Nijinsky!

 

After dancing with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes from 1909, and choreographing the seminal modernist "Afternoon of the Faun" (1912) and "The Rite of Spring" (1913), Nijinsky was kicked out of the company in 1913 by lover/mentor Diaghilev because of Nijinsky's marriage to a woman.

Am currently reading Nijinsky's uncensored 1919 diaries (published as "The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky"), an account of his mental breakdown. (He was subsequently institutionalized off and on until his death in 1950.)

I'm only about half-way through the book. In parts, as when he's recounting his youth (and poverty and sexual abuse by Diaghilev), he's lucid. In much of it, though, he's either in a schizophrenic fugue or else doing a form of automatic writing, in which he constantly channels any irrational thought that comes into his head. (In which case, he's not crazy, just experimenting.) 

At one point, he breaks from his dense pages of prose into "poetry." It goes on for 4 pages, but what I was reminded of, and what I'm condensing here, are lines that remind me very much of John Lennon and his Beatles song "I Am the Walrus," as well as "I'm Only Sleeping" and "Julia." (The Nijinsky diary was initially published in the late 1930s, and so would have been available to Lennon.)

Note: "Rif" is the first syllable of the Russian word for "rhyme": rifma.

...We are rif. You are rif we are rif. You are He and I am he. We are we you are they.

I want to tell you that one cannot write to you. I write to you to you. I will tell you you
I want to write to write. I want not to sleep, but to shit.
I want that you went...
You went and I went
You do not want to walk there

Gulia gulia gulia lia lia
You are gu lia gu lia gu
You are gu gu gu gu gu
Gu gu gu gu gu gu gu. You gu gu and I gu gu

I want to say that to sleep...
You do not want to sleep with me
I wish you and you with me...
We are you and you are in me.
I want you to you to you
You want for me you are He
I am He and you are in me.
We are you they are You....

I want to tell you
That you want to sleep sleep sleep.
I do not want want to sleep
You do not want want to sleep.
I will go and shit with you
You are to shi but I am not to shi.
I am not sha ming sha ming shi...