“Passion and violence never opened a human being.”
”What opens human beings?”
”Compassion.”
Henry laughed. “Compassion and June are absolutely incompatible. Absolutely absurd. As well have compassion for Venus, for the moon, for a statue, for a queen, a tigress.”
”Strange irony, in Spanish, compassion means with passion. Your passion is without compassion. Compassion is the only key I ever found which fits everyone.”
”And what would you say aroused your compassion for June?”
”The need to be loved...”
”You mean faithlessness...”
”Oh, no. Don Juan was seeking in passion, in the act of passion, in the welding of bodies, something that had nothing to do with passion and was never born of it.”
”A Narcissus pool.”
”No, he was seeking to be created, to be born, to be warmed into existence, to be imagined, to be known, to be identified; he was seeking a procreative miracle. The first birth is often a failure. He was seeking the love which would succeed. Passion cannot achieve this because it is not concerned with the true identity of the lover. Only love seeks to know and to create or rescue the loved one.”
”And why week that from me?” said Henry. “I don’t even care to feed a stray cat. Anybody who goes about dispensing compassion as you do will be followed by a thousand cripples, nothing more. I say, let them die.”
”You asked for a key to June, Henry.”
”You also think of June as a human being in trouble?”
This is the kind of image Henry will not pursue. It must be returned quickly to the bottle of wine, like an escaped genie that an only cause trouble. Henry wants pleasure. Drink the wine, empty the bottle, return to it these images of tenderness, recork it, throw it out to sea. Worse luck, it would surely be me who would spot it as a distress signal, pick it up lovingly, and read into it a request for compassion.”
— p.52-53
The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One (1931-1934)
I don’t travel with a camera. (I usually travel with a man who travels with a camera that’s as much a part of him as his clothes are.) Instead, I try to take pictures with my mind. Images are essential to writing (see also Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium). They can be instigators to stories: mental pictures get a story going before words take over. During the last six days in Fez, Morocco, I took no photographs, but tried to brand images from the trip onto my mind. Here are some (and their extra words):
Lots of cats, lamb carcasses hanging from meat hooks, live chickens hang upside down ready for slaughter, a camel head, its tongue out, a rivulet of blood, the tang of raw meat mixes with meat frying in heavy spices, glassy eyed fish silver in the late-winter light: all these animals hulk at the beginning of the medieval medina. On the hill of the Merenid Tombs, the hides of sheep and cows dry in the North African sun. The red ones look like poppies from a distance, and the white ones, like live sheep.
The animals hulking on the other end of Tala ‘A Kbira are also a mix between alive and dead. At the tanneries the men first soak the sheep and cow hides in pigeon poop that is the periwinkle of the dome of St. Peter’s. Beyond, the pits like mini craters are filled with chestnut brown. Men lower themselves halfway in, pull out hides now dyed chestnut brown. Their work the entertainment of the tourists gaping from the balconies above, including me. The donkeys carry the hides out to the hill to dry. Then the donkeys graze with the sheep, and it won’t be long—the live sheep will be dead soon and the donkeys burdened under their weight. Outside the tanneries, there’s a severed sheep leg.
There is a nearness to the cycles of animals and land. Old men and women sitting on the ground of the dusty medina selling coriander and mint. The freshness of the herbs wafts through the medina’s narrow streets. Lost quickly in the constant shuffle of people. Men in long Berber robes and pointed hats, women in long, more elaborate and colorful kaftans with their pajamas on underneath and their house slippers. The roads of the medina fade to shadow, are struck with light, are covered with latticed woodwork. The smells change as quickly: coriander, honeyed sweets, onion bread, cumin, paprika, donkey poop, boiling snails. The tightly packed medina gives way to the inner sanctum of the mosques—tiled brilliant greens, reds, blues—barely seen.
Escaping onto the terrace and into the sun, I think I see Fez across its skyline of minarets and satellite dishes. While down in the streets, there is only the dropping into its currents.
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father's father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
--just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
