I always believed it was the artist in me who ensorcelled. I believed it was my esoteric house, the colors, the lights, my costumes, my work. I always stood within the great active-artist shell, timorous and unconscious of my power. What has Dr. Allendy done? Discarded the artist, handled and loved the core of me, without background, without my creation. I have even been concerned over his unattachment to the artist – I have been surprised to be so seized, so dépouillée of artifice, of my webs, my charms, my elixirs. And tonight, alone, waiting for visitors, I look upon this newborn core, and I think of the gifts made to it by Hugh, Allendy, Henry, and June.But my love for Henry is a deep echo, a deep prolongation of self in me that is eternally double-faced. I am a double personality. There is my deep, devotional love for Henry, but already it can be easily mutated into another love. I sense the termination of it, as I sense, too, that Henry’s love for me will end when he is strong enough to do without me.

Then I come home in high spirits and Hugh throws me on the bed, frenzied with jealousy, and fucks me deliriously, tearing my dress to bite my shoulders. And I act pleasure, struck with the tragedy of moods which no longer fit together. Hugh’s passion has come too late. I want to be in Henry’s arms – closeness – or in Allendy’s – the unknown. And I had always wanted my dress torn.

When I talked about her to Allendy, he said, “You want to debauch her” – but he was leveling at me the obtuse accusation made against psychoanalysts: that they make people’s instincts run wild. He (Allendy) knows that the process of running wild is only a phase in the liberation, that the re-creation consolidates the being on a new level of idealism and sincerity.

I knew it was the deep disarming of my eccentricity, an eccentricity which I wore like a mask-garment to startle, to intimidate, render uneasy and strange those who frightened me.

I do not feel any wrong about sleeping with Henry in Hugh’s bed – nor would I feel any wrong in giving myself to Allendy on the same bed. I have no morality. I know the world is horrified – not I.

There is a divergence of time, a dislocation of rhythm between the wisdom of the mind and the impetus of instincts and the inevitability of their fulfillment. I am at peace with man, all the men who have hurt me by their weakness. My father, Eduardo, Hugo, John, and even, to a certain extent, Henry (if Henry were strong, June would be in New York now) have more than atoned to me, and more love has been given me than denied me. I am at peace with myself, and my understanding tells me the suffering I endured through the abandonment of my Father and Eduardo’s homosexuality and John’s puritanism did not come from them, but from my own inner composition of being, which refused to understand the natural causes of these weaknesses and refused not to suffer.

I am inflamed by Élie Faure’s proclamation (in The Dance over fire and Water):”It is the imagination of man that provokes his adventures, and love takes here the first place.Morality reproves passion, curiosity, experience, the three bloody stages which mount toward creation.”

I tried to stretch my tolerance and understanding to their limit. I said to myself, I have often give to Henry when I should have given to Hugh merely because it gave me a greater joy to give it to Henry at the moment.

Last night Henry and I got married. By that, I mean a particular ceremony which binds two persons until they get a divorce!

Henry at that moment moved me so deeply, reached such a secret recess of my being, that all former surrenders seemed but half gifts; and that night, in his arms, I almost wept because of that absolute breaking up of myself, this absolute dissolution of myself into him.

Why this obsession in me to interpenetrate with people? Why can I not live more on the surface, accept Allendy without that minute struggle to understand all? Everything Henry does is comprehensible to me. Comprehension and love are inextricably interwoven for me. For me, understanding is love. That is why I doubt I will ever have an expérience de passage, a one-night stand.

It does not frighten me that Henry’s sensuality will inevitably make him faithless. That is only an excursion, an incident, a phase. I have no fear, even though I may suffer from jealousy, because I know he belongs to me, and do I not also deceive him? Don’t I see that my feeling for Allendy is only un petit détour? That I belong to Henry as I have never belonged to anyone, by vital, fiery, and creative and intellectual ties?

I began to live again. Even losing at the casino could not hurt me. And that feeling, that divine feeling of liberation from the one love, on which I can never count, the feeling of security in multiplicity.

I realize I don’t believe anymore in the ideal of faithfulness. It is immature.

I say proudly, “My Father and I are lovers…”

What makes me able to give Henry the leniency and the liberty and the indifference he needs are my own infidelities.

I want to live alone in unknown hotel rooms.
Lose my identity.
My memory.
My home and husband and lovers.

Then I sat at the typewriter, saying to myself: Write, your weakling; write, you madwoman, write your misery out, write your guts, spill out what is choking you, shout obscenely. What is rebellion – a negative form of living. Crucify your Father. And it is the cursed woman in me who causes the madness, the woman with her lover, her devotion, her shackles. Oh, to be free, to be masculine and purely artist. To care only about the art.

I make it appear that I am suffering from the poverty of love. The fact that I am deceiving, betraying, never occurs to me. I am only aware of the other’s treachery. I am cast in to a mold of receiving pain – can’t escape it. Yet I can give pain. I need only reveal everything to Hugh, to my Father, and to Henry. Yet I am not tempted to do this.

In the middle of the dinner I smile to remember Henry’s caresses. All my happiness is in his hands. I am entirely dependent on him. It is terrifying, beautiful, and tragic.

Nature arranging my destiny as man’s woman, not child’s woman. Nature shaping my body for passion alone, for the love of man. This child, which meant a simple, primitive connection with the earth, this child, a prolongation of myself, now cast off so that I would live out my destiny as the mistress, my life as a woman.

How I let things die their slow seasonal deaths and cannot hasten any act of destruction.