I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 41
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 logicalness 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 door-knob 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.