Anaïs Philosophy

"And you can be Henry Miller and I'll be Anaïs Nin,
except this time will be even better
we'll stay together in the end..."

–Jewel

Anaïs Nin, courtesy of Wikipedia

One of my favorite authors is Anaïs* Nin, the famed diarist and writer of erotica. While her erotica is beautiful –rare, because it is eroticism with a genuine woman's point of view, rather than a woman writing erotica with a traditional male voice—I prefer her diaries and letters. Every now and then through the years I pick up one of the volumes of her diary, both edited and unexpurgated, open it to a random page, and let her guide me through the streets of pre-WWII Paris.

As a hybrid pragmatist and dreamer I have to take Nin's writing with a grain of salt. She was known for her surrealism, her symbolism, her exploring of the creative aspect of neuroses. She identified strongly with her zodiac sign Pisces, which is the sign of the subconsciousness, water, and dreaming. I am a Virgo, her exact opposite on the celestial wheel, and indeed there were times when I was angry with Nin for her dreaming and fantasies. Yet, as she lived longer in Paris she began to understand that the world cannot be run by idealism and good intentions alone:

"Gonzalo, I hate injustice. I am in sympathy with your Marxism because it is idealistic. I can die for any faith which is idealistic. But now the Russian Revolution is split, corrupt, divided. The organization of the world is a task for realists. The poet and the workman will always be the victims of power and self-interest. No world will ever be run by an idealistic team because by the time it begins to function it ceases to be unselfish. When the Caltholic Church became a force, a power, an organization, it ceased to be a religion. The realist, the man of power and greed, always conquers over the humanist. Greed wins out. The world will always be ruled by the materialist." –October, 1936

Nin eloquently puts to words my own point of view. The world will never be run by good people with good intentions, true equality and open humanity. However, though the world will be ruled by pragmatists and people with a material bent and need for gain, there must also always be others who do operate from humanity's point of view. There must be those who still try, against the set odds, to make the world more artistic, compassionate, humanitarian, who try to bring to the world the things that take us beyond mere function and the need to eat, sleep, work for a living.

This is why it alarms me when I hear of schools cutting the arts for the sake of keeping sports. Though sports are valuable they are only part of the equation that takes us beyond the survival aspect of being human.

Arts are the expression, the emotion, the communication of a society. Sports are more basic, reflecting on the struggle-survival, the need to travel in packs for success of the whole. They are both needed, equally valuable. The reason why schools cut arts is because they are not nearly as lucrative as atheletics, with its banners and pennants and tickets to weekly games. Once again, this part of society, this small segment representing the whole, reflects Nin's belief that the materialist and the pragmatist will conquer, while the artists and the dreamers must struggle for balance.

*pronounced Anna-eese