Now reality has won and penetrated my interior.


― Bruno Schulz in a letter to Roma Halpern, October 29, 1938

I think she was mistaken when she said I was torturing myself. I think that she interpreted me fragmentarily, which is worse than not to interpret at all.

Following my pact with the mountain – once I could move easily in the most forbidding places – I proposed to myself an agreement with the animals: horses, goats, birds. This was accomplished through the skin, by means of a sort of “touch” language. I could draw near animals where other human beings put them to precipitate flight.

I was transforming my blood into comprehensive energy – masculine and feminine, microcosmic and macrocosmic – and into a wine that was drunk by the moon and the sun.

I end up believing that I was in another world, another epoch, another civilization, perhaps on another planet containing the past and future, simultaneously, the present.

I believed that I was being put through purifying tortures so that I might attain Absolute Knowledge, at which point I could live Down Below.

I knew that by closing my eyes I could avoid the advent of the most unbearable pain: the stare of others.

Leonora Carrington, Down Below.

“The mad woman has been used as a trope for centuries by writers, but more often as a walk-on part: we are allowed short, horrifying glimpses of the mad Ophelia and the hallucinating Lady Macbeth, before they are hurried to their deaths; Bertha Rochester escapes her attic prison to cause fires and havoc, and is then put back before she, too, is sent to death. What ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ does is give the mad woman pen and paper, and ultimately a voice of her own. We hear from her, directly and in detail.”

— Introduction by Maggie O'Farrell to The Yellow Wallpaper

She wanted to appreciate things, to understand them, but all in the abstract, so to speak, without actually experiencing them.

Anna Kavan, Let me Alone.

From, A Stranger Still

The sense of unreality had left her; she felt clear-headed as never before. She stood there in absolute honesty, looking into herself. She was suddenly, objectively, aware of the girl Anna Kavan, an individual human being, alive in the world, alone, without support, without obligations, capable of intelligent thought and responsible for her own destiny.

These evenings are no-times, not day and not night. […] I don’t quite know myself any longer. I forget how to smile… how to squeeze words out of my mouth. Everything drains away. Nothing is left but an empty world. […] There is nothing in life anymore. I try to find the way out but people prevent me. Utterly heartless, they want to force upon me an unendurable existence, not seeing that I have already left their world. […] I can never got back to the living world unless I am changed completely, not only in essence, but in outer aspect, transformed throughout the entire complex of body, brain, intellect, memory, feeling, the sum of total of which is the individual being.


A summer evening, in My Soul in China, 191.

Like all the other rooms, this bedroom contains a mirror in which I am not reflected. I gaze and gaze into it, trying to become real. It’s no good, no mirror will reflect the face of a person whose soul is in China. How can I go on going about like this, a laughing-stock, a half-thing, an object of mockery to the sticky tongue of hibiscus flowers.


My soul in China, 78.

My earliest memory is of a dream. It was in the house where we lived when I was three or four. I dreamed I was asleep in the house in an upper room and that I awoke, came downstairs and stood in the living room. The lights were on although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. It was the same old living room, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance, the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad.

Anne Carson

From "Guilty"

The cottage began to look secret to me, the half-drawn shades at the upper windows suggesting the oblique glances of partially veiled eyes. And the rooms, now that they saw no more social life, developed a queer private life of their own. Often, when I opened a door, I would get the impression of wild activity just arrested, as though the different objects around me had only that moment dashed back to their usual places, where they were waiting impatiently for my departure, so that they could go on with their own affairs. I used to tell myself that one day I’d find out what they were up to by flinging open the door so suddenly that they’d be caught unawares.

---

Anna Kavan, Guilty, 22.

Eagle's nest

Today for the first time the other aspect of things had revealed itself fully, with a reality far beyond that of dreaming, so that I seemed to be living two lives at once. I noticed, though, that I never seemed fully aware of them both together; for now the concrete world regained the ascendancy, excluding the dream world beyond, but not obliterating my memory of it completely.




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