House of Incest by Anaïs Nin

ALL THAT I KNOW
IS CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK WRITTEN WITHOUT WITNESS, AN EDIFICE WITHOUT
DIMENSION, A CITY HANGING IN THE SKY.
    The morning I got up to begin this book I
coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke
the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have
just spat out my heart.
    There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the
worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her
bones. The quena has a more penetrating, more
haunting sound than the ordinary flute.
    Those who write know the process. I thought of
it as I was spitting out my heart.
    Only I do not wait for my love to die.

    My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am
of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea,
and my eyes are the color of water.
    I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing
face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self.
    I remember my first birth in water. All round
me a sulphurous transparency and my bones move as if
made of rubber. I sway and float, stand on boneless toes listening for distant
sounds, sounds beyond the reach of human ears, see things beyond the reach of
human eyes. Born full of memories of the bells of the Atlantide .
    Always listening for lost sounds and searching
for lost colors, standing forever on the threshold like one troubled with
memories, and walking with a swimming stride. I cut the air with wide-slicing
fins, and swim through wall-less rooms.
    Ejecfrom a paradise
of soundlessness, cathedrals wavering at the passage of a body, like soundless
music.
    This Atlantide could
be found again only at night, by the route of the dream. As soon as sleep
covered the rigid new city, the rigidity of the new world, the heaviest portals
slid open on smooth-oiled gongs and one entered the voicelessness of the dream. The terror and joy of murders accomplished in silence, in the
silence of slidings and brushings. The blanket of
water lying over all things stifling the voice. Only a monster brought me up on
the surface by accident.
    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, traveling,
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.

    The night surrounded me, a photograph unglued
from its frame. The lining of a coat ripped open like the two shells of an
oyster. The day and night unglued, and I falling in between not knowing