I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 24
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.
But for want of—other, other people—I am intensely lonely.
When I was eighteen I thought I must be the most lonely creature in this world. I analyzed my life then as now and it by itself had set me apart. But I stood then as it's given Youth to stand—on High Ground. I was strong to endure loneliness while viciously hating it. There was unaware a hope-colored bliss in my inexperience which companioned me. I felt it then without knowing I felt it. I can see that plainly now.
Now also I see plainly and feel plainly that I stand on lower ground, at poorer vantage. As my bodily strength which was then robust is now slight. The metaphysic life-shadows reach me more easily. They have a feel of fatally shutting down, fatefully closing in. They are the mirages on the dun-colored worldly air near me of my own useless untoward selves. There is no more the hope-colored bliss.
At eighteen I said to me: 'I'm lonely but some day I may be happily friendshiped and apprehended and it will be like paradise.'
Now I say to me: 'I'm lonely by fate and by nature and temperament. I've known some friendships of vivid alluringness and informingness—they await me now in the offing. And others. There is paradise in it—an odd sweet dubious paradise. But what's the use—?'
It's that what's-the-use, born of the lower vantage-ground and the closing-in shadows, that chiefly makes me lonely—lonely to a desperateness and on through to a ruinous calm.
It is this metaphysic loneliness which breeds in me one constant reasonless restless urgent motif: to Express me: not of-the-past except desultorily, not of-the-future save indifferently: but of my low-toned, low-echoing now. Until I've Expressed me there's no setting open the gates of my spirit to a passer-by, though the passer-by should be a poet-in-the-flesh, a god, an angel with a torch.
Four-and-twenty turbulent moods may break over me in a day, or four-and-twenty passive ones, or four-and-twenty someway joyous ones. But like the theme in a fugue this loud tranquil recurrent need to Express me transcends them all.
It is a big voracious part-human bird of prey. Of it too I say what's-the-use. But it is a need without a use, a need scornful of use. It springs unconceived, unsourced from inside me. It rises from the ashes of blightingest moods and beats its bruising strong wings against my face.
It says: 'Know me, defer to me, Slim-woman. Serve me, follow me, gather-in all your answers for me. Do this though I undo you, though I rend you, tear you with my sharp teeth so like a wolf's. When you've answered me I may let you go. Until then, turn to me. Tell me: tell me again and again. Utter yourself. Interpret. Unfold.'
It makes my life-space someway sweet, someway heartbreaking, someway frightful—strewn with dust of broken stars.
I live long hours of nervous profound passionate self-communion. I discover strange lovely age-worn facets of my Soul. I discover the subtle panting Ego—the wonderful thing that lives and waits in its garbled radiance just beneath my skin.
To ask oneself and make answer out of oneself is the most delicious of this life's mental delectations. I might have missed it but for those beating bruising wings against my face, now and years ago: for expressing breeds the last Expressions.
I might have gone on through years and decades and lumps of months knowing at best a little of some rare person, a little less or more of another rare person, a little of a musician's soul in a nocturne, a little of a dead poet's splendors. But to Me and my own fine spirit-relationships to those things I could remain, but for my radiant flawed egotistic interpreting, eternally strange.
But for it I'd not have the wit to perceive the one human being in the world I may know with vitalness: my own Self. I should drop into my grave at last without a good-by to the glowing one who was locked just inside, whose hand I'd never clasped, whose sad prescient eyes I'd never looked in, who was then flitting out and on and away.
It is a being cruel and transfiguring and terrifying: terribly worth clasping close and breathing with.
And some days it sleeps, sleeps like the dead: it is delicater than rose-vapors before the dawn: a sun-blown faëry thing.
When it sleeps I'm left alone. Then comes a doubtful dreadful quiet, a hell of dumbness that only God could reach.
It is as if neither God nor I attempts to cope with it.