I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 49
I DON'T know whether I write this because I wear two plain dresses or whether I wear two plain dresses because I write it.
My life fell into a lowering mood which calls for but two dresses: which mood compels me to write out these things that are in me as inevitably as heavy gathered clouds come raining to the ground. The mood having overtaken me I can not keep from writing this day after day, more than I can keep from brushing my hair every day, and eating lumps of food every day, and picking up tiny white specks from my blue rug.
I love this book and I fear and hate it. I love the writing of it though it is a finical unobvious task—more so than it looks. And often I fear to read it over lest I hurt my own feelings. And I hate it in ways. I am a particularly sane woman when all's said. And many things I come to in me are grating and inexplicable and incongruous.
But also I love it. It is my companion 'when the world is gone.' I am as solitary as if I had no human place in this earth. My days are as silent as if I lived in it alone. The few voices that bespeak me in a day or a week stop at my ear-drums and are immensely alien. At times, for weeks on end, I am quite alone in this house and the silence then has a depth and a hollowness. From it I feel not alone in a house but alone in a world: and more when the family is in the house.
And it is what-should-I-do if I had not a writing talent to expend me upon from day to day, and so rest me. I feel God around some corner but that feeling is no rest, but only an odd terror which wants the dignity of terror.
Times I wonder if I shall have this published afterward for all to read and if so what colors it will paint on my world—and what else may befall.
But it's an aspect dim and remote now. I wearing but two nunlike dresses and face to face with me, have nothing to do with publishing books and with the beautiful noisy world and its befallings. It is easy to believe I shall never again have to do with any of that. This may be my death-mood. I am very tired. The weight of being a person is heavy on me as weights of lead. And still I know if I suddenly bloomed with beautiful frocks and went out to-morrow to lose myself among people, people, people I should at once achieve a veneer of the utmost frivol. I have an odd frivolous quality full of an ardor and strength, with all of my mental mettle in it. Also I know if I did that now it would be but postponing this analytic reckoning. Which would confront me again with the more rancor, the more futileness gathered into it from having been put off.
This book and the two dresses are my present portion. If I could escape them (I am not quite sure I want to—but—hell!)—it would be of no use. They would come back again in an unexpected ripeness of time and demand a hearing: an exquisite nervous tragic hearing.
They are such stuff as the conscious analyst is made of.
But though I'm the conscious analyst I can't quite tell whether I write the book because I wear two plain black dresses or I wear those because I write it.