I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 12
MAY I own no unleavened egotism.
May I own no egotism that is not sensitive and poignant and vibrant: a harp of Worn Strings.
The surprising world is full of non-analytic persons of ox-eyed vision and hen-headed mental caliber whose egotism is a stupendous impregnable armor: those who burned the Maid of Orleans: those who crucified the prophet of Nazareth: those who killed John Keats.
They inherit the earth, which is a Golden-Green earth, but never look at it.
They accept this life, which is Intoxicating life, but never feel its texture with their fingers.
They gather a Blue iris by a marsh-edge and let it die in their sweating hands, or let it fall to the ground as they walk, or throw it away when the Blue petals droop: without looking at it and breathing it and knowing it: without sensing the tremulous Blue to be lovelier in its wilting.
Theirs is the thick fat solidly-fierce egotism of an emperor or an infant whose main metaphysic concept is that he is alive, and will remain alive, and must be alive, though all around him bleed drop by drop to their death.
I have analyzed mine, and it is not so with me.
If I say I am enchanting or false or despicable it is because I know it's true. Not because I say it but because I have tested and proved it. I feel the textures of my life with the tips of my fingers. I turn my senses outward and let the old winds blow over them—icy, balmy, harsh, gentle, scorching, cooling. I suffer for it but I know those winds: songs of seas and stars and of little pebbles are in their thunderous-dim wailing: life is in the soft stinging perfume of their wings.
No breath of poetry and beauty comes to me that I do not pay for with the beating ache of my Heart, the nervous tensions of my Body, the fraying and shredding of my Soul. If any beauty or poet-thing comes easily and gives me pleasure and not pain, I know I have not yet got it and that it will come again.
It will come again: with the pain.
I can't eat cake and have it.
I can't make silk purses out of sows' ears.
Those things I learn nearly perfectly from playing on my harp with the Worn Strings.