Anais Nin: The Lie Box at The Forge
The Ismena Collective will be presenting Anais Nin: The Lie Box at The Forge on November the 23rd. Mayda Narvey, creator of the show, gives us a quick look into the background of this intriguing character:
The diarist and novelist, Anaïs Nin was fascinated by music and fascinated by lies. She led a complicated life involving many transgressions and even managed to find herself married to two men at the same time.
Her father, a Cuban-Spanish composer and pianist was her first love and it was his abandonment of the family and her subsequent complicated relationship with him that engendered both her passion for music and her passion for lies.
Nin wrote constantly about lies:
'When I talk, I feel that I lie imperceptibly in order to cover myself. I put on costumes. I hate to expose myself truly…. The truth is I only face human beings in fragments… I always find the mensonge vital necessary — the one lie which separates me from each person.'
'I have a sense of all that I leave out – the lacunae, especially the dreams, the hallucinations. Also the lies are left out, a desperate necessity to embellish. So I do not write them down. The journal is therefore a lie.'
In fact, she reworked and rewrote her diaries constantly until they became well-honed works of fiction. In the words of her composer brother, Joaquin Nin-Culmell, in his introduction to her childhood diaries, 'Linotte': 'Later she reinterpreted many events, many situations, many impressions. Linotte may seem to contradict these later interpretations, but I do not feel that this is so. After all, reality is many layered. We peel off one layer only to discover that the process must be repeated. It is evident from the very beginning that Anais's heart went out to the intuitive, to the poetic, to the magic of subjectivity.'
It is fascinating to reflect upon this uneasy relationship between truth and fiction, between reality and lies.
It is equally fascinating to ponder Nin's relationship to music which seemed to embody for her both her sensuality and her creativity:
'Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.'
'When he was five years old, my brother Joaquin, a spirited and restless child no one could tame, would spend hours absolutely still on the staircase of our home in Brussels, listening to the musicians rehearsing. That was the sign of his vocation. We both listened. I can still hear the lines o
f Bach which were most often repeated. Joaquin became a musician and in me music was channeled into writing.'
For more information about the theatre company, you can visit their website here and you can book seats for the performance here.