A deathly pathos

I love the sex-passion which is in this witching Body of me. I love to feel its portent grow and creep over me, like a climbing vine of tiny red roses, in the occasional dusks.

It is no shame or shadow or sordidness: but beauty and sweetness and light.

no token of sin: a token of virtue.

no thing to crush: rather to nurture, to garner.

no thing to forget: to remember, to think about.

no flat weak drawn-out prose: live potent clipped heated poetry.

not common and loosely human: rare and divine.

not fat daily soup: stinging wine of life.

not valueless because born of nothing and nowhere: valuable, priceless, a treasure under lock and key.

Sex-desire comes wandering in dusk-time and gulfs me as in a swift violent sweet-smelling whirlwind. It goes away sudden-variant as it came, out of a region of hot quick shadows.

And for that, for hours and days afterward, oranges and apples look brighter-colored to my eyes: hammocks swing easier as I sit in them: rugs feel softer to my feet: the black dresses lend themselves gentler to my form: pencils slide faciler on paper: my voice speaks less difficultly into telephones: meanings sound super-vibrant in Keats’s Odes: sugar--little pinches of granulated sugar--are shaper, sweeter-sweeter in my throat.

And God grows less remote. And my wooden coffin and deep wet yellow clay grave move a long way back from me.

--all from fleeting ungratified wish of sly sex-tissues--

Also in it, and in my life from it, I sense some deathly pathos.


The necklace

The Necklace which God long ago hung round the white neck of my Soul is composed of little-seeming curses, like precious and semi-precious gems. They are polished smooth as if by age, as if by wear, as if by fingering and as if by brisk industrious rubbing.

The Necklace is at once beautiful and ugly. The gems are in color chiefly blues and greens--with grays, lavenders, drabs and mauves. But mostly blues and greens. They make a circlet of small stones strung at short intervals as if on a strong thin gold wire, with two large tawdry pretty pendants hung in front. One of the pendants is my fertile phase of Weakness and the other my odd encompassing Folly. The smaller stones are seventeen in number and their names and natures are these:

the first is Dishonesty which makes ghosts of half my life.

the second is Pretense, hard and genuine stone, which keeps me from being all-ways sincere even to anyone who knows me and whom I know: who loves me and whom I love.

the third is Fear which makes me who scorn all leonine dangers cringe and crawl for Trifles of life incredibly little.

the fourth is Sensuality which burns and bursts across my Mind, half-missing my Body.

the fifth is Anxiety, strange flawed green stone--by it I worry, tortured and wildly wavering, about the passing hours of my life: where they are going, where they are taking me.

the sixth is Amativeness, extraordinary deep-tinted warm false gem--it makes me love someway amorously some person I meet and fancy: an intimate tragedy, crucial and trivial.

the seventh is Fatigue of the spirit itself, gray sad stone, meaning terrible sensations of age in my young flesh.

the eighth is Incongruity, the sense and feeling of it, round blue stone--it kills what might be art and constructiveness and excellence in me.

the ninth is Acquiescence, worn dull stone--it has kept me all the ages from the salvation of heated luminous strife.

the tenth is Sensitiveness, pale-toned stone--by it the fingers of life touch me too suddenly, too sharply, too tensely to do me the good they might.

the eleventh is Doubt, frail opalescent stone--by it my delight in the sunny Spring wind against my cheek is qualified with dubious surprise: by it I half-disbelieve in moon and stars and in long country roads stretched out solitary, lovely, drenched in sunset.

the twelfth is Self-consciousness, blue-and-green stone--it robs me of the comfort and self-respect of feeling any motive in me to be un-ulterior.

the thirteenth is Introspection, beautiful-beautiful blue-green stone--it pays for its place in beauty but by it I lose the building, the substance, the matter of living.

the fourteenth is Intensity--too vivid vision, too vivid taste for some details of life--little hot-looking cool-feeling stone--by it I undervalue and overvalue, dwell upon surfaces, missing the serene feel and possession of precious solidness.

the fifteenth is Isolation, pale purple stone--it makes me feel never at home, never at ease, never belonging--a subtle insulation--in this sheltered peopled world.

the sixteenth is Bewilderment, mixed-tinted stone--by it I wonder what is truth with truth seeming that moment fluttering soft-plumed wings at my throat.

the seventeenth is--it has no name--the Feel-of-Me, bright blue-green stone, lovely and loathesome--by it I’ve lost my way, I’ve felt all and only Me when I might have groped outward, hand and foot, and found a wind-swept path to go in: I was always blurred by Me.

A small Necklace, all dull gleams and unusual tints, strung finely and strongly and beautifully on shining gold. The sweet Soul droops like a wilted lily under even its slight weight. Strong fine rivets hold it firm-clasped and the weight of the two charming imitation pendant-stones keep it gracefully in place. My loved and lovely Soul has worn it through the ages: manacle, shackle.

How long more--God may know but does not tell me.

It’s only a Necklace. And my Soul is a Soul!

Even under the frail galling burden of the flesh the Soul of me to-morrow could tear off that Necklace and crumble it to airless nothing.

It does not: but could.


Slyly garbling and cross-purposing

At rarish intervals comes my Soul to visit me.

My Soul is light sheer Being.

My Soul is like a young most beautiful girl marked and worn by long cycles of time but not anyway aged. She comes dressed in something like gray-white de-soie muslin or fine-grained crêpe silk, a loose-belted frock reaching to her ankles.

My Soul is unmoved by the world and the flesh and their feeling, as befits a Soul. She looks on me with a chill faëry-ish contempt, as also befits a Soul. The quality of her contempt is of weary understanding and is like a caress.

In the dusk of yesterday came my Soul to visit me--a dusk of a deep beauty. The last glow of the sun lay along the earth, and all was gentian blue.

I leaned against my window-pane watching it, and beside me sat her Presence. Her Presence makes me feel wonderfully gifted: it is mine, this Soul all Golden-Silk and Silken-Gold!

We talk on many topics, of many things: I in worldly nervous ignorance and with a wishfulness to reach and compass and know: the Soul with poise and surety of attitude, a wearied patience and the chill sweet contempt.

She answers me from her cool old tranquil viewpoint, which is near me yet remote.

We talked last of some bygone persons I have been, some shapes she wore.

Said the Soul: ‘Early in the sixteenth century you were a ragged Russian peasant girl living in ignorance and filth in a hut by a swamp-edge. You had parents both of whom beat your body black-and-blue from your babyhood. And at eighteen you were a coarsened hardy wench tending a drove of pigs and goats on the sunny steppe. I was there with you as presently as now--as sentient, as perceptive. But it is a question whether you or the little beasts you drove were the more beastly stupid. You and they were equal in outer quality, equal in uncleanliness, equally covered with vermin.’

I have no ghost-memory of that time, but as the Soul told of it a nascent feeling came on me, as if some part of my Mind felt its way back to that. I warmed to the thought of the Peasant Girl. I was quiescent to her filth and ignorance.

Said I: ‘Was she brave and fairly honest?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were a ready liar--you lied your way out of many a beating. But you were brave enough. You faced the roughnesses of your life uncringing, and you died game.’

Said I: ‘How did I die?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were run neatly through the body by the short sword of a soldier whose lust-desire you had had the hardihood to refuse--and I fled away upon the instant.’

Said I: ‘I half-knew it--she died a violent death. You--were you glad to be quit of her filthy flesh, her surroundings, her ignorance?’

Said the Soul: ‘Glad? Such things mean nothing to me. Your body, be it sweet or foul, has no bearing on my long journey. Motives--motif--back of your human acts make me glad or sorry at leaving you.’

Said I: ‘Tell me about a time when I seemed someway fine, humanly fine.’

Said the Soul: ‘In London, near the end of the seventeenth century, before and during the period of the Gordon Riots, you lived in a way of peace. From when you were fourteen until you were twenty-nine you lived alone with your little lame half-sister whom you cared for very devotedly, very tenderly.’

My little half-sister-- Until the Soul spoke of her there was no vision, no image like her. Then something of me remembered.

Said I: ‘What was she like? Who were our parents?’

Said the Soul: ‘Your mother died at your birth, hers at her birth. Your father was hanged at Tyburn for forgery. The sister was pale, large-eyed, long-haired, crippled from a dislocated shoulder and hip. When you were twenty-five she was eleven, a beautiful frail child. You lived in two rooms above a linen-draper’s and you supported the two of you by weaving and calendering cloths for the shop-keeper, and by illuminating missals and manuscripts when you could get that work. For a very poor wage, but living was cheap. All the time you took zealous care of your sister. Your heart was bound up in her--you adored her.’

Said I: ‘I know that. Tell me what we did--how we lived--how we loved each other.’

Said the Soul: ‘In the summer evenings you often walked out along quiet London streets--the sister sometimes with a crutch and your arm about her, sometimes in a rolling chair, whilst you walked beside her pushing it. Your father had educated you in an erratic fashion. You had a deal of desultory knowledge--what is called knowledge--and you educated the young sister in the same manner. Often it was of the poets--Latin, English, Italian, and of histories and sciences and arts--what odd comprehensive bits you knew--that you two talked as you sauntered in the bright late English sunlight. Or you talked of the little details of your joint life. Sometimes you sat together--you holding her close in your arms--by a window in your darkening front room, and watched the children at play in the common opposite, and conversed and were quietly happy. You were maternal and the child was a mature old-fashioned yet childish innocent child.’

My little sister--sweet--long gone-- Would that I had her now!

Said I: ‘Tell me what we said.’

Said the Soul: ‘You said to her, “Our poverty and even our deprivations, dearest, which for your sake I feel deeply would not matter, not the least, to me if I could see you well and strong.” And the child replied, “Sweet, just to rest like this in your arms each twilight makes me rich, rich--as rich as the smartest ladies in Piccadilly.” And you said, “Rich reminds me, Darling, we shall have four extra shillings--four bright silver shillings--at the end of this week from the book-seller. So what shall we purchase for a treat? There’ll be, if you like, prawns and crumpets for tea, for days to come--or if my Child prefers oranges or pineapples once--” And the child replied with her cheeks quite pink at the thought, “O Sister-love, let us have the pines, just one day, and let us make-believe to be ladies that day, and comport ourselves like ladies, and take our tea--all like ladies.” And you pressed her close to your breast--you both wore caps and kerchiefs and stuff-gowns in the fashion of the lower-middle artisan class--and showered gentle kisses on her cheeks and eyelids, and promised her the pineapples and the tea like ladies.’

I listened to this with vivid still pleasure. It felt like endearing fulfilling life--a day of tenderness--. And oddly familiar.

Said I: ‘What were we in the habit of having for our tea--that prawns and crumpets would make us a treat?’

Said the Soul: ‘Your tea was chiefly bran-bread and cress or perhaps lettuce, with a stone mug of milk for the child when you could afford it. The London of that day had no luxuries for the poor. And having had none you missed none. But the populace lived in starveling misery. The rabble rose and rallied to the Gordon as it would have to anyone who urged it to rioting. You were Protestants but you regarded him as a weakling visionary. You watched the rioting in the streets with little fear, but the linen-draper and all other shop-keepers kept barred doors. You two were venturesome and were yourselves of the masses, and when the mob stormed Newgate prison you both stood watching with many other householders on the outskirts of the crowd, in terror but secretly half in sympathy. You were safe enough from the rioters who were intent on wrecking the gaol and freeing the inmates. It was characteristic of you as you were then to be out looking on at a murderous night scene with interest, carefully protecting the child from contact with the throngs.’

Said I: ‘How long did that life last?’

Said the Soul: ‘Four years after that your sister changed from her bare little bed to a coffin and you went on alone achingly suffering her loss for long years. You lived to be seventy, a thin old woman, working latterly as one of the night nurses in a public hospital. You lived an abstemious outwardly self-sacrificing life and died alone, from hardened arteries, one autumn night.’

Said I: ‘And was there an informing beauty for you, for you and for me, in my life then?’

Coldly said the Soul: ‘You were self-centered, for all your self-sacrifice. You reckoned it your duty to care for your sister. It was also your irresistible delight. And after her death you took self-satisfaction in self-sacrifice: smug--smug. For me there was a laming distortion in it all.’

Said I: ‘Tell me some other life.’

Said the Soul: ‘You were once a little thief in the streets of a later London. You picked pockets, you stole bits of food in Covent Garden market, you pilfered shop-tills, you systematically worked the wealthy throngs as they came from the Opera at midnight. You were known to the police as the cleverest child-thief in London.’

It warmed my vanity to think of myself as clever in so theatric a rôle as thief.

Said I: ‘How did that life like you?’

Said the Soul, with a shrug of her delicate shoulders: ‘I had little to do with it and that in a negative way. My part in you was to keep up your heart in hungry hunted days. You were neither a good thing nor a bad thing: perishingly passive. And you were dead in a potter’s field before your sixteenth birthday.’

Said I: ‘How did the little Thief look?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were sufficiently ugly--an undersized form, a gamin face, bastard features.’

Said I: ‘And I daresay ignorant?’

Said the Soul: ‘Ignorant of everything rated useful, but wise to the under-sides of human nature and in the sordid viciousness of London slums. And singularly shrewd--what is called philosophical.’

Said I: ‘Pray tell me another life.’

Said the Soul: ‘An earlier time--Paris, some century before the Terror saw you a slim fille-du-pavè, a prostitute of a low cheap type, but with more brain, more of what is termed character than you have ever possessed. You had wit, will, esprit, determination. From having been at seventeen most obscenely of the streets you were at thirty a wonderfully grand courtesan: no better in what are called morals but possessed of very much inner and outer strength and luster. You were chère-aimèe to men of brain, men of importance to the state, whose acts were shaded by your influence. And you achieved unusual wealth chiefly by the powers and strategies of your character. You lived in the extreme of luxury of that time and of your type--a delicate luxury, almost high-bred. You were wanton in amour, being physically extremely passionate, but admirably straightforward and strong in each matter and aspect of your life.’

Said I: ‘You admired her?’

Said the Soul: ‘I was serene and vividly alive within you. You were in all ways, simply and completely, an honest woman, and for the only time.’

Said I: ‘How could she be honest, since she lived by exchanging treasure of much personal economic value for cheap cheapest gold, trash, and a besmirched name: and all through two sorts of greed?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were honest since you made no pretense of any kind to yourself. You took no gold that you did not logically, humanly or shamefully earn. You were consciously and unconsciously above all subterfuge. You wrought no ruin nor error nor darkness upon your own spirit or any other. You deceived neither yourself nor anyone about you. The tone of your life was of sun-shining simplicity and cleanness. There was no greed in you. You saw your way of life before you and lived it without degradation, with a positiveness of strength.’

It is as if my Soul’s view and mine were infinitely separate from being narrowly paralleled. The portrait was mystically familiar: but not by her light.

Said I: ‘Was she beautiful to look at?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were beautiful in a pallid saintlike French manner--an uncertain type of beauty which fatigue or depression turns to plainness. You had but little light charm of prettiness. But you had what counts for more than beauty: the nerve and verve of attractiveness, the force and fascination of physical being, the fragrance, the flair of the deeply-sexed woman. In one phase you were constantly preying and preyed upon, but with high valors of attack and endurance.’

Said I: ‘Did she live in peace--had she no times of suffering?’

Said the Soul: ‘You had hours of violent bitter suffering. Paris has always accepted without countenancing the properous cocotte. And often you were infamously insulted at street-crossings by soldiers and sergeants-de-ville as you drove out in your small bright-colored carriage. And you were hailed with opprobrious appropriate names by the ragged populace as they picked up silver pieces which you threw among them. Such things were stinging brands and lashes to you. But you bore yourself with entire courage. You gave much money to churches and charities but looked on such acts in yourself rightly as some slight weakness which would, however, be of benefit to the starving poor. I can not describe--so you could grasp it--the peace, the expansion, the freedom for me in that life and in that attitude.’

The exact outlook of the Soul throws over me a veil of wistfulness, bewilderness, freedness, lostness which hides the material moorings of my life and casts me adrift on broad clouded seas.

Said I: ‘What was the end of that--how did she die?’

Said the Soul: ‘You died exquisitely, of syphilitic disorders. You were something past forty, badly broken--your looks were gone, your friends were gone, your money was not gone but it was of little use to you. But you smiled serenely and lived up personally and mentally to your smile. A surgeon and a fat mustached old woman saw you die in the beginning of that bodily rot--the just portion of the passionate whore--one sweet Spring dawn, with birds twittering in green branches outside your window and a great gold sun slowly breaking the mist. Then for once I left you with reluctance. I clung to you. The kiss of me was last on your fainting brain and your fast-cooling heart. For I was leaving, in an agony of my own, an honest person. And I knew not what might be my next petty prison.’

Said I: ‘What was my next life?’

Said the Soul: ‘It was not so petty as were some others. You were next--about seventeen-fifty--a quaint extremely common little person. You were apprenticed as a child to a milliner in Liverpool, England. You grew out of that and became a dancer in a dingy theatre--a cheap bedraggled life. You were a cheap and bedraggled young woman. You wore odd gay tawdry frocks, hideous little shoes, ragged raveled silk hose, surprising bright bonnets. Your mind was a shallow pool filled with tales from shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls in which you believed implicitly. You were mentally degenerate, organically a fool, a wonderful snob. You wanted only wealth and place bitterly to deride and browbeat the low class to which you belonged--not from lack of heart but because you believed it to be the proper aristocratic manner. And what you wanted in mind you made up in temper. You quarreled, you came to blows, with your fellow-dancers in any of a half-score of small selfish daily disputes. Cleverness among you consisted in gaining any possible advantage over the others and in calling each other names. Also in maneuvering bits of money--as much as might be--from unpleasing men who hung about the dingy play-house. On holidays you were invariably half-drunk.’

Said I: ‘And wherein was she not petty?’

Said the Soul: ‘You believed in yourself. You had not a doubt you belonged in worldly high places but were kept down by the malice and depravity of human nature, people about you. And you lived up to your vulgar ideal of ambition. There was a simplicity, an enlightening pathos in you then which was lacking in the linen-draper’s lodger.’

In my flawed way I saw that, but objected to the bygone Liverpool lady from many an angle.

Said I: ‘Had I no life of a sweetness and gentleness and with it something that buoyed and bore you on?’

Said the Soul: ‘Never once. You were many centuries ago a Greek girl of the aristocratic class, bred in an intellectual life. You read the philosophers in the cool retreats of an olive grove. The mental knowledge you have now compared to your learning then is a tangle of ignorance. But the Greek girl had no heart, no human flame, no active blood of personality. Those wanting I starved. The Liverpool dancer in her warming virile vulgarness bore me vastly farther on my way. You were a Greek woman in a still earlier time--of a type which murders all simplicity. Your body and mind were haunted by perfervid imagination and both ached with the weight of it. You were made of twisted fires. I grew in that day: grew burdenedly: grew distortedly.’

Always those Greek visions are my ‘half-familiar ghosts.’--

Said I: ‘Was I sometime a married woman?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were--in four separate ages. Which brought you and me singular solitude.’

Said I: ‘Was I always woman?’

Said the Soul: ‘You were once a young lad of fierce temper and were at twenty a madman. And died mad. No male body and brain could withstand and outface merely the emotional besiegings of you.’

Said I: ‘When I went mad, what of you?’

Said the Soul: ‘I fell asleep, and knew no rest, but dreamed.’

Said I: ‘Of what?’

Said the Soul: ‘Things I always dreamed in your mad lapses--poetry served very conscious and very hot: the material Color of the Sunshine: the musical Softness of the Dawns: the pulsing Thoughts in Girls’ Throats: the Scent of Water-Falls.’

The Soul has an airless voice which tells her meanings, beside her words and in their rhythm.

Said I: ‘What do you, and how do you, with me now?’

Said the Soul: ‘I grow tired with you. Exasperated. Desperate. As if I too wore flesh. You are a deathly prison, a torture chamber. I turn everywhere and nowhere at all. You tire me--you wear me. I wait. I stay. Yet I move.’

She looked lovely, my Soul--and quite in and of this bitter-ish lovely world in its bloody bitter wrappings of bone and flesh. Around her neck was the Necklace she wore in all the ages, showing greenish in a dusk of gentian blue.--

All of it slyly garbles and cross-purposes me a little bit more than usual.

I wish I’d been born a Wild Boar.


Not quite voilà-tout

The clearest lights on persons are small salient personal facts and items about them and their ways of life.

To know that a woman is ‘sensitive’ is to have but a blurred conception of her as one easily impressed, easily hurt. But to know that she wears thick union-suitish under-clothes and uncompromising cotton stockings is to know much about her: by those tokens she is plain: she is stupid: she is smugly virtuous: she is poor: she is narrow-thoughted: she lacks imagination: she is prosaic: she has a defective sense of humor: she is catty: she is ‘kind’: she catches cold: she is a thoroughly good woman.

To know that a child is ‘bright’ is to have no definite knowledge of the child. But to know she flies into rages and bites whisk-brooms, laces and her fragile grandmother is to have a wide-beamed far-reaching spirit-light upon her.

That I am ‘thoughtful’ means little or anything or nothing: that I love the odor of ink, that I hate the stings of conscience, that I never lounge untidily about the house or in my room but am always ‘groomed,’--those tell me to myself.

Here for my enlightening I write a garbled list of my items and facts:

--I never see a soft new yeast-cake without wishing to squeeze it for the salubrious feeling of the tinfoil bursting facilely and the yeast oozing with its odd dry juiciness through my fingers.

--And I never see a shiny waxy green rubber plant without wanting to bite the leaves precisely and daintily with my sharp teeth.

--My luncheon each late midday is made of four radishes, three crackers and a thin glass of water: an anchoretic feast which I eat with relish. The rhyme I murmur with it is: ‘what do you think, she lives upon nothing but victuals and drink.’

--Whenever I look out my window at five in the afternoon I see a neat nice-looking strange nigger-woman walking past. And the nigger-woman glances casually up at my window and sees me. We are unknown to one another and have belike as much and no more in common as if we grew on different planets. But the nigger-woman and I are someway dimly liking each other and dimly knowing it.

--I scent my belongings faintly with Houbigant’s Quelques Violettes perfume.

--I like to light a box of matches at a twilight window-sill singly and by twos and threes and little bunches, and hold them till they burn out, and watch the little flames, and drop the burnt ends out the window: a pastime inherited from my child-self.

--Of living creatures that I know I most hate cockroaches.

--Of inanimate things that I know I most hate a loose shutter rattling at night in the wind.

--While I smoke after-dinner cigarettes down-stairs I put flat round black records on a tall red Edison phonograph and I curl up in a leather chair in the dark to listen to the music which is soft and deep: ‘Che Gelida Manina’ in a wistful tenor, and ‘Refrain Audacious Tar,’ and ‘Ah Quel Giorno,’ and ‘Scenes That are Brightest’ and others and others--tantalizing, tawdry, artistic, cheaply pleasant, luring, whatnot. And by turns it makes me lighthearted, lightheaded, emotional, romantic, restless, evilly coarse. It is piquant debauchery. Music sweetly poisons me.

--My bureau-drawers I keep neatly in order--lingerie and other articles arranged convenient to my hand in white rows and fragrant tidy piles: with the exception of the upper left-hand drawer which is a bit of terrific snarled chaos. In it is an inky handkerchief of an old vintage: in it are several un-mated crumpled gloves: in it are some olive-pits: in it is an empty sticky liquid cold-cream bottle with tufts of eider-down power-puff stuck to it: in it is a tangle of smudged ribbons: in it are two pieces of pink rock-candy: in it is a spent yellow-silk garter: in it is a torn sponge: in it are blackened pieces of chamois-skin: in it is a broken scissors: in it are three twisted ragged black-net veils: in it is a brass curtain ring: in it is a broken scattered string of coral beads: in it is a lump of wax: in it is a piece of knotted twine: in it are little bunches of cotton-wool: in it is a spilled box of powder whitening everything: in it is a spilled box of matches: in it is a jet bracelet broken into small pieces: in it is a broken hand-mirror: in it are some crushed cigarettes: in it is a ruined blue plume: in it is a warped leather purse: in it is a damaged lump of red fingernail paste: in it is a stick of gum arabic: in it is a bisque kewpie defiled by wax, ink, paste, powder and rock-candy: in it are some partly melted vestas: in it are other bits of rubbish: all in wildest disorder. Why I do not empty the drawer and burn the rubbish I don’t at all know.

--I sometimes take one or two of the neighborhood children to a picture-show.

--Sometimes as I lean at my window I alternate looking at the distant deeply-blue mountains by looking at the near-by women who chance to pass on the stone pavement below--the smartly-clad and lighthearted-seeming ones. I look at their good shoulders in pastel-toned silk and at their trim silk ankles and proud flaring skirts and insolent beautiful hats--the buoyant worldly insouciance of their ensembles--as their owners walk along on happy errands. As I look I feel Me to be behind prison bars looking out in thin psychic jealousy: regret for a time when I also went thus buoyantly on happy worldly errands and an odd raging silent impatience for a time when I may again. But with it too the wavering acquiescence in this analytic-writing mood.--‘pussy-cat-mieow,’ I ruminate, ‘can’t have any milk until her best petticoat’s mended with silk.’

--One kind of man I impatiently scorn is the kind that looks bored if I mention Ibsen or ceramics or Aztec civilization but is interested instantly, alertly if I mention my garters. Equally I abhor the type that begrudges me my own private phases of amorousness: not those who condemn me for them: not those who dislike them in me: not those who deplore them: but who begrudge me them.

--Always I come up a stairway softly. Always I close doors softly. I make no noise.

--The quaintest character I have met with in fiction is Huckleberry Finn’s father, looked at as a father. Next in quaintness I place Sally Brass, regarded as a human being.

--I like a glass of very hot water and a dish of preserved damson plums on a sultry August day: and another of each on top of that: and another of each on top of that.

--I like the word addle: I hate the word redress. I would fain have my ‘wrongs’ ever addled than redressed: merely for the word prejudice.

--I would rather that almost any physical disaster should befall me than that I ever achieve an ‘abdomen.’ When an abdomen comes in at the door life’s romances fly fast out the windows: so it looks to me. May death overtake me haply before the menopause.

--The pictures I have crowded on a small side-wall space two feet from my eyes as I sit at my desk are: Theda Bara as Carmen: the late Queen Isabella of Spain: Marie Lloyd, loved of the London populace: a velvety-looking black-and-orange print of a leopard: Blanche Sweet, loveliest of film actors: John Keats, a small old print: Ethel Barrymore, a pencil drawing made by herself: Nell Gwyn, a photograph of a Lely portrait: Watts’s ‘Hope’: Stanley Ketchel, dead middle-weight fighter: ‘Jane Eyre’ by a Polish artist: Fanny Brawn, the solitary extant silhouette print: Ty Cobb: two children: Charlotte Corday in the Prison de l’Abbaye: Susan B. Anthony: a Chinese lady: Andrea del Sarto: Queen Boadicea: and Christy Mathewson.

--I am old-fashioned in many of my tastes--in all my reading and writing tastes. I do not like typewriters: they make fingertips callous in a poor cause. And I do not like fountain-pens which someway seem suitable only for business-letters, forgeries, bookkeeping and crude cursory love-letters. I like a steel pen in a fat glossy green enameled wood penholder with a thick pleasant-feeling rubber sheath at the lower end.

--I wear to-day a modest frock of black silk: beneath it a light silk petticoat: beneath that a white pussy-willow silk ‘envelope’ and a pale narrow pink silk shirt chastened by many launderings: no stays: thick white silk stockings gartered above my knees by circles of mild mauve elastic: on my feet cross-ribboned bright-buckled black shoes: round my neck a jet necklace:--all of it a costume that might be of a conventional woman, a plain-living woman, a good woman, a well-bred woman--saving only that beneath my left shoulder-blade the smooth new pussy-willow silk has a jagged two-inch rent where it caught on a drawer-handle: and the rent--in lieu of neatly mending it with the thread and needle of woman’s custom--I caught up any way by its jagged edges and tied tight in a hard vicious heathen knot: the note of spiritual fornication, of Mary-Mac-Laneness: always there’s some involuntary pagan touch to undo me, to arraign me, to betray me to God and to myself.

--I wear five-and-a-half A-last shoes: number twenty-one snug whalebone stays: and weigh a hundred-twenty-four pounds.

--I am fond of green peas, baseball and diamond rings.

--I like violently to spoil a little charlotte-russe with a fork: it gives me the same feeling of lawless sweet-fiery lust which must belong to a Moslem soldier when deflowering a Christian virgin: and harms nobody.

--Sometimes when I’m dressing in the morning I glance down through my window and see two elderly Butte business men, one a lawyer and one a banker, going by on the way to their offices. And I wonder at how frightfully respectable they look in their tailored clothes and reproachless gloves and perfectly celestial-looking hats. I murmur: ‘Robin and Richard were two pretty men who lay in bed till the clock struck ten.’

--I keep on my desk a little doll with fluffy skirts, blue eyes, pouting lips and curly hair and named Little Jane Lee after an adorable child I have seen in moving pictures.

--I am five feet six inches tall in my highish heels:

--I wear number six gloves: the calf of my leg is a shapely thing.

--The six extant Americans I most admire are Thomas A. Edison, Harriet Monroe, Gertrude Atherton, Theodore Roosevelt, the remaining Wright Brother, and Amy Lowell.

--I think I’d learn to be a cook, a professional cook, if I were less easily fatigued.

--I love the sound of the clinking of two clean new white clay pipes, one upon the other.

--I crack nuts with my teeth.

Voilà!

But not quite voilà-tout.


A damned spider

To-day was one of the To-morrows of encompassing dissatisfaction when this seems all a nasty world and a nasty life.

A Spider drowned in my bath-tub this morning.

It was one of those long-legged spiders. It was in the tub when I went there--a small ovalish dark-gray pellet with seven ray-like legs as of an evil little sun lying flat on a white desert. It feels inconceivable that any creature should naturally have an odd number of legs: we are all, including spiders, laid out as with rule and compass. Perhaps it is inconceivable. But this Spider had seven legs. I counted them while I knelt, blue-peignoired, beside the tub with my elbows on the edge and watched the Spider and waited for it to go away. Whether it had lost a leg, or had one too many, or its kind is normally made like that: those things I vexedly wondered about. In either case it seemed a so much worse Spider. It did not go away so I touched it gently with an oblong of green soap. Then it moved and began to walk up the side of the tub. But the side is smooth as glass and always it slipped back. I went to my room and fetched a post-card. With a post-card newly from Delaware I lifted the Spider out of the bath-tub. Then I scaled card and Spider to the farthest ceiling corner of the room. Then I drew the tub one-third full of tepid water. And there floating in it as if brought down by Black Art was the seven-legged Spider, drowned and ruined. It spoiled the atmosphere and anticipation of my morning tub. I shuddered miserably. I pulled out the rubber plug and water and Spider washed down and away into the dark sewer-wastes of Butte, into the bowels of the earth, through the gateways of hell, I hope. I took a hasty shower with a flavor of long-legged Spiders in it. I dressed, and combed and coifed my hair, with the clouded thought in me that throughout my life I shall inevitably encounter by eternal law a long-legged Spider from time to time. I know there’ll be no evading it. Those who know statistics doubtless could tell me how many Spiders I shall encounter in so many or so many years: the exact percentage even to the division of a week and the half or the quarter of a Spider. There is something disconcerting and tragic in the thought.

The drowned Spider’s ghost pursued me all day though its memory faded.

My breakfast, though it included an egg, seemed antagonistic, hostile toward me as I ate it. It made me melancholy.

I watched from my back window a slim boy painting a porch and singing in incipient tenor a rhythmic lullaby beginning ‘go to sleep my dus-ky ba-by.’ He painted silently for some minutes and then dipped his brush in the tin of paint. Whenever he left off painting to dip the brush he sang. Once he failed to sing when he dipped the brush but instead burst forth with it in the midst of painting a long mustard streak on his porch. Ordinarily that would not have mattered to me since I am innately keyed and pitched to expect the galvanically unexpected. But to-day it made me rackingly nervous.

In the afternoon I went for a walk. Down and down, seventeen squares from here, in a quiet neighborhood a strange woman accosted me. She was pale and smartly dressed and quite drunk. She said, ‘Listen--can you remember which of these corners I was to meet a friend at?’ It made me feel annoyed and bewildered and sad and silly.

When I came back I read awhile--a story of Guy de Maupassant’s about a little dog named Pierrot, whose owner loved him much but loved money more and could not bring herself to pay a tax of eight francs to make Pierrot’s existence legal. So she threw him into a pit. As heartbreaking a tale as even de Maupassant ever wrote. It made all the loves in this world feel terrifyingly sordid. It made me unhappy.

Then I found a poetry-book and read about the Blessed Damozel leaning out from the gold bar of heaven. Always, by her loveliness alone, she stirs me to my still depths of tears. But to-day the song made me feel over-wrought and life-worn.

To-night I walked out to a little desert-space west of the town, a very pale, very gray desert, with a sweet wet mist like dissolving pearls swathing it. The million placid stars looked down, remote and hard, as if each one had newly forsaken me. It made me afraid and cold around my heart.

Here I sit and nothing in all the world is pleasant or reassuring.

That damned Spider.


To wander and hang and float about

My damnedest damningest quality is Wavering--Wavering--

I might say I prefer the dawn to the twilight or the twilight to the dawn.

Neither would be true.

I love the dawn--I love the twilight.

What I unconsciously prefer is the long negative Wavering space-of-day between the two.

I might say I prefer heaven to hell or hell to heaven.

Neither would be true.

My garbled gyral nature, partaking uneasily of both, prefers to wander and hang and float about between the two.

I might say I prefer strength to weakness or weakness to strength.

Neither would be true.

What I prefer is a hellish hovering, an endless torturing Tenterhook between the two.

And that Wavering preference is against my will, against my reason, against my judgment, against my taste and liking--against my life, my welfare, my salvation: against the clear lights of my spirit.

I know I work intently and industriously at the articles of my damnation in the Wavering--Wavering--

I know it would be better to die at once: failing that, to live but to live positively as a beggar, a whore, a thief or a milliner. Knowing that, I know also I Waver: I know I shall prefer to Waver: I know I shall constantly Waver.

I am constant--I am remarkably profoundly constant--in my Wavering.

In the morning as I dress I draw on a stocking--a long black or white glistening stocking. I know I do it only because the mixed big world, which refuses to Waver, is pushing--pushing me. I would choose if I could--though loathing my choice--to stay with my bare foot and my stocking in my hand, Wavering. Between drawing it on and pausing barefoot, Wavering. I prefer not to draw on the stocking: I prefer not to be barefoot: I prefer Wavering--Wavering--

When I’m hungry I choose: not to let food alone: not to eat it: to have it by me and Waver, Waver emptily. Not to enjoy its anticipation: not to contemplate it. No--no! To Waver! I reach and take the food because the world in its pushing pushes me.

If the world stopped pushing--

One reason it will be pleasant to be dead: I can then no longer Waver.

Worms will eat me unwaveringly. Or they may then do the Wavering. But I shall no more pause with a bare foot and an empty stocking, a dish of food and a gnawing midriff.

Here I sit as yet, alive and Wavering.

The Wavering is not the pale cast of thought: it is not my way of analysis: it is only Wavering--Wavering--

Wavering is not among the blue-green Stones in my antique necklace: not by that name--not as one Stone.

It is a marked and hateful and hellish gift of this present Me who house my Soul.

It is half of this Mary MacLane--who is I--: and I know.

I am constant alone--noticeably tensely constant--in my Wavering: and less constant in Wavering than in the ghoulish preference.

An odd and subtle doom.


A thousand kisses

Among my other gifts I own also Wantonness. In proof of which I am wishing as I sit here for a Thousand careless kisses: eleven o’clock of still evening--a Thousand Kisses.

A wonderful, wonderful attribute, Wantonness: rich, rich luster in the conscious temperament which owns it, a Gift-thing delicate and gorgeous.

By it I want a Thousand Kisses: a Thousand--made all of Wantonness.

Kisses come in differing kinds and only one is Wanton.

The kiss of a lover has an intense cosmic use: the kiss of a mother is tender fostering food: the kiss of a friend is vantage and grace of friendliness: the kiss of a child is cool charm of snowflakes and green springtime leaves.

And the kiss of Wantonness is not of use, nor of food, nor of gracing vantage, nor of childhood charm--but is restless essence of humanness and worldliness and mere sheer limitless encompassing liking: born of sweet lips, alien it might be, and secretly ‘unattuned,’ but warm and fond and present: answering the pathos of infinite jejuneness which flows, flows always in red human blood.

Through the race rides a long dread wistfulness, made of tears and lies and the barbaric distress and pitfall of everyday’s journey: a crying wish for a cup of warmed drugged sweet ease to turn it all a moment away: but a moment away.

And through all the race is the measureless poetry, purling and mantling in its bowl of flesh. Each human one is made of the sun, and made of the moon, and made of the four winds and the seas and the last pink sea-foam on the crests of the twilit waves: and made of salt and of sugar and of lonesome calling of loons and quick song of skylarks: and made of sword-edges and of money and of dolls and toys and painted glass: and made of loose reckless shuffling of dry autumn leaves, and of nerves and of illusions and of broken food and hesitance: and made of Mother-Goose rhymes and of cigarette-ashes and of raveled silk: and made of layers and layers of mixed-up passionate colors and of gilded cakes and of strawberries and of temperamental orgasms and raw silvery onions and gaming and dancing and minute-by-minute inconsistency: all veiled in a thin gold veil--all in a thin gold veil.

Betwixt the wistfulness and the poetry--hélas, what chance has the human equation, unsought, unwarned, unchallenged of God to be straitly equable!

No chance.

Happily no chance.

Thus I, Mary MacLane, so conscious of Me and garbledly gifted, want a Thousand Kisses at eleven o’clock of a still evening.

No spirit-hands of Love are laid soft on my drooping shoulders in the passing days: no Love--no Love--in all my life.

No miracle Wonder and Gentleness stirs in and against my Heart: my Heart is strangely dead of a strange Realness, known and felt but unachieved:--no Love--no Love in my life.

And I can wish for no Love, for the listless Heart is listlessly dead.

I wish instead, in hastening present clock-ticking moments, for a Thousand present-warmed Kisses: a Thousand in Wanton response to a Wanton ’leven-o’clock.

Dominating waving washing warmth of Wantonness, compassing me at eleven o’clock.

A Thousand careless insouciant Kisses: a Thousand gorgeous delicate Kisses: a round Thousand.

From what lips--whose lips--what do I know?--: so their Kisses are a Thousand.

From what lips--what do I care?--: so they be eager and live and tenderly false.

--come some of the Thousand glowing on my pink lips, and my white fingers, which were tense, relax--

--come more of the Thousand, and my rigid hard-riding thoughts grow drowsy and pliant and negligible.

--come more of the Thousand, and my knees and the marrow in my bones are gently aware of most logical opiate ease--

--come more of the Thousand, and my midriff is full of cream-and-chocolate casualness and my smooth arms are washed down with mists of custom.

--come more of the Thousand, and my seven senses start to melt at the edges--

--come more of the Thousand, and the palms of my hands wax merely pleasant-feeling and the soles of my feet fatly comfortable--

--come the last of the Thousand in a swirling silly lovely lightly-insane shower--and I feel exactly like a woman in the next street who goes forth clad in mustard-and-cerise with a devilish black-and-white Valeska-Suratt parasol: and more--much more--I feel the way she looks--

For this Wanton-thing is not amour but psychology: in it I am less the mænad than the philosopher: less the Cyprian woman than the Muse.

I am a deeply gifted woman.

I am not prone on my green couch, frayed, frazzled, bowed-down in spirit from a day of frightful stress and cross-purpose.

Instead, hair-triggerishly alive, with definite desire beating hotly this moment in my throat: the wish for Kisses--Kisses far removed from Death and Graves and Coffins: Kisses of this present clock-tickingness, Kisses useless, meaningless, sweet--oh, sweet!--

--in number, a Thousand: in kind. Wanton.


A fluttering-moth wish

A wish that God would come personally to see me flutters in my thoughts ever and anon like a restless moth.

I am in a prison-mood and coldly content to be in it. For how long content--content is not the word: despairingly acquiescent--there’s no word to express that--I can noway tell. But now I live and breathe aloof and strange-mooded. And with it I wish God would visit me a moment.

It is not a strong wish. Yet restless and persistent.

I want to be free from myself and away, loosed in the little broad big narrow World: but first and more I want God to visit me.

I want people again, those away from here who are my friends--some glowing-spirited ones who appreciate my Mind and cater to me: I want, I think, a poet to love me with some unobvious madness: but first and more I want God to visit me.

More than I want strength of spirit and flesh, more than I want a fat mental peace, more than I want to know John Keats in star-spaces: more than I want my dream-Child: I want God to visit me.

More than I wish this appalling tiredness would leave me: more than I wish this I write to be a realization, a de-fait portrait of the thin-hidden Me, my self-expression achieved: more than I want to be quit of my two black dresses and back in the wide sweet frivol of variegated clothes: I want God to visit me.

God must know all about that. He must have known it a long time. He still does not come. If he would come and tell me one thing, one certain thing, it would be enough. It would show me a direction and I could keep on in it by myself. If God would tell me even a sheerest matter-of-fact, for sure--like What O’Clock by his time it really is: that would be a spark from which I could build an eternal fire for myself. Forever after I could dispense with God as a personality.

I am strangely weak. Strong of will, strong of mind, but weak of purpose: damnably, damnedly. I shall never be able to write in words one one-thousandth of the dramatic drastic weakness which is in me. But I hate weakness with so deep and strong a hatred, and to know one eternal certain thing would be so roundly restful, I could then go on: I could vanquish the potent pettinesses which beset me.

I do not want from God a passport, a safe-conduct into heaven. I don’t want to get into heaven. I don’t know what it is, but the word has sounds of finality, as if all winds, sweet nervous petal-laden winds, had stopped blowing forever. For cycles and centuries to come the Soul of me will be too restless to live where winds can not blow.

I love the journey: so that only I might have one dim torch to go by. I love the pitfalls and ditches--all the dangers--black-shaded woods and wolds, and lonesome plains and briery paths, and very wet swamps, and strong whistling gales which chill me: so that I could feel but one tiny bright-bladed truth, within and without, pricking and urging me to struggle on through it all till I might emerge at last like a human being, rather than linger indifferent and inanimate like a jaded wood-nymph in drearily pleasant spaces.


Twenty inches of ajarness

God might come to visit me on a Monday afternoon.

He would come in at the door of my blue-white room which had been left about twenty inches ajar: for I cannot imagine God, the aloof and reticent, opening a shut door to visit anyone. It is as if God purposely lacks all initiative. If I wish to meet God I must first suffer deeps of terror and passion and loneliness to make the mood that wants it. Then I must train my life down to two plain frocks. And to crown all my room-door must be left ajar on the day he happens to come or he will not come in. That seems certain: but for twenty inches of ajarness at my door he will not come in.

In it God is quite fair. I do the reaching-out and I live out the despairs: he furnishes a fact to go upon: I go upon it, in some anguish doubtless: but then mine, not God’s, are the lights and the translated splendor. It is a ‘gentleman’s game’ God plays. It is because I feel that to be true, more than for that he is the Dealer, that I would have a word with him.

On a Monday afternoon--

He might come in the figure of a precise mystic-looking little old man, punctilious of dress and manner like an English duke on the stage. He might wear overwhelmingly correct afternoon attire, with spats and a monocle on a wide ribbon. It someway fills my peculiar trivial concepts of God: mystic-seeming because he is the God of the dead dusty hosts of Israel, and punctiliously modern because he is also the God of new-poeted radium-gifted Now. A God like a druid or like Aladdin’s genie, such as I fancied as a child, or like Jove or Vulcan, would seem an inadequate and unsuitable God. What would such a one know of the shape and fashion of my two plain dresses, and of my shoes, and my breakfasts, and the charmed surface joy in the back of a magazine? God, to be God to me, must know all those things.

And if he only bespoke me in thunderous preludes touching souls’ triumphant apotheoses--bold and intolerable ecstasies beyond heaven’s last poignantest door--it would be nothing to my purpose. Those my poet-brain can make for me if I wish. But I’d like God to explain me the little frightful puzzles which thrive all around me in the wide daylight of this knife-and-fork-ness.

God might come walking lightly in and perhaps seat himself fastidiously in my chastest chair. He might cross one knee over the other. He might adjust his monocle and regard me through it speculatively or sadly or politely-wearily. I should be outwardly calm but I might feel an inward panic: lest he go away again without having told me a fact.

I might say to God: ‘God, if you please, this small blue vase on my window-sill--I see it and I touch it and I love it--will you tell me, you who know, is there a blue vase there or is there no vase?’

And God might merely glance at the vase through his glass and daintily hold his white handkerchief crumpled-up in his gray-gloved fingers and might merely say: ‘Madame, you have eyes with which to see the vase and hands with which to touch it and sentiments to lend it charm for you, no doubt. Then why not let them inform you as to its actuality?’

And then I might say, with a weariness equal to God’s: ‘My senses are pleasant--they are sweet--but they do not inform me, or they inform me wrong. Because they don’t plainly tell me whether it’s a Blue Vase or a Blue Shadow--just for that I burn in little disconcerting hell-fires, and vulture-thoughts with beaks and talons come and tear me in the night, and I starve and decay trivially, and my life is a flattish ruin and a tasteless darkness and a slight shallow death, a death in the sunshine--I am fed-up with a sense of death because of pricking doubts as to my blue vase’s realness.’

To which, again, God might reply with his head tilted to one side, tranquil and impersonal: ‘As to that, Madame, there may be less death in doubt than in certainty about your vase. You might in discovering it discover in yourself no right whatever to the sunshine--no right to live in it, no right to die in it.’

And I might answer, with some insolent feeling: ‘I should wish to discover the fact about it though it proved to me I don’t exist and never existed--that I’m a dust on a moth’s wing, and at that alien--not belonging there.’

Upon which God, for what I know, might only shrug-the-shoulders.

In that identity he might shrug-the-shoulders or break-the-world with equal omnipotent plausibleness.

But I might try again. I might say: ‘One thing feels realer than my blue vase--this blue-and-green Necklace which my Soul wears. It is rare and recherché but my beautiful Soul is very tired from wearing it. Will you please unclasp it for me?’

And God might say, deprecatory: ‘Pray, Madame, do you consider what portion of the beauty you mention may be in the Necklace? Should I unclasp it--it is doubtful whether you would recognize your soul without it.’

To which I might answer, with more insolent feeling: ‘I don’t know anything of that and I don’t care for it. I only know I want the Necklace off. To wear it makes me languid and frenzied and worn--full of wild goaded saneness and the wish to go violently mad.’

And God might answer: ‘Permit me to express my regrets for those sentiments which, I should add, I neither concur in nor refute nor deny nor share.’

There I might be: conversationally whip-sawed.--God is full of works of beauty, serene and miraculous: Gray Lakes and Blue Mourning Mountains and Deserts beneath the Moon. Those have quietly ravished me many and many a night and day--and will again, and still again, in pacing To-morrows.

But I can’t tell What O’Clock it is by them. And if God were by me and I asked him the time the odds are all that he would look at the toy-face of my little ivory toy-clock, which sets on my desk where I can see it myself, and tell me the time by that.

But though he is thus perplexing he knows the right time and could tell me it.

For that restlessly I wish God would make me one brief visit.

I wish that though he should so godlily baffle me and divinely bore me.


A profoundly delicious idea

It is nineteen minutes after one on a summer night. And if only I felt a bit hungry this is what I should wish--spread out on a damask cloth before me in a few gold-medallioned Chinese dishes, with no forks or knives: first of all, two thin foie-gras sandwiches, four grilled snails and maybe a little alligator pear: on top of those, two truffles: on top of those, two slim onions: on top of those, two thin salted biscuits: on top of those, a bit of Camembert cheese: on top of that, two cigarettes: on top of all a hollow-stemmed glass of sparkling Burgundy.

I’m not hungry, but it is comforting to think how delightful that supper would taste if I were. Food is a so magic rich gusty gift bestowed on the human race: and is besides a profoundly delicious Idea.

I like food better to imagine than even to eat. If I were hungry I think I could obtain that chaste supper item for item, and eat it: swallow it down magic and all, and thus vanquish it magic and all, and there an end. So I am glad I am not hungry. It is much more delectable to sit here and think that if I were--

if I were--

a Hollow-stemmed Glass of Sparkling Burgundy.

two cigarettes.

a Bit of Camembert Cheese.

two Thin Salted Biscuits.

two Slim Onions.

two Truffles.

two Thin Foie-Gras Sandwiches: Four Grilled Snails: and maybe a Little Alligator Pear.

If I were a bit hungry: oh, the idea of a little supper! It would then be blestness, benediction--fruit of the very garden of Paradise!


A mountebank’s cloak

I am so Clever. I am the Cleverest human being I know.

I have thought my Cleverness an outer quality, a mountebank’s cloak, and as such not belonging in this book of my own self. But there are no outer qualities. Everything in and about me is my own self.

My Cleverness is of high quality--even supernatural, I have thought--and is of unobvious tenors.

To any essentially false nature, such as mine, a quick and positive Cleverness is its needfulest resource in coping with this pushing world. To any un-sanely sensitive nature such as mine Cleverness is its fender against human encounters and onslaughts.

There is no Cleverness in this I write. There is writing skill and my dead-feeling genius. But my Cleverness is beside those points.

I use Cleverness when I encounter people.

Sometimes I like people and wish to impress them.

Always I am vain and sometimes I wish my vanity catered to.

And I can get from people whatever tribute I choose.

I mostly choose to bewilder and half-fascinate which is easiest: I talk about anything, nothing, everything with a tinsel-bright complexity which captures average intellects. And even very Clever people seem not Clever to me because I feel so exceeding Clever to myself. I am a little more intuitive, a little falser, a little lightning-quicker than the most artistically antic mentalities I have known.

I am a lady with the ladies, a woman with women, a highly intelligent writer with writers, a loosed fish with the loose fish: being all the time nothing but my own self, unspeakably incongruent. Having never found anyone remotely matching me in barbaric and devastating incongruity of nature I use in human encounters whatever phase makes the occasion most gently befit me. I cater, or I thrill some bastard dull brain, or I grow roundly versatile: all with a sudden coruscant Cleverness which is not in itself any of Me but is my mountebank’s scarlet cloak.

But its main cause and reason is not vanity nor a fancy for piquant trickery, nor the wish to try my superior wings in glowing human atmospheres--the preponderant impulse to fly because I can fly. It’s none of those, but a need of protection, of a bright armor to keep other people’s superficialities from touching me. There’s a human effluvium which I feel from people which would touch, wrap, enclose me in a harsh vapor--a half-froze, half-stinging worldly cloud. It hurts with thin cruelness like a corroding spray of acid on my skin: unless I send out the sudden air of my own Cleverness to keep it off and away.

It is long months since I have encountered people with any impulse save hastily to avoid them. But if I should meet, with an aggression of mettle and mood, some woman or man or little group of human sorts (except children of and for whom I have always a fear and a respect) I should then suddenly be casual and half-fascinating and phosphorescently glowing and insolent: being inside me haggard from solitude, wistful from a bereftness and a beauty-sense, suffering and lost.

Ah, I’m notably Clever!

I write a letter of Clever delicate surprisingness--it is the only Clever writing I do. There are twenty people, now long outside my life, to whom a Mary-Mac-Lane letter is the agreeably-vividest thing that could come into a day. The letter, which is an unapparent cater, is not real Me who am someway a strong and contemptuous spirit--but instead one tinsel facet. And it makes people--people! people!--admire and defer to me in a subtlest human aspect: an unwilling antagonistic homage. It stays me, buoys me for the time.

I am profoundly Clever in that I who am in reality so futile, so wavering, so sensitively lyingly artistic, can still show myself aggressively Clever to other persons. I must, being false, be Clever in order to get by.

It is at its best a trickster’s quality: and so much the more am I Clever in stretching it out over my shaded life like a strong bright cloak-of-mail.

Just to be Mary MacLane--who am first of all my own self!--and get by with it!--how I do that I can not quite make out.

I’m by odds the Cleverest human being I know: more than likely one of the Cleverest who ever lived in this world.


A familiar sharp twist

I have--a Broken Heart--

It is nearly a year now.

It feels strange to be writing it. What is one’s Heart? But it is a plain fact of me.

I have not had a Broken Heart in the years before. I have had silly fancies--I have wasted the outer tissues of my Heart, and it has been bruised and battered. But nothing pierced deep enough to break it till this.

My Broken Heart is the outstanding inner item of my life: and it still is a very small thing even in my own reckoning. It tortures me minutely all the minutes and moments and hours. And yet my all-round life moves on beside it and often passes it on the road.

My Broken Heart contributes nothing, no cause and no urge, to the writing of this song of my Soul and bones. It rather is a handicap. It makes me sit and brood. It makes my eyelids heavy and my head droop. It makes my shoulders ache. It makes me sit longish half-hours with my head on my lonely hands. It fills me with foolish wasting despair.

Its foolishness is the foremost thing about my Broken Heart. It is not a foolishness of worldly reasons nor of outer causes but of all the surprising folly of myself crowded into my Heart and into that which Broke it. The foolishness would not be so noticeable if the Brokenness were not so hideous and genuine and actual and matter-of-course. It was foolish to lay myself open, who am humanly starved, to the possible Breaking of my Heart: and doubly foolish to let it be Broken. And being left in possession of a Broken Heart I feel it to be a triply insanely foolish thing: but complete and absolute and natural.

I am so oddly a fool.

The proper price for such or such a thing in the Market might be one-and-twenty drops of red human blood. But I headlongly pay for it one-and-ninety drops: each one touched with fire, shot with purple, tinctured with hottest spirit-essence. The proper payment for Love is to pay back value received--which is enough. But I in addition dip my white bare foot into red world-and-hell flames by way of quixotic bonus. When other persons emerge from Love with the old-fashioned accustomed wounds and scars I emerge with besides an immensely useless futilely ruined foot.

It is wildest foolishness. Not merely folly. Folly is something picturesque--a bit romantic.

I am oddly a fool. It is that consciousness that rushes over me with each sad black thought of my Broken Heart.

My Broken Heart--it feels half-false to myself as I write it. And the written words look half-false to my eyes. But it is realer than my fingernails: than my palms: than my aching left foot.

My Broken Heart, besides being a triviality is a mistake, and will pass in time doubtless, but is long about it.

It is one thing I do not dwell upon in this book of me. A Broken Heart is sharply immediate like a newly-bitten tongue. It may bleed at a touch. To dwell on it connects me strainedly with the world around, and the world is really gone from me. This book is I as I breathe alone. I cannot write in it the silly shadowy Breaking of my Broken Heart. This writing is I Just Beneath My Skin. My Broken Heart is beneath bones and flesh. And though my M.-MacLane heart intact is wildly individual, my Broken Heart is merely human: made not alone by me and not alone by God. Its place in this I write is just outside the margins.

At times my Broken Heart feels far off while I’m feeling it hideous and wan inside my breast. Myself is Me, and much of Me had nothing to do with my Heart when it Broke: though I loved with all of Me. I loved with all of Me one who lives in New York--and I lost and lost, all the way. There was mere human ordinariness about which I built up a strangely sincere temple-of-grace which I looked to see shed light on my life like the new eternal beauty of a Day-break. I gave the best I knew to it, from the distance, and I lost. The day was a little day and broke at last only like my Heart. All was broken without so much as clasp-of-hands.

I am realest, strongest, passionately-sincerest in my essential known falseness--

It was all foolish and petty and someway false but I felt foolishly and shudderingly that I could live no more. But I am singularly brave from life-long custom. I have no pleas and surrenderings in me. I shudder but live on.

One Thursday I felt suddenly oppressed and beset and something in my throat cried out to the absent God to help me and guard me.

It was something in my throat which shrieked it dumbly in the deafening silence in my room. It was not I myself: for I am unsuppliant toward everyone human and divine though there often come such Thursdays.

Harder than Thursdays are Fridays and some other days when comes a familiar sharp twist beneath my chest-bones without the cognizance of my remembering thoughts: and when though I strive against it my Broken Heart makes me sit longish half-hours with my head on my hands.


A dark bright fierce fire

I am Lonely. I am so Lonely that I can feel myself rattle inside my life like one live seed in a hollow gourd.

I am on fire with Loneliness.

I am living this month alone in this house. The solitude is pregnant: Doors and Door-knobs and Curtains and Tables have silently come alive in it and have taken on identities like those of tamed wild beasts.

I do housework--I dust window-sills and water flowers. I gather up newspapers and brush the floors with a dust-mop. I wash my dishes. I cook my breakfasts. I look out of windows. I linger at screen-doors.

I answer the telephone: I say, ‘They’re not at home.’

I change my frock and put on a hat and a cloak and gloves and go softly out the door and front gate on an errand.

I meet people on the street whom I know, whom I may speak to, whom I may avoid: who may speak to me: who may avoid me: for I am at best well hated in this Butte.

I come back again, softly unlock the door and come in. I come upstairs, take off the out-door things, give a hasty side-glance in my glass and go downstairs.

I read awhile. To-day I read an old-fashioned short story whose soft wondrous prose cadences fed my senses--the Parable of the Prodigal Son.--for this my son was dead and is alive--was lost and is found--.

But I am very restless and cannot read long.

I am on fire--dark bright fierce fire with Loneliness.

I move about again from room to room. I look out of windows and linger at doors.

I close my eyes and open my eyes.

My Soul-and-bones! I’m afire with Loneliness!

It is Loneliness not made of the Empty House and the tamed wild Door-knobs and Doors and Curtains and the Lonely Errands. Those are its small-fruits. Itself is my ancient daylight Loneliness dating from Three-Years-Old when I first began whisperingly analyzing things and finding little life-items to be of a fierce bitter importance.

If I were living among people, friendly people, then the Loneliness though unchanged would be disguised and vested with a padded muffling power--false, belike, and a mistake (but everything is false and a mistake: only there are wrong mistakes and right mistakes)--but made of the world-stuff that lets a human being get by in this nervous life.

But it would be of no use now. I must face Loneliness: and outface it. I do, and with no effort: for I am Lonelier than Loneliness’s self. So it feels. This locked-in mood--soon it may be worn down and outgrown, and the husks blown away in the winds.

But may come after it a wilder Loneliness of being free, fearfully free: flavored with the heaviness of rain at night and draggledness of beggar-women’s skirts.--

Meanwhile bright and black among Doors and Door-knobs and Curtains and Tables burns the fire of this Loneliness with strong, strong flame. It is mystic agony. There is no thinking in it. There is an utterly irrational wish, an aching yearning for people: not people to see, or listen to, or talk to, but--humanness I could feel with familiarity. I wish for hands and bodies near me: breath for mine faintly to mingle with: the feel of their human garments in the room around me: the feel of the pulsing blood in their veins remotely vibrant in the air: the feel of minds and spirits and throats and rich warm virile hair of human heads keeping me warmly company. I have heard one may step rarefied out of this living-place into the Fourth Dimension, where one feels everything without the efforts of feeling, and knows everything without the weights of knowing. It might be that I grope for in this black bright anguish.

Yet I feel rarely rarefied, heavily rarefied, wornly rarefied in this living-place where Loneliness burns me in strong fire and where I can shake my life like a hollow gourd and hear the eerie rattling sound I make in it.


Late afternoon

Last night as I slept I dreamed a vivid dream.

I dreamed it was late afternoon and I was locked in a condemned cell, sentenced to die. I would be led out and hanged on a gallows the following morning at day-break. I dreamed I sat beneath a narrow window in the cell through which shone the light of the waning afternoon. The light was very pale, as of sunshine long dead. I dreamed I held on my knees a small block of paper which had a half-inch blue border at the top to mark a perforation, and in my hand I had a red pencil. And I dreamed I had cheated the gallows and was writing a little ballad about it in sudden rhymes and rhythms quite alien to my waking forms. When I awoke the song was still beating time in my brain. And with my black awake-time pencil I wrote, except for two words, the rhyme, title and all, as I dreamed:

LATE AFTERNOON.

They’ll think when I pass through that door To-morrow in the dawn, I’ll then be going to my death. It’s I’ve already gone.

They’ll watch me walk serenely out, Still-nerved and somber-eyed, ‘So strong,’ they’ll say, ‘to meet her death.’ To-day it is I died.

There’ll be my pulses quick with life, My white sweet throat, my breath: But flesh and bone are all will hang. This noon I met my death.

For days I charmedly dwelt on death-- I raved at death--I swore-- Till vexédly death waived the date: And came this Day-Before.

From being lured with artful thoughts My life abortive grew. From being broached in livid mood My death aborted too.

To-morrow they’ll remark my calm-- No fuss, no fright, no swoon. They’ll kill a wench to-morrow dawn Was dead to-day at noon.

Three oddnesses are in that dream:

that it is true to life in that I in my lightning Mary-Mac-Lane-ness would manage to cheat a gallows.

that it is untrue to life in that instead of writing of it in the true twilit poetry of my own sufficient prose I wrote it in the shallow trick-phrasing of rhyme, a little serenade to the gibbet.

that it catches and holds my Shadow-self who lives not inside me but beside me: the resembling dissembling shadow I cast when I stand between the daylights of the actual world and the quivering films of the region of dreams.--

My owned mysteries thrive apace. They are poetry and beauty and loveliness yet they bruise and batter me and split me to atoms. Withal are terrifyingly superfluous: they violently kill the wench to-morrow dawn who died restfully to-day at noon.


An ancient witch-light

Also I am someway the Lesbian woman.

It is but one phase--one which slightly touches each other phase I own. And in it I am poetic and imaginative and worldly and amorous and gentle and true and strong and weak and ardent and shy and sensitive and generous and morbid and sweet and fine and false.

The Lesbian sex-strain as an effect is reckoned a prenatal influence--and, as I conceive, it comes also of conglomerate incarnations and their reactions and flare-backs. Of some thus bestowed it makes strange hard highly emotional indefinably vicious women, turbulent and brilliant of mind, mystically overborne, overwrought of heart. They are marvels of perverse barbaric energy. They make with men varied flinty friendships, but to each other they are friends, lovers, victims, preyers, masters, slaves: the flawed fruits of one oblique sex-inherence.

Except two breeds--the stupid and the narrowly feline--all women have a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant intensive personal taste, the flair of inner-sex, in the tenderest friendships of women.

For myself, there is no vice in my Lesbian vein. I am too personally fastidious, too temperamentally dishonest, too eerily wavering to walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in freest moods. There is instead a pleasant degeneracy of attitude more debauching to my spirit than any mere trivial traînant vice would be. And a fascination in it tempers my humanness with an evil-feeling power.

I have lightly kissed and been kissed by Lesbian lips in a way which filled my throat with a sudden subtle pagan blood-flavored wistfulness, ruinous and contraband: breath of bewildering demoniac winds smothering mine.

Lesbian essence is of mental quality. There are aggressively endowed women whose minds are so bent that they instinctively nurture any element in themselves which is blighting and ill-omened and calamitous in effect. There are some to which the natural inhibition of their own sex is lure and challenge. There are some so solitary by destiny and growth that the first woman-friend who comes into their adolescence with sympathy and understanding wins a passionate Lesbian adoration the deeper for being unrealized. There are some so roiledly giftedly incongruous in trait that they are prone to catch and hold any additional twisted shreds afloat in human air-currents.

Each of those influences biases the Mind of me, which is none the less a clear-visioned mind which rates no thing a truth which it knows to be a lie: though it batten on the lie.

--often here and there around this human world the twisted and perverted and strongly false concepts are the strong actual working facts and the straight road is myth--myth--existent but in visions--

I don’t understand why it’s so: I know it is so.

Not only so with me: so with millions whose stars jangled.

Not always. But often.--

The deep-dyed Lesbian woman is a creature whose sensibilities are over-balanced: whose imagination moves on mad low-flying wings: whose brain is good: whose predilections are warped: who lives always in unrest: whose inner walls are streaked with garish heathen pigments: whose copious love-instincts are an odd mixture of mirth, malice and luxure.

Its effects in me who am straight-made in nothing, but strongly crooked, is to vivify tenfold or a hundredfold or a thousandfold in my shaded vision the womanness of any woman whose inner or outer beauty arrests and stirs my spirit.

I see in some woman, some girl, any who attracts me--be she a casual acquaintance, or a Victorian poet dead fifty years whose poetry and portrait live, or an actor in a play, or a sweet-browed friend, or an Old Master--I see one such as if all her charm were newly painted and placed near me shining wet with delicate fresh paint. It is bewitching to look at: it has a deep seductive fragrance of smell: it is luxuriantly aromatic to all my known senses--and two senses unknown float from my deeps and rise at it. The Stranger becomes a dearly poignant fancy to dream over. My Friend turns into a vivid goddess whose fingers and hair I would touch tenderly with my lips.

Because of it a little flame, pale but primal, leaps from the flattest details of life. In such a mood-adventure a window-shutter blooms: a hair-brush glows: a sordid floor has gleams upon it. These bewildering frightful beautifulnesses in this life--.

--withal the same inherence which makes me someway Lesbian makes me the floor of the setting sun--strewn with overflowing gold and green vases of Fire and Turquoise--a sly and piercing annihilation-of-beauty, wonderful devastating to feel--oh, blighting breaking to feel--oh, deathly lovely to feel!--It is the bewitched obliquities that run away with me: grind, gnaw, eat my true human heart like bright potent vitriol.

What God means me to do with such gifts and phases--I don’t and don’t understand. I never get anywhere as I think it out. I don’t know shades of rights and wrongs since that ancient witch-light has found more trueness of human feeling in me than has any simplicity my life knows.

It began, they say, with Sappho and her dreaming students in the long-ago vales of Lesbos. It may be, I daresay. I know it did not stop there. And I know that--Greek, French, Scotch, Indian--Welch--Japanese--all women sense its light lyric touch. For myself, I know only it is part and parcel in my tangled tired coil.

I don’t know whether I am good and sweet in it or evil and untoward.

And I don’t care.


The gray-purple

Close at the east edge of this Butte is a barren ridge of Rockies that is sudden and big and breathing-looking, barbarously personal, touched with varying gifted color-moods and glowering morose color-passions: at the south the snow-topped Highlands lie long faëry solitary miles away, caressed at their summits by thin soft sun-rings and sun-vapors of salmon and sea-green and turquoise and mauve: at the west a gray-shadowed desert burns red-gold in the setting sun and sleeps in pearl-and-ashen stillness under midnight stars: at the north smaller spurs of the range break into foothills and bluffs and gulches, restful wastes of lonely stones and blurred radiances of tawny sand: on top of all the rarefied air of these plateau heights refracts the light into hot dazzling prisms at any vagrant flash of sun on a trailing storm-fringe. This Butte is capriciously decorated with sweet brilliant metallic orgies of color at any time, all times, as if by whims of pagan gods lightly drunk and lightly mad.

St. Paul-Minnesota looks a greenlier-prettier town: the Arizona Cañon looks vastly more fearfully beautiful: Wichita-Kansas probably looks more a regular town: Akron-Ohio doubtless looks more Americanly reassuring: Rome-Italy must have a more ‘settled’ look: New York is much larger and much brighter-looking.

Only this Butte looks deeply and exactly like Butte-Montana.

Its insistent charm is that it goes on strongly resembling itself year after year.

There is love in me for this Butte.

I am profoundly lonely in it: my life-tissues are long-familiar with the feel of it: its mournful beauty has entered like thin punishing iron into my Soul: and my love for it is made of those things. For no reason I feel love for this Butte.

As much as for the mountains in their mourning intimateness I feel love for all the outsides and surfaces of the town itself: the stone streets full of houses and shops and stores and brick walls and laundry-wagons and persons: the vacant lots where boys play ball: the school-buildings which for twenty years have needed the same green grass around them and the same playgrounds for school-children to play in (and will go on twenty years needing them): the little mines in unexpected midtown blocks with their engines and hoists and scaffolds and green coppery dumps: the big mines on the Hill busily working day and night, a bristling citadel of smoke-stacks and tall buildings above the treasure-drifts and tunnels that come down honeycombing the town under its streets and hoses and yield up wealths of monthly millions: the desolate wind-swept cemetery on the Flat: the Timber Butte: the School of Mines: the Brophy grocery-window full of attractive grocery-food: the St. Gaudens statue of Marcus Daly: the few sweet green trees on North Montana Street by the court-house: the edge of Walkerville: Ex-Senator Clark’s old-fashioned closed house in Granite Street: the stone Episcopal Church with the memorial windows: the surprising steep Idaho Street hill: the old Reduction Works reminiscent of the bygone Heinze and the bold buccaneering days: the Montana Street cemetery at last kempt and nurtured green as Beloit-Wisconsin: the little rocky Missoula gulch: the North Excelsior Street neighborhood where I wrote my Devil and Gray-dawn book: the Butte High School where I studied and meditated youngly: the old Library where I used to get a variety of books in my gangling girlhood: the electric ore-trains going to Anaconda: the vegetable Chinamen: the Post-Office News-stand: the Mexican tamale venders in the early night: the sweet green trees and other greenness in people’s yards garnered and cherished in a way which would astonish Toledo-Ohio: the brilliant sparkling look of the town from far out on the Flat late in the evening, like a mammoth broken tiara of starry diamonds, twinkling points of blue and orange and cerise and violet, fired and flung against a mountainside of dark velvet,--an aspect intensely Butte: the cool mosquitoless summer nights: the Anaconda Standard: the sulphurous smoky deadly-cold winter mornings: the Cornish and Irish and Austrian and Finn miners: the little slim green onions in the markets: the noise and color and morale of the crowds on a Miner’s Union day: the markets on the afternoon shade side of West Park Street full of crabs and lobsters from Seattle and shining fish from California, and mushrooms and froglegs and squabs and hothouse things from hereabouts: the Parrot smelter: the Chinese gardens at Nine Mile: the Italian village of Meaderville: the fortified battlemented look of the town at the east of South Butte: the mystic familiar sand-and-barrenness--

All of it has a feel of something aloof and metallic and distinctive and gray-purple and Butte-Montana. Gray-purple is the color of the town, its spirit-tone. Its odor and fascination are gray-purple.

This Butte is bodily a young rich present-day city of a hundred-thousand population, all told: miners who bulwark its foundations: masses who make and manage its business: millionaire-members who spend most of their lives and dollars in New York: all are Butte-made. But its soul is still the soul of the frontier mining-camp which sprang into copper being when the Comstock mine in Virginia-Nevada failed of its silver-ish promise.

A very few years ago--what one could count on one hand’s fingers--there were no lids in this Butte. Every summer bony thoroughbred horses from Juarez and Denver raced round the oval track on the Flat, watched by a shrieking betting throng of Butte citizens and citizenesses, ridden by silk-bloused black-booted jockies, their finish-spurts under the wire chaperoned by a flock of bookmakers. Roulette and poker and faro were wide-open in the town and flavored the air with a taste of gray-purple hazard. Gin-palaces and mining-camp dance-halls, highly de-luxe’d, lent their tinted breath to the current. Noodle-ish and little bacchanalian dives flourished in unexpected nooks. The police court on a Monday morning resembled the debris from an alcoholic human volcano, a condemned but owned portion of this Butte in its Butte-Montana-ness. All of it was but one element in an isolated prosperous town of many elements, but it someway tinctured all.

No pagan-wild sunset burst above the west desert but suggested that the vague lid was off the town, and vaguely lost: a lost lid.

The gambling lid is fast on now--if they gamble they gamble under it. And no more do ribby horses and surprising-mixed crowds disport them at the deserted race-track.

But the setting Butte sun suggests the same wealth and wildness as if always its celestial chemistry were shot with essence of mining-camp: rich, generous, feverish and virile.

Brophy’s grocery-window and the Marcus Daly monument and the Parrot smelter and the Clark house and the Idaho Street hill--all of it--owns the gray-purple which is not St. Paul and not Wichita and not Pittsburg and not Spokane: not anything except intensely Butte-Montana.

I have felt it since I first lived here in little young short-frocked days, and I felt it when I lived away from Butte: I feel it all these now-days to the roots of myself.

I have no reason: but the contrary: to love Butte as a townful of human beings.

I have no friends in it, no feel-of-friendship, no human friendliness.

And the sculpturesque poetry of the outlying deserts and buttes pushes and presses hurtingly upon the lonely and introspective gazer in Body and Soul: I knew it as child and girl and woman.

There is nothing benign, nothing enlightening--no gentleness, no pity--in its barren beauty. But its hard chaste influence on the sensitive spirit is beyond any analytic power to gauge.

Its wonderful Aridness starves human nerve-soil till the sad wide eyes of the Soul grow bright--fever-bright, light-bright, star-bright--from denial and unconscious prayer: involuntary worship: homage of the unsuppliant unhoping dévotee.

Because of that--and because of all its long-familiar outsidenesses-- mournful, beautiful, mystic, lavish, madly-mixed, gray-purple--a fascination beyond plaisance or pain--I feel love for this Butte.


The subdivided cell

When I was twenty I was one strong Cell firmly, primly closing many little cells different from each other but each greenly intact.

When I was thirty the Cell had burst in dusty worldly winds and loosed the little cells. Those in turn had subdivided, losing strength by the cellful but gaining in shadowed truth by a roundabout road. And they showed me my fates and inevitablenesses as in a broad wrecked field misty but plain to view. And thus I see me in the subdivided cells:

a piece of a normal woman.

a piece of a child.

a piece of a poet.

a piece of a Lesbian woman.

a piece of a writer.

a piece of a jester.

a piece of a savage.

a piece of something someway brave.

a piece of a student.

a patriotic American.

a lump of tiredness.

My strength is in knowing the evil from the good and the false from the true in it.

My weakness is in wildly waveringly inclining toward the false.

Except for love of my country I am ardenter, determinder, stronger in my falseness than in any of my shadowy truth.


Food and fire

The first beauty in my life is John Keats.

In John Keats is my faith in some resurrection.

Without John Keats human nature feels to be something broken, menacing, unspeakably despicable and lost--lost in the shade. With John Keats the lights break across it and reflect the blazing yellow sun again from eyes and foreheads and fingers and shining hair.

There are world-and-human things which it thrills me to think about and dwell on: Nathan Hale on the British gallows: the charge of Pickett’s Confederate infantry at Gettysburg: Henry V, prince among kings and men, at Agincourt: Charlotte Corday in prison: Columbus with his felon crews sailing westward: Susan B. Anthony--a woman made in a strange still heroic splendor half-incredible: Alexander Hamilton: Arnold Winkelried: the sea-worn Pilgrim women disembarking into bitter Novemberness.

Those thrill me because they are brave persons and brave things full of idealistic strife: but they still are made of very struggling-garbled world-stuff--they are mere human fabric--till I think of John Keats: and at once they grow informing and eternal.

In his light the detailed world burns and glows!

John Keats! John Keats!--

Other poets have written Nightingales and Grecian Urns and Sonnets and Mirth-and-Passion things: but he wrote them in his glorious and wistful pain. He wrote the sweet headaches of his spirit into his delicate beaten-gold verse: the precious fevers of his mental veins: the bone-aches and muscle-aches of his thoughts: the darling skin-damps and palm-damps of his divine fancy:--all in the Song of his lilied youth.

There is no poet but writes his poetry out of inner travails and immense wistfulness. But they all write just beside their travail, not in it: just beside their wistfulness, not with it. A poet who feels the throat of his soul aching and swollen and inflamed writes--not just that astral diphtheria, not till another time: but instead the fine smothering of a hope, perhaps, the oblique suffocating of a love. A poet whose brain-hands throb with some horrible dulcet-ish tiredness from handling the heavy bright tools of his craft writes instead the throbbing of his brain-soles and brain-insteps from walking small odd hard rutted daily ways.

It rouses me--it heats my eyeballs with salty honeyed warmth as I read: but it is not John Keats: who writes his own immediate magic sickness in perfect sudden obvious blood-warm golden Now!

It is always old, old-fashioned ailment, worn of ages. The drowsy ache of the Nightingale goes a thousand years back and a thousand years to come: the restless ecstasy of a thousand thousand Nightingales, one for each who reads, in any age, all ages. Long, long after the jeweled English language is gone, dead as Homer’s, Keats’s Nightingale will flutter lyric-winged in the nervous jeweled lovely Now.

‘Weep for Adonis,’ wailed the differently-lovely Shelley, ‘he is dead.’ But he isn’t dead. He is terribly living, passionately living.

Each day of my life I feel him living. He breathes. He breathes close to me, pantingly, like a swimmer breasting waves or a playing child in a summer day.--John Keats!

Just Beneath My Skin he is my God-of-the-World, my Fetich and my Lover. He has been my Lover for seven gold years.

He is the first beauty in my flawed futile life. He is the most beautiful thing in the living and dying world. John Keats--John Keats!--

In everyone else I can feel mixed motives, tough tangled silk threads of self woven into wonderful wefts of days and deeds: in everybody, from Iscariot to Toussaint L’Ouverture, from Jeanne d’Arc to Victoria Woodhull, from Paul of Tarsus to Aaron Burr.

Only John Keats stands out alone, a true-breathing Poet, an Inmost Heart bleeding outward.

The lyric poet is the true poet. The lyric poet achieves no end in his art. He turns fragments of light and life into terms of beauty and sends them flying forth on flaming word-wings which translate the smooth human flesh they brush-by into delicious flesh-of-gold, flesh-of-petals, flesh-of-fire! But he makes no morals, teaches no lessons, finishes nothing. It’s as it should be. Nothing is finished. The mixed world is all unfinished, a glorified Mistake. The race is a millionfold Mistake: lives it, breathes it, battens on it--coarsely and finely and lamentably and musically and bravely. So that all poetry which wanders from the lyric is only a play or a picture or an airship or a cause which aims at fait-accompli, attaining an object: it is limited and man-made: its beauty is lopped off like boughs and branches after a storm: its wings are clipped. Its distanceless spaces, little and large, are visibly engineered by mathematic hands. But the lyric poetry is the true luminous and bloody interpreting of humanness.

John Keats wrote by the lights of his living and he lived all his days in joyous lyric anguish.

Once he wrote, ‘Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.’ It is a factful of himself--lawless, radical and non-civilized, agleam in the mixed world. It is everybody--poets, burglars, nursemaids: everybody. He wrote it in a hundred other ways, but it is all in that: it is the lyric epitome of every day. Pleasure never is at home.

And ‘Heard melodies are sweet,’ he wrote, ‘but those unheard are sweeter’--

There spoke the wild delicate wiseness of his brain and the passionate delicate wonder of his heart.--John Keats! John Keats!

But everything he wrote, the Grecian Urn itself, is immeasurably less lyric than himself writing it and being it.

He is rich bright-wet living lyric for this Me in this Now though he has lain dead in Rome nearly the full hundred years.

My garbled life and my thinking hunger feed upon him.

He was the one human one who walked on in the way before him: not around the jagged little stones and icy little pools that were in it: but straight on through them all, though his lyric feet were quivering shuddering sensitive, sensitive beyond knowledge of commoner feet that walk around.

It fattens my leanest self to keep that in my constant remembrance.

The thought of his brave radiant loveliness reassures me to myself, by the hour.

I am futile: but he is mysteriously omnipotently useful and I catch some of it from him.

I am half-full of vanity: but he is of a lustrous priceless vanity himself that justifies mine and all the world’s.

I am fearing and false: but he is so brave, so true to infinite form, that by it he leavens the lump of the whole world’s mendacious cowardice.

My brain is full of wilding darknesses, snarled and knotted gifts and penchants: but into his strong brain the strong fresh yellow rain-washed sun shines straight down--through the wide twin-brightness of his Eyes. I look down his Eyes--twin public wells (he belongs publicly and privately to all this mixed mad world, and anyone may look!--)--I look into that titanic vibrant brain, and mine catches some of it: a blest and precious Disease, oh, a rare Disease!

My Heart--my Heart feels strange and tired and dead, a bit of dead-sea fruit: but his heart, warm and real and boundlessly unsatisfied, is always the deep quick fragrant Rose of this World.

A Hero!--a Poet-at-arms!--John Keats!

‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night,’ wrote that Shelley, and wrote no truer word.

I have read so many of the strange and splendid things--bits of them: Vergil and Homer and Villon and Goethe and all the English poets, and prose writers like Carlyle who in places out-poet poets,--and moderner ones and the new poets, imagists and others: John Keats feels a noticeably braver thing, and always, always a little way beyond. He is purely lyric.

When he loved a woman he loved the dubious fascinating Fanny Brawn-- sordid-brained, worldly: to him a mixed living devilish-glowing goddess. A higher-souled woman would neither have so tortured nor so held him. He was purely lyric. He cared truly nothing for the verdicts of critics and reviewers: and in the sweet-lipped boyish beauty of his youth they truly and easily killed him. It would be like that--it had to be. He was so purely lyric.

He died in the sweet fierce dazzling cause of Beauty.

I have so many thoughts and my thoughts are always my own. There are endless written thoughts deeper than mine--finer, stronger, anything-you-like. But mine answer for me: no written thoughts affect them, though they thrill my reading hours. Only John Keats’s thoughts can enter in and crush and cripple mine.

Because everybody is a little bit like John Keats I have a starry thin edge of faith inside me. He is food for my hunger of thought, fire for my passion of life.--John Keats!

He is the resurrection and the life.--

From my desk he gazes at me in a frame of old-gold. Every day the sunset on the glass blurs his large mournful joyous eyes with strangest agonized sunset tears: he shows me the sweet, sweet intoxication of his lyric grief.

He died young, unfinished--and oh, but it’s a shivering ecstasy to think of all those lyrics in him he never wrote!--the sweeter melodies--‘Unheard.’