We need a kind of talk between strangers that drops the veil of strangeness and leads to intimacy. James Joyce and Anais Nin call this special type of conversation of “furrawn.” We need spaces to have conversations that enhance the human spirit. Spaces that let us know our suffering isn’t special but universal. Our conversations are filled with screaming matches between partners. The regurgitation of Victorian ideals about the role of men and women. The hyper-importance of money and wealth. However, our conversations will release us from these debilitating ideals. But we need spaces, outside the internet, devoted to vulnerability, honesty, and release. Anais Nin speaks on artistry as the key to all furrawns.
Through other people we encounter ourselves, and everything we conceal is revealed through meeting other people. The people we love, envy, and hate are reflections of us. This revelation only comes through conversation. Only when we remove the mask of strangers can we see the universality in our experience. Anais Nin teaches us to see everyone as a reflection of ourselves. She tells is to embrace our totality, and dive into ourselves. Furrawns are means to reshape our spirit, and provide us with the courage to move when anxiety paralyses. Speaking on love, intimacy, and the secret of a full life–Anais Nin On Artistry says:
Understanding Is Love. Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all! You haven’t loved yet. You’ve only been trying to love, beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am.
In order to discover more about ourselves we must ask questions to lovers, our friends, and, most importantly, ourselves. We become whole through the steps we take to reach these revelations, and through much strength and patience to overcome and move through our anxiety and shame we recognize the purpose of our lives. Internal revelation and community expression is the role of the artist, and every artist must accept that people are using them as a springboard for their own possibilities. Our healing is simultaneously for us and other people. As we “become” people heal. Anais Nin On Artistry speaks on the the artist being a representative for the people, and focusing on the individual.
The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty. Every individual is representative of the whole, a symptom, and should be intimately understood.
There is an opacity in individual relationships, and an insistence that the writer make the relation of the particular to the whole which makes for a kind of farsightedness. I believe in just the opposite. Every individual is representative of the whole, a symptom, and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.
Also, this indifference to the individual, total lack of interest in intimate knowledge of the isolated, unique human being, atrophies human reactions and humanism. Too much social consciousness and not a bit of insight into human beings.
Anaïs Nin on Artistry speaks with warmth and urgency on those themes which have always been closest to her: relationships, creativity, the struggle for wholeness, the unveiling of woman, the artist as magician, women reconstructing the world, moving from the dream outward, and experiencing our lives to the fullest possible extent. Continue reading about creativity by reading the opinions of Brewster Ghiselin.
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