Rain, Anais Nin, art, & sex

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.  ---Anais Nin

It is a rainy day, here in N.California.  Drought conditions make headlines these days.  Rain is predicted through the coming 10-day forecast, with the dire warning that while raining, it is not enough to cause a dent in the dry, dry, dry year.  We are still drying up.

I have a small fire whispering in the wood stove.  The front door is open so I can hear the doves and Orioles in the hedge.  On the stereo soft, meditation music.  Clouds hang gray, their edges overlap with the muted hills. The air is thick with moisture and orange blossom.  The is no rain at the moment, yet it is foretold in the occasional cool breeze singing in the wind chimes.

I used to appall my mother by reading Anais Nin and D.H.Lawrence.  There may not be an equivalent in post-modern literature to these artists.  If there are, they have not caught my interest.  At one time I dreamed that I might be the one to take things over the edge, but, thankfully, let that one go.

Recently Wayne and I ventured into the de Young Museum in San Francisco to see the Georgia O'Keefe exhibit, her landscapes and flowers from the Lake George years.  She was young, a prolific artist.  A woman.  Early in her marriage, painting what she experienced, she explored light, perspective, color, emotion.  Later, when she attended a show of her husband's photography featuring intimate nude images of her, she was furious.  She felt exploited.  He had not told her that they would be exhibited.

Anais Nin brought sexual intimacy out into the mainstream, insisted that sex is enjoyed by women.  Georgia O'Keefe did, too, and said that she didn't.  If you were hapless enough to say that you saw sex in her work, she told you that that, my friend, was what you brought to the picture.

A few more words from Anais Nin:  Loving loving loving as the artist can love, the poet in love with the world, with all ... senses, adoring all that is alive, courting the whole world with songs, dancing, poetry, music, a huge passion for life, a passion for all its faces, phases, contents, aspects for man, woman, child, the sun, nerves, pain, the perspiration of nervous agony..."

The creative process is sensual, bringing experience to life.  Recording the intimate relations we have with our environment, emotions, thoughts and feelings, expressing that which words may not touch with their clunky articulations.

Don't think for a moment that I know anything!  I am easily embarrassed by sexual innuendo while being excruciatingly curious.  I love erotic art and literature.  The creative process demands "rigorous honesty,"  demands that one leave no stone unturned.  The ego may rise to make its own unreasonable demands for recognition, "I am so great and unique and I do it this way, the only right way..."  

And the woman who plays

both earth and guitar

bears in her voice

the mourning

and the joy

of the most poignant moment.

Time and distance

fall away from the guitar.

We are a dream,

an unfinished

song.

The  untamed heart

rides back roads on horseback;

over and over again it dreams of the night, of silence,

over and over again it sings of the earth, of its guitar.

from Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Guitar

Holding close to Mother Earth, blessing this day with Presence, Thank You Spirit.

xoxo
LPC