The Sunrise of a New World!

"Here is Man's free will; Crucify Him!" - Adolph E. Knoch

* 2000 years have passed; proclaiming the Millennial Kingdom of Christ at hand! A Sabbat Journey is 2000 cubits = 2000 years. Jozua 3:4, Hosea 6:1-3, 2 Peter 3:8, Acts 1:12.

Eonian Life; an aionian reformation

Gods great calendar exists of aions/eons, which are periods of time. This scriptural word “eons” appears about 75 times in the New Testament, but has been obscured by bad translations such as “worlds,” “forever” or “eternity.” Every human born will live endlessly with God, because God eventually abolishes death (1 Cor. 15:24-28) through Christ. A few people chosen by God, however, will live with God before He abolishes death, during the 2 future glorious eons. This is known as eonian life.” - Martin Zender

What I believe 

John Gavazzoni 

I believe in the one, true God, eternal in Being, whose essence is love; the I Am, who is internally relational and who, in and by Their Pure Relational Being, becomes the Family of God, the God-Family. This procession from Being to Family is by the impregnation and conception within the I Am who knows His Spouse as integral to His own Being, the Complement of His Person and in that pure coitus of perfect love, the Son is eternally begotten.

The Son of His love is the exact representation of the Divine Nature and in Him dwells all the fulness of Deity. God, the Primal "Us," self-described plurally as the curtain of biblical revelation opens; the One who becomes Father and Mother by conjugal love, by Divine pursuit and surrender, by Divine assertion and reception, by the combining of the DNA of Deity, the gender complete Deity, becomes and is Family by the communion of the Holy Spirit, who is the life of Deity and is He who constitutes the flow of Being and Personified transmission of love within and among the God-Family.

The Sperm of God, which is His Word, the Christ, sent forth by and in the ecstasy of divine love, seeks and penetrates the yielded Ovum of God in the climax of God's own Self Knowledge eternally generating the Son of God, who Being the perfect Image of His Parental Source, the Radiance of the Parental glory, like His Father, seeks union with His internal bride, and thereby is the family of God infinitely multiplied out from the One Seed, the Christ, the Single-begotten Son.

I affirm that the Son is singularly and uniquely, the Christ of God, yet by Him, many sons are begotten all proceeding processionally out from the One Seed, the result being many sons consituted by One sonship. Family-constituted, Family-defined Personhood, eternally proceeds forth from our Primal Origin, Love. From the Single-Begotten proceeds many sons, many brethren, one New Humanity, One Body.

The Christ in the Head of the Body, but in union with the Head, the Body, with Him, is also the Christ of God. This corporate Christ includes a Bride, and together They are the perfect and complete image of Father-Mother God. Those that are begotten by the union of the Son with His Bride are also truly sons of God having their origin in the Primal Seed.

Such progression is not to be understood "under the sun," but as the eternal unfolding of God, our Family. I believe in God as both Progenitor of all Being and the Creator of all things, initiating all His/Her offspring by His Seed, the Word, the Christ, and releasing forth and forming all creation from His Substance. In creation, Deity becomes existential in the eons, immanently in all creation, but particularly in man. In this Way, beyond carnal understanding, God, in the eons, becomes what He is not, while never ceasing to be all that He is eternally, and in overcoming what He is not, by what He is, He draws forth out of His depths otherwise hidden dimensions of His glory.

From this ultimate quandary there develops the tension, ambiguity and finally, perversity of existence. Thereby the Essence of Being, which is Love, becomes to creation what creation cannot be to itself. This is grace. And in His Son, He returns all things in His Son to the glory which He, the Son, had before the world began. The grain of wheat has fallen into the ground and died, and will not abide alone. Full Family glory requires the Family crisis of all Fulness being subjected to deprivation, the deprivation of death by sin, and all that death includes.

By this contrarianism, and the conquering of the same, the Family of God realizes its greatest potential so that principalities and powers, by beholding such wonders, are taught the manifold wisdom of God. This wisdom is necessary for the administration of the kingdom of God that begins at the highest level of sons down to the lowest level of angels. At the heart of this divine wisdom is the ordering of death and resurrection, life out of death, which eternal reality was historically demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Son of Man, our Savior, in His earthly passion.

THAT WHICH IS BEING, must be subjected to that which CLAIMS independence of being, and that which claims independence seeks the death of Him upon whom they are dependent. It is in this struggle that divine love is seen at its best as it yields to the attack of the those who owe all to Him, and yet who wish to break "free" from Him and be gods in their own right.

This rebellion is conceived not by any initiation of the creature's will, but by the will of the Creator who deprives the creature of light and thereby creates the unimaginable in the creatures imagination.The creature must experience how alienated and hostile it will act toward God and itself when left to itself. This alienated "self" is the false persona, the alter ego that we must all bear so that by becoming what we are not, we shall fully come to know who we are. When the independent "self" is left to itself, it resentfully affirms its independence through rebellion, waiting to see how its Father-Creator will react. Deep within the heart of the rebel is the cry, "will you love me even in my rebellion.It seeks the crisis.

It seeks to know, once and for all if it is unreservedly loved. Hence Golgotha, hence Calvary, hence the passion of man meets the passion of God and we know, we see, we understand that we are loved. It is as love that God must be known. This is the administration of His Family-kingdom. And love can only be fully known in its response to attack. Love can only be fully known when It refuses to act in retaliatory vengeance, but instead submits to the infamous hostility of crucifixion with unflinching grace.I believe that man is the image and glory of God for he is only to be known, in truth, as in the Christ, who is the Primal image and glory of God.

The Christ does not grasp nor keep the glory for Himself alone, but as the Seed become the Son, He gives His glory, the glory of the Father to all His brethren. The glory is hidden within their creaturehood, yet it is in their creaturehood that the glory shall finally be fully expressed.

I believe that a transcendent, normative, divinely inspired record of the above administration has been given us in Holy Scripture by which we are turned to Christ, the living Word of God, who declares His Father and our Father to us. When exposed to its pages a providentially ordered interplay of penultimate revelation and yes, with it, an ugly distortion of the face of God occurs, for Holy Writ serves, on one hand, to lead us to the ultimate revelation, Christ Himself, but to that end it paradoxically hides God from us and demonstrates that, left to ourselves, we will read into it all the perversity of our fallen imagination.Without it we are deceived, yet by its letter we also deceived, in preparation of the true Light that lighteth every man, coming into the world.

The Bible is given to us, full of the shadows of Truth, to demonstrate the vanity of our knowledge of Him.What is the final conclusion? The Book of books, like all things and with all things, works together, or is worked together by God for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. Without it, we are helpless. With it we are helpless, but through it help comes and we abuse the help until the help overcomes our abuse.

It is one of many good and holy things which must finally decrease that He might increase.I believe in Christ as the Head of His church, a church not constituted by creeds, dogma and hierarchy, but the church, the organic fellowship of members joined in One body, edifying itself in love and knowing its Head in the measure that it knows the love that flows from that headship. I do not believe in the faith as a body of doctrine, but I know it as the gift of the faith of the Son of God to His church, the only faith without mixture which is the Son's response to the Father's faithfulness.

I believe in the communion of the saints which is not a mutual admiration society composed of similar thinking individuals who congratulate one another that they are right in their understanding of God, but rather is a grant by grace of communion in and with Deity through the glorified humanity of our Lord.I believe in the forgiveness of sins, firstly as it is grounded in the immutable disposition of God toward sinners whereby He refuses to disqualify any man or woman from the purpose of His love for them, while He corrects that in them which is not worthy of their sonship and His kingdom.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins secondarily as the communication of the Divine disposition to the human heart whereby the pressure of forgiveness as it flows from the heart of God to our hearts causes the opening of our hearts so that what is subjectively in the heart of God becomes subjective in us.So great is the love. which by nature will not reckon sin against us that the human heart cannot finally resist and turns to God in grateful reception of that which is held in the heart of God for us.I believe in eternal life, which is God Himself, who becomes eonion life in Christ, abiding in the eon(s) till all death is swallowed up by the victory of His resurrection. I believe that in the death and resurrection of Christ, Father God acted, and in that action historically carried out in time that which is eternally sealed in His heart.

He acted, reconciling all men by His death and saving all men by His life from the dead.He continues to act to make men aware of the love which constitutes the Christ event and as He was successful in the first, he shall be successful in the second. This we know as the good news of the glory of Christ. As His son, I know and believe the love God has for us. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the personal Spirit of the communion of the Family of God.

I believe in the resurrection of the body, the mortal body; for that which is immortal needs no resurrection. Our very body, which the apostle calls into the service of God with its instrumental members of righteousness, presently carries the burden of alien mortality.Existentially it is mortal, but as the expression of Being it shall come forth out of its affliction of death to bring the glory of God to final consummation. There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body.Paradoxically it, singular, is sown in dishonor and raised in glory, for there is One Body.

 > Jacques Ellul

What follows is a quotation from a book by the late French theologian, Jacques Ellul, What I Believe (Eerdmans, 1989, pp.188-192)

> I am taking up here a basic theme that I have dealt with elsewhere but which is so essential that I have no hesitation in repeating myself. It is the recognition that all people from the beginning of time are saved by God in Jesus Christ, that they have all been recipients of his grace no matter what they have done.

> This is a scandalous proposition. It shocks our spontaneous sense of justice. The guilty ought to be punished. How can Hitler and Stalin be among the saved? The just ought to be recognized as such and the wicked condemned.

> But in my view this is purely human logic which simply shows that there is no understanding of salvation by grace or of the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ. The proposition also runs counter to the almost unanimous view of theology. Some early theologians proclaimed universal salvation but almost all the rest finally rejected it. Great debates have taken place about foreknowledge and predestination, but in all of them it has been taken for granted that reprobation is normal.

> A third and the most serious objection to the thesis is posed by the biblical texts themselves. Many of these talk about condemnation, hell, banishment into outer darkness, and the punishment of robbers, fornicators, idolaters, etc. As we proceed we must overcome these obstacles and examine the theological reasons which lead me to believe in universal salvation, the texts that seem to be against it, and a possible solution.

> But I want to stress that I am speaking about belief in universal salvation. This is for me a matter of faith. I am not making a dogma or a principle of it. I can say only what I believe, not pretending to teach it doctrinally as the truth.>

1. God Is loveMy first simple thesis is that if God is God, the Almighty, the Creator of all things, the Omnipresent, then we can think of no place or being whatever outside him. If there were a place out side him, God would not be all in all, the Creator of all things. How can we think of him creating a place or being where he is not present? What, then, about hell? Either it is in God, in which case he is not universally good, or it is outside him, hell having often been defined as the place where God is not. But the latter is completely unthinkable.

One might simply say that hell is merely nothingness. The damned are those who are annihilated. But there is a difficulty here too. Nothingness does not exist in the Bible. It is a philosophical and mathematical concept. We can represent it only by a mathematical sign. God did not create ex nihilo, out of nothing. Genesis 1:2 speaks of tohu wabohu ("desert and wasteland" RSV "formless and void') or of tehom ("the deep').

This is not nothing. Furthermore, the closest thing to nothingness seems to be death. But the Bible speaks about enemies, that is, the great serpent, death, and the abyss, which are aggressors against God's creation and are seeking to destroy it.

These are enemies against which God protects his creation. He cannot allow that which he has created and called good to be destroyed, disorganized, swallowed up, and slain. This creation of God cannot revert to nothing. Death cannot issue in nothingness. This would be a negation of God himself, and this is why the first aspect seems to me to be decisive. Creation is under constant threat and is constantly upheld.

> How could God himself surrender to nothingness and to the enemy that which he upholds in face and in spite of everything?

How could he allow a power of destruction and annihilation in his creation? If he cannot withstand the force of nothingness, then we have to resort to dualism (a good God and a bad God in conflict and equal), to Zoroastrianism. Many are tempted to dualism today. But if God is unique, if he alone has life in himself, he cannot permit this threat to the object of his love.

> But it is necessary that "the times be accomplished," the times when we are driven into a corner and have to serve either the impotence of the God of love or the power of the forces of destruction and annihilation.

We have to wait until humanity has completed its history and creation, and every possibility has been explored. This does not merely imply, however, that at the end of time the powers of destruction, death, the great serpent, Satan, the devil, will be annihilated, but much more. How can we talk about nothingness when we receive the revelation of this God who will be all in all? When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself also will be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).

> If God is, he is all in all.

There is no more place for nothingness. The word is an empty one. For Christians it is just as empty as what it is supposed to denote. Philosophers speak in vain about something that they can only imagine or use as a building block, but which has no reality of any kind. (1)

> The second and equally essential factor is that after Jesus Christ we know that God is love. This is the central revelation. How can we conceive of him who is love ceasing to love one of his creatures? How can we think that God can cease to love the creation that he has made in his own image? This would be a contradiction in terms. God cannot cease to be love.

> If we combine the two theses we see at once that nothing can exist outside God's love, for God is all in all. It is unthinkable that there should exist a place of suffering, of torment, of the domination of evil, of beings that merely hate since their only function is to torture. It is astounding that Christian theology should not have seen at a glance how impossible this idea is. Being love, God cannot send to hell the creation which he so loved that he gave his only Son for it. He cannot reject it because it is his creation.

This would be to cut off himself. [Note (not by author)] The author has brought out a very important point here. And that is that God's creation is the extension of himself, his very own being.

> A whole theological trend advances the convenient solution that God is love but also justice. He saves the elect to manifest his love and condemns the reprobate to manifest his justice. My immediate fear is that this solution does not even correspond to our idea of justice and that we are merely satisfying our desire that people we regard as terrible should be punished in the next world.

This view is part of the mistaken theology which declares that the good are unhappy on earth but will be happy in heaven, whereas the wicked are successful on earth but will be punished in the next world. Unbelievers have every reason to denounce this explanation as a subterfuge designed to make people accept what happens on earth. The kingdom of God is not compensation for this world.> Another difficulty is that we are asked to see God with two faces as though he were a kind of Janus facing two ways. Such a God could not be the God of Jesus Christ, who has only one face. Crucial texts strongly condemn two-faced people who go two different ways.

These are the ones that Jesus Christ calls hypocrites. If God is double-minded, there is duplicity in him. He is a hypocrite. We have to choose: He is either love or he is justice. He is not both. If he is the just judge, the pitiless Justiciar, he is not the God that Jesus Christ has taught us to love. Furthermore, this conception is a pure and simple denial of Jesus Christ. For the doctrine is firm that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died and was willing to die for human sin to redeem us all: I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (John 12:32), satisfying divine justice.

All the evil done on earth from Adam's break with God undoubtedly has to be judged and punished. But all our teaching about Jesus is there to remind us that the wrath of God fell entirely on him, on God in the person of the Son. God directs his justice upon himself; he has taken upon himself the condemnation of our wickedness. [Note (not by author)] This is a most crucial statement indeed. What would be the point, then, of a second condemnation of individuals?

> Was the judgment passed on Jesus insufficient? Was the price that was paid-the punishment of the Son of God-too low to meet the demands of God's justice?  This justice is satisfied in God and by God for us. From this point on, then, we know only the face of the love of God.

> This love is not sentimental acquiescence. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31). God's love is demanding, "jealous," total, and indivisible. Love has a stern face, not a soft one. Nevertheless, it is love. And in any case this love excludes double predestination, some to salvation and others to perdition. It is inconceivable that the God of Jesus Christ, who gives himself in his Son to save us, should have created some people ordained to evil and damnation.

> There is indeed a predestination, but it can be only the one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard. We have often said that God wants free people. He undoubtedly does, except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to decide and choose to be damned. To say that God presents us with the good news of the gospel and then leaves the final issue to our free choice either to accept it and be saved or to reject it and be lost is foolish. To take this point of view is to make us arbiters of the situation. In this case it is we who finally decide our own salvation.

> This view reverses a well-known thesis and would have it that God proposes and man disposes. Without question we all know of innumerable cases in which people reject revelation. Swarms are doing so today. But have they any real knowledge of revelation? If I look at countless presentations of the Word of God by the churches, I can say that the churches have presented many ideas and commandments that have nothing whatever to do with God's revelation.

Rejecting these things, human commandments, is not the same as rejecting the truth. And even if the declaration or proclamation of the gospel is faithful, it does not itself force a choice upon us.

> If people are to recognize the truth, they must also have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. These two things are indispensable, the faithful declaration of the gospel, the good news, by a human being and the inner witness in the hearer of the Holy Spirit, who conveys the assurance that it is the truth of God. The one does not suffice without the other. Thus when those who hear refuse our message, we can never say that they have chosen to disobey God.

> The human and divine acts are one and the same only in the Word of Jesus. When he told his hearers not to be unbelieving but to believe, if they refused then they were rejected. In our case, however, we cannot say that there is an act of the Holy Spirit simultaneously with our proclamation. This may well be the point of the well-known text about the one sin that cannot be pardoned, the sin against the Holy Spirit (cf. Matt. 12:31-32). But we can never know whether anyone has committed it. However that may be, it is certain that being saved or lost does not depend on our own free decision.

> I believe that all people are included in the grace of God. I believe that all the theologies that have made a large place for damnation and hell are unfaithful to a theology of grace. For if there is predestination to perdition, there is no salvation by grace. Salvation by grace is granted precisely to those who without grace would have been lost. Jesus did not come to seek the righteous and the saints, but sinners. He came to seek those who in strict justice ought to have been condemned.

A theology of grace implies universal salvation. What could grace mean if it were granted only to some sinners and not to others according to an arbitrary decree that is totally contrary to the nature of our God? If grace is granted according to the greater or lesser number of sins, it is no longer grace-it is just the opposite because of this accountancy.

Paul is the very one who reminds us that the enormity of the sin is no obstacle to grace: Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more (Rom. 5:20). This is the key statement. The greater the sin, the more God's love reveals itself to be far beyond any judgment or evaluation of ours. This grace covers all things. It is thus effectively universal.

> I do not think that in regard to this grace we can make the Scholastic distinctions between prevenient grace, expectant grace, conditional grace, etc. Such adjectives weaken the thrust of the free grace of the absolute sovereign, and they result only from our great difficulty in believing that God has done everything. But this means that nothing in his creation is excluded or lost. (1) This is why books like Satre's Being und Nothingness and H. Carre's Point d'appui pris sur le neant are so feeble.

Among the Celestials

Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come. - Isaiah 21:11

Wat gaan we straks doen?

VRAAG:Wat is straks de taak van de ekklesia (het lichaam van Christus) in “de hemelse gewesten”?

ANTWOORD:We zijn al een heel eind in de goede richting wanneer we ons realiseren dat de toekomst van de ekklesia (het lichaam van Christus) inderdaad gelegen is “in de hemelse gewesten”. Of zoals anderen vertalen “temidden van de hemelingen”.

 (Hij) heeft ons mede opgewekt en ons mede een plaats gegeven in de hemelse gewesten, in Christus Jezus, om in de komende eeuwen de overweldigende rijkdom zijner genade te tonen naar (zijn) goedertierenheid over ons in Christus Jezus.Efeze 2:6,7

één met ChristusDe ekklesia heet “lichaam van Christus” omdat ze met Hem wordt geïdentificeerd. Hij stierf - wij stierven met Hem. Hij werd opgewekt  - wij werden met Hem opgewekt. Hij is gezeten in de hemelse gewesten - wij zijn met Hem gezeten in de hemelse gewesten. Christus’ positie is onze positie. Ons leven is nu nog verborgen met Christus (Kol.3:3) maar in de komende eeuwen (aionen) zal God dit gaan tonen.

zendelingen?Sommigen stellen het zo voor, dat we straks als zendelingen temidden van de hemelingen, Gods veelkleurige wijsheid gaan bekendmaken. Men verwijst daarvoor naar Efeze 3:10. In dat vers wordt echter niet gesproken over de taak van de ekklesia in de toekomst maar over haar taak nu (”opdat THANS door middel van de ekklesia…”).

op de Troon!Om te weten wat ons straks te doen staat, dienen we ons bewust te worden wat onze positie is. God heeft Christus doen zitten aan Zijn rechterhand (d.w.z. de hoogste positie) in de hemelse gewesten…

… BOVEN ALLE OVERHEID en MACHT en KRACHT en HEERSCHPAPPIJ en alle naam, die genoemd wordt niet alleen in deze, maar ook in de toekomende eeuw. En Hij heeft ALLES ONDER ZIJN VOETEN GESTELD en Hem als hoofd boven al wat is, gegeven aan de ekklesia, die zijn lichaam is…Efeze 1: 20-23

Als de ekklesia Christus’ lichaam is, en alles is onder Zijn voeten gesteld, dan betekent dit dat alles ook onder ons is gesteld! Dat betekent dat we zullen HEERSEN…

Gij doet Hem (= de Ben Adam; vers 4) HEERSEN over de werken uwer handen, alles hebt Gij onder zijn voeten gelegd.Psalm 8:6

rivalen…Tesamen met Christus is de ekklesia bestemd voor de Troon op de allerhoogste plaats. Geroepen tot heerschappij! De overheden en machten in de hemelse gewesten die daar nu nog de dienst uitmaken (Efeze 6:12), zullen plaats moeten maken voor ons. Vandaar ook dat deze machten het op ons gemunt hebben en tegen ons strijden.

onvoorstelbaar!Voor sommigen misschien een teleurstellend idee, maar de komende aionen wordt het voor ons dus beslist niet louter vakantie vieren… Integendeel, ons wacht een SUPERTAAK: de heerschappij over de ganse schepping! Als kleine mensjes op aarde hebben we er geen idee van wat het betekent om met een hemels lichaam (gelijkvormig aan dat van Christus) in hemelse regionen de scepter te gaan zwaaien over al wat is. Het mag ons voorstellingsvermogen tarten, maar Gods Woord zegt het!

Of weet gij niet, dat de heiligen de wereld zullen oordelen? (…) Weet gij niet, dat wij over engelen oordelen zullen?1Korinthe 6:2,3

Het woord is betrouwbaar: immers, indien wij met Hem gestorven zijn, zullen wij ook met Hem leven; indien wij volharden, zullen wij ook met Hem als koningen heersen…2Timotheüs 2:11,12

Waarheid vanuit de ooghoeken

"Ook minder heldere sterren kunnen we zien. Dan moet je net naast de betreffende ster kijken. Vanuit de ooghoeken. Omdat daar de meeste zenuwen zitten. Misschien kunnen de we waarheid ook alleen zien vanuit de ooghoeken!" - Janna Levin

Anais Nin, March 23, 1923 – october 14, 1923

Richmond Hill. In the same room which held my youth's virgin dreams, bathed in the same soft light which threw a rosy radiance about my fancies, reflected in the same mirror into which I gazed in girlish expectation, questioning and wondering, now sits Hugo, my husband. A little more than a month ago I was in Havana, still taking part in social life, still the butterfly with gorgeous colors on her fluttering wings inwardly beginning to tremble at the approach of half-veiled changes.

Somehow out of a confusion of practical reasoning, romantic impulses, decisions forced by circumstances, Hugo and I emerged one morning, married. Social pleasures, adulation, luxury and idleness, the least fragments of a brilliant and short season of girlhood, all seemed to melt away as our ship sailed out into the open sea. Days of traveling, our arrival in New York, were all steeped in unreality, which nothing could dispel. Now we live under the shadow of Mother's sorrowing spirit and our life is difficult but we are strong together.

March 26, 1923

In one room I may spend the most honeyed hours with my love. Youth vibrates in both of us; our confidences, our growing knowledge of each other, steeped in glowing tenderness, are infinitely sweet and wondrous. Regretfully I close the door upon my heaven and I steal softly into another room. Mother lies there, weeping. I fall upon my knees - with a sorrow so piercing that it effaces all other feelings. Mother clings to me. She murmurs vaguely that she has lost her little girl.

Of life, which has been all hardness and pain for her, she expected a sole compensation and she does not have even that. She tells me through her tears that her life is useless, that she has lost her desire to live. Her faith is broken, her courage, her health, her very heart. The unspeakable cruelty of it overwhelms me. There are times when, in horror of the grief I am causing the mother I love beyond words, I think myself mad. My love opens his arms; his eyes shine with love of me and the need of me. Behind him mother's sorrow looms, immense and terrifying. I see her tear-stained face, her weak, worn figure.

I am torn by the choice torn by conflicting reasoning, by irrepressible sentiments, by pity, by rebellion, by bitterness and self-reproach. I am impotent to preserve those I love from sorrow. Shall I be permitted to alleviate it? Why has God allowed me to be the instrument of mother's unhappiness when I prayed night after night to be allowed to suffer for her? Evening. The Hugo I have decribed in the past is not the one whose wife I am now. In the first place I described him as I saw him with my girl's eyes and misplaced idealism. I did not know him then. Now he has truly changed. Whatever I write now alone counts and is alone true.

I need to say this because I love to muse on his character and disentangle the diverse discoveries I make day by day. And Hugo has above all else the quality of constant variety. He evolves continually so that I can understand him without knowing all of him. I forsee the exclusion of one generally accepted misfortune befalling the married ones - we shall escape monotony.

March 27, 1923

Clinging to Carlyle's teaching and seeking to do the work before me well without tinking or questioning. But I must write because I suffer. My work is done; and just as I so often sat to rest and dream, writing to fill my aching emptiness and vain expectation, I now sit listening for the sound of Hugo's footsteps upon the gravel path. How sweet it is to meet after a day of separation. I long for evening, when I can hear his voice again and be folded in his arms. It is only when he is with me that I am contented. As I sit here watching the twilight and waiting for him, I can now say I want nothing else, my life is complete, I know its purpose now.

Evening. Too often now I hesitate before my opened book, tempted to retrace the broken web of my most wondrous past. There is not a day, however bright, which does not suffer from the fading touch of time. This makes me regretful. I am one who respects the past, who revers it.

A thousand pictures return to me. I see Havana once more; I see society and luxury and beauty of environment; I pass again by the seaside in our soft rolling car; I move again in that ease and idelness in the brilliant sunshine; I gallop again along the white road at dusk, seeing the palm trees outlined against a fire-colored sky; I meet the peasants and answer their humble greetings; I visit their little huts and witness their abject poverty; and then again I dress in fine delicate, colorful things and set outto a tea in some luxurious place, deeply struck by the contrast - outwardly the fluttering butterfly, inwardly passing from one deep thought to another.

Through the mist of recollections Hugo's voice reaches me, and as I look into his face I hear something calling to me: live in the present, live in the present.

March 28, 1923

I used to lay great stress upon Hugo's quality of decision of character. In my hours of profound discouragement I looked up to his strength and self-confidence. It is a curious example of the irony of fate to find that he does not possess these things. I, in my weakness and the stronger of the two. He gives me happiness, understanding, devotion, the truest companionship, all that I have ever wished for and dreamed of, all but support.

I had hoped for that support and leadership; when it failed, like some frail plant I swayed and trembled then suddenly I held my head high and held myself straight and firm and in one moment realized that I had learned to stand alone and struggle alone. Where shall this lead us? I, who believed myself made to cling, thrown upon my own strength.

March 29, 1923

I am struck by the manner in which love transforms the most humble work. What once revolted my far too sensitive artistic sense has now become invested with sacredness, not for what it is, or means in itself but for its ultimate end. Whatever I do is done for Hugo. And I love him, so that the ugly becomes beautiful and the coarse fine, only because it is for him. What joy for me to prove that a mind inclined to occupy itself with elevated, creative thought, to dreaming and solving, to philosophizing, can yet hold sway over the necessary machinery of life and equally apply itself to the humbler labor.

This is a new language you are listening to. You have listened to my ravings and my raptures. So shall you listen now to my wise and sober discourses upon my preoccupations and interests as woman (still a prosateur and still enamored of her books and her pen.) Hugo often talked of these things which he does not possess, and I now understand it is because he thought of them so continuously and strongly. And I used to feel intimidated by his emphasis on them because I looked into my own heart, I found them lacking.

It is not perhaps after all a blessing that it shoud be thus? What he might have had in his nature he might have expected of me, exacted. Now he admires what is in me, and perhaps I love him more when he confides and clings to me than when he seemed apparently so self-sufficient and self-assertive. How strange the contrast between what I believed of him and what truly is. How strange our marriage, where union is based on likeness and accord. We begin with similar roots; we both feel deeply, think continuously; we have moods and dreams and visions - and there the similarity ceases, for the results of these, the effects outwardly, the actions and manner of living, are strikingly different.

Thus we begin by understanding each other. We meet in a feeling or thought. In acting, we branche out, each in his own way, but we do not lose each other. We criticize and explain each other, we reason, we seek influence each other - we understand even when we do not approve.

April 3, 1923

Now after days of unspeakable torment, I watch on mother's ravaged face the first signs of fleeting happiness. Her expression too often clouds at mention of the future, but at least the excruciating pain of the first days is softened into the first awakenings of resignation. Evening. Hugo teased me the night I wrote of Havana, for he said I did it because I loved to dwell on the warmth, it being so cold here. So without knowing it, on a cold, crisp march night I wrote about Havana to keep myself warm! If I could be happy by writing about happiness.

But for some reason or other, I always come to your pages cold, and I write of warmth to forget... Oh, it is sweet to be contented, but it is far more thrilling to be ever dissatisfied and reaching out, for who knows how far and where a great thirst may lead you. I look up to see Hugo smiling reproachfully at me. He is a little jealous of you, little journal. It is true I should tell all things to him, and I am willing, but how can I when we are together so few hours and when I have so much to tell that even you are not enough, and most of it is turned into soliloquies?

April 7, 1923

Hugo was teasing me and among other things said that one could not spend all one's time writing in a diary. He little knows how near that phrase lies to the truth, which torments me. Why can I not do anything else? Why can I not find the class of writing that I am suited for? Am I like Amiel, only capable of this? Our life is slowly being molded into a close resemblance to our dreams. We have spent 2 evenings listening to entrancingly fine music. We have renewed our literary talks with Eugene and John. We have taken walks in the woods.

Our evenings are restful. The thought of Mother alone enshadows me, and I can have no taste of happiness without intolerable pangs of regret and self-reproach. I should have sacrificed love for her sake.

April 13, 1923

Above all else I have desired death these past days. Not even my love of Hugo could alter my despair; it even deepened it, because I could not surrender to the charm of it wholly - always the thought of mother, mother holding sway over my feelings. Hugo begs me to control these feelings, and I could if it were one feeling, but mother's despair calls out all of them, the deepest, the most enduring and the most heartrending.

There is my love for her; there is the pity I always feel strongly even towards strangers and more so when it is my mother who suffers; there is the helplessness to sustain and live for one who needs me, as mother does; there is the intolerable pain of causing suffering.

And mother sees in our separation only the ruin of all her dreams, her hopes, her needs, her very life. Sometimes I find strength to communicate my faith to her; at others I am carried away, and together we follow the road of our cavalry. And to think that I wrote, some time ago, in the ignorance of my idealism, in the blindness of my dreams: "I see the way to a truer happiness for mother." I did not know she wanted only me, free of obligations, free to devote myself to her completely.

April 14, 1923

Among a thousand other things, I ask myself if it is possible to find completeness in human companionship. In contemplating love, I foresaw the abandonment of my diary. In fulfilling love, I still cling tenaciously to these pages. The reason I need you is to receive the emotions and ideas which overflow from my being. With mind ravaged by the devouring monsters of revolt, I attended Mass - an offering on the altar of my mother-worship - and was struck into awed and humble silence by a simple sermon on simple faith. With eloquent, contagious trust, the priest laid healing fingers on the burning pulse of my doubts. He made faith beautiful, and he made peace holy and precious.

I did not question my attitude. I knew that at the moment I was good. "It was not a question of being good or wicked," said hugo, analyzing this. "It is a question of being right or wrong." I reflected for a moment. The hesitation was provocative. "I was wicked before, but I was right. And now I am good but I am wrong." He took it humorously. But this is a case of the grain of truth in humor.

April 18, 1923

Eugene, Johnnie, Hugo and I the other night discussed religion, superstition, faith and mysticism, and weighed the distinction between thought and feeling. We agreed there was no distinction, but I well know that the balm on my agonized emotions (I experienced at Mass) was of a different nature and superior sphere. Detachedly I watched and marveled. Eugene, Johnnie and Hugo were gently puffing their pipes, and through the mist of smoke I could see all our books and, as if arising from them, our discussions and the weighing of one another's ideas.

The little room was warm with animation and earnestness. In the intellect alone there is a strength, balance, happiness... but there is no peace. Does peace only come with th death of the flesh? Why can we not have it when the intellect is all-powerful and it is allowed full freedom and sway?

April 20, 1923

Eduardo arrived from college. He invited Hugo and me to the performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and before that, we renewed our former talks, marveled at the chance in each, aired our new ideas, exchanged unexpected impressions. Eduardo is still essentially charming and even his dealing with a more palpable existence is clear, fresh and pure. Jesting, I begged Hugo to break me of the vice of diary writing. He objected. It was rather a privilege to be endowed with the habit of writing. Besides, he added, it was exercise and preparatory practice. No. I am caught in a circle. At first I wished only to exercise, to develop, to attain ease and fluency, but now I cannot cease. I cannot fit myself to any kind of writing after so much arduous and sincere preparation.

And then I long to give myself wholly to my writing, if at all. A Diary is a polite work and easily adaptable to the fragmentary quality of time I have for it. To willfully ignore sorrow, to guide the thoughts into detached channels - that is the acme of mental weakness, and yet sometimes the result of unbearable pressure. To steady myself, to retain to my evenness, I sometimes avoid the subjects closest to me. But now I may again approach them. It appears the solution of our numberless troubles is to be found in a total change, and realizing the state of Mother's mind as I do, I hail as our salvation a change of country and environment such as we are threatened by. Hugo's affairs may take him to Paris, the city of my most secret and cherished dreams, long thought lost.

And as the feelings surge within me, I come to you to unburden myself of them. Dearest diary, you are the living symbol of my failure, as the world sees failure, but you are the representative of all I hold most sacred, which is the subtle transition of thoughts and emotions into words, which are to me invested with the holiest of joys. Oh, the joy, the joy of writing, a joy so intense, so pure, so all-absorbing and free and all-encompassing, flooding the soul in mystical ecstacy, elevating and sanctifying, infusing beauty in the humblest subjects and a purpose in the most wayward life.

April 23, 1923

Eduardo has gone, and again the loss of his enchanting presence creates a void. I had the joy of feeling harmony between Hugo and Eduardo - a joy mingled with gratitude, for Hugo not only sanctions my devotions but participates in them. Eduardo's personal merit perhaps largely influenced the continuity of this response, but not the first expression of it, which is what touched me. Accepting the theory that I am composed of many selves, of many opposing forces, moods, even reasonings, I shall proceed to classify them as high and low, for this in itself is suggestive of the feelings which accompany the passing of one state into another.

Thus in my highest moments, which I believe to be inspired by a sudden and mysterious kindling of the divine influence, I make statements and laws and utter righteous truths. And in my lower moments, I do not abide by them. I forget. I become an empty skeleton into which, so to speak, no ideas breathe. These days I have blindly struggled with myself and hungered for purer thoughts and nobler sentiments, for that state I remembered vaguely having visited, in the past, which was beautiful compared with the present one.

Today I remembered my own words, which I wrote with a quivering, triumphant pen: "Happiness is a small consideration and seems of little value. I feel a joy beyond joy in the midst of my sorrow, and what I feel while suffering is far beyond contentment - beyond peace - it is something nameless which approaches the divine... In agony, in torment, in despair, through burning tears, I thank heaven that I am suffering, because through the purifying fire of sorrow I shall see the ideal, and I see God. I repudiate ordinary happiness I want martyrdom an sacrifice, I want something greater than human happiness."

April 25, 1923

I cannot write of my love. Each time I approach it, I seem to melt in pity and reverence. But it is joy to be consumed by flaming adoration. Hugo and I have long and heated discussions on all topics. Last night he said half in jest that I was too materialistic for him. Fatalism an materialism, these are what I have swung towards, pendulumlike, and it will be curious to observe whether I shall swing once more away from them or remain enmeshed till the end of time. It cannot be; I shall pass through materialism as I have before passed through all unworthy states.

But I fear that fatalism is more deeply rooted, for it is not a mere conclusion reache by reasoning; it is beyond that - it is a feeling, as clear and as strong as any faith, that scorns and evades all proofs and weighing. I read somewhere an enlightening definition: "Mal de siècle, dégoûté de la vie, cette maladie nait, comme on le voit, de la préponderànce dangereuse que prend l'imagination dans une vie desoeuvrée!" It took me so much paper, pen and pains to reach the same conclusion! It is at once inspiring and discouraging to discover that "Michelangelo aimait s'entourer de gens differents à tous."

The human being is pleased to find support The creator is distressed to find himself preceded. Perhaps that is why I can never be wholly satisfied with anything. There is no unity in me, I am not whole. It is amusing to be composed of fragments; there is always the hope that some of them may be lost. But would I like to be purely woman or purely writer, purely mind? I might become bored. At least I now may experience the enchantment of eternal variety - not forgetting the agony of perpetual conflicts - which, as some say, also exist for the purpose of saving us from boring perfection.

The writer feels perhaps more grateful than others for that mercy which provides for a new life with the beginning of each day. I say the writer because his faults are doubled in comparison with those of ordinary mortals, and they are more difficult to efface. He sins in act, and sins in the writing of his sins, which magnifies and fixes them. I often think of the man who was thought great by his fellows, deeply reverenced and intensely praised, and all because he did not talk. His silence permitted others to interpret him.

Often when silent, I have won the deepest appreciation, have heard many interpret my ignorance as wisdom, my indolence or indifference as a wondrous calm or depth of thought. Were I to remain silent, I might retain these opinions. Instead I thoughtlessly write my own condemnation and reveal my faults to those who love me. Is this not the first step in the renunciation of self and vanity, and do I not owe this tribute to Truth, which I profess to worship?It is a pleasant feeling to reach a limit in a talk when the intelligence can travel no further. It gives one the sense of having traveled some distance and reached something - even if it be a limit.

May 1, 1923

This day marks the beginning of a new development in my writing. I have earnestly begun a play and completed the first scene. To Eduardo:For a moment, as a keen contrast to your kind of life, mine seems to be evolving outside the bounds of literature. Yet no, it seems rather to remain permeated with the intense coloring of literature, but to have ceased breathing within it. By that I mean that we are so absorbed in the living of our dreams, thoughts, emotions, that we cannot read. Think of it we are making a home. We are creating our own story henceforward. We are creating the setting and the background. From now the time has come for us to be and have a life to lead such as those in the books we love.

 The moment for which our studies, readings, imaginings, were but a preparation has come, and we realize the importance of it and strive to succeed...Weekends we spend far away from here, in some woods we find peace and can worship nature. We take books along but never read. We either sit silent, drinking in the tender sunlight filtering through the leaves, or talk quietly of deep, absorbing things...

June 30, 1923

A dream fulfilled. We have at dusk sat with hands clasped, Hugo's head upon my breast - he listening and I reading from my old journals. We have once more lived through the entire past. From the moment of our first meeting and our discoveries, difficulties, joys and disappointments, fears and doubts, until the present moment, still unwritten...

July 4, 1923

My aunt has come. She brings many stories of those people I once was so deeply interested in, and a flood of memories. With her coming, the ever increasing tension and agony of my contact with Mother, is brought to a climax. Last night the pain became overwhelming; I felt a chasm opening between us such as no material separation can equal. I slept with my head on Hugo's breast, and only the realization that it was as much my obligation to live for him as it was before to live for mother, prevented a mortal despair from crushing me. Mother no longer grieves over my loss. She grieves over the will and dominance I do not submit to.

I made her happy before by living a subdued, submissive life, and now, although I give her more materially and spiritually (for I am able to help her and be with her more) she is not satisfied. I write bluntly out of the bitterness of my soul, for I am crushed by the cruelty of her unreasoning. I have spared no effort; I have been thoughtful of her every need. She has, if she truly loved me, the assurance that Hugo is as good to me as she could dream. Her will alone, her unbending will, towers above her truest feelings and blinds her to the crime. For she breaks my health and poisons my joys, and Hugo suffers with me.

July 6, 1923

My aunt's good sense and masterful, convincing expressions of it are working upon mother's mind. I owe her more than all those visible gifts the world can see... so much that I will wait for a peaceful day when I may tell you about it with a clearer mind.

July 7, 1923

My thoughts do not linger now on lofty subjects or universal problems. They do not concern themselves with all-embracing principles and laws or truths. It is a curious phase, to study this transition between the high-pitched voice of earlier years, criticizing, philosophizing, concluding, dealing with things large, wide, abstractedly; and then, after much converse, much disquietude and loud expressions of intentions, opinions and decisions, to be placed in the heart of true life itself and set to act.

July 9, 1923

Musing on a book review from which I gathered a curious definition of genius: "excess of vitality or of emotion or of imagination..."This suits as well the one who writes without talent - who writes urged by a nameless pressure - a creature such as I myself might be. With this difference: that I know what urges me - the excess of feeling and imagination, the overflowing, at which I wondered when I believed it unnatural, nay, condemnable.Today I was gripped by the sharp, stunning sense of unreality and paused in the midst of my life and work, suspended as it were. Looking upwards, I was flooded in my old dreams, my halfspoken dreams of love and home and life.

Looking down, I was dazzled by the realized picture. I saw Hugo dreaming from the pillowed depths of his armchair, watching the smoke curling from his pipe. A jet-blacked kitten with glossy fur, a yellow bow around his neck and yellow eyes lay on a black-and-yellow pillow at his feet. A soft breeze quivered through the soft-greem curtains. Sunshine lay in patches over the Persian rug and the dark furniture, and its light was reflected in a large mirror over a bureau, and with it the books within the bookcase and the books on the table. In the mirror too, I saw the reflection of a vase of yellow flowers, the yellow and black lampshades.

Not far off is our bedroom - warm, rose-walled, gray-curtained, soft as a nest of softest feathers. We sleep in the very heart of a velvet-petaled rose, whose stem and leaves we live in when awake and wish to read or write. Extending from midway up the stem are the little kitcheb and bathroom. The first, white and dazzling, has a window with red curtains, framing boxes of red geraniums and trailing ivy. We eat there mornings, and the sun pours into it, cheerfully.

July 13, 1923

I read of women who give as a reason for their continued interest in work after their marriage the fact that they become restless and bored and lonesome in their houses. I could scarcely believe my eyes. I find an ever deepening joy in solitude and have too much time on their hands. Enric played for us at Mother's house and played to perfection. He shall some day receive the tributes due him; some he has already, in Spain and Havana. I marvel too at his mental growth. He has gained remarkable understanding and breath of vision, and also a firmer hold on solid things and facts.

The vague dreams in which he continually indulged when I knew him have dispersed like mists. This was no surprise to me. I have seen the same change, in principle, take place in Eduardo's character. Enric is also more interesting and even more charming. His eyes, gestures and voice are expressive of the multitude of emotions which move his bow. His temperamental irregularities are no longer perplexing and mysterious, but they deepen the color of his individual character and strongly influence those around him, attracting and holding interest.

He is no longer a talented boy whose place in life and whose fate are subject to vague suppositions - he is a genius who, whether recognized or ignored, will place an ineffaceable stamp of his passage in the world. I bow before his achievement. He has done more than I. He has already given to the world a glimpse of the inspirations and visions that visit him, and he has the power to enrich others' lives with hours of beauty. His music roused my longings to pur out in writing all that comes to me in such overwhelming fullness; this grows day by day until it will become stronger than I, and I shall be swept away, joyfully. What retains me now are such wordly and human considerations as should dissolve in the white heat of so divine a calling.

August 31, 1923

I come to you, dear journal, with an apology. I have mangled and cut into your mercilessly, have left you deprived of half your belongings. I have no longer added pages to your book; rather, I have torn them from you. And even in your poverty you have still that elusive and inexplicable way of retaining your power and your character. You are still alone and unsurpassed in that you are the most intimate, if not the most complete, of the reflections of my changing self. All because I have written a book, which on the 24th of this month, having been begun on the first, reached its 184th page.

During those long days of unbroken and copious overflowings, had no time to turn to any other writing. Mind and soul, like a sunflower, pointed only one way, which I followed so intensely that I reached the climax and may therefore rest.

September 1, 1923

I will some day write a story of how a woman can love two men; how she can receive one kiss while dreaming of the other's lips; how she can gaze into one face with love while remembering another face; how she can fall asleep in the arms of one and dream of the other. How one letter may evoke the most exalted devotion, and she may a moment later open the door to the other and receive him with tenderness. Such a thing is possible.

September 7, 1923

I have moments of doubt and discouragement. At such times Hugo has faith and strength for me and he supports me. He listens to me when I read him what I have written at night, and sometimes I am thrilled to find that I can lift the weight of weariness from his shoulders, that I can excite his imagination and touch his soul. So has love risen above my devotion to writing, for I find that the latter depends upon the first and draws its élan and inspiration from it alone.

Eugene approves of my work. Eduardo is breathless with surprise and expectation. While I work I think only of those who have faith in me, although ultimately my writing is directed at those who have no faith in what I uphold. I would like my book better if someone else had written it.

September 17, 1923

West Shokan, Ulster C. N.Y. Once more among the mountains and not far from Woodstock. My love and I are going to visit the place where I was at once so happy and so sorrowful, but we are now interested because I have written of it in my book. Its nearness keeps me in constant remembrance of my writing, which is a cause of pain, for often I do not have the heart for it, and yet it seems criminal to waste one day, nay, one hour, through sheer laziness.

September 25, 1923

The desire returns; the book progresses now, and it is in its last phase of retouching and perfecting. I have crowded into it a young woman's whole life and many ideas, many moods and numberless emotions - also characters that have fitted about me. If I were asked to name my greatest difficulty, I should unhesitatingly say: omission. To omit was my problem, for I had too much of everything, including adjectives and split infinitives!The labor of it was tedious enough - that I cannot deny - but I cannot describe, on the other hand, the joys I derived from my onw book's favorite passages. I have privileged chapters which thrill me, even though I have written them myself.

Somehow now my entire literary life hangs on the fate of this book. Its failure would destroy it; its triumph would mark the beginning of endless production, for I feel it in me to produce generously, at least, if not wisely. Oh, that someone might pick it like a wild flower and see in it not the perfection of the hotbed rose but the vivid color of spontaneous growth. For this I pray, and also that the world and the critics and the editors might not detect my twenty youthful years - as I detect them and self-consciously turn up my nose at the sight of them.

Why I am ambitious? Why I am no longer content to write in my journal and for my ow ears? Why has my voice swelled and increased in volume, as have my once timid desires and purposes? First, because the time is ripe to fulfill my mission. Second, because I want to bring happiness to Mother.

October 14, 1923

Eduardo came from Harvard to read my book, and again his charm delighted me, and I find the hours short. Eugene, the other night, read us a written criticism of the book, and the criticism was a far better piece of writing than you could find in any of my chapters. Alas, I am turning again to my old ways. For a long time I was sustained by my Love's praise and reflected the faithfully burning flame of hope my writing has aroused in him, but now I am descending gradually and sadly, and I nog longer believe in my book.

Kingdom of Christ at hand

Christ Jesus was most likely born on 10 Nisan, 3 BC. (Luke 2:42) and ressurrected on 17 Nisan. John the Baptist was probably born on 10 Tisjri, 4 BC. (Luke 1:36).

Not the Son or Christ, but the word that became flesh, is pre-existent. Rev. 19:13 

De tijd is nabij!

Olijfberg - Jeruzalem, een sabbatsreis

Het was de veertigste dag na zijn opstanding dat Jezus vanaf de Olijfberg ten hemel voer en onttrokken werd aan de ogen van zijn dicipelen. Juist op die dag hadden zij Hem nog de vraag gesteld: "Here, hersteld U IN DEZE TIJD het Koninkrijk voor Israël?" (Handelingen 1:6). De vraag was niet OF het Koninkrijk voor Israël hersteld zou worden - dat stond vast. De vraag was, of de dicipelen dat nog in hun dagen zouden beleven. Het antwoord van Jezus was, dat het hun niet toekwam dit te weten.

Of de terugkeer van Jezus Christus in de dagen van de dicipelen zou plaatsvinden, wordt in Handelingen 1 dus open gelaten. Inmiddels weten wij wél allang het antwoord op de vraag van de dicipelen: het Koninkrijk werd door Israëls ongeloof niet in die tijd hersteld. Dat lezen we ook expliciet aan het einde van het boek Handelingen. "Ga heen tot dit volk en zeg... het hart van dit volk is vet geworden en hun oren zijn hardhorend en hun ogen hebben zij toegesloten, opdat zij niet... zich bekeren en Ik hen zou genezen" (Handelingen 28:26,27).

I.v.m. "de belofte van zijn komst" schrijft Petrus aan het einde van zijn leven: "doch dit ene mag u niet ontgaan, geliefden, dat één dag bij de Here is als duizend jaar en duizend jaar als één dag" (2Petrus 3:8). Uit wat hij in dit hoofdstuk schrijft blijkt dat het hem inmiddels wél toekwam om antwoord te weten op de vraag van Handelingen 1. Petrus refereert onmiskenbaar aan de cryptische woorden in Hosea 6:1-3, waar staat dat de HERE "na twee dagen" tot Israël zal komen. Hoezo "twee dagen"? Wat is voor de Heer een dag? Wel, dát mag ons niet ontgaan, schrijft Petrus. Het doelt op twee dagen van elk duizend jaar.

Terug naar Handelingen 1. Hoewel niets bekendgemaakt wordt over het tijdstip van Christus' terugkeer, vinden we niettemin achteraf, een verborgen aanwijzing. Wanneer de dicipelen ná Jezus' hemelvaart vanaf de Olijfberg weer terugkeren naar de stad, dan lezen we:

Toen keerden zij terug naar Jeruzalem van de berg, genaamd de Olijfberg, die dicht bij Jeruzalem is, een sabbatsreis daarvandaan.Handelingen 1:12

Een sabbatsreis is de afstand die een Jood mag afleggen op de sabbat: 2000 el. Het is dezelfde afstand waarvan we ook lezen i.v.m. de doortocht door de Jordaan (Jozua 3:4). Toen ging eerst de ark door de Jordaan waarna het volk Israël de ark moest navolgen... op een afstand van ongeveer 2000 el. In type zien we hier Christus (> de ark) die als eerste door de doods-Jordaan trekt (> dood en opstanding), waarna Israël weliswaar volgt, maar op aanzienlijke afstand. Een afstand van ongeveer (!) 2000 jaar.

In Handelingen 1 staat de Olijfberg voor de hemelvaart. Daar werd Hij door een wolk aan de ogen van zijn leerlingen onttrokken. De stad Jeruzalem staat daarentegen voor de vervulling van de belofte. Het is de stad van de grote Koning, de stad waar Hij straks zichtbaar zal regeren. De afstand tussen de Olijfberg en Jeruzalem staat (typologisch) daarmee dus voor de tijdspanne tussen Christus' hemelvaart en zijn wederkomst. 2000 el = 2000 jaar. Het hoeft ons dan ook niet te verbazen dat het profetisch decor in onze dagen volop in aanbouw is. Want de tijd is nabij!!

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wij geloven...

AANGAANDE GOD

• God is GOD, d.w.z. Degene die alles een plaats geeft. Nooit gaat er iets bij Hem mis. Ook het kwaad in de wereld (zonde en lijden) vervult een noodzakelijke rol in Zijn plan der aionen. meer..
• Er is één God, de Vader, de Onzienlijke, UIT Wie alles is. Jezus Christus, Gods Zoon, is het Beeld en de Gestalte van God, de Eerstgeborene van elk schepsel, DOOR Wie alles is. meer...

HET EVANGELIE

• Het Evangelie zoals Paulus dit predikte, is de boodschap dat Christus Jezus, de beloofde Messias, door zijn dood en opstanding Heer en Redder van allen is. meer...
• God is de Redder van alle mensen. Zoals alle mensen zondaren en stervelingen zijn, zo zullen ook alle mensen gerechtvaardigd en levendgemaakt worden. meer...
• Het kruis van Golgotha bewijst: geen vijandschap zo groot of Gods liefde overtreft altijd. God zal door het kruis elk schepsel met Zich verzoenen. meer...

DE SCHRIFT

• Al de Schrift is van God geïnspireerd. Paulus is degene die het Woord van God gecompleteerd heeft, d.w.z. de 70 boeken van de Bijbel voltooide. meer...
• Het is onnodig de Bijbel te verdedigen daar zij zichzelf bewijst en uitlegt.

DE TEGENWOORDIGE TIJD

• Paulus is de apostel en leermeester der natiën, gedurende de tegenwoordige (tussen-)tijd van Israëls ongeloof. Het "Evangelie van de voorhuid" dat aan Paulus was toevertrouwd, is nadrukkelijk onderscheiden van "het Evangelie van de besnijdenis" dat "de twaalf" predikten. meer...
• God is in de tegenwoordige tijd niet uit op de openbaring van het Koninkrijk. Integendeel: Hij roept in het verborgene, door de prediking van het Evangelie een ekklesia uit, het lichaam van Christus.
• De ekklesia is een gemeenschap van gelovigen die samenkomt in vrijheid, buiten de dwang van menselijke systemen. Zij wordt middels het Woord van God, gevoed en geleid door Christus haar Hoofd.
• Rituelen (b.v. de waterdoop) en speciale dagen (b.v. de sabbat) die voor Israël een belangrijke rol spelen, zijn voor de ekklesia volstrekt onbelangrijk. .

GELOOF

• God rekent geloof tot gerechtigheid. Geloof betekent: vertrouwen op Gods belofte. Geloof staat tegenover ieder eigen pogen van de mens (werken). Leven uit geloof betekent: God danken voor wat HIJ geeft en bij machte is in en door ons te doen. meer...

DE DOOD

• Dood is geen andere vorm van leven maar het tegenovergestelde van leven. De Bijbelse verwachting is gericht op levendmaking en opstanding van doden. meer...

DE TOEKOMST

• De ekklesia, het lichaam van Christus zal haar Heer in de lucht ontmoeten, wanneer ze zal worden geëvacuëerd (weggerukt) voor de toekomende toorn. Die dag zal haar niet overvallen als een dief in de nacht omdat ze op de hoogte is van de tijden en gelegenheden. meer...
• Als de ekklesia haar hemelse bestemming zal hebben bereikt, zal God weer de draad oppakken met het volk Israël. De Messias zal terugkeren op de Olijfberg en het volk Israël herstellen en alle profetieën aan dit volk vervullen en haar tot een zegenkanaal maken voor de gehele volkenwereld.
• De Bijbel spreekt over Gods oordelen en gerichten. Deze kunnen heftig zijn maar nimmer eindeloos. God heeft het heil van al zijn schepselen op het oog. meer...  
• Bij de komst van Christus vangt niet een eindeloze eeuwigheid aan, maar beginnen "de toekomende aionen" waarin Christus zal heersen. Wanneer Christus uiteindelijk ook de dood als laatste vijand zal hebben teniet gedaan, zal Christus het Koninkrijk overgeven aan God de Vader en God zal worden, alles in allen 

Gedeelte uit de geloofsbelijdenis Van Nicea:

"Ik geloof in één God, den almachtigen Vader, Schepper des hemels en der aarde, aller zienlijke en onzienlijke dingen. En in één Heere Jezus Christus, den eniggeboren Zoon van God, geboren uit den Vader vóór alle eeuwen; God uit God, Licht uit Licht, waarachtig God uit waarachtig God, geboren, niet gemaakt, van hetzelfde wezen met den Vader, door Welken alle dingen gemaakt zijn (...) En in den Heiligen Geest, Die Heere is en levend maakt, Die van den Vader en den Zoon uitgaat, Die te zamen met en Vader en den Zoon aangebeden en verheerlijkt wordt..."

De allerbelangrijkste waarheid van de Schrift is dat er één God is. Dat is maar niet een kwestie van kwantiteit maar van kwaliteit. Een Godheid die z'n plaats moet delen met een andere Godheid ís niet eens een Godheid! God is GOD omdat er maar één van is. Uit, door en tot Hem is alles. Betwijfel het woord 'alles' en je komt in de nevelen van het meergodendom. Marcus 12:30; Romeinen 11:36 

De Schrift leert expliciet op meerdere plaatsen dat er maar één God is, de Vader. Deze statement is wel de meest dodelijke van alle voor de leer van de Drieëenheid. 1Korinthe 8:6; Efeze 4:6; Johannes 17:3; 1Timotheus 2:5        

Wanneer we onze gedachten over God en Zijn Christus willen verwoorden, dan bestaat daarvoor maar één veilige methode: woorden en frasen gebruiken die de Schrift zélf aanreikt. Woorden van menselijke wijsheid zijn erger dan waardeloos. 1Korinthe 2:4,5; 3:20           

Het is ontstellend dat de belangrijkste doctrine waaraan iemands orthodoxie wordt afgemeten niet uitdrukkelijk (of beter: uitdrukkelijk niet) wordt onderwezen in de Schriften. Sterker: het duurde enkele eeuwen om via redeneringen het er uit af te leiden!           

Het Griekse woord voor 'belijden' is 'omo logeo', hetgeen 'hetzelfde zeggen' betekent. Een accuraat belijdenisgeschrift dat de Schriftuurlijke waarheid omtrent iets wil verwoorden is dus per definitie aangewezen op de woordenschat van de Schrift.           

Nergens leert de Bijbel dat de schepping tot stand is gekomen door de Vader, zoals 'Nicea' beweert. Zoals we ook nergens lezen dat de schepping uit de Zoon voortkomt. Alles is uit God de Vader en alles is door de Heer Jezus Christus. 1Korinthe 8:6; Johannes 1:3; Kolosse 1:16           

Negentien keer spreekt de Schrift over 'God de Vader'. Een kleine vijftig keer is er sprake van 'de Zoon van God'. Niet één keer vinden we de uitdrukking 'God de Zoon'. Veelzeggend.          

God de Onzichtbare, en toch...

De Zoon van Gods liefde is het Beeld van God, de Onzichtbare. Dat de Zoon zo dikwijls in de Schrift als God Zelf wordt gepresenteerd is met recht Beeld-spraak. Kolosse 1:15      

Zogenoemde 'Jehovah's Getuigen' ontkennen dat de Jehovah die in het OT verschijnt de Zoon is. Daarmee ontgaat ook hen dat de Zoon het Beeld van de onzichtbare God is.           

De Zoon is Gods LOGOS (NBG: Woord). Vergelijk dit met ons woord 'logo'. Een logo is een beeldmerk dat een onzichtbare grootheid vertegenwoordigt. Johannes 1:1

Christus is de IKOON  (NBG: Beeld) van God, de Onzichtbare. Het wordt de mens uitdrukkelijk verboden om ikonen te maken en zich daarvoor neer te buigen. Waarom? Omdat deze eer slechts weggelegd is voor het enige volmaakte IKOON! Kolosse 1:16; 2Korinthe 4:4

Dat de Zoon van eeuwigheid af zou zijn is weer een typisch voorbeeld van het afwijken van de Schriftuurlijke termen. De Schrift kent geen 'eeuwigheid' maar aionen (=wereldtijdperken). En God heeft de aionen gemaakt door de Zoon. Zodat de Zoon er dus was vóór de aionen. Hebreeën 1:3; 2Timotheüs 1:9

De Schrift zegt dat de Zoon "de Eerstgeborene van ieder schepsel" is. Arius werd als ketter veroordeeld omdat Hij beweerde dat de Zoon nummer één van elk schepsel is, en toch sprak hij daarin slechts Kolosse 1:16 daarin na. Christus is het eerst voortgebracht, als het Origineel (begin) van Gods schepping. Kolosse 1:16; Openbaring 3:14; Spreuken 8:24           

Athanasius belijdt weliswaar dat de Zoon gegenereerd (geboren of voortgebracht) is maar ontkent het tegelijkertijd door te stellen dat "in de Drieheid geen eerste of laatste is ... maar de ganse drie Personen hebben gelijke eeuwigheid". Wie het vat mag het zeggen...           

Toen God ooit de Zoon als Eerste voorbracht, werd "in Hem het al geschapen". De Zoon is de kiem waarin de hele schepping vervat is. Kolosse 1:16,17           

Athanasius veronderstelt dat "de Geest van de Vader" een ander is dan de Vader Zelf. Vreemd... is de geest van de mens soms ook iemand anders dan de mens zelf? Matteüs 10:20; 1Korinthe 2:11           

Maria werd zwanger van de heilige Geest. M.a.w. de heilige Geest was de Vader van Degene die uit Maria voortkwam. Mattheüs 1:18           

De Geest is niet Iemand náást de Allerhoogste maar het is "de Kracht van de Allerhoogste". Lucas 1:35 

Nergens in de Schrift wordt de mens beeld van God genoemd. De mens is geschapen náár Gods Beeld. En Gods Beeld is... Christus! Genesis.1:26,27           

De kerk zegt: er is één God: de Vader én de Zoon én de heilige Geest. De Schríft zegt: er is één God, de Vader. Punt. Deze God is de Onzichtbare en de Zoon is diens Beeld en Gestalte. De Geest is de (persoonlijke) Kracht van de Allerhoogste.           

Mary of Nazareth

His mother, Mary of Nazareth: I'm here!

"She heard from Gabriel, she heard from Joseph that he had heard from Gabriel, and she heard from Elisabeth who had heard from Zecharia, who had heard from Gabriel who had heard from god. She also heard from the shepherds who had heard from the angels who had heard from God."

Mary mysteriously being pregnant...

"Mary knew what the facts about her life would point toward, and she knew the sort of things that would be said about her on street corners in backwater Nazareth."

We are ready to be surprised if not amazed that Mary consented to Gabriel with the simple words "may it be" as recorded in Luke's Gospel 1:38.

We shall overcome - Martin Luther King

Mary's song was for Mary's world what "We shall overcome" was to the African American Community in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mary, girl of 17:

"for he has been mindful, of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the mighty One has doen great things for me - holy is his name."

Martin Luther King:

"we shall overcome, we shall walk hand in hand, we shall all be free, we are not afraid, we are not alone, the whole wide world around, we shall overcome."

Mary witnessing Gentile Magi arriving at her home with gifts for a KING!

How could she not have thought that this meant her son would have significance well beyond the borders of the Land of Israël? How could she not have also thought that her son might have sigificance all the way to the throne in Rome?

"Mary was too sharp not to have made these connections!"

Anais Nin, April 14, 1937 

WHAT I FIND HUMOROUS IS TO MOCK THE ORDER of the world, to tell my Father I'm working for the fascists when I need his [mimeograph] machine and to pretend to Gonzalo to care about the communists, not a double-faced character but fundamentally not caring for either, no more than Henry cares for ideas seriously. I don't take these things seriously. I find it hu­morous to irritate my Father with the title of my book The House of Incest (he, telling Elena, imagine what people will think!), precisely because I know his hypocrisy. Humor in shattering hypocrisies—or mocking men's system of thought, telling Gonzalo I'm Henry's wife and Hugh's mistress because I am amused by the idea of not being Hugh's wife (Mrs. Guiler, wife of submanager of National City Bank) in Passy, the bourgeois world. Humor in carrying the diary al and thinking of juxtapositions as the world would see them, not feel them.The old Abbé Lancelin coming every day to convert me—whose door-ringing I finally did not answer. One morning, while he ringing persistently, I was sorting out the pages in the diary relating the incident of flagellation! He rings the bell, the gray-bearded a whose eyes lingered with pleasure on my face, and I am number pages on incest, flagellation. And it makes me laugh. Laugh. That world should have brought itself to such foolishness, incongruous impasses! Through sheer idiocy. I laugh. The same with faithfulness, loyalty, and other ideals!Pierre Bresson says that symbolical, stylized language impedes the human participation.People admire House of Incest, but they warm up, explode over the childbirth story. The human. The direct. Letter from Lawrence Durrell:  Dear Anaïs Nin: I feel a pig if I don't write and tell you what a splendid writer you are—though of course you know. It was that last thing you sent, the Dionysiac little birth scene. That rang the bell and returned the penny: as you know, only a real heavy's strength will do that.... I have always dreamed of a sort of hypothetical goal which the woman writer would reach.... Writing as a woman. I am becoming more and more aware this. All that happens in the real womb, not in the womb fabricated by man as substitute. Strange that I should explore this womb of real flesh when of all women I seem the most idealized, the most moonlit a Persian miniature, a dream, a myth. And it is I descending into the real womb, luring men into it, struggling to keep man there, and struggling to free him of me! To help him create another womb. The diary ends in Fez, in a city, in the street, in the labyrinth for me because that is the city which looks most deeply like the womb, with its Arabian night gentleness, tranquility, and mystery.

My self—wom­an—womb—with grilled windows, veiled eyes, tortuous, secret cells.When I leave Henry at ten in the evening, saying I have posing to do, with only a half hour between his kiss and Gonzalo's, I cannot cross the bridge as lightly, and half of me remains imprisoned in the fine wrinkles on the edge of Henry's eyes, his laughing wrinkles, in the corner fold of his humorous, soft mouth, and the wave of desire for Gonzalo envelops me again with languid eyes and palpitating eye­lashes, and a mouth that seems to await pain tremblingly.  

APRIL 20 , 1937 

THE QUAI D'ORSAY CLOCK POINTS TO ALMOST noon!  With eyes half asleep I look at it, un­believing, as I stand on the little rotted wood stairway leading from our room to the deck of Nanankepichu. "Gonzalo, it is nearly twelve!" He springs up. We had talked late into the night, about madness. I said no one became mad except from loneliness, I said while there is someone near you who sees what you see, you don't go mad. "See, Gonzalo, the lamp hanging there, it has the color of the moon.""Yes, it has the color of the moon.""Then if you see it like that we are both sane, or both crazy and we have a world of our own."The rain is falling. Home at quaff de Passy. Every first and every fifteenth of the month, Hugh makes very seriously and earnestly a budget: He hands me 3,200 francs, or 6,400 a month. My allowance, Soo; Lantelme, 200; Mother and Joaquin, I,500; house, 500- With this I have to pay: Henry's rent, 650; Henry's food, 1,500; Helba and Gonzalo (more than I confessed giving), 1,500; rent of Nanankepichu (unconfessed), 300; Lantelme (more than I confessed giving), 700; my expenses, 500; Mother and Joaquin, 3,000- I pay 8,150- I have 6,400- 1,750?????Money in hand I pay right and left. After a week I have nothing. I have to borrow or take it from Hugh's pocket, or we have a wind­fall! We have debts. Henry got 3,000 francs royalties [on Tropic of Cancer] and my own share [advanced for] the printing. We paid 400 francs taxes; 500 francs Henry gave to Osborn; too francs to Reichel, in payment for a painting I have been buying slowly; 5o francs debt to Edgar; 300 francs debt to Durrell. He gave me i,000 with which I paid bills I had long ago said I had paid. Bought myself a pair of shoes, and Henry bought a shirt and tie. And when I arrived two days later Henry had only red beans for lunch, heavy red beans I could not digest and when I met Betty [the copyist] at the Dome, I told her about the red beans and ordered Vichy! How we laughed.I never worry about money. But I often have to play desperate tricks. [Cousin] Eduardo [Sanchez] and Hugh do the worrying.

Every month I juggle through. And at the blackest moment something hap­pens! A check comes, a patient pays me, Hugh's mother relents. So today it is raining. George Turner on the telephone: "Can't I see you?" He is back from a cruise around the world: "I thought I was cured, had forgotten you, Anaïs, but I'm still crazy about you....Elena: "Come over. It's a sad day. I want to see you."I elude them all. I want to be alone. Walk the streets. Pursue my game, my secret life, my fantasy. I want to buy enormous candles for Nanankepichu, sweep the room, change the sheets. I walk in the rain. On the way I try on hats I cannot buy, but for a few minutes I pretend. I take the copied diaries to the vault. At six I am marketing for Henry, with Betty who laughs at my life. I peel potatoes and string beans. Henry is out meeting Leon-Paul Fargue. It is raining. He will be glad to walk in and find a good dinner waiting. While I peel the vegetables I rage a little because people prefer the childbirth to the coral and the dream and the Atlantide. They like the naked female world. Human life. This black narcissus growing on top of the diary's back like a mushroom on a wet roof, they don't like. At the Dome Feri stops me: "Why doesn't Eduardo write me? I'm getting mad.""You must know why he doesn't write you. It's all over." "When can I see you?""There is no more bond between us. We have nothing to say to each other."He walks away angrily. 

APRIL 21, 1937 

I DON'T KNOW WHY I CAN'T GET AS HUMANLY close to Elena as I did to Thurema. At mo­ments we do. When she is at home, quiet and deep, we talk deeply about life, but soon I feel, as I did with Louise [de Vilmorin], that we are playing. I see the colored balls of our imagination, I see the nonhuman eyes, and I don't trust her. People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment. Sur elle, human feelings seem to slip, they glisser—yet she talks about her life in tragic terms, and Louise's life was tragic, but it does not move me. She seems unreal. A brilliant, multicolored Medusa, capable of great evil unconsciously. One feels the vampire in her, the taker, the one who destroys, in contradiction to the facts, the conscious life of Elena as a generous woman, as a healer, as a creator. She has truly two faces and she only believes in one of them. She has two aspects: Elena at home, sewing, serious, tragic almost, maternal, the Catholic girl who is afraid of sinning, and Elena outside, with mocking eyes, a sardonic mouth, an adventurous air. This aspect frightens people, freezes them, or amuses them. "Which is my real self?" she asks me.Absolute duality. As there is in me. Betty copying the New York diary of a year ago can't believe all this passion, tumult, pain, and fever could be taking place under my calm, peaceful, sphinxlike exterior.  Elena exteriorizes her fever, as June did. I live it deep down, and secretly. As an actress I present a facade to the world, of innocence and tranquility.The night I spent with Gonzalo, Henry went to a movie on the Champs-Elysees and walked home, passing by the Pont de la Con­corde at midnight, so near to Nanankepichu. The same night, Hugh went to the café where Allendy's group meets—Carteret etc.—and walked back home passing by the Pont Royal at about midnight. An­other time, Gonzalo and I were walking from Nanankepichu to the café because he was thirsty and Emil [Savitry], the photographer, was leaning over the quays, studying the péniches for a possible composi­tion. It was dark and he did not recognize us.Living out my relationship with Henry in Elena's presence, and keeping my relationship with Gonzalo a secret, makes the first seem very real and the second a life of the imagination. No mention to anyone except Eduardo, the existence of the péniche makes it seem a dream. A warm dream.Gonzalo says we were made of the same paste but in baking us he was kept in the oven too long and got darker! I can watch our two skins for hours with delight. They are made of the same tones. I have not the whiteness of the Anglo-Saxon but a creamishness, a banana color, a moon glow and baked longer this would produce Gonzalo's color.I like secrets. Everything that is natural and right with Henry, crowded streets, cafés, movies, is wrong with Gonzalo, and we run away from it.

We created a dream which unfolds in Nanankepichu. No one in the Dome knows where he goes when he leaves precipitately about ten at night. Henry's love for the ordinary, natural human aspect of Paris, and his exaggerated expectations, demands, and disillusions with travelling  because nothing is as extraordinary as he imagined it to be is a paradox. His acceptance of ordinary, natural human beings stands in the way of his finding the extraordinary, I tell him. This he does not understand. I find 'the extraordinary in proportion to my rebellion against the natural. It would seem as if he dodges the extraordinary in order to be forced to create it, while I seek and find the ex­traordinary and don't have to invent it: Rank, Louise, June, Elena, Gonzalo, Fez. Henry enjoys the familiar and the known, fears the unknown: Corfu, Lawrence Durrell. The extraordinary in life, real­ized, makes him uncomfortable. He does not recognize it. He does not like it until it has become familiar, human, natural.I am at home in the marvelous. Absolutely at home. And uncom­fortable and paralyzed in the common. What Henry enjoys around him are the unpicturesque, the not-striking, the common street, the face of a clock, a homely house, a prosaic café, just like the people around him. Faced with the created marvel, he does not see that it matches his dream, or his writing. The transformed, created, illu­mined material he looks at as upon a scarecrow.  

MAY 1, 1937 

WE SAW A CLOCHARD WHO WORE A SCOTCH CAP. I said to Gonzalo: "Ask him if he is Scotch and if he is we will give him a bottle of wine, in honor of Scotch ances­tors." Gonzalo's father. Hugh's mother.When Gonzalo talks about ritual, the first theater on the altars of the Catholic Church, the extraordinary fantastic ceremonies full of mystery and grandeur, I feel that I recover a lost world which is beyond my everyday self, the world of my race. When he raves against the vulgarity of the Western world, the scientific epoch, the lack of ritual and significance, I understand. When he fears we are tainted, I understand, tainted with consciousness. But we know deep down we have kept a chalice and an altar, a mystery. I know what passionate affinity attracted me to Fez, what deep roots are stirred in me by the Orient. I had all this sense of form and ritual in the life of dress and symbolism, of continuous significance, and the power of falling into a trance, of moving out of myself by exaltation, away from violence.A gorgeous world of grandeur and hierarchy, of faith and wor­ship. A lost world. Religion as poetry.[Antonin] Artaud attempted to recapture the illusion and sym­bolism, to break with the realism in the theater.Henry always says: "Why don't you get a beret"—like the servant girls, coquettes, students, like everybody?Even in hats I like hierarchic coiffures: hats like Russian tiaras, hats like aureoles, hats like crowns, like Venetian headdresses, like Egyptian, Greek, or Indian headgears. The softening, relaxing influence not of woman but of the men I choose! The sleepy, lazy, soft, weak men! Sexual enjoyment all a matter of relaxation or tension. Frigidity is brought about by tension. Tension due to resistance of some sort—psychic, psychological. I re­sisted responding to Gonzalo out of love for Henry. But now I have completely divided myself. At times I have a fear of this dedoublement. Perhaps I shall divide beyond unity. But I do not feel broken. I feel balanced over a great net. No abyss, scission, split, madness, but sanity and harmony. I feel a great joy and no remorse. Helba took a black cat under her protection. The black cat vom­ited a worm. Helba went into convulsions. Her face twisted, her eyes protruding. "The worms are inside of me. That is why I'm sick. They have eaten into my intestine and the food does not stay. Take the cat away. You have caught worms too, Gonzalo."Worms. Death.

Fear of death. Of burial. Of worms. Insane over the worms. Her eyes show no recognition.At the same moment Osborn haunts Henry's studio. He lies on the couch and sticks his tongue out, and tries to chew the tip of it. Or he stands before the mirror cutting his hair with his left hand and contemplating his unshaven face. Or he comes showing his penis in his hand to Edgar and Henry saying: "It looks quite healthy, doesn't it, it doesn't look like syphilis." He asks Henry, "How would you go from Litchfield, Connecticut, to Boston?"He has built up an imaginary legal case against an imaginary man who has stolen one of his manuscripts, sold it for a fabulous price to a Hollywood producer. He thinks Hugh dismissed him from the bank because he drank Pernod, frequented Montparnasse, and had a mis­tress. He wants Henry to hold his money and deal it out to him in small sums.Rank had visited him in the asylum in Connecticut. Had said: "I am Otto Rank." "So you say!" answered Osborn.Rank had said: "Guilt. He is loaded with guilt, envy, jealousy. He is jealous of Henry as a writer and of what you gave Henry."Henry is haunted, obsessed, uneasy. He wants to leave Villa Seurat. He hides, is afraid to typewrite—yet will not go and visit Durrell in Corfu.

I hold the money for all of them. Henry hands it over to me. I have to send envelopes with one hundred francs to Osborn by way of other people. I sent Gonzalo once, who does not know Osborn is a friend of Henry's. Yesterday afternoon I took Gonzalo to the doctor for his eyes. He found him run-down, but not sick. A wonderful physique. Unusual vitality. No syphilis traces. Gonzalo and I walked back through the Bois, passed le boulevard Suchet, where I first visited Rank, passed boulevard Suchet studio. At seven we parted at the Passy subway station. At seven Hugh and Horace [Guicciardi] were bicycling through the Bois while I walked back along the rue de Passy to the little restaurant on the rue Boulainvillier, where Henry and I used to eat when we stayed in the rue des Marronniers. I was meeting Henry there because he wanted to elude Osborn. Great softness. I observe the great changes in Henry, his spiritualization, his interest in clair­voyance, astrology, the mysterious, the far-from-the-earth. He has be­come wise, as I was, and I have become emotional. He looked tired and very serious. When we laugh at the movies he takes my hand. We sit in a café. We talk about clairvoyance. I leave him at midnight, saying I have to go home because the next morning Hugh and I are leaving very early for a bicycle ride. I leave him to meet Gonzalo.Gonzalo is disgusted, nauseated by politics, the petty self-interest, the petty jealousies, the petty quarrels. He is hurt, disillusioned. Our night is not happy. The mad violinist, who is a Freudian, has told  him that his fear of spiders reveals his fear of woman and homosex­uality. Gonzalo is affected. He has begun to be anxious over the fact that he prefers to take me always from behind. "Am I abnormal?" he asks. I laugh his fear away. I tell him I think the real reason is a kind of punishment for what I wrote in my novel about legs parted, a phrase which aroused his jealousy and carved an irradicable image in him. So much so that he remembered it one night when he was lying over me and suddenly the phrase flashed through his mind and he closed my legs and his desire died. "You see, Gonzalo, I mistrust all explanations now because you can always give two of them, one physical, one metaphysical. So let us leave all that alone." I was sad to see Gonzalo conscious.Hugh, however, does not let me live in a brume of feeling. He is reading Rank, discussing him, he is analyzing his friends. I have to hear all this that I know too well and which I have left behind. But I listen through a veil. I am far away, far away.I get tired of Edgar's mental acrobatics. Henry urges me again to talk. I stop as soon as I feel misunderstood. Edgar, like Fraenkel, talks geometrically. I can't answer that. I was very simple and sincere and told Henry why I withdrew. Not as he thought, through hostility, but through shyness, inadequacy, lack of faith in myself as a talker. I am not ashamed of my weakness. 

MAY 9, 1937 

WHAT I FAILED TO SAY TO EDGAR WAS: SELF-analysis is destructive, it generates only introspection, the labyrinth, division. It is always false, based on false premises. It is paralyzing.Analysis should be only endured at the hands of another as a healing process. There is no self-analysis—there is neurosis. It is anti-creative. It is a form of pause, not motion.  When at times I lean over a Gonzalo half asleep, half drunk on caresses and I am awake, alert, my imagination on fire, he often closes his eyes and says: "Tengo pereza. I am lazy. Pereza spiritual. Pereza cerebral. " A blessing. "Strange," he says, "the unexpected effect you had on me. Al­though we do nothing but dream together, although you drug me, although Nanankepichu is a dream, you have a dynamic effect on me. I want action."He has been made secretary of the Peruvian Communist Party. Waiting in the café I write these words: "On being the womb." And it unleashes a tremendous new feminine world. I am completely divorced from man's idea world. I swim in nature. On being the womb. Englobing. All the artists, the intellectuals, rushing to find the blood rhythm in war and revolution. I go wherever there is pulsing blood. Nothing can shatter my individual world. No storm on sea or earth. Communism they call it. It is the drama, the poem, and the rhythm of hatred, desire, lust, war, passion. The rhythm of illusion. I will call it the madness of perpetual analogy. Identification. Because I love I identify myself. Everything is identified. People are mingled inside of me. There is flow between all of them, an ab­sence of separateness.I give Gonzalo medicines for Helba and I get into the subway, not for Passy but for Alesia, where I stop in the rain to buy food for Henry who is signing contracts with Stock for the translation of his books. When he comes I am peeling strawberries. He talks excitedly but says he is not excited because it has all come too late. It is raining. We eat slowly. Afterward I work on volume thirty-eight, changing the names of Artaud, Allendy, et al. Strange how many years I missed Gonzalo. Henry had met him. Artaud knew him. Roger Klein knew him. Natasha Troubetskoia knew him. There was my happiness and it did not come until I was ready for it. Before Henry I was not ready for Gonzalo, spiritually. Henry brought him to me when I needed him not to go mad with jealousy and the inhumanness of my life with Henry. How grateful I am for all this which makes me believe in God. How each friend and each lover represents the world in us, the unborn potential world and makes it be born. I traversed a sensual pleasure world to arrive at my spiritual devotion world of Gonzalo, clothed in ardent flesh, but a kind of communion flesh. Ironically, Henry is becoming a saint and is saying his life was an error. "Write this in your journal, Anaïs, I like to be with myself now." Il se receuille. Et moi je me donne. He communes with himself. I give of myself. I live in the dark yet sun-warmed flesh of Gonzalo which I hear burn­ing—a sound of fire.When Helba and I walk together she makes me happy telling me: "Gonzalo is a changed man, and I am so happy, Anaïs. He was very unhappy before.

A man cannot live without love, and Gonzalo was not easy to satisfy. All the women wanted him, all of them wanted him. But he would .see them once perhaps and come back unhappy and refuse to see them again. He did not care about women. They sought him out while he always found something wrong with them. With you, he is ecstatic. And I'm happy, because I knew this had to happen sometime but I am happy it's you and I know you would not take him away from me because I need him. I used to fear some woman coming and taking him where I would never see him again. And you, you're a part of me. I'm not unhappy."Hugh is with Carteret, Henry with Edgar, when I am with Gon­zalo. Each one reflects Hugh's and Henry's mood of the present. Hugh always mystical, occult, analytical. Henry spiritualized, mentalized. Henry shares analysis with Edgar, while I have passed on into another plane. La nuit.  

May 25, 1937 

EVER SINCE OSBORN CAME, HAUNTED HENRYS STUDIO, borrowed money and food, Henry, while acting with compassion and wisdom, became more and more de­pressed. His passivity, acceptance, inertia tied him in a knot. I tried to help him. I suffered from his fatigue, bad moods, despondency. I understood. He was far away, cold, impersonal, abstracted, jellied.My own madness came back. I began to imagine he was tired of me, indifferent. My understanding wore out. I was hurt. Gonzalo's caresses and fervor could not dispel my greatest sources of pain: any feeling of distance between Henry and me, of separateness, of lack of vital exchange. For the last three days, after a dark evening with Henry I fell into darkness myself. Henry's remoteness, Henry's dead­ness. I tried to find a cause for my misery. I grasped on his last act of selfishness (spending all his royalties on an illustration of the Scenario which represents all my own images out of House of Incest). But that was not the cause. Yesterday morning I went to him feeling rebellious, hating his passivity—full of poison. He was sick, he wanted to be left to sleep. I left him. I spent the afternoon with Gonzalo. We fixed up our rooms, worked together. His kisses, humanness, warmth, nearness warmed me. But I was still sad inside. I went back to Henry at six. He had slept all day. He was soft, gentle, caressing. I told him what I felt. He said he felt shattered inside, tired, needed recueillement, meditation. We had dinner and sat in a café, talking quietly. He said: "I feel I have never lived on the same level as the one I write on." Continually, he says the things I felt and did not attack because they were his nature. Now he knows."Except with you, and now Edgar.""I suppose you did that not to be alone—not to go mad. You closed your eyes in life. If one's eyes are too open one can't live, like Rank, for instance."He was very near again. Apropos of Elena he said: "Doesn't she dress frumpishly?" He does not seem attracted. He was human and near, and I felt great joy again, and all the ideas, angers, rebellions, resentments, and criticisms which had separated me from him van­ished again. All the poison vanished.I had to leave him to meet a train, Henry Mann and his wife, and then Gonzalo. But I was happy again.To separate makes me mad. And when my sickness comes back, doubt of him, of Gonzalo, I am very near to madness. I imagine my isolation, and I go mad inside, a delirium of doubts and fears.  

June 5, 1937 

DREAM: A LONG PATH OF ICE. A WOMAN WALKING on it with a great terror of the ice breaking. Runs away in a panic. Hugh decides he will try. I tell him not to because he is heavier. He begins to walk over it and I hold him. The ice breaks. I am holding Hugh so he does not fall into the pit but I feel the heat that comes from it and I pull Hugh out of this  hell. We all have to pass through a narrow aperture to reach a certain place. I feel the usual anxiety before a hole and decide to take another route. I leap like a deer over lakes, bushes, hills. I get to an isolated castle—old, ravaged, with many rooms locked with huge keys. The rain is pouring in through the windows and the floor is rotting. I open all the rooms. I come upon a room and through a glass door I see a man sitting with his back turned, sitting in an absolutely empty room. He is blond. I get panicky and I run away, carrying one of the keys.  When I join the others, Lyon, the manager of Helba and Joaquin, has decided I am to dance an Indian dance with my body painted in gold and feathers. I say to Gonzalo: "I think it is Helba who would do this better." He agrees. A man says: "If you got into that castle, can you prove it?" I say: "I have one of the keys." "Then you are a hys­terical woman," he answered. The son of Henri Matisse, Pierre, was on the same train with some friends. They met Henry and said to him: "We saw Anaïs meeting some people. She looked very radiant and was with a very romantic-looking dark man." I had told Henry about my having to wait two hours for the train the night I left him, but I had not told him I was with Gonzalo. When I came to Villa Seurat Henry first of all kissed me with unusual fervor and then began to tease me about my lie. The jealousy made him desirous and extraordinarily tender. I was exalted with happiness. When he fears to lose me he clutches at me. We become aware of our love. Yet last night, a whole evening in Nanankepichu could make me happy, too. I could respond fully to Gonzalo, almost sob with joy when the orgasm came in both of us so miraculously in rhythm. Durrell writes: "I have no doubt, not a shadow of doubt about you as an artist. The sense of dislocation proves that to me more fully! Loneliness is the password...." From a letter to Lawrence Durrell:  . . . I could say to you what Henry said about me in the diary: "Eyes too open." And I see yours are closing a bit—the metamorphoses. You are already somewhere else. You reached life by divination first, I take it, as I reached it. How much I like Gregory [in The Black Book] and his sincerity and his cosmic reachings. I won­der where you are now, metamorphically speaking. I'm in the night looking for silence. The head quiet and everything else, and all the other cells and tentacles, breathing. Wonder why you called me the submarine superwoman. That made me laugh, yet it is accurate. Only it took me many years to recover my fins and. my swimming stride. I was trying to walk (like the penguins?) and to think like a man. I was very impressed by man's thinking. 

JUNE 13, 1937

JOLAS COMES, AS IF ABOUT TO CHARGE, HEAVY with German mysticism, disillusion with the poet's temporal concessions, praising House of Incest as a marvel of language, beauty "qui ma donne de grande frayeurs, sickened as I am with the actual." So we talk in harmony, a kind of opaque Wagnerian language. I hear the "mantic" horse hooves, I feel the bath of mists, and the "Language of the Night," with its red cover and very black letters, takes the form of a man tormented with an anxious smile and a mystical fatigue. Desperate with fragmentation, suffering because it is Henry and Durrell who understand my work and whose work I love; because it is Jolas and not Gonzalo who damns politics; because Gonzalo is writ­ing anti-fascist trash, such as the fascists write about communists; be­cause it is Gonzalo who keeps the blood flame alive; because some of my prayers still rise toward a God, and I want Oneness."You have the hands of a sculptor," Gonzalo says, because he has seen Hugh's metamorphoses. Hugh is in life now, touching everything with his own hands, feeling, enjoying, drawing, talking until dawn with his friends, walking through Paris, reading Rank's Le Double. I asked Ponisowsky, a Russian friend, to buy one of Gonzalo's drawings, saying I would pay him back. Wanted Gonzalo to have faith. I knew someone would buy Elena's work, but I was afraid for his. Gonzalo is happy, working feverishly at his political campaign. I took some suits my mother had collected for the Franco Red Cross and gave them to Gonzalo. Gonzalo put one on at his vernissage and then the giver, David Nixon, appeared and Gonzalo had to hide. He wanted to hide anyway. He is savage, and wild with timidity. He looks right and left, out of somber eyes, with a bowed head, for a door. Henry is aging, his beautiful health weakening, he goes to the dentist, to the doctor. He takes medicine but even over his hands, reddened by fever rash, I can yearn with the desire to englobe him, caress him, protect him. Helba still expresses her love for me and each time I see her she adds strangely to my faith in Gonzalo's love—telling me how women pursued him but how he ran away because he wanted the ideal. Only when I say: "Hugh is changing. He may fall in love someday," a shadow falls over her face and she says: "You will suffer then." Obsessed with deformation, with what I am with Gonzalo for instance.

Angry when I have said something not true. He acts on me as a confuser, I leave my cosmic realms.When Henry talks about his impersonal friendships I tried to explain to him my impersonal pity, which he does not understand. I am pushed by a force greater than myself to create, to give hope and pity even when I personally don't care for the other. To be benefic. With Elena, whom I would like to see dead, I have acted creatively, as a life-giving force. It is I who give Elena her faith in herself. And it is I who cure Helba, whom I also wish to see dead. It is I who restore her to her dancing, to life; something greater than myself which I obey. I have to act out my white magical power. Yet perverse and diabolical actions haunt me, attract me. And it is diabolical of me to have kept Henry and Elena apart. I should have said to Elena: "You are not, as you think, monstrously large. There are men like Henry who like that." But in place of this I have done a more subtle act of creation, continuous and effective."Before," I said to Hugh, "you were drinking life through a straw."Bill's book has been accepted in New York, so all my patients have given birth and know realization of their desires. Henry Mann here with his new wife. Betty facing New York to conquer it.For Moricand I found a fabulously rich man who appointed him court astrologer—or rather, Bourse astrologer. The man's mistress ap­pointed him lover. And so he shines with secret, malefic glee. I sewed colored stones on my black velvet curtains unevenly placed as the stars. Marvelous. Carteret falls into a trance when he sees them. This is the fairy tale.Inside of my illusion, as inside a cellophane balloon, I sit raging because when people come, more than two or three, I begin to suffer. I thought Moricand, who knows me by the route of Neptune, must be disillusioned. I can't talk. I can't manifest myself. I'm paralyzed. But my dress, my colors, my stones, my decor, my gestures—perhaps they talk. It becomes an anxiety, because I cannot be passive either, listen, efface myself. Was introduced to [André] Breton and almost turned my back on him, in a panic.Henry tests himself, in a mood of self-assertion, by giving a talk to a group of people. Failed. Went blank.There is still work to be done on this picture. Many things are missing. Communication haunts me, imperative, vital. I hate the fail­ures. It is like stuttering.  

June 16, 1937 

THE DIABOLICAL TANGLE OF THE PRINTING MACHINE: We discovered a printing machine for two thousand francs. A perfect, small, neat, easily run invention. A marvel. The dream of Henry's life, of mine, of Gonzalo. Gonzalo was set on fire. He wants to publish all my things. He wants to run a magazine. He is exultant, active, awake. He gets up early. He doesn't drink. He works feverishly at his propaganda, he draws, he tries tc collect the money for the machine. He combs his hair, he dresses with the clothes I took away from my Mother. He is radiant, dynamic. The printing machine here is half literary, half political. The group is mixed.Meanwhile I am thinking of Henry. Henry's joy if I could get the machine, Henry's work, which is of greater value than Helba's poems, or my work, or the propaganda. How can I get two thousand francs for Henry? Henry dreams. We'll put the machine in his studio. Work there. And so again my desire splits in two directions. And as I walk the streets thinking about it I'm a little anxious because I think: this takes away from my strength, this duality weakens me. Yet I laugh, too. Spiritually I am with Henry, not Gonzalo. Monday. After a long peaceful talk with Henry in bed, and after Gonzalo's enthusiasm to print me, I began to work seriously on the mirrors, on this book of mirages and metamorphosis.

Now, how can I get two thousand francs to get the machine for Henry without Hugh knowing it, or Gonzalo? Sunday. I reread my "Father" MS. It creaks with artifice and unnat­uralness. All but the feverish passages. Flat brevity due to timidity. I talked to Henry about it. I told him I was grateful to him for his natural­ness, which I value highly. He was glad I could see my defects. I helped him with his sincerity in writing. In my diary, with Henry, I am natural. With Hugh and Gonzalo. But not in the world and not in my novels. I collect clothes from the comfortable ones, saying it is for refugees, and I give them to my poor, saying now it is for communists, now for the fascists. I say to Hugh, laughing: "Had a good haul today— or a good holdup." I even give Hugh one of Turner's new silk shirts! To go and see the machine with Gonzalo I walk quietly from Villa Seurat to the metro of Denfert- Rochereau. In the sun, in Nixon's suit, shaved, he looks bronzed and magnetic. I feel gently amorous, his deep voice stirs me, his smell, his eyes. My life of lies every day more difficult because all the people we know know each other: Stuart Gilbert knows the [James] Joyces; the Joyces the Turners; the Turners the Jolases; Jolas knows Ponisowsky, who knows Elena, who knows Moricand, who knows Carteret;

Carteret knows Allendy; Allendy, Artaud; Artaud knows Gonzalo; Gonzalo knows Bill Hayter and Arnaud de Maigret and Mayo, who know Henry as well as Brassai and Emil Savitry; Fred [Perlès] knows Emil, Emil knows Buckland Wright, a friend of Hugh's and Horace, who knows Hayter, and Hayter knows Anita de Caro, who knows Henry and [Jack] Kahane. Gonzalo knows the same painters and writ­ers. In his house lives André Dhote, who knows Elena etc., etc. Most of them go to the same Club du Cinéma for choice artistic movies, most of them to the same vernissages, the same concerts, the same cafés and restaurants. Fred and Artaud saw me meeting Gonzalo. Maigret sees me with Henry. Mayo knocked at Henry's studio last night while I was there. [Abraham] Rattner made a drawing for the Scenario, and he stays in the same hotel with the Joneses, where Henry goes to see him, while Henry calls on Jones. [Denise] Clairouin knows Colonel Cheremetieff, Betty's lover, and most of the people I know.

At the Villa Seurat lives Lucette Leque, Rank's ex-secretary, a friend of Chang Orloff, who receives Mrs. Rank, who is a friend of Mrs. Alfred Knopf, who sent Henry one hundred dollars. Bravig Imbs met Hugh through Horace, and Buckland Wright met Henry. He is a friend of Mrs. Hensley, astrologer, who met Eduardo and came to the house, and who now knows Moricand, who knows Evreinoff, who knows the colonel, who knows Clairouin, who knows all of them! Colette [Roberts] knows Roger Klein who knows Gonzalo loves me, but he's in Spain! Mrs. Jolas knows Gonzalo, Gonzalo knows Edgar, who knows Mrs. Hensley, etc.A spiderweb closing around me.  

JUNE 20 , 1937 

FATHER AND I ALONE IN MY ORANGE ROOM, father saying: "Until I met you I knew pleasure, women, but it was love I wanted and it was love I found with you. After that marvelous, violent climax everything else would seem tasteless and disgusting. My career ended there. And you?"  With an honesty I have rarely shown I said gently, "I have Henry and Gonzalo.""You are younger and you have to follow your own evolutions. It was less profound for you.""Not less profound—remember, I was in love with you for twenty years when you were not in love with me!"Every time we kiss each other something hard and pointed breaks inside of us—our will—some strange carapace, the shell around him and my defense against him.

There is no nearness possible, only that violent conjunction, an impossible love. Defense, fear, predominate, doubt of each other. A relationship that tortures, baffles me, un­hinges me.With a desire to cling to my wholeness I turn toward Gonzalo at such a moment—turn my love toward him—call him.Sickness the same day. The devil planted his 'fourche" into my back—paralyzed me with rheumatism.Gonzalo comes for only a little while. Sanity.What is there between my Father, my brothers Thorvald and Joaquin, and me which causes only misery and misunderstandings, undercurrents of cruelty, of twisted, jealous, destructive love?In all my other loves there is softness and faith. Hugh so soft, drawing with great sensitiveness. Beginning to live for himself. When Jolas came he took him right over to see his draw­ings instead of effacing himself as before and exalting me.I make them all live for themselves, I nurture their egoism! Hugh thinks of his pleasure now, Gonzalo lives to realize his own desires.

Hugh becomes aware of his charms, that he possesses El Greco hands, the power to heal; they make him play the role of ideal father, too. He comes home at three in the morning. And every day he exonerates me more. He says: "Now I understand why you gave so much. I see the needs around me." Or: "Now I understand why you couldn't be home at fixed hours, one has to leave when the talk ends naturally." He discovers the joy of seeing the sun rise, while drunk on talk. He has his group of friends, their activity, their cycle of interests, confer­ences, talks, expositions, creations. He is happy.  A letter from New York threatening a change came like a thun­derbolt. Hugh said: "I won't let them change me, just when life is opening up for me here." Gonzalo begins his propaganda work tomorrow morning with an office, telephone and stenographers, files and a big desk.Meanwhile, Andrés Nin, anarchist, is about to be shot. Father says playfully: "Thank God for one less Nin in the world."Gonzalo says: "Treason, treason."Gonzalo and I have in common a malady unknown to Henry, les tristesses ideales.

If something goes wrong, if because I'm sick he comes to see me in my house, feels nervous about Hugh coming, the cat's intrusion, the loud noises of the Exposition, begins to caress me and cannot fulfill his desire, he gets sad. If our time is rushed, and there is brusqueness—if I am moody, one phrase misplaced—he goes away sad. Hugh feels this, Rank, my Father, all the idealists. Henry never. Henry is attuned to dissonances, is not shocked by interruptions, or by grotesque accidents.

This makes me seek with Gonzalo again more and more dream­like atmosphere, exclusion of the world, of all accidents—and we get more and more sensitive to reality.When Nanankepichu was threatened by the occupancy of the pro­prietor, quarrels began about the pumping, roof leaking, etc. I cut through all the petty discourses with a dictator-like firmness. I wrote a note: "I will pay more—the three hundred francs for only the room on condition that the pumping is done from outside, that René never penetrates into our room, that you fix the leaking roof and all the things which go wrong and leave us alone—Finish."Everything was done as if by magic. Gonzalo and I were left alone. Nanankepichu became again the dream, the opium den.But misery is the great reality. That is why artists seek it. It is their only reality. It was my only reality as a child. It gave me the only human reality I ever understood. I sought it out afterward, with Henry, Helba, Gonzalo. All my friends are poor. It also has a religious significance. It represents sacrifice, it is usually the outcome of a choice between artistic and spiritual values and the material. It has a spiritual significance.  I have used all that Hugh gave me to protect, foster, and realize other's dreams—to reinstate poetry.

For that I have given all. For that we are moving to a cheaper place. For that I have denied myself voyages, luxuries, clothes. I have kept only what was necessary to my creation in my life. I have nothing around me that is not necessary. Just enough to create an image, an illusion of beauty, an illusion of oriental softness (in reality what there is in my apartment is worth no more than two or three thousand francs!). I have stripped myself joyously. I feel great joy thinking of Henry working in his studio, with his watercolors, his phonograph, his femme de ménage; Helba with her medicines, food, and a new box full of stuffs to make new costumes; Gonzalo with paper to draw, pencils, suits to wear; Elsa with one of my dresses, paints. All these are the real gifts, but they would mean nothing: It was the love.Perhaps it is true I do all this to atone for all the marvelous gifts life made me, for what I took, received, absorbed, for the love given me. To atone for the miracle of a fulfilled life!

Then if it is atonement I must give more and more. I shall never give enough then. Never enough for all I have received. Gratitude makes me generous, grati­tude makes me flow out, yield, abandon, give. I feel so rich. The less possessions I have the richer I feel. Perhaps I'm seeking poverty al­ways. Only Hugh kept me from it.But when I see what it did to Henry, Gonzalo, and Helba I won­der. Their hope, life, health, everything destroyed. The dream de­stroyed. No food. No material to work with. No paper, no paints, no costumes, no medicines.Yet I seek this—every day I come near to it. If Hugh had not fought me I would already be poor.I am grateful to him. I am grateful to everyone tonight. I feel my weakness fully, as never before. My love of others, my depen­dency, my ...Sh, sh, sh ...Sentimentality.  

Anais Nin, we write as Birds sing

We’re the Nazareth of the Milky Way  

Take a look at the position of our sun in the Milky Way Galaxy. We are not in the “power house” of the galaxy. We’re not even in the suburbs. Folks, these are the slums. It looks from this photo like we barely made the grade, and we’re one celestial burp from getting slung into nothingness. And yet this is the place (the only place) where Christ came to die. This is the only place where the future rulers of the universe (that’s us) endure boot camp. Ladies and gentlemen, our little planet— which clings like a hangnail to the galaxy— is the moral and political center of the universe. Nathanael said of Jesus: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” The celestials now ask: “Can anything good come out of the Milky Way?” Wait and see!

- Martin Zender 

Anais Nin, 1903-1977, writer, whore

Anais Nin studied the soft silvery reflection of her naked body in the full length mirror that stood in the corner of the bedroom, running her hands over her own smooth alabaster skin and stopping every now and again to lovingly caress each one of the fresh red suction marks. Eventually her hands reached down between the inside of her tender thighs and she paused for a moment in thought; for a second, a smile played upon her lips. 

Deep in thought, Anais picked her beautiful blue Chinese silk robe up from the floor where she had discarded it the night before and draped it over her bare shoulders. She sat down at her desk, picking up a virgin sheet of bright white paper and rolled it into her typewriter. Anais always found the writing down of her thoughts and memories such a pleasurable experience. It was a second chance to live through the amazing and confusing events of the day before. She positioned her slender fingers onto the polished keys of the typewriter and began to type. 

“I awoke on Saturday morning to the sounds of birdsong drifting through the open window, a glorious yellow light shone through the curtains warming my bare skin and a light spring breeze raised goose bumps on my arms. After dressing I made my way downstairs to find Hugo all dressed up in his finest cycling clothes.  

He smiled and said to me, “I thought it would be a nice morning for a ride”. “ 

Huge and I sped along through the green spring forest, the wind felt so good in my hair and it filled the folds of my skirt lifting it up and exposing my bare legs. After some time Hugo was far ahead of me and as I watched he pulled off of the dirt track and headed into the forest, he called back to me  

“Anais I have to stop, I have a flat tyre!” 

By the time I caught up to Hugo he had already unpacked his cycling bag and the different parts of his cycle repair kit were strewn across the forest floor and Hugo was bent down studying his bicycle tyre. Hugo looked around as I approached panting and out of breath, a smile played over his lips as he turned to me holding his bicycle pump in his hands. 

“But Hugo your tyre is fine!” I said in puzzlement, “I know” said Hugo, the pump isn’t for the bicycle, I have something else more fun in mind”  

Hugo instructed. “Lay down and lift your skirt for me Anais.”  

Oh what fun I thought as I realised what Hugo had in mind, so it looks like this cycling trip is going to be more fun than I imagined. I laid myself down upon the cold earth of the forest floor, pulling my skirt up to my belly and pulling the soft silk of my panties aside to reveal the special warm place between my legs. Bending down, Hugo gently pushed the rudder tube of the bicycle pump deep between my legs, my whole body tingled with excitement as Hugo started to Inflate me, pushing more and more air inside with every stroke of the pump, stretching me from the inside with such pressure until I felt like I was going to burst from the pressure. 

“Oh please no more!” I begged as Hugo continued pumping more and more air inside of me,

 “Ok Anais.” he laughed  “You look about ready to burst, I guess we better deflate you again” He pulled the pump back out from between my legs and I felt my whole body start to deflate again, the air rushed out of me making a loud rushing sound pffssjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj. 

Anais looked down at the page she had just typed and realised that her breathing had become fast and excited just from the memory of that morning. That day had started of so nicely and it was just going to get more and more exciting. She began to type again. “Later that day as I sat in the garden admiring the fresh spring flowers and revelling in the perfume of the spring air I heard raised voices coming from inside the house, Hugo was arguing with one of his business rivals Hans who had come to the door earlier just before Hugo had ushered me out of the room and told me to go to the garden. As I listened I could just make out fragments of their argument, just the usually boring things about sales and finances. It was the kind of thing that Hugo spent at least half of his life talking about in one way or another but then something else caught my attention as the argument suddenly stopped and I heard Hugo say in a defeated voice,  “Ok I will send her over to you later tonight”.

What could it mean, I wondered as I heard Hans leaving by the front door and Hugo’s footsteps approaching.” Hugo appeared at the French doors that lead out of the main house and down to where I stood listening, his face was red from the argument and he had a sad look of defeat in his eyes. Hugo called over to me “Anais.come and sit down we need to talk about something.”  We sat on one of the grey stone benches in the garden and Hugo explained things to me, Hugo was in a lot more financial trouble then I could ever had imagined, of course I knew that things hadn’t been good at the bank but what Hugo told me shocked me. “Anais” He said almost sobbing, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this before but I have been trying to sell the house”. The news hit me like a bucket of ice water down my spine.  

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked “Well it doesn’t matter now anyway” he replied “This is what we where arguing about.”  

With that Hugo took a neatly folded letter out of his jacket pocket, “I received this letter from Hans wife Christine a few days ago, they are expecting you to visit them at their house tonight because they have some clients meeting there that they need you to entertain.” Hugo put his head into his hands and sobbed, “I’m sorry Anais, I’m so sorry.” 

I took Hugo’s hand in reassurance. “It’s Ok Hugo.” I whispered, “It’s the only way.” 

I had no idea what to expect as I walked along the driveway of the grand house. The sun was just beginning to set as I knocked at the front door and I could hear the sound of music and people chattering to each other coming from inside the house. A woman in her late thirties opened the door. She was very pretty, with long wavy red hair that hung seductively over her right eye and spilled out onto her shoulders. “Ahh you must be Anais” she purred, “We have all been expecting you! Do come in” I stepped through the door and into a long hallway “I’m Christine.” the woman said, leading me down the hall. I couldn’t help but notice that she as she walked she wiggled her hips in the most alluring way. 

Christine opened one of the doors leading off of the hallway and I stepped into a smoke filled room where five men sat drinking and smoking cigars. Every pair of eyes turned to stare at me. One of the men: the youngest and most handsome stood up and poured a glass of Champagne. He handed it to me and said:  

“Hi Anais, it’s so good to meet you properly after such a long time, I’m Hans.”

 ”Hello” I replied nervously.

 “So did Hugo explain why we asked you to come here this evening?” Hans enquired.

“He said I was to come here and do whatever you asked me to,” I said.  

I couldn’t help the anger from appearing in my voice as I started to feel the degradation of being in such a situation.

“He said I was to be your slut.”

 “That’s right,” said Hans grinning, he gestured around the room with his hand and said,  

“These are my four biggest clients, they are very rich men and they have high expectations of you my sweetheart.” 

 “So what exactly am I supposed to do for you?” I asked. 

 “Well your husband is in a lot of financial trouble Anais” he replied. 

“So it’s going to have to be something very special. Why don’t you start by taking that pretty dress off?” 

Christine appeared behind me. “Let me help you Anais” she whispered into my ear as I felt her reach up and unzip the back of my dress. My dress dropped to the floor exposing my white silk underwear and I felt the strangers eyes burning into me, studying every curve of my body my breath quickened and to my shame I felt that special place in between my legs start to grow moist at the thought of what was about to happen. “Now you do me,” Christine commanded, stepping in front of me and pulling her hair up so I could reach the zip of her dress. Quickly she stepped out of her clothing and stood in front of me dressed only in a black bra and panties and sheer black stockings she looked me in the eye proudly as if she could read my mind and knew that I was attracted to her. Christine took my hand and said, “Come over to the Piano my sweet Anais.” Turning to Hans she said:  

“Why don’t you go and get the equipment so we can start the fun.”  

Hans turned and walked out of the room. 

 “Now why don’t you lay down!” said Christine as she helped me up onto the top of the shiny black Grand Piano. The wood felt warm and inviting against my back and as I lay there I could feel the eyes of the businessmen studying me like I was a specimen in a science laboratory. I couldn’t help but get even more excited as I felt them staring between my legs and studying my breasts as I lay helpless. 

The door opened again and in walked Hans in his right hand he held a vacuum cleaner that glistened with chrome “Ok Anais” Christine whispered, “Now the fun can begin!” 

The vacuum cleaner jumped into life as Hans plugged it in and handed it to Christine. 

Christine started to run the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner over me as I closed my eyes I felt it sucking at my arms then along my legs and neck and over my stomach, I felt her delicately move the silk of my bra aside and she started to run whooshing sucking hose over my breasts, opening my eyes again I suddenly realised that I was now surrounded by the strange men, all staring down hungrily at me. I felt a rush of embarrassment redden my face and I bought my hands up in an attempt to cover my exposed breasts, Christine gently moved my hands aside once again saying,  

“Don’t be silly Anais, you have fantastic breasts, let everyone see them!” My resistance melted away at the sound of Christine’s reassuring voice and I closed my eyes once again feeling a wave of pure pleasure roll over me.  

“Now there’s just one more place left to vacuum,” Christine giggled and with that she grasped my panties and pulled them down in one quick movement. I was now completely exposed and Christine moved the hose of the vacuum downwards then softly grasping the inside of my thighs and parting my legs to expose my most private part she inserted the sucking hose between my legs. I started to deflate instantly feeling all of the air being mercilessly sucked from inside of me by the whirring unstoppable machine, the suction was so powerful that it was a little painful at first but as I relaxed the vacuum sucked more and more air out of me until I lay quivering on the Piano, completely deflated and flat. 

Christine flicked the switch of the Vacuum stopping it’s noisy sucking motor and turned to Hans.  

“I think it’s time for you to show our guests out now Hans” she said, “It’s getting late.”  

The room slowly emptied out as the guests filed out of the room, each one congratulating Hans on providing such fantastic entertainment as Hans beamed with pleasure.  

Slowly rising and pulling my underwear and dress back on I sat down on one of the sumptuous Green leather chairs, I poured myself some champagne and noticed that my hands were still shaking as I picked up the glass. 

After a short whole Hans came back into the room. 

“That was excellent Anais,” he said excitedly, “Everyone thought you were amazing” and then glancing at my shaking hands he said, “It looks like you enjoyed it to!” 

I just couldn’t bring myself to admit that I had enjoyed my shameful whorish performance and I dropped my eyes to the floor, not wanting to meet his gaze, Hans put his hand on my knee “Don’t worry Anais” he said “You are doing this for Hugo remember?” 

The door opened again and this time Christine walked in. She had changed into a long fur coat that reached down to her ankles and I could just see a pair of Red high heels and the start of her black stocking poking out from underneath. “It’s time for us to drive you home,” she said. 

Hans and Christine lead me outside and into their garage in which stood a magnificent racing green Bentley.

 “Do you like it?” asked Hans.  

“It’s magnificent.” I replied as I gazed at the polished chrome and the deep green leather that covered the interior.

Hans bent down and grasped one of the black rubber tyres.  

“Oh damn” exclaimed Hans with a grin. “It looks like this tyre is going flat. Christine can you hand me my tyre pump from the shelf?”

Christine walked over to one wall of the garage and started to rummage through the contents of a high shelf that was filled with oil cans and all kinds of car parts eventually she pulled a long T-shaped tube with a large rubber hose attached to it, down from the shelf and handed it to Hans. 

Hans bent over attaching the pump to the tyre and started to inflate the tyre. Sweat formed on his brow as he pumped harder and harder until the tyre was fully inflated. Hans then turned to look at me.  

“There’s just a couple of more things we want you to do for us, Anais.” he smiled I knew instantly exactly what Hans and Christine wanted and without saying another word I pulled a blanket from the floor of the garage and laid down on it spreading my legs open as far as I could and pulling the wet gusset of my panties aside. 

In an instant Hans had placed the rubber tube of the pump between my legs and started to pump as hard and as fast as he could. I felt the rush of air pushing deep into me, expanding me, stretching me. 

I saw Christine reach into the back seat of the Bentley and her hand returned holding a camera.

My first instinct was to try to struggle but the please of being so full and inflated meant that I just couldn’t move and soon I saw the flash of the camera as Christine started to photograph me from every angle. 

“Oh these pictures are going to be priceless,” laughed Christine.  

Just when I felt that I really couldn’t take any more the flashing stopped and Hans reached down between my legs pulling the tube from inside me. I felt myself deflating again as the air rushed out of me.

 “I need to change films” Christine said to Hans “Why don’t you get Anais ready for our final game?” 

Christine skipped out of the room excitedly leaving me alone with Hans. “I want you to roll over and get on your knees, just like a naughty little doggy,” Hans instructed. 

I did as Hans said wondering what else this couple could have in store for me feeling both exhilarated and exhausted but with all of my earlier feeling of embarrassment completely gone. Hans pulled a long rubber tube from off of another shelf.  “This on is going to be a little more extreme,” he said.  But I’m sure you will do just fine, now Anais I want you to pull your panties down and then pull your beautiful round buttocks apart for me”. 

Again I did as Hans instructed without hesitation and as I spread myself open I felt Hans eyes upon me, studying my womanhood. 

I gasped as Hans pushed the rubber of the tube inside of me “Now for the other end.” he said. Hans bent down next to the car and I craned my neck around to try and see what he was doing but I couldn’t. As Hans was doing this Christine walked back in and burst into laughter.  

“Oh Anais what do you look like” she giggled as she inspected me on all fours with my panties pulled down and a large tube protruding from my rear. She bent down next to me and started to snap more pictures of me. 

“I’m ready” Hans called out and I heard a small click from behind me I froze as I realised what was about to happen, 

“No, please” I moaned as I heard the huge engine of the Bentley turn over and then spring into life with a deafening roar.  

“Oh my god” I whispered as I started to feel the hot gases of the car exhaust enter into me, Hans revved the engine over and over again and I began to fill up while Christine ran around the garage taking more and more photographs and almost dancing with glee at the spectacle before her. 

The air inside me was so hot and the car so noisy that I almost felt that I was going to faint and then just when I was on the edge of losing consciousness completely Hans turned off the engine once again leaving me panting and moaning as I once more started to deflate. 

About an hour later I sat in the back of the Bentley with Christine beside me softly stroking my arm, the wind whipped through our hair as Hans drove the car as fast as he could through the narrow countryside roads leading back to Hugo’s house. 

Pulling into the driveway I saw Hugo waiting for me, he gave Hans a look that was full of anger and contempt and took my hand. 

“Are you Ok Anais?” he asked softly. “She was fantastic,” laughed Christine. Before I had a chance to reply Hans said “We will definitely be seeing her again” and with that Hans turned the car around and sped back out of the drive an onto the road the engine roaring like a fighter plane into the distance. 

The rest of the night was a blur, Hugo and I made intense passionate love and as he came inside me I heard the roar of the Bentleys engine and imagined myself filling up with the hot exhaust gases again. I fell asleep in Hugo’s arms.” 

Anais took the last sheet of paper out of the typewriter and laid it on top of the others with a sigh of contentment, looking out of the window at another gloriously sunny spring day, I think today would be a very good day for another bicycle ride she thought to herself, as made her way downstairs to see Hugo again.

---------------------------------------------------

PARIS. OCTOBER 1931 

My cousin Eduardo came to Louveciennes yesterday. We talked for six hours. He reached the conclusion I had come to also: that I need an older mind, a father, a man stronger than me, a lover who will lead me in love, because all the rest is too much a self-created thing. The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself. As we were talking, Eduardo suddenly began to tremble, and he took my hand. He said that I belonged to him from the very beginning; that an obstacle stood between us: his fear of impotence because at first I had aroused ideal love in him. He has suffered from the realization that we are both seeking an experience which we might have given to each other. It has seemed strange to me, too. The men  I have wanted, I couldn't have. But I am determined to have an experience when it comes my way."Sensuality is a secret power in my body," I said to Eduardo. "Someday it will show, healthy and ample. Wait a while."Or is this not the secret of the obstacle between us?—that his type is the large, buxom woman, heavy on the earth, while I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.For a whole week Hugo has come home very late, and I kept cheerful and unconcerned, as I had promised myself. Then on Friday he got worried and said, "Do you realize it is twenty minutes to eight, that I'm very late? Say some­thing about it." And we both burst out laughing. He did not like my indifference.On the other hand, our quarrels, when they come, seem harder and more emotional. Are all our emotions stronger now that we give vent to them? There is a desperation in our reconciliations, a new violence both in anger and in love. The problem of jealousy alone remains. It is the one obstacle to our complete freedom. I cannot even talk of my wish to go to a cabaret where we could dance with profes­sional dancers.

I now call Hugo my "little magnate." He has a new private office the size of a studio. The entire bank building is magnificent and inspiring. I often wait for him in the conference room, where there are murals of New York as seen from an aeroplane, and I feel the power of New York reaching way over here. I do not criticize his work any more because such conflict kills him. We have both accepted the genius-banker as a reality, and the artist as a very vague  possibility. However, psychology, being scientific thinking, has become a successful bridge between his banking and my writing. Such a bridge he can cross without much jolt­ing. It is true, as Hugo says, that I do my thinking and speculation in my journal and that he is only aware of the pain I can cause him when an incident happens. However, I am his journal. He can only think aloud with or through me. So Sunday morning he began to think aloud about the same things I had written in my journal, the need of orgies, of fulfillment in other directions. His need came to him in the middle of his own talk. He was wishing he could go to the Quatz Art Ball. He was just as overwhelmed with sur­prise at himself as I was by the sudden alteration of his expression, the loosening of his mouth, the rising of instincts he had never before entirely brought to the surface. Intellectually I expected this, but I crumbled. I felt an acute conflict between helping him to accept his own nature and preserving our love. While I asked his forgiveness for my weakness I sobbed. He was tender and desperately sorry—made wild promises which I did not accept. When I had exhausted my pain, we went out in the garden.I offered him all kinds of solutions: one, to let me go away to Zurich to study and give him temporary freedom. We fully realized we could not bear to meet our new ex­periences under each other's eyes. Another, to let him live in Paris for a while, and I would stay at Louveciennes and tell Mother he was traveling. All I asked for was time and distance between us to help me face the life we were throw­ing ourselves into.He refused. He said he could not bear my absence just now. We had simply made a mistake; we had progressed  too quickly. We had aroused problems we were not phys­ically able to face. He was worn out, almost ill, and so was I.We want to enjoy our new closeness for a while, live entirely in the present, postpone the other issues. We only ask each other for time to become reasonable again, to accept ourselves and the new conditions.

I asked Eduardo, "Is the desire for orgies one of those experiences one must live through? And once lived, can one pass on, without return of the same desires?""No," he said. "The life of freed instincts is composed of layers. The first layer leads to the second, the second to the third and so on. It leads ultimately to abnormal plea­sures." How Hugo and I could preserve our love in this freeing of the instincts he did not know. Physical experi­ences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and per­versions for pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.All this, Hugo and I knew. Last night when we talked he swore that he desired no one but me. I am in love with him, too, and so we let the issue lie in the background. Yet the menace of those wayward instincts is there, inside of our very love. 

NOVEMBER 

We have never been as happy or as miserable. Our quarrels are portentous, tremendous, violent. We are both wrathful to the point of madness; we desire death. My face is ravaged by tears, the veins on my temple swell. Hugo's mouth trembles. One cry from me brings him suddenly into my arms, sobbing. And then he desires me physically. We cry and kiss and come at the same moment. And the next moment we analyze and talk rationally. It is like the life of the Russians in The Idiot. It is hysteria. In cooler moments I wonder at the extravagance of our feelings. Dullness and peace are forever over.We asked ourselves yesterday, in the middle of a quar­rel, "What is happening to us? We never said such terrible things to each other?" And then Hugo said: "This is our honeymoon, and we are keyed up.""Are you sure?" I asked incredulously."It may not seem like one," he said, laughing, "but it is. We are just overflowing with feelings. We can't keep our balance. "A seven-year-late, mature honeymoon, full of the fear of life. In between our quarrels we are acutely happy. Hell and heaven all at once. We are at once free and enslaved.At times it seems as if we know that the only tie which can bind us together now is one of white-heat living, the same kind of intensity one finds in lovers and mistresses. We have unconsciously created a highly effervescent rela­tionship within the security and peace of marriage. We are widening the circle of our sorrows and pleasures within the circle of our home and our two selves. It is our defense against the intruder, the unknown. 

DECEMBER 

I've met Henry Miller.He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult on the contract for my D. H. Lawrence book. When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.In the middle of lunch, when we were seriously dis­cussing books, and Richard had sailed off on a long tirade, Henry began to laugh. He said, "I'm not laughing at you, Richard, but I just can't help myself. I don't care a bit, not a bit who's right. I'm too happy. I'm just so happy right this moment with all the colors around me, the wine. The whole moment is so wonderful, so wonderful." He was laughing almost to tears. He was drunk. I was drunk, too, quite. I felt warm and dizzy and happy.We talked for hours. Henry said the truest and deepest things, and he has a way of saying "hmmm" while trailing off on his own introspective journey.Before I met Henry I was intent on my D. H. Lawrence book. It is being published by Edward Titus, and I am working with his assistant, Lawrence Drake."Where are you from?" he asks me at our first meeting. "I'm half Spanish, half French. But I was raised in America.""You've certainly survived the transplantation." He appears to be sneering as he talks. But I know better.He takes up the work with tremendous enthusiasm and speed. I'm grateful. He calls me a romantic. I get angry. "I'm sick of my own romanticism!"He has an interesting head—vivid, strong accents of black eyes, black hair, olive skin, sensual nostrils and mouth  a good profile. He looks like a Spaniard, but he is Jewish—Russian, he tells me. He is puzzling to me. He looks raw, easily hurt. I talk warily.When he takes me to his place to go over the proofs, he tells me I interest him. I can't see why—he seems to have had a lot of experience; why does he bother about a beginner? We talk, fencingly. We work., not so very well. I don't trust him. When he says nice things to me, I think he is playing on my inexperience. When he puts his arms around me, I think he is amusing himself with an overin­tense and ridiculous little woman. When he gets more in­tense, I turn my face away from the new experience of his mustache. My hands are cold and moist. I tell him frankly, "You shouldn't flirt with a woman who doesn't know how to flirt."It amuses him, my seriousness. He says, "Perhaps you are the kind of woman who doesn't hurt a man." He has been humiliated. When he thinks I have said, "You annoy me," he jumps away as if I had bitten him.

I don't say that sort of thing. He is very impetuous, very strong, but he doesn't annoy me. I answer his fourth or fifth kiss. I begin to feel drunk. So I get up and say incoherently, "I'm going now—for me it can't be without love." He teases me. He bites my ears and kisses me, and I like his fierceness. He throws me on the couch for a moment, but somehow I escape. I am aware of his desire. I like his mouth and the knowing force of his arms, but his desire frightens me, repulses me. I think, it's because I don't love him. He's stirred me but I don't love him, I don't want him. As soon as I know this (his desire, pointing at me, is like a sword between us), I free myself, and I leave, without hurting him in any way.  I think, well, I just wanted the pleasure without feeling. But something holds me back. There is in me something untouched, unstirred, which commands me. That will have to be moved if I am to move wholly. I think of this in the Métro, and I get lost.A few days later I met Henry. I was waiting to meet him, as if that would solve something., and it did. When I saw him, I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was not afraid.Then I read Drake's novel, and I discover an unsus­pected Drake foreign, uprooted, fantastic, erratic. A real­ist, exasperated by reality.

Immediately his desire ceases to repulse me. A little link has been formed between two strangenesses. I respond to his imagination with mine. His novel conceals a few of his own feelings. How do I know? They are not consistent with the story, not quite. They are there because they are natural to him. The name Lawrence Drake is put on, too.There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work. I wondered at this last night as I closed Drake's book. I knew it would take me years to forget John [Erskine], because it was he who first stirred the secret source of my life.There is nothing of Drake himself in the book, I am convinced. He hates the parts I like. It was all written ob­jectively, consciously, and even the fantasy was carefully planned. We settle this at the beginning of my next visit. Very good. I am beginning to see things more clearly. I know now why I did not trust him the first day. His actions are devoid of either feeling or imagination. They are motivated by sheer habits of living and grabbing and analyz­ing. He's a grasshopper. He has now hopped into my life. My feeling of dislike becomes intensified. When he tries to kiss me, I evade him.At the same time I concede to myself that he knows the technique of kissing better than anyone I've met. His gestures never miss their aim, no kiss ever goes astray. His hands are deft. My curiosity for sensuality is stirred. I have always been tempted by unknown pleasures. He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away. Finally I lie still on the couch, but when his desire grows, I try to escape. Too late. Then I tell him the truth: woman's trouble. That does not seem to deter him. "You don't think I want that mechanical way—there are other ways." He sits up and uncovers his penis. I don't understand what he wants. He makes me get down on my knees. He offers it to my mouth. I get up as if struck by a whip.He is furious. I say to him, "I told you we have different ways of doing things. I warned you I was inexperienced." "I never believed it. I don't yet believe it. You can't be, with your sophisticated face and your passionateness. You're playing a trick on me."I listen to him; the analyst in me is uppermost, still on the job. He pours out stories to show me that I don't ap­preciate what other women do.In my head I answer, "You don't know what sensuality is. Hugo and I do. It's in us, not in your devious practices; it's in feeling, in passion, in love."He goes on talking. I watch him with my "sophisticated face." He does not hate me because, however repulsed, however angry I am, I have a facility for forgiveness. When I see that I have let him be aroused, it seems natural to let him release his desire between my legs.

I just let him, out of pity. That, he senses. Other women, he says, would have insulted him. He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.I owed him that; he had revealed a new world to me. I had understood for the first time the abnormal experiences Eduardo had warned me against. Exoticism and sensuality now had another meaning for me.Nothing was spared my eyes, so that I might always remember: Drake looking down at his wet handkerchief, offering me a towel, heating water on the gas stove.I tell Hugo the story partially, leaving out my activity, extracting the meaning for him and for me. As something forever finished, he accepts it. We efface an hour by pas­sionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms, lulled by our love, by tenderness—sensuality in which the whole being can participate.Henry has imagination, an animal feeling for life, the greatest power of expression, and the truest genius I have ever known. "Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.Hugo admires him. At the same time he worries. He says justly, "You fall in love with people's minds. I'm going to lose you to Henry.""No, no, you won't lose me." I know how incendiary my imagination is. I am already devoted to Henry's work, but I separate my body from my mind. I enjoy his strength, his ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength. I could write a book this minute about his genius. Almost every other word he utters causes an electric charge: on Bunuel's  Age d'Or, on Salavin, on Waldo Frank, on Proust, on the film Blue Angel, on people, on animalism, on Paris, on French prostitutes, on American women, on America. He is even walking ahead of Joyce. He repudiates form. He writes as we think, on various levels at once, with seeming irrelevance, seeming chaos.I have finished my new book, minus polishing. Hugo read it Sunday and was transported. It is surrealistic, lyrical. Henry says I write like a man, with tremendous clearness and conciseness. He was surprised by my book on Law­rence, although he does not like Lawrence. "So intelligent a book." It is enough. He knows I have outgrown Lawrence.

I have already another book in my head.I have transposed Drake's sexuality into another kind of interest. Men need other things besides a sexual recipient. They have to be soothed, lulled, understood, helped, en­couraged, and listened to. By doing all of this tenderly and warmly—well, he lit his pipe and let me alone. I watched him as if he were a bull.Besides, being intelligent, he understands that my type can't be "made" without the illusion. He cannot bother with illusions. O.K. He is a little angry, but ... he'll make a story of it. He is amused because I tell him I know he doesn't love me. He thought I might really be childish enough to believe that he did. "Bright kid," he says. And he tells me all his troubles. Again the question: Do we want parties, orgies? Hugo says definitely no. He won't take chances. It would be forc­ing our temperament. We don't enjoy parties, we don't enjoy drinking, we don't envy Henry his life. But I protest:  One doesn't do those things lucidly, one gets drunk. Hugo doesn't want to get drunk. Neither do I. Anyway, we won't go and seek the whore or the man. If she or he comes our way, inevitably, then we'll live out what we want. Meanwhile we live satisfied with our less intense life, because, of course, the intensity has died down—after the quickening of Hugo's passion because of my entanglement with John. He has also been jealous of Henry and of Drakehe was miserable but I have reassured him. He sees that I am wiser, that in fact I never again intend to run into a blank wall.I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.

I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman. Such a separation may seem childish, but it is possible. Subtract the overintensity, the sizzling of ideas, and you get a woman who loves per­fection. And faithfulness is one of the perfections. It seems stupid and unintelligent to me now because I have bigger plans in mind. Perfection is static, and I am in full progress. The faithful wife is only one phase, one moment, one meta­morphosis, one condition.I might have found a husband who loved me less ex­clusively, but it would not be Hugo, and whatever is Hugo, whatever Hugo is composed of, I love. We deal in different values. For his faithfulness, I give him my imagination—even my talent, if you will. I have never been satisfied with our accounts. But they must stand.He will come home tonight and I will watch him. Finer than any man I know, the nearly perfect man. Touchingly perfect.  The hours I have spent in cafés are the only ones I call living, apart from writing. My resentment grows because of the stupidity of Hugo's bank life. When I go home, I know I go back to the banker. He smells of it. I abhor it. Poor Hugo.Everything is made right by a talk with Henry all afternoon—that mixture of intellect and emotionalism which I like. He can be swept away completely. We talked without noticing the time until Hugo came home, and we had dinner together. Henry remarked on the green fat-bellied bottle of wine and the hissing of the slightly damp log in the fire.He thinks I must know about life because I posed for painters. The extent of my innocence would be incredible to him. How late I have awakened and with what furor! What does it matter what Henry thinks of me? He'll know soon enough exactly what I am. He has a caricatural mind. I'll see myself in caricature.Hugo says rightly that it takes great hate to make a caricature. Henry and my friend Natasha [Troubetskoi] have great hates. I do not. Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it.

I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am more preoccupied with loving.I am absorbed by Henry, who is uncertain, self-critical, sincere. I get a tremendous and selfish pleasure out of our gift of money to him. What do I think of when I sit by the fire? To get a bunch of railroad tickets for Henry; to buy him Albertine disparue. Henry wants to read Albertine dis­parue? Quick, I won't be happy until he has the book. I am an ass. Nobody likes to have these things done for them, nobody but Eduardo, and even he, in certain moods, prefers utter indifference. I would like to give Henry a home, mar­velous food, an income. If I were rich, I would not be rich very long.Drake no longer interests me in the least. I was relieved he did not come today. Henry interests me, but not phys­ically. Is it possible I might at last be satisfied with Hugo? It hurt me when he left for Holland today. I felt old, de­tached.A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry's wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth.Years ago, when I tried to imagine a true beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth.Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness.

Her role in life alone preoccupies her. I knew the rea­sons: her beauty brings dramas and events to her. Ideas mean little. I saw in her a caricature of the theatrical and dramatic personage. Costume., attitudes, talk. She is a su­perb actress. No more. I could not grasp her core. Every­thing Henry had said about her was true.By the end of the evening I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body, which promised so much, and I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves.  June. At night I dreamed of her, as if she were very small, very frail, and I loved her. I loved a smallness which had appeared to me in her talk: the disproportionate pride, a hurt pride. She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself. There is no June Mansfield. She knows it. The more she is loved, the more she knows it. She knows there is a very beautiful woman who took her cue last night from my inexperience and tried to lose her depth of knowledge.A startlingly white face retreating into the darkness of the garden. She poses for me as she leaves. I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, "You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same mad­ness, the same stage."The only power which keeps you together is your love for Henry, and for that, you love him. He hurts you, but he keeps your body and soul together. He integrates you. He lashes and whips you into occasional wholeness. I have Hugo."I wanted to see her again. I thought Hugo would love her. It seemed so natural to me that everybody should love her. I talked to Hugo about her. I felt no jealousy.When she came out of the dark again, she seemed even more beautiful to me than before. Also she seemed more sincere. I said to myself, "People are always more sincere with Hugo." I also thought it was because she was more at ease. I could not tell what Hugo was thinking. She was going upstairs to our bedroom to leave her coat. She stood for a second halfway up the stairs where the light set her off against the turquoise green wall.

Blond hair, pallid face, demoniac peaked eyebrows, a cruel smile with a disarming dimple. Perfidious, infinitely desirable, drawing me to her as towards death.Downstairs, Henry and June formed an alliance. They were telling us about their quarrels, breakdowns, wars against each other. Hugo, who is uneasy in the presence of emotions, tried to laugh off the jagged corners, to smooth out the discord, the ugly, the fearful, to lighten their confidences. Like a Frenchman, suave and reasonable, he dissolved all possibility of drama. There might have been a fierce, in­human, horrible scene between June and Henry, but Hugo kept us from knowing.Afterwards I pointed out to him how he had prevented all of us from living, how he had caused a living moment to pass him by. I was ashamed of his optimism, his trying to smooth things out. He understood. He promised to re­member. Without me he would be entirely shut out by his habit of conventionality.We had a cheerful dinner together. Henry and June were both famished. Then we went to the Grand Guignol. In the car June and I sat together and talked in accord."When Henry described you to me," she said, "he left out the most important parts. He did not get you at all." She knew that immediately; she and I had understood each other, every detail and nuance of each other.In the theatre. How difficult to notice Henry while she sits resplendent with a masklike face. Intermission. She and I want to smoke, Henry and Hugo don't. Walking out to­gether, what a stir we create. I say to her, "You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination." She answers, "It is a good thing that I am going away. You would soon unmask me. I am powerless before a woman. I do not know how to deal with a woman."Is she telling the truth? No. In the car she had been telling me about her friend Jean., the sculptress and poetess. "Jean had the most beautiful face," and then she adds hastily, "I am not speaking of an ordinary woman. Jean's face, her beauty was more like that of a man." She stops. "Jean's hands were so very lovely, so very supple because she had handled clay a lot. The fingers tapered." What anger stirs in me at June's praise of Jean's hands? Jealousy? And her insistence that her life has been full of men, that she does not know how to act before a woman. Liar!

She says, staring intently, "I thought your eyes were blue. They are strange and beautiful, gray and gold, with those long black lashes. You are the most graceful woman I have ever seen. You glide when you walk." We talk about the colors we love. She always wears black and purple.We return to our seats. She turns constantly to me instead of to Hugo. Coming out of the theatre I take her arm. Then she slips her hand over mine; we lock them. She says, "The other night at Montparnasse I was hurt to hear your name mentioned. I don't want to see cheap men crawl into your life. I feel rather ... protective."In the café I see ashes under the skin of her face. Disintegration. What terrible anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her. She is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, somber beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength.I do not make any sense out of her words. I am fas­cinated by her eyes and month., her discolored mouth, badly rouged. Does she know I feel immobile and fixed, lost in her?She shivers with cold under her light velvet cape. "Will you have lunch with me before you leave?" I ask.She is glad to be leaving. Henry loves her imperfectly and brutally. He has hurt her pride by desiring her opposite: ugly, common, passive women. He cannot endure her pos­itivism, her strength. I hate Henry now, heartily. I hate men who are afraid of women's strength. Probably Jean loved her strength, her destructive power. For June is destruction.My strength, as Hugo tells me later when I discover he hates June, is soft, indirect, delicate, insinuating, creative, tender, womanly. Hers is like that of a man. Hugo tells me she has a mannish neck, a mannish voice, and coarse hands. Don't I see? No, I do not see, or if I see, I don't care. Hugo admits he is jealous. From the very first minute they hated each other."Does she think that with her woman's sensibility and subtlety she can love anything in you that I have not loved?"It is true.

Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration.I hate Henry for daring to injure her enormous and shallow pride in herself. June's superiority arouses his hatred, even a feeling of revenge. He eyes my gentle, homely maid, Emilia. His offense makes me love June.  I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hes­itation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain.

House of Incest

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.

- Anais Nin, House of Incest

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House of Incest

I imagine this: My Father has taken me up to the attic room to spank me. He takes my pants off. He begins to hit me with the palm of his hand. I feel his hand on me. But he stops hitting me and he caresses me. Then he sticks his penis into me. Oh, I enjoy it. I enjoy it. In and out, in and out, with ass exposed, my pants down, he takes me from behind. But my mother is coming up the stairs. We have no time. I clutch at him, suck him in, palpitating. Oh, oh, my mother is coming up the stairs. My Father's hands are on my ass—hot—I'm wet—I'm eager, eager. Open, close, open, close. I must feel him all before she comes. I must shoot quickly—stab, once, twice—and I have a violent orgasm.

- Anais Nin, House of Incest

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Monday, March 15, 2010

I hate you UNKNOWN caller!!!

Salaams!So I'm being annoyed by an UNKNOWN! I'd been getting these calls from UNKNOWN sometime back, but they were not frequent and i was too busy to worry about them. Then they recently started again! I got two of them recently, both at late night! that bugged me most! One of them was really late at like 1.45amSo it made me think this person who's doing it is upto no good! I hate creeps! And stalkers! Whats unsettling is that there is no number displaying on my screen, just a word UNKNOWN flashing. And it doesn't even get registered in my Call Log! So i really have no proof of it that way...So, i was wondering..What can I do about it.. I'm not going to change my number for the fourth time cuz of some fool.Well, what i thought last night was that I'd download that scary voice from Lord of the Rings, when Smeagal's alter-ego goes like, "Smeaaaaagal" in his raspy voice and then quickly play that sound on my phone as i answer the unknown call! haha..

If it's late at night, the person on the other side would really really freak out!! Hee hee. Inshallah, that'd thrown him off the edge!Or or or...I could record a verse of the Qur'an in a really thick voice..something like, "And Allah's curse is on the Unjust...." or some verse about Hell fire and play it immediately as i answer the call! hee hee thats could also work in scaring him away!But I'm smart! that last two times since i answered the call, i didn't speak at all! I was completely silent, and so was the other side! So even if it is a sad sick stalker, he will NOT have the privilege of listening to my voice!! Grrrr...But, seriously..Is there something i could really do to find out who is it who's doing it??

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Amena's Blog

Day 1

Another Monday morning, everything for the week is prepared so hopefully it will be nice and calm with lots of family time.

The weekend was really great, although a couple of odd things happened. We went to the park with the kids and ate a picnic outside on the grass; it's so great to do that in the summer isn't it? Anyway, as we were walking I kept imagining that the other people in the park were looking at us or even talking about us as we passed them. At one point two old businessmen in grey suits passed us and I was almost sure that one of them whispered my name to the other and they started to laugh. I thought at first that they might be friends from work, of my husband, but he told me that he doesn't know who they are and has never seen them before.

I suppose that I'm just being silly. Maybe it's my Mothering instinct kicking in and turning me into a mother grizzly bear wanting to protect my little cubs and making me imagine things, paranoia!!

Anyhow, time to feed the babies and clean up all of the damn mess that the house gets into after the weekends, as usual.

Comment from Annie:

"Sounds like you had a good weekend, mine was super boring. I think it's natural to get protective like that with new babies, nothing to worry about I'm sure.."

Comment from Vejaay:

"I bet you're just tired from being a new mum, need to relax.."

Day 2

Tuesday, I've had an idea for a new style of scarf. This one would cover a little bit more of my face than usual. As you all know I don't often like to have a lot of my face covered. But lately I've felt more like it. I've definitely been feeling like I want a bit more privacy. I think that it's because I'm still thinking about what happened at the weekend.

Anyway this scarf won't cover everything. Maybe just a little more of the bottom of my face. I think I'll work a bit more on the design today and maybe even try and get some photographs of me wearing it to share with you guys.

Comment from Sarah:

"Can't wait to see the new scarf design, I love everything you make !!!"

Comment from Anonymous:

"You shouldn't cover your face! Your much to beautiful for that."

reply to comment by Amena:

"Please don't make comments like this on my blog, I have a husband and children."

Tuesday evening:

"Back again, I know I don't usually update twice in one day but something strange just happened and I needed to tell you all about it and ask you all what you think I should do."

I've mentioned before that my husband is a very powerful businessman and so that means that he has to be away from home a lot either visiting his clients or going to meetings and conferences. So that means that I'm home alone a lot just me and the babies, like I am at the moment.

Anyway as I mentioned earlier I wanted to work on my new scarf design today (It's going great by the way, can't wait for you all to see it!) I was just doing some sketches in my big A3 notebook when the phone rang. When I answered the phone however there was no one on the other end. I thought I might have heard someone breathing quietly in the background, but that might have just been my imagination. Then about an hour later the phone rang again, this time when I picked it up instead of silence there was a really strange sound like pffftttjjjjj. It almost sounded like a car tyre or something like that being deflated, then I could have sworn that I heard the sound of muffled laughter in the background.

I don't know what to do, it's probably just stupid teenagers but honestly the calls combined with what happened at the weekend (read my Monday blog if you want to know about that) have really scared me. I don't want to call my husband as I know he's so busy at a conference and his phone will probably be turned off anyway.

I don't want to be in the house alone at the moment though.

Comment from Annie:

"Amena darling, call the police if your really scared. I hate to think of you all alone there not knowing what to do, You never know what kind of weirdos there could be out there, better to be safe than sorry."

Thursday

I didn't post yesterday, too busy sewing and designing.

The scarf is finished and I have the pictures for you, but now I don't want to post them. The strange phone calls have continued. In fact I got 5 yesterday so it's getting a bit out of hand and I'm finding it hard to concentrate on my work through it. The first one woke me up at 7am. I was so sure that it was going to be my husband that I picked it up and said "Hello darling it's so great to hear from you.." but I soon realised that it wasn't him. Then that strange sound came again pffftttjjj followed by complete silence. I was so angry and upset that I slammed the phone down and wouldn't answer it again all day, but it just kept ringing and ringing almost driving me mad.

I’ve also noticed something else strange. I logged into my Youtube account yesterday to see how my videos were doing and one of my videos has suddenly jumped 1000 hits in one day. How could that happen? I don't understand what’s happening at all as none of my videos have ever had that many views. That combined with the phone calls is making everything very stressful.

The good news is that my husband has a break from his conference tomorrow so he will be hoe with me and maybe we can work out what's happening together.

Saturday:

This is going to be a bit of a long blog today, but so much has happened in the last couple of days that it's going to take time to sort it all out in my head and tell you about it. Some of it is just going to sound crazy and maybe you won't even believe me.

It's a beautiful Saturday and I should be outside with my children, but I need to get all of this off of my chest before I go crazy.

So my husband took a break from the conference that he has been attending for the whole week yesterday and came to spend Friday and the weekend at home. I was just so happy to see him after all of the drama of the week before and I hugged him so hard when he came through the door that I thought I was going to crush the poor guy.

I could tell something was wrong as soon as he came in, he is usually so carefree and happy, but that night there was something in his face that told me something was wrong. He seemed distracted and upset but I put it down to him just being tired and exhausted from working so much.

I cooked dinner. I had prepared something really special that I will tell you all about later if I get the time. I so wanted to tell him about the phone calls and things from the days before but watching him just pick at his food I knew this wasn't the right time so I held back. Finally he told me that he had something to talk about. Well I'm sure you can imagine what I was thinking; does he want a divorce, or maybe is he getting fired from work?

I think I'm babbling now so I just need to write out what he said, here it is.

My husband was on a break in-between meetings and was sitting at the bar of the Hotel (his conference at the moment is one of the big hotels in the city) when his boss came up to him, His boss is such a nasty ignorant old man, the few times he has been here in the past for dinner we was so rude and I think that he knows that I don't like him, even though I tried my best to smile and laugh at all of his terrible horrible jokes.

So my husbands boss pulls a chair up next to his at the bar and then completely casually, without a word he puts his hand into his pocket and pulls out a picture of me. It was one of the photographs from this very blog that he had printed on some office paper. The paper was crumpled and dirty, like it had been in his pocket or somewhere for a very long time. My husband was surprised as you can imagine, but his surprise turned into shock as his boss said to him.."You know I've always liked your wife don't you? In fact I like her so much that I keep this picture of her with me." My husband didn't know what to say or think so he just stared at him with anger in his eyes. Then the next second Karl (that's my husband boss's name) unzipped his fly and announced in a loud voice, "I like her so much that I keep her right here.." and with that he crumpled up my picture and stuffed it down into his trousers. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that my husband was furious and several of his work colleagues had to hold him back from hitting Karl. In a way I would have loved it if he had hit him, but we just can't afford for him to lose his job at the moment with the two babies and everything.

I'm sure you all can imagine how I felt when my husband told me all this I was so angry and upset, but that isn't where the story ends if you can believe it. It gets worse! I need to eat something, as typing this out has made me feel a little bit weak, so I will finish this later on..

Comment from Amra:

"Oh my god Amena. I can't believe this, is it true? I'm so upset for you, how could this happen?"

Saturday evening.

I had some lunch and spent some time with the kids, they always help me to feel better with their silliness.

I promised you all the rest of the story that I began earlier, although I'm finding it pretty hard to write down without getting upset again.

So after what happened in the bar my husband was pretty upset but as you can understand he still had to continue with his meetings and the rest of the conference. You must understand that it's not only his job at stake but the money of all of his clients.

The next meeting that my husband had was in the big conference hall of the hotel. It was some kind of presentation on how the company is doing. The type where they show lots of graphs and things on a big screen and some boring guy reads out lots of numbers and projections. My husband didn't want to see or talk to anyone after the incident earlier so he came in late, about 10 minutes after the meeting started and quietly took a seat right at the back of the hall. As soon as my husband took his seat the person on stage (one of my husbands colleagues) stopped the report that he was giving and with a big smile said "Ahhh I see that our main guest has finally arrived." he looked directly at my husband and asked "What took you so long?" The whole conference hall turned round to look at my husband. "Now" said the speaker, "if you will all reach under your seats you will find the real presentation for this meeting." Everyone noisily reached down including my husband and what he found under there was unbelievable. It was a full booklet filled with pictures of me all of the pictures taken from my blog with my phone number scrawled on the bottom of every page. The whole hall began to laugh, except my husband of course.

"You will notice" said the guy on stage, "that we have helpfully included a phone number for you, your tas