Here’s another woman I recently fell in love with. Choreographer, dancer, poet, film theorist, photographer, writer and avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren. See her movies.

Born Eleanora, she changed her name to Maya in reference to the Hindu word for all reality being an illusion. Despite being friends with Andre Breton and other surrealist artists, she denied any connection to the surrealist movement or its aesthetic aims. She said she was concerned with “that point of contact between the unreal and the real”, not with the incredibility of the unreal. When she tired of making avant-garde cinema in New York the Ukraine-born beauty went to Haiti and worked on a book and haunting documentary of Haitian Voodoo, Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti. She participated in the Voodoo rituals and adopted the religion.

But that’s enough. I didn’t really enjoy writing about Claude Cahun’s life, I just wanted to look at her pictures. Analysis can kill the magic. Here are some words on that from Anaïs Nin, the French erotic writer who was friends with Maya Deren when they both lived in Manhattan’s East Village (she appears in some of Maya’s films):


“I developed this vision which sees before facts, the better to find sensations and divinations... It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I never learned the dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unknown was my science and progress.”