelation to me. Through the narrow shelves that reached the ceiling stuffed with bindings in English, I ran my eyes like a drug fiend, always on the search for brilliant names. I crouched and I stood on my tip-toes as the rain came down as it does in Northern countries, taking the sky. I gasped when I found it; I gasped when I found Plexus. I hurried through the rain to warmth and the crisped yellow pages.
In Amsterdam, not two days before, I found journals I and III of Anaïs Nin. So began an obsession that came back to me in the opening pages of Erotica. Anaïs Nin sparks mystery and an unquenchable curiosity as a writer and as a woman. Actually, I stopped Anaïs Nin a few years back when in the rains of Oakland I read Diedre Blair’s biography. It was as if through the unwinding of fact her life lost the sparks of fiction and halfway through Incest and Fire in the waiting, I quit, cold-turkey. Is it that Anaïs Nin’s life just makes better sense in the veil-waving, tale-weaving realms of fiction? Her life has something in it that fact can’t handle.
Delta of Venus was written in New York City after Anaïs fled Paris and the war. The erotica was written for a dollar a page paid for by an anonymous “collector.” Henry Miller first tried his hand at it then passed the money making scheme onto Anaïs Nin. What was eventually published, much later, was Delta of Venus and another similiar, Little Birds; was pages of sex through the female’s perspective and not any female but the woman who was constantly assessing her own sexual limits.
I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented.
Perhaps, opening Pandora’s box was what Anaïs did in her journals. Of which, when I began to pour over them was dually surprised at how much sex was left out, though I got a firm impression of her casual, intimate prose. Then I discovered the unexpurgated in Henry and June. If anything, those journals were certainly what the others, poetic and cautious, were not. The unexpurgated rocked me with their sensual poetics, compressed and saturated sex. Anaïs Nin’s fiction always seemed weak and airy in comparison with the journals. In Delta of Venus I hear that strong feminine voice, always acutely aware. Even at the end were her and Henry Miller as Hans. “Hans’s penis never softens, so he takes his time, with a sureness about it. He installs himself inside of the present moment, to enjoy calmly, completely to the last drop.”
The prose of Anaïs Nin was made for sex, as her body at times in the unexpurgated journals, drips with it. There’s that one scene that will always stand out, after she’s broken the most taboo of sexual rules, walking out of her father’s bedroom, after sleeping with him. Her delta dripped sperm and she had to walk with a rag between her legs to stifle the flow. She can surely shock. Some stories in the Delta of Venus were slightly strange, but I never got uncomfortable, it was more like watching unusual behavior, refined by poetry, in a closed setting like a zoo.
Most stories were full of sensuality that rose up from my core depth within me in a dull blaze. I especially liked Elena’s. It was longer than most and I’m a sucker for expansion of character. Elena, in the beginning, was a woman of latent sexual curiosity who wondered dreamily about men on a railway car while reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover. At the end Elena was a woman of unrestrained sexual curiosity, a woman on the plateau of her own pleasure. “…the presence of Leila’s hand in the taxi had plunged Elena into a state that was unlike anything Pierre had ever aroused in her. Instead of reaching right to the center of her body, Leila’s voice and touch had enveloped her in a voluptuous mantle of new sensations, something in suspense that did not seek fulfillment but prolongation.”
The shorter story, Artists and Models, I also found especially alluring. Then there is the woman Bijou, a street walker. She fell into the clutches of the Basque, who never failed to bring her up to the peak of sexual climax but failed to take her over it, he left her dangling with her want unfulfilled. In fact, most of the women in Delta of Venus were endowed before or during the length of a story, with the realization of their bursting sexualities, which they never left dangling. These women were full of sexual action, usually accompanied by a fonder emotion, such as love.
To think of female sexuality is to imagine worlds of sexual possibility beyond the bounds of the usual dichotomy, as seen in what we are made to believe. I believe female sexuality is not what is seen in trite pornography and advertisements and nude celebrities, those are caricatures meant to abhor. Men are scared. Women are scared. Rare is the woman who can claim her own sexuality. It takes a consciousness, I think. Some getting inside and erasing all the damage that has been done through sex itself, through words, through the constant flood of signals all pulling in a myriad of different ways.
Anaïs Nin is far from being a perfect sexual role model. Her lies were so intricate at times the web they wove was impossible to get out of. I don’t like that. BUT, and that but’s big, she created a language for female sexuality, a language of poetic fluidity, a language around love and the small sensual prolongations that make women’s experience of sex so different from men’s. This intimate knowing of Anaïs Nin goes deep and touches in me all that makes up my own sexuality and it does so truly, more completely then any man’s version, any media’s version, any new-age feminists, anti-porn, pro-porn version, because it is my own and it is poetic and it is sensual.
I believe that we have lost so much by being afraid of what females store so deep. Pandora’s box can be opened further and further still but we have to know about it and want it and be able to spread it, to create ample safe ground for it, so that every woman, if not fulfilled, will know why they are not fulfilled. Then we will have a SEXUAL REVOLUTION (Brenda) for it has not happened yet. If Anaïs Nin only knew a few things—but she knew more—they were journal writing and sex. Delta of Venus is sex, erotic sex, woman’s sex, love sex, sex sex, Anaïs Nin sex. Come and get your sex if its hot and subtle and enjoys a little poetry and European charms.
When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.
Autobiography
11 November 2008
by: John Cowper Powys
It was Simon’s habit, when making reference to this book, to this Autobiography by John Cowper Powys, to call it the “brick.” My hardcover edition could, with the help of some fine mortar, no doubt lay a foundation for it is heavier than slate. The symbol stuck and like the lichen which coats the trunks of the oldest in the olive groves and nestles into the crumbled walls of old villages, it began to slowly grow. Though those who are hasty and quickly bored would pass such trunks, walls and bricks by, they would miss that this brick is flecked with the most mystical and sensational gold.
Autobiography is heavy and at times interminably dull. John Cowper Powys is meticulous and in the upmost devoted to every single life-sensation so that this book is less an autobiography and is more a chronicle of a life self-observed in its subtlest forms. Which is why, when from amongst the prattle there arose such insight! such brilliance! that surfaced and shone and awed me into contemplatively setting the brick down. Autobiography becomes like a manual whose subscript reads: Never never never short your life-illusion!
In fact it may be said at once that the grand struggle of my life has been between my conscience and my impulse to live a life made up solely and entirely of sensual-mystical sensations.
And:
By slow degrees it has made itself known to me that the purpose of my life was to dodge—when I could get leave of absence from my exacting conscience—all obligations to humanity and to cultivate certain totally useless, purposeless, unprofitable feelings.
The gold vein runs so thick at times. The impact of the flakes and flecks renders me still, so that I may then absorb what John Cowper Powys writes about when he writes about his life-illusion. I do not only begin to understand in an imperceptible way but I begin to try to follow his examples so that I too may bolster my conscious conceptions and configurations of what I have begun to call my life-illusion. The Magic of this genius, scattered through interminable pages has enough mystical otherworldly force in it to enhance, alter and irrevocably deepen what I “see” on a daily basis. Henry Miller did this to me—and continues to do still—bombastically and boldly. John Cowper Powys does it imperceptibly, eccentrically, magically.
I have always believed that the imagination and the will have a creative power. What a person wills and what a person imagines become a mysterious part of what is. It is madness to spend your days trying to eliminate what your own will and spirit and imagination are perpetually adding to the mystery of life.
Do not short yourself or your life-illusion! Let it feast on the most fertile food it can find, the most eccentric, the most true to your nature, feed feed until you’re full and then move on, guiltlessly, to the next. “The Mystery of Life” is a deep river running through us all. Those who dare not to cower before the strengths of social conformities and external pressures, cultivate the life-illusion that is their own and do not doubt it. “Independence! Independence!” John Cowper Powys wrote, “That is the secret to all philosophy.” I must believe that those who have searched their deepest abyss and have resurfaced time and again, hold in their hands the envelope of their selves onto which they must blindly rest their whole life’s belief.
To live out one’s life-illusion to the end of one’s life is no little chore. John Cowper Powys had this tenacious skill; he was himself from the beginning until the end.
… I am inclined to think that the two great electric currents of my life, the currents that have gathered and gathered their momentum beneath all the changes and chances of circumstance have been first the gradual discovering and the gradual strengthening of my inmost identity, till it can flow like water and petrify like stone; and second the magic trick of losing myself in the continuity of the human generations.
Autobiography was not written at the end of a life of long writing, but at the beginning of a writing career begun in his sixties. It was written in nine-months in long hand. It was written in Phudd Bottom, up-state New York, before he sailed his return to England. It was written in flamboyance characteristic of one who knows oneself from the inside out. There are no dates, no concrete markings to count the passing of Time. It is a collection of feelings and well-formed ideas. Autobiography was written as John Cowper Powys laid on his back, after he submerged his head in a bucket of water, after he tapped is forehead on sacred rocks and said his prayers to the dead and living, bowed his head to the trees and earth-mounds, he wrote it.
We are all mad; and the best thing is to learn to forget our madness. Forget it! Never fight against it.
John Cowper Powys was very careful to include his “fetishes” and his fear of evacuating himself in public, the terrors of Prep school and his three counts of sadism. As equally, he was careful that his history-so-far would “contain No Women at all.” I was left with a very large mystery ; a large part of his private life was gone missing. What was John Cowper Powys’ relationship with women? Which women? How did these relationship influence his writing? My questions grew and were left hanging. He kept his promise—true to form—of not writing anything that would hurt any female. To quench this curiosity I must then pick up Morine Krissdottir’s biography: Descents of Memory.
There were women that John Cowper Powys included, but these women only managed to tilt the scale for me so far in the sexually misfitted direction. These women were the “Messengers of the Grail.” Burlesque dancers, girls taking sun on Brighton beach, theatre performers, girls in the street, sketches of girls in Ally Sloper, girls in bawdy French book, girls with knees and ankles, girls whose bodies were the Holy Grail. It was not that I found his eccentric eroticism especially disturbing, because mostly it was simply strange; but that I prefer more, more than just a “Grail.” To be made to digest so many “fetishes” and never any hints of female love is like eating dough instead of cake.
What John Cowper Powys gives us in Autobiography is a “living portrait” of a writer of the old lineage. His reverence for Nature and the inanimate spirit, his piquant observations, his blazing eccentricities, his staunch tie to all that stretches its brave limbs through the annals of history, his merciless prose are the many veins of gold in this dull rock. Autobiography goes to every limit but the female one. Do not pick up this book if you haven’t made it though a book of his before, I warn you! You’ll then know what was meant when some patron to his lectures muttered that he’s a “long winded bore.”
But, if you are like me and like John Cowper Powys enough to revere him, obsess over him as an insightful, invigorating, life-giving spirit, than you will discover those bits of metaphysical gold. John Cowper Powys had a life-illusion! When this life-illusion strikes by tangents or by bold shafts of light, on my own life-illusion, there refracts a great blaze like an extinguishing star. “Of this I am as certain as I am certain that I am I.”
Bracciano Italia
November 2008
→ Also by John Cowper Powys on Descriptedlines: Wolf Solent, Porius, Porius, so far and Porius, again, The Part of the Magician.
The Part of the Magician
15 October 2008
Autobiography (in part), by: John Cowper Powys
John Cowper Powys’ Autobiography is solely related to “autobiography” in that his chapters follow the chapters of his life. This is a very powerful book, loaded to the brim; ebullition is in order, that’s where I come in. I am always amazed at life’s long untwining links of one who is aware; links that lead one to something, to somewhere—or better yet, to all things and all places. When the continual self-meaning in experience and thoughts and ideas are scrutinized, the links strengthen and are given depth and meaning. If one does not know oneself—the finer the better—one can not move ahead.
This writer, this John Cowper Powys, excels at this conscious knowing more than any other author I have ever read. His autobiography is his life-illusion’s revelation. “The shape” his “character-destiny” assumed is “the shape of a compound, less self-contradictory than it used to be, but not even yet entirely harmonized, of five rather discordant elements. I will name them in the order in which, at the present moment, I feel them to be more or less dominant. They resolve themselves into—a desire to enjoy the Cosmos, a desire to appease my Conscience, a desire to play the part of the Magician, a desire to play the part of a Helper, and finally a desire to satisfy my Viciousness.”
Autobiography is proving to be a journey into a stringently invigorating mind. Such a sentence can not be taken lightly, for his mind, like mine and maybe your own, is a chaos of competing elements which fall into harmony of perfect duality, only every so often. We have the “Power” to bring such bliss about, with a tip-top consciousness and with daring to be much less (or much greater) than sane. Anyone knee-deep in normalization should skip this part—and maybe my whole website—completely.
John Cowper Powys’ thoughts stun me in their eccentricities. No one who grew up in the public schools, university, ad nauseam, would ever be able to think like him, for like it or not, we have all been influenced by what is called, “right” and “wrong, “crazy” thoughts and “normal” thoughts, accepted ways of being and the unacceptable. If John Cowper Powys was born in our day, he would have been so full of medications that his genius mind would have been fried at eighteen. We would shake our heads and groan, “He deserved it,” playing with words and thoughts like he did.
I’ve reached my point: a desire to play the part of the Magician. What John Cowper Powys is talking about is the desire “to exercise a certain supernatural control over my destiny and that of others.” The magician is a miracle worker, take Jesus, whose wonder workings gave him immortal acclaim. The magician has supernatural powers, powers stemming from Nature, always there, just floating in the air; the magician sees our silk threads of interconnectedness and plays with them, much like a guitar player strums a guitar. The magician sees and transforms another’s sight to seeing, for most, rarely see at all. I think that when John Cowper Powys speaks of being a Magician he is speaking of his developing power, his expression into words and books.
The solitary child, reading as much as can be devoured, learns the powers of imagination from those who have learned before. I think that the conception of most writer’s germ, ‘To Write,’ can be traced back to younger times. It is a desire to recreate the world into one’s own terms, to infuse it with one’s own. What else is childhood but a very firm dismissal of the world of adults and all that is “boring.” If John Cowper Powys learned the thrill of being a Magician in childhood, he then thought about it and desired to become it, over time.
To be the Magician in accord with one’s life is to transform the dull itinerary of everyday into a surging creative energy. It is the artist’s task, I think.
I touch here upon what is to me one of the profoundest philosophical mysteries; I mean the power of the individual mind to create its own world, not in complete independence of what is called “the objective world,” but in a steadily growing independence of the attitude of other minds towards this world.
This book is a long one. There will be more.
Thanks for reading.
Bracciano, Italia
October 2008
→ Also by John Cowper Powys on Descriptedlines: Wolf Solent, Porius, Porius, so far, Porius, again and Autobiography.