I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 63
GOD might come to visit me on a Monday afternoon.
He would come in at the door of my blue-white room which had been left about twenty inches ajar: for I cannot imagine God, the aloof and reticent, opening a shut door to visit anyone. It is as if God purposely lacks all initiative. If I wish to meet God I must first suffer deeps of terror and passion and loneliness to make the mood that wants it. Then I must train my life down to two plain frocks. And to crown all my room-door must be left ajar on the day he happens to come or he will not come in. That seems certain: but for twenty inches of ajarness at my door he will not come in.
In it God is quite fair. I do the reaching-out and I live out the despairs: he furnishes a fact to go upon: I go upon it, in some anguish doubtless: but then mine, not God's, are the lights and the translated splendor. It is a 'gentleman's game' God plays. It is because I feel that to be true, more than for that he is the Dealer, that I would have a word with him.
On a Monday afternoon—
He might come in the figure of a precise mystic-looking little old man, punctilious of dress and manner like an English duke on the stage. He might wear overwhelmingly correct afternoon attire, with spats and a monocle on a wide ribbon. It someway fills my peculiar trivial concepts of God: mystic-seeming because he is the God of the dead dusty hosts of Israel, and punctiliously modern because he is also the God of new-poeted radium-gifted Now. A God like a druid or like Aladdin's genie, such as I fancied as a child, or like Jove or Vulcan, would seem an inadequate and unsuitable God. What would such a one know of the shape and fashion of my two plain dresses, and of my shoes, and my breakfasts, and the charmed surface joy in the back of a magazine? God, to be God to me, must know all those things.
And if he only bespoke me in thunderous preludes touching souls' triumphant apotheoses—bold and intolerable ecstasies beyond heaven's last poignantest door—it would be nothing to my purpose. Those my poet-brain can make for me if I wish. But I'd like God to explain me the little frightful puzzles which thrive all around me in the wide daylight of this knife-and-fork-ness.
God might come walking lightly in and perhaps seat himself fastidiously in my chastest chair. He might cross one knee over the other. He might adjust his monocle and regard me through it speculatively or sadly or politely-wearily. I should be outwardly calm but I might feel an inward panic: lest he go away again without having told me a fact.
I might say to God: 'God, if you please, this small blue vase on my window-sill—I see it and I touch it and I love it—will you tell me, you who know, is there a blue vase there or is there no vase?'
And God might merely glance at the vase through his glass and daintily hold his white handkerchief crumpled-up in his gray-gloved fingers and might merely say: 'Madame, you have eyes with which to see the vase and hands with which to touch it and sentiments to lend it charm for you, no doubt. Then why not let them inform you as to its actuality?'
And then I might say, with a weariness equal to God's: 'My senses are pleasant—they are sweet—but they do not inform me, or they inform me wrong. Because they don't plainly tell me whether it's a Blue Vase of a Blue Shadow—just for that I burn in little disconcerting hell-fires, and vulture-thoughts with beaks and talons come and tear me in the night, and I starve and decay trivially, and my life is a flattish ruin and a tasteless darkness and a slight shallow death, a death in the sunshine—I am fed-up with a sense of death because of pricking doubts as to my blue vase's realness.'
To which, again, God might reply with his head tilted to one side, tranquil and impersonal: 'As to that, Madame, there may be less death in doubt than in certainty about your vase. You might in discovering it discover in yourself no right whatever to the sunshine—no right to live in it, no right to die in it.'
And I might answer, with some insolent feeling: 'I should wish to discover the fact about it though it proved to me I don't exist and never existed—that I'm a dust on a moth's wing, and at that alien—not belonging there.'
Upon which God, for what I know, might only shrug-the-shoulders.
In that identity he might shrug-the-shoulders or break-the-world with equal omnipotent plausibleness.
But I might try again. I might say: 'One thing feels realer than my blue vase—this blue-and-green Necklace which my Soul wears. It is rare and recherché but my beautiful Soul is very tired from wearing it. Will you please unclasp it for me?'
And God might say, deprecatory: 'Pray, Madame, do you consider what portion of the beauty you mention may be in the Necklace? Should I unclasp it—it is doubtful whether you would recognize your soul without it.'
To which I might answer, with more insolent feeling: 'I don't know anything of that and I don't care for it. I only know I want the Necklace off. To wear it makes me languid and frenzied and worn—full of wild goaded saneness and the wish to go violently mad.'
And God might answer: 'Permit me to express my regrets for those sentiments which, I should add, I neither concur in nor refute nor deny nor share.'
There I might be: conversationally whip-sawed.—God is full of works of beauty, serene and miraculous: Gray Lakes and Blue Mourning Mountains and Deserts beneath the Moon. Those have quietly ravished me many and many a night and day—and will again, and still again, in pacing To-morrows.
But I can't tell What O'Clock it is by them. And if God were by me and I asked him the time the odds are all that he would look at the toy-face of my little ivory toy-clock, which sets on my desk where I can see it myself, and tell me the time by that.
But though he is thus perplexing he knows the right time and could tell me it.
For that restlessly I wish God would make me one brief visit.
I wish that though he should so godlily baffle me and divinely bore me.