Read It Again Already.

Nadja is my favorite! I am reading it again...

I have always loved that book and have read it like, 10 times. Mad Love is another of Breton's books that I really enjoyed. I have met Nadja's in my life and have had relationships with them. To me, the idea of Nadja (which is the creation of someone within your mind who is actually non-existent) is really a love affair with your idea of what a relationship wants to be. It is a haunting dream where Nadja comes into your life and you are simply, for lack of a better phrase, along for the ride. That idea is nothing new. It is rather, the way Breton suggests in a surrealist manner, that your relationship with someone (who is as beautiful as Nadja) leads to disorientation or a sense of contradiction and randomness.

I have always been intrigued by the notion of "chance encounters" in my love affair with beauty, emotion and the complexities of uncertainness in personal relationships. That has always been something that I have deep down, tried to understand or seek out in any kind of relationship I have had. And I must admit, it was actually a driving factor in the way I would encounter anybody for a while there.

I used to wander through my life and basically trip over these incredible instances where I would see someone and immediately create a scenario in my mind based upon the visual cues and manners this person had. I would then figure out a way to meet them and literally begin a screenplay of my ideal relationship with them as the lead. And surprisingly, for awhile, I could actually live in this moment of "imagined reality" with them. And of course the surprises and strange idiosyncrasies that arose would add to the allure and confusion within this dream state. All the while complicating the whole thing would be sex, passion and the act of falling in love which all provided a wonderful, confused, and extremely exciting world for me.

The final line of the book is my favorite and I have quoted it over and over and applied it in many contexts to my personal experiences. To me it means simply, there is no beauty if there is no passion. And because beauty is so subjective and means so many different things, passion is complex and because so, highly powerful. I have gotten in very deep deep trouble because of it too.

My Nadja is still out there. Somewhere. Maybe cruising the back alleys on her scooter, wearing dark sunglasses, a white t shirt under a loose black sweater and celery-colored cropped pants with sandals. She carries a big, Chrome shoulder bag full of her things. Her hair is windblown and short. She pulls over at a random cafe. Sits at a small table, orders a regular coffee and lights a cigarette. Then, she reaches in her bag, pulls out a copy of Nadja with dog-eared pages marking her favorite passages and begins to read. She looks up and notices a boy sitting two tables away. He is looking at her and imagining what she is thinking.

He is haunted by Nadja.