But I - I have acquired the art of eating an olive.
Now listen and I will tell you the art of eating an olive.
I take the olive in my fingers, and I contemplate its green oval richness. It makes me think at once of the land where the green citron grows - where the cypress and myrtle are emblems; of the land of the Sun where human beings are delightfully, enchantingly wicked, - where the men are eager and passionate, and the women gracefully developed in mind and in body - and their two breasts show round and full and delicately veined beneath fine drapery.
The mere sight of the olive conjures up this charming picture in my mind.
I set my teeth and my tongue upon the olive, and bite it. It is bitter, salt, delicious. The saliva rushes to meet it, and my tongue is a happy tongue. As the morsel of olive rests in my mouth and is crunched and squeezed lusciously among my teeth, a quick temporary change takes place in my character. I think of some adorable lines of the Persian poet:
Give thyself up to Joy, for thy Grief will be infinite.
The stars shall again meet together
At the same point in the firmament,
But of thy body shall bricks be made
For a palace wall.
“Oh, dear, sweet, bitter olive,” I say to myself.
The bit of olive slips down my red gullet, and so into my Stomach. There it meets with a joyous welcome. Gastric juices leap out from the walls and swathe it in loving embrace. My Stomach is fond of something bitter and salt. It lavishes flattery and endearment galore upon the olive. It laughs in silent delight. It feels that the day it has long waited for has come. The philosophy of my Stomach is wholly Epicurean. Let it receive but a tiny bit of olive and it will reck not of the morrow, nor of the past. It lives, voluptuously, in the present. It is content. It is in Paradise.
I bite the olive again. Again the bitter salt crisp ravishes my tongue. “If this be vanity, - vanity let it be.” The golden moments flit by and I heed them not. For am I not comfortably seated and eating an olive? - Go hang yourself, you who have never been comfortably seated and eating an olive! - My character evolves farther in its change. I am now bent on reckless sensuality, let happen what will. The fair earth seems to resolve itself into a thing oval and crisp and good and green and deliciously salt. I experience a feeling of fervent gladness that I am a female thing living, and that I have a tongue and some teeth, and salivary glands.
Also this bit slips down my red gullet, and again the festive Stomach lifts up a silent voice in psalms and rejoicing. It is now an absolute monarchy with the green olive at its head. The kisses of the gastric juice become hot and sensual and convulsive and ecstatic. “Avaunt, pale shadowy ghosts of dyspepsia!” says my Stomach. “I know you not. I am of a brilliant shining world. I dwell in Elysian fields.”
Once more I bite the olive. Once more is my tongue electrified. And the third stage in my temporary transformation takes place. I am now a gross but supremely contented sensualist. An exquisite symphony of sensualism and pleasure seems to play somewhere within me. My heart purrs. My brain folds its arms and lounges. - I put my feet up on the seat of another chair. - The entire world is now surely one delicious green olive. My mind is capable of conceiving but one idea: that of a green olive. Therefore the green olive is a perfect thing - absolutely a perfect thing.
Disgust and disapproval are excited only by imperfections. When a thing is perfect, no matter how hard one may look at it, one can only see itself - itself, and nothing beyond.
And so I have made my olive and my art perfect.
Well then, this third bit of olive slides down the willing gullet into my Stomach. “And then my heart with pleasure fills.” The play of the gastric secretions is now marvelous. It is the meeting of the waters! It were well, ah, how well if the hearts of the world could mingle in peace, as the gastric juices mingle at the coming of a green olive into my Stomach! “Paradise, Paradise!” says my Stomach.
Every drop of blood in my passionate veins is resting. Through my Stomach - my Stomach, do you hear - my soul seems to feel the infinite. The minutes are flying. Shortly it will be over. But just now I am safe. I am entirely satisfied. I want nothing, nothing.
My inner quiet is infinite. I am conscious that it is but momentary, and it matters not. On the contrary the knowledge of this fact renders the present quiet - the repose more limitless, more intense.
Where now, Devil, is your damnation? If this be damnation, damnation let it be! If this be the human fall, then how good it is to be fallen! At this moment I would fain my fall were like yours, Lucifer, “never to hope again.”
And so, bite by bite, the olive enters into my body and soul. Each bite brings with it a recurring wave of sensation and charm.
No. We will not dispute with the brilliant mind that declared life a tragedy to those who feel. We will let that stand. However there are parts of the tragedy that are not tragic. There are parts that admit of a turning aside.
As the years pass, one after another, I shall continue to eat. And as I eat I shall have my quiet, my brief period of aberration.
This is the art of Eating.
I have acquired it by means of self-examination, analyzing - analyzing - analyzing. Truly my genius is analytical. And it enables me to endure - if also to feel bitterly - the heavy, heavy weight of life.
What a worm of misery I should be were it not for these bursts of philosophy, these turnings aside!
If it please the Devil, one day I may have Happiness. That will be all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different being.
But meanwhile I shall eat.
When the last of the olive vanishes into the Stomach, when it is there reduced to animated chyme, when I play with the olive-seed in my fingers, when I lean back in my chair and straighten out my spinal column, - oh, then do you not envy me, you fine, brave world, who are not a philosopher, who have not discovered the art of the small things, who have not conscious chyme in your stomach, who have not acquired the art of Good Eating!
January 29
As I read over now and then what I have written of my Portrayal I have alternate periods of hope and despair. At times I think I am succeeding admirably, - and again, what I have written compared to what I have felt seems vapid and tame. Who has not felt the futility of words when one would express feelings?
I take this hope and despair as another mark of genius. Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.
I am more than fond of writing, though I have hours when I can not write any more than I could paint a picture, or play Wagner as it should be played.
I think my style of writing has a wonderful intensity in it, and it is admirably suited to the creature it portrays. What sort of Portrayal of myself would I produce if I wrote with the long elaborate periods of Henry James, or with the pleasant ladylike phrasing of Howells? It would be rather like a little tin phonograph trolling out flowery poetry at breakneck speed, or like a deep-toned church organ pouring forth “Goo-Goo Eyes” with ponderous feeling.
When I read a book I study it carefully to find whether the author knows things, and whether I could, with the same subject, write a better one myself.
The latter question I usually decide in the affirmative.
A writer who charms me is Maria Louise Pool with her novels of New England. She is fascinating and she knows things. If she had written seventy years ago she would doubtless now be standard literature. One thing I have noticed about her books is that as I read them I find myself thinking not particularly of the characters therein, but of the author who somehow appears between the lines. And I find this very interesting. I have spent a great many half-hours thinking and conjecturing about Maria Louise Pool. Always I wonder what she likes to eat, and what she does on a pleasant Saturday aftern
oon when she has nothing else to do, and what kind of clothes she wears, and if she can possibly be as uninteresting at that stout, gray-haired age as most women are. I hope I may see her some day.
The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them. Eugene Field and Edgar Allan Poe and R. Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens, among others, have succeeded in doing this. They impress the world with a sense of their courage and realness.
There are people who have written books which did not impress the world in this way, but which nevertheless came out of the feeling and fullness of zealous hearts. Always I think of that pathetic, artless little old-fashioned thing Jane Eyre as a picture shown to a world seeing with distorted vision. Charlotte Brontë meant one thing when she wrote the book and the world after a time suddenly understood a quite different thing, and heaped praise and applause upon her therefor. When I read the book I was not quite able to see just what the message was that the Brontë intended to send out. But I saw that there was a message - of bravery, perhaps, or of that good which may come out of Nazareth. But the world that praised and applauded and gave her money seems totally to have missed it.
It takes centuries of tears and piety and mourning to move this world a tiny bit.
But still, it will give you praise and applause and money if you will prostitute your sensibilities and emotions for the gratification of it.
I have no message to hide in a book and send out. I am writing a Portrayal.
But a Portrayal is also a thing that may be misunderstood.
January 30
An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth. But, after all, the Devil is so clever that he could produce unexcelled workmanship with even the poorest tools.
My brain is one kind of Devil’s-workshop, and it is as incessantly hard-worked and always-busy a one as you could imagine.
It is a Devil’s workshop, indeed, only I do the work myself. But there is a mental telegraphy between the Devil and me, which accounts for the fact that many of my ideas are so wonderfully groomed and perfumed and colored. I take no credit to myself for this, though, as I say, I do the work myself.
I try always to give the Devil his due - and particularly in this Portrayal.
There are very few who give the Devil his due in this world of hypocrites.
I never think of the Devil as that atrocious creature in red tights, with cloven hoofs and a tail and a two-tined fork. I think of him rather as an extremely fascinating, strong, steel-willed person in conventional clothes - a man with whom to fall completely, madly in love. I rather think, I believe, that he is incarnate at times. Why not?
Periodically I fall completely, madly in love with the Devil. He is so fascinating, so strong - so strong, exactly the sort of man whom my wooden heart awaits. I would like to throw myself at his head. I would make him a dear little wife. He would love me - he would love me. I would be in raptures. And I would love him, oh, madly, madly!
“What would you have me do, little MacLane?” the Devil would say.
“I would have you conquer me, crush me, know me,” I would answer.
“What shall I say to you?” the Devil would ask.
“Say to me, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ in your strong, steel, fascinating voice. Say it to me often, always - a million times.”
“What would you have me do, little MacLane?” he would say again.
I would answer: “Hurt me, burn me, consume me with hot love, shake me violently, embrace me hard, hard in your strong steel arms, kiss me with wonderful burning kisses - press your lips to mine with passion, and your soul and mine would meet then in an anguish of joy for me!”
“How shall I treat you, little MacLane?”
“Treat me cruelly, brutally.”
“How long shall I stay with you?”
“Through the life everlasting - it will be as one day; or for one day - it will be as the life everlasting.”
“And what kind of children will you bear me, little MacLane?” he would say.
“I will bear wonderful, beautiful children - with great pain.”
“But you hate pain,” the Devil will say, “and when you are in your pain you will hate me.”
“But no,” I will answer. “Pain that comes of you will be ineffable exaltation.”
“And how will you treat me, little MacLane?”
“I will cast myself at your feet; or I will minister to you with divine tenderness; or I will charm you with fantastic deviltry; when you weep, I will melt into tears; when you rejoice, I will go wild with delight; when you go deaf I will stop my ears; when you go blind I will put out my eyes; when you go lame I will cut off my legs. Oh, I will be divinely dear, unutterably sweet!”
“Indeed you are rarely sweet,” the Devil will say. And I will be in transports.
Oh, Devil, Devil, Devil!
Oh, misery, misery of Nothingness!
The days are long - long and very weary as I await the Devil’s coming.
January 31
To-day as I walked out I was impressed deeply with the wonderful beautifulness of Nature even in her barrenness. The far-distant mountains had that high pure transparent look, and the nearer ones were transformed completely with a wistful beseeching attitude that reminded me of my life. It was late in the afternoon. As the sun lowered, the pure lavender of the far-away hills was tinted with faint-rose, and the gray of the nearer ones with sun-color. And the sand - my sand and barrenness - almost flushed consciously in its wide, mysterious magnitude. In the sky there was a white cloud. The sky was blue - blue almost as when I was a child. The air was very gentle. The earth seemed softened. There was an indefinite caressing something over all that went into my soul and stirred it, and hurt it. There was that in the air which is there when something is going to happen. - Only nothing ever happens. - It is rare, I thought, that my sand and barrenness looks like this. I crouched on the ground, and the wondrous calm and beauty of the natural things awed and moved me with strange, still emotions.
I felt, and gazed about me, and felt again. And everything was very still.
Presently my eyes filled quietly with tears.
I bent my head into the breast of a great gray rock. Oh, my soul, my soul, I said over and over, not with passion. It is so divine - the earth is so beautiful, so untainted - and I, what am I? It was so beautiful that now as I write, and it comes over me again, I can not restrain the tears.
Tears are not common.
I felt my wooden heart, my soul, quivering and sobbing with their unknown wanting. This is my soul’s awakening. Ah, the pain of my soul’s awakening! Is there nothing, nothing to help this pain? I am so lonely, so lonely - Fannie Corbin, my one friend, my dearly-loved anemone lady, I want you so much - why aren’t you here! I want to feel your hand with mine as I felt it sometimes before you went away. You are the only one among a worldful of people to care a little - and I love you with all the strength and worship I can give to the things that are beautiful and true. You are the only one, the only one - and my soul is full of pain, and I am sitting alone on the ground, and my head lies on a rock’s breast. -
Strange, sweet passions stirred and waked somewhere deep within me as I sat shivering on the ground. And I felt them singing far away, as if their faint voices came out of that limitless deep, deep blue above me; and it was like a choir of spirit-voices, and they sang of love and of light and of dear tender dreams, and of my soul’s awakening. Why is this
- and what is it that is hurting so? Is it because I am young, or is it because I am alone, or because I am a woman?
Oh, it is a hard and bitter thing to be a woman! And why - why? Is woman so foul a creature that she must needs be purged by this infinite pain?
The choir of faint, sweet voices comes to me incessantly out of the blue. My wooden heart and my soul are listening to them intently. The voices are trying hard to tell me, to help me, but I can not understand. I know only that it is about pure, exalted things, and about the all-abiding love that is somewhere; and it is about the earth-love, and about Truth, - but I can not understand. And the voices sing of me the child - a song of the unloved, starved little being; and a song of the unloved, half-grown creature; and a song of me, a woman and all alone - awaiting the Devil’s coming.
Oh, my soul - my soul!
A female snake is born out of its mother’s white egg, and lives a while in contentment among weeds and grass, and dies.
A female dog lives some years, and has bones thrown at her, and sometimes she receives a kick or a blow, and a dog-house to sleep in, and dies.
A female bird has a nest, and worms to eat, and goes south in the winter, and presently she dies.
A female toad has a swamp or a garden, some bugs and flies, contentment - and then she dies.
And each of these has a male thing with her for a time, and shortly there are little snakes or little dogs for her to love as much as it is given her to love - she can do no more.
And they are fortunate with their little snakes and little dogs.
A female human being is born out of her mother’s fair body, branded with a strange, plague-tainted name, and let go; and lives awhile, and dies. But before she dies she awakes. There is a pain that goes with it.
And the male thing that is with her for a time is unlike a snake or a dog. It is more like a man, and there is another pain for this.
And when a little human being comes with a soul of its own there must be another awakening, for she has then reached the best and highest state that any human being can reach, though she is a female human being, and plague-tainted. And here also there is heavy soul-pain.
I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated Page 5
