by Mary MacLane
I mean not the lies I may tell but the lies I think. I mean not my falseness. That is a different thing, one I feel someway responsible for. But the thinking lies feel to be a heritage from ancient evil selves. I lie to myself, to the air around me—I blow lies into space from my quiet lips. And one half of me knows them for lies and the other half of me believes them.
Those half-known lies, the need of the lies half-believed, are the realization of an essential Artist-spirit.
The oblique belief in them and the recognition of them as lies proclaim me to myself, as a writing-person: Liar and Artist.
IT’S NOT DEATH
To-morrow
It’s not Death I fear, nor Life.
I horridly fear something this side of Death but out-pacing Life a little: a nervousness in my Stomach—a very Muddy Street—a Lonely Hotel Room.
A HUMAN PREROGATIVE
To-morrow
It is a quiet deep of night. A bell has just tolled two.
I am clothed in cool bedroom negligees and a softening sweetness of cold cream, from head to foot.
I am tranquil for to-day I had a walk that made me feel Sincere and Safe.
It is a comforting feeling: it is like a beef-sandwich.
It was a long walk south-east of Butte along an out-skirting road where I used often to walk when I was sixteen—a broad gray desert. It was the same sand and barrenness. It was bare and withered as if a giant coyote had picked its rocky ribs.
The day was windy and dusty. The sunshine was thick and sweet and heavy like floating honey.
The dust that blew against the white of my neck was like ground glass.
My feet ached as I walked.
My shoes were Cuban-heeled thick-soled pumps of corded silk, a kind easy to walk in. But the same feet which once readily bore me seven miles along that road ache now at three. All of me ached as I walked along. I cursed desultorily with a smooth whispered flow of curses, because the circumstances seemed to demand it. But I loved the walk—even the more for my tired feet and my aching knees and my irking drooping shoulders and the hot glazed sand against my throat.
My Soul tasted realness in it.
Quite close to me, in immense sad beauty, were the deep high heavy silent somber hills of Montana. To-day the nearer ones were a stately enchanted Blue: a Blue of all ages: a Blue of infinitude: a Blue with a feel of life and death in its Blueness. Above it the sky was not blue but a pale glimmering shimmering silver hung across with gray silk clouds soft as doves’ plumage.
I sat on a flat rock and looked at all of it and at the desert around, and at my dusty shoes.
All of it felt overwhelmingly sincere: at one with the wide worn used earth.
My dusty shoes looked to be at one with it and could interpret it.
I felt my shoes could claim their human prerogative of getting dusty in any of this world’s roads.
It gave me a feeling of human Sincerity: good-and-evil Safeness.
It is on me now, along with cold cream and strong memory of Desert and Sun and Blue.
It is as good as a beef-sandwich.
Better: I don’t like beef-sandwich.
THE MERCILESS BEAUTY
To-morrow
Sometimes the dusk is full of fire.
Some dusks I sit by my window looking out and hotly and coldly want a Lover: hotly with my Body and coldly with my Mind.
A dusk has just gone. I sat looking out at it.
A mist of dark cream tinged with heated violet came from nowhere and hung above the ground.
Suddenly came on me a sense of bewildering mysterious beauty.
In it was a feel of rippling warmth that crept into my bone-and-flesh from forehead to heel, from temples to soles, from crown to toe-tips.
It crept slow and suffocating like magic chloroform.
I leaned elbows on window-sill and chin on palms and sunk my gaze in the violet shades outside and straightway knew I wanted a Lover: not in delicate moonlit culmination like Juliet in her balcony: not denyingly like the timid young nun in her cloister assailed unaware by faint forbidden emotions.
I wanted a Lover like the jungle leopard leaping through the Springtime covert at nightfall to find her mate.
It is a subtle and an obvious feeling, made of a merciless beauty.
It is the tired urge of sex-tissues and nerve-cells: positive, furious, fiery as the bloodiest sun.
It is the same which the heated leopard feels in her sharp immaculate lust. It is quite the same—but it could not move me as I sat alone loverless to the knitting of an eyebrow, to a change of posture, a movement of elbows on the window-sill or of palms beneath my chin. Nor could it, though the potential Lover had stood outside my window. For any woman of any charm the world is full of Lovers: each and all to be had by the flutter of her finger, the droop of her white eyelids, the trembling of her pink-bowed lips. The world is full of them— facile Lovers, craven, potent and pinchbeck. And it’s that kind I want hotly with my Body, coldly with my Mind in dusks of rippling warmth—rippling, rippling warmth—
I want the Lover as the leopard wants hers. But I’m not a leopard: instead, a woman-person of keen sentientness and wild wistful imagination. So I wouldn’t so much as crook a finger to call a Lover to me: a curious nervous inertia.
It’s only I want the Lover with frantic blind cosmic ardors inside me.
I analyze it in my magic Mind and find I would call no Lover. I analyze farther and find I’d reject all but an impossible one-in-ten-thousand. But remains the desire, hot as live embers, cold as hail.
Sex is an odd attribute. It has been to me like a blest impediment and a celestial incumbrance and a radiant curse.—When I was seventeen I stood on a threshold and peered curiously into a dim-lit strange-scented Room.
It was unknown to me then. My mind alone bespoke it. As I stood at its doorway the air it wafted out touched my sense with only the lightest frayed-cobweb contact, unintelligible and unenlightening. I had lived an emptily alone girlhood. I was icily virginal.
At five-and-twenty I crossed the Room’s threshold. I breathed lightly the odd fragrance. I looked curiously around. I touched some amorous-looking grapes and some love-promising apples that lay about: I bit into one and burst a grape with my finger and thumb. I gathered a weak-petaled flower or two. I gauged the Room and its furnishments and was un-thrilled by anything in it. Even bodily it left me un-thrilled.
Those two memory-mists do not keep me in the now-dusk and in the strength and terror and fire of top-most youth from wanting a sudden Lover with all that’s in my Body.
Love has naught to do with it. Love is a flame-winged Bird.
I know it. I know the values of my life and of me. I do not mistake tapers for torches, ducats for louis d’ ors, vicarious nepenthe for dreamless death.
In dusk-moments my bone-and-flesh is all of me I’m sure of. It begins and ends in this earth. It answers the violent summonses of this earth and its dusks.
In the just-gone dusk I felt the prickling blood flow to my finger-ends. A flood-tide, blinding red, surged and seethed and bubbled and pounded at my heart.
‘I want a Lover—some Lover’—I murmured to the shadows beyond my window.
I grew breathless.
The spirit of my flesh rose like a wind-blown flame.
A loud cry rang in my nerve-wilderness.
That moment the variant analysis which always rides with me stopped dead.
There came instead sheer feeling—the merciless beauty.
—a man-person, maybe—the man of happy unanalytic brutality—to be suddenly there with me: to flash into my shadowy solitude like a lightning bolt and burst and break me.
—a quarter-hour of exquisite wildness—restlessness, made of Star-flame and Lily-petal and Cloud-burst on Mountain-summits and Sea-waves purple in a Stormy Dawn—an intolerable hunger and ecstasy—But just gone and I sit writing it in the pale cast of thought.
But breathlessly I recall the breathlessness of it.
>
MY SHOES
To-morrow
I love my Shoes.
I love them because they so guard my feet.
I walk many a mile along the stone pavements and into distant odd streets and on open roads at the outskirts of this Butte.
And while I walk I think.
I think things of a great many kinds—potent and magic and mad. The act of walking starts an engine in my sparkling infernal mind. And the weight and the sting and the hurt and the fascination of my walking thoughts bear down on my slim feet as they carry me along. And the hard-beaten world beneath them feels resentful and un-complaisant to my soles. And then I look down at my Shoes with their trim tailored vamps and their walk-worthy soles and instantly my feet feel secure against evil, smartly protected from my thoughts and from the world’s surface: my thoughts which shoot down on them out of my devilish brain and the world-hardness beneath them.
To-day I was walking along the road that leads up the ever-wonderful Anaconda Hill—a place of stones and sand-wastes and hoists and scaffoldings and mines with ten thousand digging men thousands of feet down in their metallic bowels. Close by were melancholy mulberry-toned mountains at the northeast. They were tragic, triumphant, grief-stricken, terrifyingly beautiful. Purple clouds hung around them like mourning veils. I can’t look enough at those—it is as if there weren’t enough looking-power in my human gray eyes.
Presently I came to a small open space as I walked, a toy desert. A toy desert is more like a desert than is a real one. The sand in it is grayer sand. The stones are abrupter. The sun is flatter-looking. The air is less willing to furnish breath to a human being. The best that could be said of this one is that it was intolerably desolate. I looked about and about it. And suddenly I was afraid. Afraid of many things: afraid of grief-stricken mountains: afraid of my life and of Me.
I leaned against a yellow ledge of rock with a subtle sickening faintish feeling. ‘I am afraid,’ I said inside me, ‘of this world and this life, and of all things little and large—nerves and Christmas days and poetry: toy deserts and all. How can I cope with it—I alone?’
Then I looked down at my Shoes of black soft dull leather and cloth, buttoned snugly around my ankles and with tough supple soles fit to take me to Jericho and back. Thus neatly armored I felt suddenly my blue-veined feet need fear nothing from sand and stone and hardness of ground. And if my feet are not afraid—my feet which bear weights of all-of-me—why should afraidness touch my spirit which is proud?
There will be always Shoes in the world: stout stylish serviceable boots, and pale delicate rat-skin pumps, and satin mule-slippers.
And always I shall have Shoes: in toy deserts I shall have black strong snug-buttoned ones.
I looked at them in this toy-desert and straightaway I wasn’t afraid.
It has been often like that.
So I love my Shoes.
AN EERIE QUALITY
To-morrow
When I was Ten years old I played marbles ‘for keeps,’ smoked little pieces of rattan buggywhip in the hay-scented barn and slid ‘belly-buster’ down long winter hills on my sled. And I hammered and sawed ruinously with grownup tools, whistling happily. And I played with dolls absorbedly for hours on end.
I was not boyish and not girlish.
I was not childish except for an oddly hungry childheart.
I was myself.
So long ago and longer I consciously owned an eerie quality which toppled over the edge of my humanness.
And still own it.
A HELLIAD
To-morrow
This noonday as I sat on the veranda two young lads stopped by the stone coping which borders this front yard, and conversed. One was eager-looking and about eleven years old. The other was perhaps thirteen and morose and he had a small rifle which he polished with a bit of waste, not lifting his gaze as they talked. Said the younger boy:
‘Say-Frank, I could ’a’ had that old shot-gun off my dad if I’d’ a’ went after it to Rocker that time.’
‘Like hell you could,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank, you know that Winchester o’ Billy O’Rourke’s?—he made six bull’s-eyes and one inside ring with it day ‘fore yesterday.’
‘Like hell he did,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank, Mexicans and Indians can get a guy ev’ry time with a long-distance rifle without taking aim through the sight.’
‘Like hell they can,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank, there’s a kid down on South Arizona that’s got a Colt automatic that’ll hit without him aiming at all.’
‘Like hell there is,’ said Frank. ‘Say-Frank, you know them little brass machine-guns the militia’s got?—the bores o’ them things ‘re rifled just like this.’
‘Like hell they are,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank, my grandfather in Illinois’s got a bullet in him he got at the battle o’ Fredericksburg in the Civil War.’
‘Like hell he has,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank, it costs a hundred-thousand dollars to make a Krupp gun and eighty dollars ev’ry time you fire it.’
‘Like hell it does,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank, it ain’t a felony to croak a burglar with a gun even if he’s only breakin’ into somebody else’s house.’
‘Like hell it ain’t,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank, my mother goes huntin’, too—she can shoot rabbits and ducks on the wing and once she got a deer with that big old .44 o’ my Uncle Walt’s.’ ‘Like hell she did,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank—listen, will you gimme your gun for my bicycle, both my catcher’s gloves and four dollars when I get paid?’
‘Like hell I will,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank—listen, will you gimme it for my bicycle, my two catcher’s gloves, four dollars when I get paid and my shepherd pup?’
‘Like hell I will,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank—listen,—and my artificial snake?’
‘Like hell,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank—listen,—and my half o’ Ernest’s camera?’
‘Like hell,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank—listen,—and my last year’s shinguards?’
‘Like hell,’ said Frank.
‘Say-Frank—listen,—and my this year’s shinguards?’
‘Like hell’, said Frank.
‘Say-Frank, come right down to it I don’t want a .22. If I get a gun this year it’ll be a .32.’
‘Like he—’ —
Which point I felt to be the top-note of the helliad, so I rose and came into the house.
I felt replete with rhythm and with a sense of surprising human attitudes remote from my own.
SWIFT GO MY DAYS
To-morrow
Swift, Swift go my days.
By rights I think time should drag with me, for I am wasting my portion of life as I live
But my days pass Swift—Swift, Swift.
They come, they fly away—before I know.
I’m thinking it is Tuesday: but while I’m thinking —Wednesday has come: and gone: and Thursday is rushing in. Tuesday, blue-and-gold or gray-and-silver, with its mornings and nights and bits of food and openings of doors and thinkings: Wednesday with the same equipment: Thursday the same.
Each day comes and goes like a flash of filmed silvered garbled light.
But there is time in each for me to touch the enchanted Everydayness: time for the turbulent sly delight of tasting, smelling, feeling the eternal humors and romances in each small thing near me—my Clock, my Window, my Jar of Cold Cream, my Two Thumbs. There is time in each day for it to make me pay a wearing glimmering feverish homage to the mystic daily godhead.
My life exacts terrific homages from me.
I am wearing out—frailly, tiredly, from a desolate uneasy love of living.
It is why my days go Swift when by rights time should drag leadenly in punishment for barbarous futileness.
There is not time-space enough in any of
the days sufficient to love the virile green and the murderous red and the sweet pale surprising purple in the sunset above the west desert: nor space to love the smell of a sudden August rain: nor the flaming delicate Idea of the poet John Keats.
While I’m starting to love each of those to its height of love-worthiness—the to-day is gone: and the tomorrow, which must see a new love-game started for each Thing, is come. But while I say ‘is come’: it’s gone.
So Swift go my days—oh Swift, Swift!
BY THE BLOOD OF DEAD AMERICANS
To-morrow
Since I wrote the beginning of this there has come the war in Europe: a war full of suffering brave women and dead children: full of German greed and cruelty and stupidity and of French gameness and cheerfulness, French splendor of valor.
It has an effect of some kind on each person who reads so much as its ‘headlines.’
It has the effect on me of making me a jealously patriotic American.
It makes me think of Lexington and Gettysburg with an odd furious personal shame.
We are Americans not by accident but by the blood of dead Americans. But we assume it is by accident. We lie down like a nation of bastards to let the pig-hearted Hun trample by proxy on our neck.
It was for America to declare war in the same hour the Lusitania passengers met murder.
We were not ‘too proud’ but afraid. Afraid and not ready.
Not ready has no right thing to do with it.
They were not ready at Lexington.
I long with some passion to exchange my two black dresses for two white ones with red crosses on the sleeves: to serve my country in a day of death and honor. It too is all the time under my skin though I write along but in this flawed song of myself.
TO EXPRESS ME
To-morrow
I suppose I’m very lonely.
It is luck—luck from the stars—not to be beset by clusters of people, people who do their thinking outside their heads, ‘cheerful’ people, people who say ‘pardon me’: all the damning sorts scattered about obstructing one’s view of the horizons.
