I, Mary MacLane

by Mary MacLane

  It is the dim-felt memory of those journeys that heaps the Tiredness on me now. Not only is my spirit Tired. Through my spirit my hands are Tired: my knees are Tired: my drooping shoulders: my thin feet: my sensitive backbone. When I lift my hand in the sunshine the weight of the yellow honeyed air bears down and down on it because I’m so Tired. When I start to walk on stone pavements the ache of them is in my feet before I set a foot on them because I’m so Tired. The pulse in my veins Tires my blood as it beats. My low voice, though I speak but rarely—it Tires my throat. My breath Tires my chest. The weight of my hair.

  Tires my forehead and temples. My plain frocks Tire my Body to wear. My swift trenchant thoughts Tire my Mind.

  It is not the Tiredness of effort though I strive to the limits of my strength every day.

  It is not pain, Restful pain. It is Tired Tiredness.

  So when I’m dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave.

  It would Rest me.

  In the Episcopal Church they use a ritual of poetic beauty, full of Restful things. One of them is the sleep of the dead. The crucified Nazarene slept three days. But all others of us when we go down into our graves are to sleep until a Judgment Day. ‘Judgment Day’ is preposterous and evilly crude: there’s no judgment till each can judge himself simply and cruelly in the morning light. But the sleep of the dead—

  —the sleep of the dead. Its sound by itself without the thought is Restful—

  And the thought is Restful.

  I imagine me wrapped in a shroud of soft thin wool cloth of a pale color, laid in a plain wood coffin: and my eyelids are closed, and my Tired feet are dead feet, and my hands are folded on my breast. And the coffin is nine feet down in the ground and the earth covers it. Upon that some green sod: and above, the ancient blue deep sheltering sky: and the clouds and the winds and the suns and moons, and the days and nights and circling horizons—those above my grave.

  And my Body laid at its length, eyes closed, hands folded, down there Resting: my Soul not yet gone but laid beside my Body in the coffin Resting.

  —might we lie like that—Resting, Resting, for weeks, months, ages—

  Year after long year, Resting.

  STICKILY MAD

  To-morrow

  It is damn-the-Smell-of-Turpentine!

  Here I happen on a damn in me which is not desultory but bloodily strong and alive and alone.

  The wood in my blue-white room has been newly painted.

  For a day and a night I intermittently encounter and go to bed in a spirit of Turpentine. It bears a cruel obscure abortive message to my nerves.

  I lie wakeful in the dark and try to reason out a Iogicalness or poetry in a thing so artfully pestilential. But I am hysterically lost in it and my heart beats hysterically in it.

  I remember the inexpressible ingenuity of man: of white man as against bone-brained savage races. Every invented usefulness feels like divine witchcraft. A pen and a bottle of perfume and a doorknob and a granite kettle and an electric light: I have the use of each since white man is so ingenious. Were I a red Indian I should have only the awkward barbarous stupid tools my race had used a thousand years. I contrast the two as I lie wakeful, with a sense of richness and of detailed repletion and of material blestness.

  But at once comes the Smell of Turpentine and announces itself something outside that and different, something stronger, something masterfuler than ingenuity and savagery together. It tortures my nerves: it burns my eyes: it lames my flesh: it jerks and flays and garbles my inner body. The ingenuity of man has produced opium and cocaine which would combat and hide it all behind a heavy curtain of stupor, with effects equally damaging if less grievously subtle.

  The Smell of Turpentine is a thing to bear since all its counter-things bring only solider evil.

  The paint was put on the wood by a dirty little man whom I briefly inspected as something removed from my range of life. In return he covertly eyed me. I expected my wakeful hours would be punished by strong new paint and be-visioned by dirty little men. But it is all sheer Turpentine with a power suggesting nothing human nor super-natural nor divine. Just itself: a goblin virulence.

  In all my Soul and bones and Mary-Mac-Laneness it is damn-the-Smell-of-Turpentine as a bastard murderous hurt.

  I have an odd feeling God has no more power over it than have I.

  It half-calls for a different Turpentine God.

  I am shakily mad tonight, I believe, from a so slight sticky matter.

  GOD COMPENSATES ME

  To-morrow

  It’s Sunday midnight and I’ve just eaten a Cold Boiled Potato.

  I shall never be able to write one-tenth of my fondness for a Cold Boiled Potato.

  A Cold Boiled Potato is always an unpremeditated episode which is its chief charm.

  It’s nice to happen on a book of poetry on a windowsill. It’s nice to surprise a square of chocolate in a glove box. It’s nice to come upon a little yellow apple in ambush. It’s nice to get an unexpected letter from Jane Gillmore. It’s nice to unearth a reserve fund of silk stockings under a sofa pillow. And especially it’s nice to find a Cold Boiled Potato on a pantry shelf at midnight.

  I like caviare at luncheon. And I like venison at dinner, dark and bloody and rich. And I like champagne bubbling passionately in a hollow-stemmed glass on New Year’s day. And I like terrapin turtle. And I like French-Canadian game-pie. And artichokes and grapes and baby onions. And none of them has the odd gnome-ish charm of a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.

  I can imagine no circumstance in which a Cold Boiled Potato would not take precedent with me at midnight. If I had a broken arm: if I had a husband lying dead in the next room: if I were facing abrupt worldly disaster: if there were a burglar in the house: if I’d had a dayful of depression: if God and opportunity were knocking and clamoring at my door: I should disregard each and all some minutes at midnight if I had also a Cold Boiled Potato.

  I love to read Keats’s Nightingale in my hushed life. I love to remember Caruso at the Metropolitan singing Celeste Aïda. I love to watch the bewitching blonde Blanche Sweet in a moving picture. I love to feel the summer moonlight on my eyelids. And it’s disarmingly contented I am with a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.

  Content is my rarest emotion and I get it at midnight out of a Cold Boiled Potato.

  Some things in life thrill me. Some drive me garbledly mad. Some uplift me. Some debauch me. Some strengthen and enlighten me. Some hurt, hurt, hurt. But I’m not thrilled nor maddened nor uplifted nor debauched nor strengthened nor enlightened nor hurt, but only fed-up and fattened in spirit by a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.

  I stand in the pantry door leaning against the jamb, with a tiny glass salt-shaker in one hand and the sweet dark pink Cold Boiled Potato in the other. And I sprinkle it with salt and I nibble, nibble, nibble. And I say aloud, ‘Gee, it’s good!’ I liked Cold Boiled Potato at four- and twenty. I liked it at seventeen. I liked it at twelve. At three I climbed on cake-boxes in search of one. And now in the deep bloom of being myself I am made roundly replete at midnight with a Cold Boiled Potato.

  A Cold Boiled Potato—it tastes of chestnuts at midnight, the first frost-kissed chestnuts in the woods: and it tastes of rain-water and of salt and of roses: it tastes of young willow-bark and of earth and of grass-stems: it tastes of the sun and the wind and of some nameless relishingness born of the summer hillside that grew it: it tastes at midnight so like a Cold Boiled Potato.

  A precious peach-colored orchid, an antique spider-web-like lace handkerchief, a delicate purple butterfly, an emerald bracelet: I’d strive for each of those in an eagerly casual way. But it’s like an ogre at midnight I pounce on a Cold Boiled Potato.

  A Cold Boiled Potato reminds me of the Dickens books in which so much food is eaten cold and tastes so savory—even the ‘wilderness of cold potatoes’ portioned to the Marchioness by Sally Brass. And it reminds me of the Rip Van Winkle play—‘give this fellow a cold potato and let him go.’ And
it reminds me of Hamlet—funeral baked meats might include it. And it reminds me of Robin Hood’s merry men, and Huckleberry Finn, and the Canterbury Pilgrims, and the Prodigal Son, and all the picturesque wayfarers. It reminds me of the poor as a colorful race wrapped around with hungry romance. It reminds me that life is full of life—rich and fruitful and evolutionary and cosmic: few things feel so cosmic as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight. It makes me want as I nibble to plant a field of potatoes on a southern-exposed hill and hoe them and dig them all by myself: and give all but one to the poor and Boil that to eat Cold at midnight.

  I have to be very hungry to crave a Cold Boiled Potato, but being hungry no possible morsel of food can so interest me at midnight. The same potato hot is domestic and tasteless. The same potato at ten in the evening lukewarm within and sodden with memories of dinner, is a repellent item. At midnight it is all unexpected magnetism. At midnight my whole being is profoundly courteous, wooingly cordial toward a Cold Boiled Potato.

  If I had only what I deserved my portion might well be a Cold Boiled Potato. Intrinsically it is rated low and I know me to be a sort of jezebel. But I’d wonder each midnight if whoever metes out the deserts in this surprising universe knew with what gust I rise at it—would I get it.

  Nor am I satisfied like the meek and lowly with my midnight supper of Cold Boiled Potato: damn the meek and lowly. It’s a Satanic delight I take in it. It’s a sly private orgie I make of it: a pirate’s banquet, a thieves’ picnic, a pagan rite, a heathen revelry, a conceit all and unhallowedly my own. My thoughts as I nibble are set mostly on my villainies. No food I eat brings me so broad a license of feeling—a sense of freedom—as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.

  On a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight I am lightly valorous: call me a trickster and I’ll call you a rotter: call me a liar and I’ll call you a traitor: call me a coward and I’ll call you another: not pugnaciously but gayly and serenely.

  I am then in my most bespeaking mood. Anyone who met me standing nibbling in a pantry doorway at midnight would be charmed. I would talk with a dainty ribaldry and offer to share the feast.

  For shadow-things piled too near God compensates me in unexpected midnights with a Cold Boiled Potato: along with it a pantry doorway to stand in and a little glass salt-shaker to hold in my other hand.

  THE STRANGE BRAVENESS

  To-morrow

  If God has human feelings he must often have a burning at the eyes and a fullness at the throat at the strange Braveness of human people: their Braveness as they go on in the daily life, with aching dumbish minds and disgruntled bereft bodies and flattened pinched gnawed hearts.

  The easy human slattern way would be to sink beneath the burden.

  Instead, people: I and Another and all others— seamstresses and monotonous clerks and lawyers and housewives: sit upright in chairs and talk into telephones and walk fast and eat breakfasts and brush hair: all the while marooned in a morass of small wild unexciting tasteless Pain.

  Of others—what do I know?

  But I might say, ‘Look, God, I am not fallen on the ground, from this and that—utterly lost and down. But sitting, drooping but strong, in a chair, mending a lamp-shade—neat, orderly and at-it in my misery.’

  JUST BENEATH MY SKIN

  To-morrow

  This I write is a strange thing.

  So close to fact: so far from it.

  So close to truth: so surrounded by lies.

  It does not contain lies but is someway surrounded by a mist of lies.

  A strange thing about it is that it is expressing the Self Just Beneath My Skin.

  That Self is someways trivial and outlandish and mentally nervous, flightly, silly—silly to a verge of tragicness. I know that to be true from a long acquaintance with me. It is oddly intriguing to read over some chapters and find it shown. Some unconscious exact photography aids my writing talent.

  Some chapters are bewilderingly and mysteriously true to life.

  My everyday self that casually speaks to this or that person is nothing like this book. My absorbed self that writes a letter to an intimate acquaintance is not like this book. My heartfelt self that deeply loves a friend, and gives of its depths, and thrills answeringly to other depths, is not like this book.

  This book is my mere Hidden Self—just under the skin but hid away closer than the Thousand Mysteries: never shown to any other person in any conversation or any association: never would be shown: never could be.

  How Another, any Other, would come out: what Another would show: photographed Beneath the Skin—what do I know?

  Perchance ten times more trivial and inconsequent and mad than Me.

  If Another thinks Me someway mad, let him look at Himself Just Beneath the Skin. Perchance Another every day as he thanks a janitor for holding open a door, would much prefer to drive a long rusty brad-nail deep into the janitor’s skull.

  Perchance Another has a brain like Goethe, a Soul like a humming-bird, a Heart like a little round nutmeg.

  What do I know?

  I know what I am.

  Another may know what he is.

  But I can’t tell Me to Another and Another can’t tell Himself to Me.

  I can tell Me to myself and write it.

  Another if he reads will see Me: but not as I see Me.

  Instead, through many veil-curtains and glasses, very darkly.

  GOD’S KINDLY CAPRICE

  To-morrow

  For twenty-five cents and one hour and twelve minutes one may get in this present detailed world a bit of unforgettable complete enchantment.

  So I found to-day in a moving-picture theater. A Carmen, the real Carmen of Prosper Mérimée glowed, vibrated, lived and died with passion on a white screen.

  Of all prose writers I know Prosper Mérimée is the one—(intimate and sensitively alive as if I had lain against his shoulder as I read ‘La Guzla’ and ‘Venus d’llle’ —he melts into my veins—)whom I would most eagerly see interpreted. Of all fiction characters—if she is fiction—the poignant Carmen is the one I would most eagerly see realized. Carmen is one of those fictions which are truer to life than life is. Such fiction-things are all around, touching everybody: the spoken truths which grow false at being spoken: the thought lies which turn to truths the moment they touch words.

  I have heard Carmen sung and seen her filmed by the lustrous Farrar, and I have seen her play-acted by some lesser lights. But Bizet’s opera, a sparkling music-storm, creates a sonant objective Carmen, a beautiful bloody lyric, remote from Mérimée who made a Carmen intensely peculiar to his own subjective art. And the stage-Carmen has always been a stage-Carmen waiting in dusty draughty wings for her cues. It remained for the cinematograph, which is a true literal mirror of human expression, to make Carmen burst into violent physical life.

  But it was less the scopes of the films which made Carmen animate than it was the virile woman who played her. It was acting—but acting in the sense of losing and sinking and saturating and dissolving herself in another woman’s temperament: and by it she achieved some strong sword keen shadings of the Carmen character—to the hair’s-breadth. And she looked like Carmen. It was not important to the vigorous fire of her acting but it made bewitchment in the portrait. No one I have before seen play Carmen fitted the elusive points of her description.

  ‘Her eyes were set obliquely in her head but they were magnificent and large. Her lips, a little full but beautifully shaped, revealed a set of teeth as white as newly-skinned almonds. Her hair was black with blue lights on it like a raven’s wing, long and glossy. To every blemish she united some advantage which was perhaps all the more evident by contrast. There was something strange and wild about her beauty. Her face surprised you at first sight but nobody could forget it. Her eyes especially had an expression of mingled sensuality and fierceness which I had never seen in any human glance. Gypsy’s eye, wolfs eye’—

  This (from the English translation of the story by Lady Mary Loyd) fitted to a charm
the pictured vision of the foreign-looking woman—her name is Theda Bara—who flung a throbbing Carmen across the screen with indescribable heat and color and luster. It was comparable only to the muscular force of the original which that Mérimée rubs nervously and heavily into one’s thoughts. I felt it someway satisfyingly unbelievable—an illusion more actual than actuality: a dream which out-bore fact.

  I suppose there’s no other character like Carmen for flaming roundness in all fiction: filled with her treacheries yet purely true to herself, without fear, utterly game: fierce, coarse, ruthless and reckless yet wrapped in a maddening unwitting pathos: strong and bold and cruelly poised yet capable of sudden complete surrender: ignorant and abandoned and criminal in every instinct yet beyond every littleness, every pettiness: sensual yet contemptuous and indifferent in it, a woman of essential chastity. Carmen is the one criminal conception in whom there is no vulgar evil, no personal maculateness though wrecking all the wildness of her temper in her tempestuous days’-journeys. She is a romantic murderous appeal to human super judgment. It was this isolate quality of her which Theda Bara gave out with mystic masterful art. She gauged the personal odors and blood-pressures of Carmen. She slipped into Carmen’s skin and first sucked in and then breathed out the irresistible menacingness and arresting ruination of her beautiful diabolic spirit. A little feverish artistic thrill ran in my veins as I sat in the dark watching.

  ‘She had thrown her mantilla back,’ says Don Jose” in the translated tale, ‘to show her shoulders and a great bunch of acacias that was thrust into her chemise. She had another acacia bloom in the corner of her mouth and she walked along swaying her hips like a filly from the Cordova stud farm. In my country anyone who had seen a woman dressed in that fashion would have crossed himself. In Seville every man paid her some bold compliment on her appearance. She had an answer to each and all with her hand on her hip—. “Come, my love,” she began again, “make me seven ells of lace for my mantilla, my pet pin-maker.” And taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me.’