I, Mary MacLane

by Mary MacLane

  So I may have found the right sort of words and measured their possibilities and pitfalls. But again: it’s a nerve-racking task to choose out one word from seven, one from five, one from two. I see two words which may be the only proper ones out of ten thousand to bear my thought. The two may be Echo and After-glow, each an unacknowledged half-sister to the other: meaning respectively something living and growing and vibrant in my spirit-ears, and fading and dying and radiant before my spirit-eyes. But because my spirit-ears may glow bright and hot from what they heard, or my spirit-eyes may seem to themselves to gaze a moment at a soundless sound—an Unheard Melody of Keats,—I miss the raylike distinction and I write After-glow when my true word was Echo.

  But another time I write Echo perfectly and masterfully to my own delight: having meant After-glow. So it is. There’s no plain sailing on this analytic sea. And if there were it would be not worth while. I want nothing, nothing, nothing that comes easily. What comes easily I distrust, be it love or language. It afterward proves dead-sea fruit. What I suffer to get I know to be life-food even if it drugs or pains or poisons me. It is one lesson I have learned.

  Without doubt it is so with everybody, all around. One sees only surfaces, husks. Anyone looking casually at this Me sitting writing might say, ‘How easily and smoothly and well she writes. How kind of God to give her so light a task in life. How complacently go her working hours.’ And I looking casually at—oh—Miss Lily Walker singing and swaying and glancing sideways in a gorgeous Broadway chorus—I might say, ‘How easy a task in life has that brainless gazelle. To work with her body and not even with the sweats and sinews of it like a scrub-woman, and not with the facile shames of it like a Lorette, but with the grace and suppleness and beauty and suggestions of it, aided by a soprano throat and a soprano face—with only the effort it wants to fling it all over footlights. And that pastime gets her her livelihood.’

  But whoever marks me writing as one doing an easy task because I write along rapidly enough considers nothing of my mental travail for the thought, my blind grope for the language, my little nervous anguish of choice among the double-edged and triple-pronged words: and the neat concise failure of the result.

  And no, I do not thus comment on Miss Lily Walker. I have an appreciative pleasure in her charm and suppleness and bird-and-butterfly prettiness. But after a bit of contemplation and analysis of her surface I deduce the unconscious struggle it may be for Miss Lily Walker to be supple on nights when she does not feel supple, the thin agony of being sweet when she does not feel sweet, the neurotic torture of being seductive regularly—by the night: the more that perchance the struggle always is unconscious. Her brain being required in her body it’s to be assumed there’s none in her head. But I can deduce a nervous red heart beating illogically somewhere in her being protesting dumbly sometimes against one irking item, sometimes against another, sometimes against all the items in Miss Lily Walker’s scheme of life, but beating and beating on, like a little automatic drum wound up tight and tossed into a maelstrom to beat itself out.

  I’d like—like with breathless eagerness—to read the analyzed being just beneath Miss Lily Walker’s skin. Everybody—every human being—is wildly Real: radiant and desolate.—

  With no amount of temperamental struggling could Miss Lily Walker analyze a psychic emotion of her own and then find the right word-combination to write it in.

  With no conceivable effort of mine could I manage to be supple when I do not feel supple.

  So Miss Lily Walker and I are quits at this game.

  It totals up evenly, all ways around.

  Nobody gets through one Real day—though it be a dayful of Real lies—without a demoniacal struggle of soul or a heavy blow on the personal solar plexus. And I make not even the intellect side of this book, which is a Realness to me, without sweet fine sweatings of blood.

  INSTINCT—A ‘FIRST LAW’

  To-morrow

  I long to do a Murder.

  Despite my futile way-of-life and my rotting destroying half-acquiescence in it I have a furious positive Murder in me.

  One near me in my daily life injures me and goes on injuring me in a way which is scourging and malicious” and intensely petty. There is in it helpless humiliation for me—me self-loving, proud and determinedly unsuppliant—and it makes maddening Murder rise in me.

  I don’t know why I do not do the Murder. I have nothing to lose by paying the law-penalty: nothing but my life, and my life is stripped bare—and was always barren by God’s decree—of all that makes a life sacred or lovely or precious. For long years and years, since child-days, I have been lost. I don’t know why I do not do the Murder: except that I think of it and brood over it and turn it round and round smoulderingly in my Mind. From no choice. I have tried to push the feeling away as a common thing beneath me. It is beneath me, for I am not little but someway big. But my Mind will take its toll of all that confronts me.

  The humiliation and the helplessness to combat being humiliated in me who keep a casual proudness toward people is like a secret hot sword thrust, and kept freshly thrust, in my flesh. It makes me wild to do the Murder. But it makes me brood over it till the red act is lost in red brooding. There come also thinkings.

  Murder, any Murder, is in its essence cowardly, a slinking meanness. And I am not cowardly and I am not mean. I am above malice and retaliation— all such impoverished impoverishing emotions. A shrug of my shoulders and they are satisfied. The impulse to hit back after a bitter wound is not of vengeance. It is instinct—a ‘first law.’ But Murder is self-accusingly cowardly and sneakingly human. I can’t get away from that. To take away a person’s life is like setting fire to his house—an officiously stooping act. It’s for me to live my life in aloof self-sufficience”. No human malice should reach me in it. Then it’s not for me to reach out of it and stain my good fingers with unpleasant sticky blood. I am always in a prison of radiance and gloom.

  But the mere habit of being a human being is breakingly insistent—no matter how many or how few frocks one owns. Neither of my two dresses is a protection against humiliation. A thin black serge dress gives me to myself a melancholy cold inert air: but beneath the smooth-fitting breast of it comes too often a throbbing frightful to feel, frightful to know, made of fierce petty anger and abasing hurt. I hide it and me in my room and twist my hands together and walk my floor, and a hurricane of helpless bitter trifling woe shakes and wrenches me. Then Murder enters me.

  What humiliates me is an obvious common thing that to any human one would mean hurt and more hurt. Though I am determinedly brave I am sensitive.

  I do not write itself because this is the book of me and not of people.

  It is a slight, a poor and vivid cruelness. There is the tie of blood in it which in all ways—from a deep heritage—I respect: and it rubs an added stinging poison in the wound.

  It is an injury I do not deserve. What I deserve I accept. What I do not deserve pressed on me to humiliate me makes Murder in me. Regardless of the other one—

  —it would be simpler and finer for me to do that Murder than to keep it in me. So many times in a week the trembling smothering longing to do that Murder beats, beats in my thin breast. To be so owned by a thing so small:—it is grief and despair and fury and wild nervous intolerableness. It strains my flesh—it wrenches my pulse—it blinds my eyes—it fills my throat—

  —it would be a simpler and finer thing to do any Murder than to feel, even once, the strangling damnedness rising, rising at my throat—

  LOOSE TWOS

  To-morrow

  I take it for granted God knows all about me. If God should read this it would not be news to him.

  But his knowledge of me is not immediate knowledge nor immediately interesting to him. He knows my Twos-and-Twos but he does not make Fours of them.

  I am formed of loose Twos which wait for God to make them Fours.

  I can not do it myself. When I’ve tried the added Twos come out threes,
seventies, nines, twelves—all the mysterious numbers. Never Fours.

  Long ago I decided not to try but to wait for God.

  I juggle with temperamental and psychic Twos and experiment in hysteric additions.

  But it’s no good my trying to make Fours.

  If God does not take it up I shall be eternal Twos.

  And I seem not greatly to care: whenever that comes home to me I merely light a carefree cigarette.

  KNITTING OR PLAITING STRAW

  To-morrow

  The things I know are jumbled and tangled into an indescribable heap inside me.

  The things I Don’t Know are separated and ranged of their own volition in long orderly rows in my conscious mentality.

  The things I know glow with tints and gleams and will-o’-wisp lights and primal colors and waveringly with the blinding gold-purple lightnings of all-Time. The things I Don’t Know glow—each one separately—with a small precise lantern-brightness of its own.

  Also in my wide background are things I don’t know and am unaware of it: the mass of my luminous Ignorance—it shines with an earthy phosphorescence. When I look at the things I know I get an undetailed perspective of me like a bird’s-eye view of London.

  When I look at neat formal rows of things I Don’t Know I have a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw.

  I reckon up and count up and check up lists of big and little things I Don’t Know—like this, rapidly: I Don’t Know what ink is made of, nor how to fire a Maxim gun: I don’t know how to make a will: I don’t know how to cook a prairie-chicken, nor what to feed a pet weasel, nor who invented the snarling-iron, nor what it is.

  I Don’t Know what food people eat in the Himalaya Mountains, nor how Lord Corwallis felt when he surrendered: I don’t know the color of a chicken’s gizzard, nor of sand, nor of fish-scales, nor of mice: I don’t know whether an English cabinet minister needs strength of mind or strength of will, or both, or neither.

  I Don’t Know how I hurt the true heart of my friend: I don’t know astronomy nor solid geometry: I don’t know what I think with: I don’t know what ooze leather is, nor who pitched for the Tigers in nineteen-nine.

  I Don’t Know a good horse from a bad horse: I don’t know why a bat sleeps head downward, nor what wasps live on: I don’t know how to open oysters, nor how to milk a cow: I don’t know the Latin for ‘whiskey.’

  I Don’t Know whether friendship is a selfish or an unselfish thing, nor who discovered the medlar apple: I don’t know what is a jab, fistically speaking, nor a punch, nor a hook, nor a wallop, nor the fighting weight of Packey McFarland: I don’t know whether a moth ‘marries’ or whether her eggs are impregnated like a fish’s: I don’t know why a clasp knife is called a jack knife, nor what to do for an aching foot.

  I Don’t Know how glass is blown: I don’t know whether coal is vegetable or mineral: I don’t know the chemical composition of the sunset vapors, nor how to play euchre: I don’t know how many guns an armored cruiser carries, nor whether a gorilla meditates: I don’t know whether I hate or greatly admire Catherine and Marie de Medici: I don’t know a winch from a windlass.

  I Don’t Know where is the cinnamon bear’s native haunt: I don’t know how flint is mined, nor if wire is made of steel: I don’t know who was the better man—William Wordsworth or the Duke of Wellington: I don’t know the advantages of tariff revision downward: I don’t know where ex-President Taft will go when he dies.

  I Don’t Know whether I feel more comfortable with or without my stays: I don’t know the origin of the word ‘dogged’: I don’t know whether a ‘full house’ is better than ‘two pairs,’ nor whether a right merry heart to-day is better than a wrong contented mind to-morrow: I don’t know whether rabbit-pie is made of cats in Paris, nor how many sails has a sloop: I don’t know what makes a dead body rot. I Don’t Know how to sharpen a carving knife, nor how to roll a cigarette: I don’t know the real English meaning of the French noun ‘élancement’: I don’t know whether my sex is a matter of my genital organs or of my mental inwards: I don’t know how to determine the contents of a circle in square inches, nor how to pronounce ‘zebra.’

  I Don’t Know whether Edgar Allan Poe is big or little: I don’t know how many soldiers fell at Shiloh: I don’t know whether temperament or nature or circumstance makes one woman a happy kindhearted whore and another an unhappy cruel-hearted nun: I don’t know how to grow artichokes: I don’t know what brimstone is, nor how to play the accordion: I don’t know what quality in me forms my handwriting.

  I Don’t Know what-like was my Soul in the Stone Age: I don’t know whether cheese is good or bad for my health: I don’t know what becomes of discarded hairpins, nor a tooth-brush’s ultimate destiny: I don’t know the ‘Fra Diavolo’ opera, nor whether anyone ever uses the word ‘thwack.’

  I Don’t Know whether my heart breaks from within or without: I don’t know whether ‘good old Marie Lloyd’ of the London ‘halls’ has a brain like G. K. Chesterton or a dexterous individuality like a juggler: I don’t know whether I feel spiritual bliss in my knees or in my spirit: I don’t know why I breathe and go on breathing.

  I Don’t Know what became of the ten lost tribes of Israel: I don’t know how to say how-do-you-do to a king: I don’t know the exact meaning of my terror and despair: I don’t know why I love—why I ever love—

  I Don’t Know whether laws of chance govern a spinning roulette wheel and ivory ball or whether chance is beyond law: I don’t know what kind of missile a Krupp gun shoots: I don’t know how a ground-and-lofty tumbler turns a triple air-summersault: I don’t know whether I really am the way I look in the mirror: I don’t know whether the Russian language has Romanic roots: I don’t know what is the wild power in poetry.

  I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.

  I Don’t Know what makes each day a Day of dark Gold and life mournfully precious: I don’t know where is God: I don’t know how they make tea in Ireland: I don’t know how to pronounce the word ‘girl’: I don’t know how to make lace: I don’t know whether I hear a sound or feel it, nor why a spool of thread looks exactly like a Spool of Thread. I Don’t Know—I Don’t Know—I Don’t Know, rapidly, to the end of the mystic common-place infinitudes.

  —those give me a clear look, as if through an un-curtained window into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw—

  A LIFE-LONG LONELY WORD

  To-morrow

  Fleeting times I wonder if it is my defect or others’ that no human family tie holds and warms me.

  There is none. I think about it with wistfulness.

  The only tie-of-blood feeling that clings to me is of my warming and keeping-alive. And it is very feeble. It grows more feeble.

  It is a trivial matter as I look at it universally.

  But as I look at it earthlily: there would be an abnormalness, a lostness in one when the mother who bore her got from it at best but a small cool dislike.

  It makes me feel humanly lost.

  ‘Lost’ is the shuddering life-long lonely word that brushes against me some nights and noons.

  THEIR VOICES

  To-morrow

  Every day at half-past ten and half-past two I hear the high shrill sweet choric Voices of hundreds of children shaking the thin clear air.

  A public school is but a block from here. The children rush out of it, a hilarious noisy crowd, for a few mid-morning and mid-afternoon minutes. So those minutes, from hearing their Voices day after day, and day after day, have become lyric to my inner-l
istening.

  Their Voices stir me, rouse me, speak to me with old very joyous, very woful meanings.

  The children fairly leap out of the school-building through doors and down fire-escape stairways. And their Voices are at once hurled skyward, clamorous and chaotic.

  The Sound they make is a roundly common sound yet ‘winged.’ It is an untrammeled Sound, uncultivated, only a little civilized.

  It is world-music.

  In it is the note beyond culture, higher than civilization, and older. It is brave as voices of the shrilling winds and warmer, viriler. It is liltinger than bird-songs and lustier than roarings of mountain cataracts.

  Music of the world!—

  A little door inside me opens to those Voices.

  My little door opens at the first shriek of the first child out of doors, and I hear not only the hundreds of vivid piercing Voices but more—their far-off echoes.

  They are the Voices of children, children light-held in crude cold innocence. The eyes of the children are clear—their impulses and instincts rule their little lives. They are yet untouched by the tiredness and terror and shame and sorrow of being human beings.

  So the Sound of their Voices sweeps out resistless and regardless as the sea or the sun which makes nothing of its own strength or weakness. And through my little spirit-door I hear them, the poignant common little sweet Voices, echoing, flying away, farther and farther: along the roads: over plains and hills: through valleys long worldly distances from here: through streets: through stone buildings and dingy courts: through big rich houses: through homes of comfort and homes of misery and homes of desolate smugness: into lifeless social foyers: into learned places: into law-courts and cabinet-rooms of nations: into graveyards and churches and down into dead-vaults: into theatres: into clinics: into shops: into factories: into dives and stews and brothels and at lustful doorsteps: into hotels and on sport-courses: into marketplaces and across battlefields, round monuments and in towers and in forts and in prisons and in dungeons:—there along fly their Voices. It is a brave, brave Sound, and an insistent: nothing stops it. It is triumph.