I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 33
THIS morning came a letter from a half-forgot friend in London. She is in vaudeville and has been booked for two months in the Music Halls. Her letter is of a tenor productive of a letter in turn. But I am somehow not free to write letters to friends while I'm living in my two plain dresses. So I wrote this letter to God instead:
Dear God:
I know you won't answer this letter. I'm not sure you will get it. But I have the feeling to write you a letter, though it should only blow down the whistling winds.
I haven't a thing to ask of you: no prayer to make. I am not suppliant nor humble nor contrite. Nor would I justify myself as a person in your eyes. I scorn to try to justify myself. What I am I am. If I am a bad actor I take the results of it without plaint. I comment on it—why not?—since cats may look at kings and each person inherits four-and-twenty hours a day. But I am bewildered and distraught and sad.
The best you do for me, God, when I think of you—you personally—is to make me bewildered and distraught and sad.
But I've imagined I could put myself to you as a proposition to take or to leave as you like: on my terms since I do not know yours.
There are some verses—the Rubaiyat—in which you are upbraided as if you might be the dealer in some gambling game who had the long end of all the wagers and still so protected his money that he could not lose however the cards turned.—'from his helpless creature be repaid pure Gold for what he lent him dross-allayed.'—'thou who didst with pitfall and with gin beset the Road I was to wander in—.'
But to me that seems a cheap attitude toward you, God. I admit you are fair. If I thought you weren't my mind would not vex itself with you at all. I can not make you out a crooked dealer nor one who lends out bad money and demands good money in repayment.
But you are reticent and cold-tempered and uninterested. So it seems. The necklace which you gave me so long ago, made of little curses, I wear always round my spirit-neck. It serves some purpose, perhaps, and it answers as a keepsake: so at least I may not forget you whether or not you forget me. I don't ask any more of your attention nor anything more of you than I would be willing to give you in return. But I wish you would be willing to exchange attention with me. I am lonely. I am terrified. I am frightfully overshadowed by myself and my odd aloofness and my thronging solitary emotions and my menacing trivialities. I am always fearing not that I may be wicked or immoral or allied with evils—I don't really care a tinker's curse about that—but that I may be growing petty and trivial and weak. It is horrible, horrible to feel that I may be a weakling—you, God, may not know how horrible to me. It is like black annihilation for all eternity when my Soul longs frantically, desperately to live. I feel weakness to be the only immoralness—hateful and vile in whatever aspect. I want to be strong to endure and to live in noonday lights and to overcome my poorness. I want, though I'm far from it, to be brave and big. What I admire you for, though you're so far off and strange and inexplicable, is that you are strong. You are Strength, you are Light, you are the Solution and the Absolute. You'd hardly know what weakness is if it did not so crop out in this human race you made. This human race is a faërily beautiful thing: star-flaming poets have sung in it: lovely youth has breathed upon it: happy wild hearts have informed it. But the odd keynote of it all is weakness. And I have felt me tuned overmuch by that keynote.
—but I won't be weak, I won't be, I won't be, God! Whether you pay attention or not, whether I breathe only futileness, I will be strong, strong, strong in myself—strong if only in my falseness—strong and strong again—
This would be your chance with me if you cared to take it: because I own now just my plain two dresses. When I grow out of this quiet mood—(if ever I do: I begin to doubt it)—I shall have more dresses, and then I shall think about them, God, and the phases of life they'll build up around me, and not about you. It's not that pretty frocks would take my attention away from you if you once claimed it. Once you claimed my attention it would be yours forever. But pretty frocks would mean I am again walking in paved peopled roads. Being there without your attention I shall go where my garments may lead me forgetful of you. One's life is of the flavor of one's clothes: 'the wine must taste of its own grapes.'
Now feels like a fitting time for you to be personal with me, to give me a sign that you know I'm here. I know I am blind and ignorant about that. You may know a time that shall be more fitting, a time when my still mood and two dresses are long gone and my life is made of fluff and lightness so your sign will crash into it like a black two-ton meteor. I only tell you how it seems. If you should come now and speak to me I should feel suddenly glad. To-day feels such a day-of-God. The sky is all wet silver and the air a thin cloud of gold. I sit writing you by my window, often looking out with my forehead resting against the cool pane. There is an ache in my forehead, in my insteps, in my backbone and in my spirit. By stopping in here a moment you would gladden me. If you could give me, or show me—where it perhaps had always been—one true thing to have always in my life I should cling to it and ask nothing of it but that it remain true. If you'd make me one far-off promise of a dawn to come after this tired darkness I would take your word for it and would walk toward your dawn in a straight road from which I should not ever turn aside. In me is a small torch glowing though set in chaos. By its light I should keep in the road leading to your dawn. I should keep in it at any sacrifice to my merely human self: any sacrifice, believe me.
It isn't a bargain I would make with you. I don't like the thought of a bargain with you. I would rather take the chance and lose honestly: not in everything but in this matter with you. You show me the road and I take it for the sole reason that it's a true one. I should expect myself to pay the tolls—heavy ones since I'm innately a liar, a someway bad lot. I know, the same as I know one and one make two, that I've only to be square in the human business of living to get back a square deal, though I'll get badly battered, with it. But it isn't what I mean. Something inside me hungers for answeringness—a Gleam—to make me know the worldly squareness and the battering are worth while beyond themselves: but a detail in the game.
You mightn't guess it but I am diffident about broaching this much that may sound like a plea, so I'll say no more of it.
But before I close the letter I want to tell you that I'm not wanting in gratitude for the terrible beauty of this world. I feel with ecstasy the burning loveliness of the life you give the human race.
I want to tell you thank-you for some things in it. But all that they mean I can not tell in words.
Only yesterday a light at sundown lingered on the hill-tops and on the desert back of the School of Mines in tints of Olive and Copper and Ochre and Rose so delicate, so radiant, so dumbly forlorn that I closed my eyes against it all as I walked along the sand: its aliveness, its realness, its flawless golden dreadful peace tortured and twisted and too-keenly interpreted me.
And one summer day in Central Park in New York I saw a little Yellow-Yellow Butterfly fluttering above a small plot of brilliant Green-Green Grass in the afternoon sunshine. To you, God, used to the purpling splendor of untold worlds that mightn't seem noteworthy. But to me—because I am half-sister to so many trivialities the Yellow-Yellow of those little wings and the sweet bright Green of the clipped velvet Grass beneath the sun suddenly fiercely entered in and beat-beat hard on my imagination. O the glare and the flare of that fairy prettiness! I shall never forget that picture though I should one day see those worlds. It made me think wildly of you, God, at the time—and ever since. It is there yet in Central Park, that particular plot of Grass, and if not that Yellow-Yellow Butterfly—happily, happily Yellow it was—then another!
And to-day and often other days I read this—
—magic words: potent hushed wizardry of beauty. It opens the doors of all the Inner Rooms and more blest, more precious, of the celestial brain of him who wrote it. In making the glimmering Purple of all your worlds, God, you have not surpassed the thing you made in the regal wistful glory of John Keats.
And two nights ago I went close to my glass and looked deep into my own dark gray eyes, and they were beautiful. Their color is the gray not of peace but of stormy sky and clouded sea. Their expression is alien and melancholy and they are never without circlings of fatigue or stress. And when I meet their glance they mostly accuse and condemn and confound me. But two nights ago they grew wide and deep and breathless-looking at realizing me human and alive. And presently I saw, back of their gray iris—my Soul: like a naked girl: like a willow in the wind: like a drowning star at daybreak: an inherent inexpressible grace—my Soul of many ages.
And this moment another little memory, God, of a tropic marsh a little way back from the sea on the island in the bay at St. Augustine, as it looked in the wane of one sun-flooded February day. In the marsh were tall waving feathery salt-marsh grasses, and little pools of murky water. And there were snail-shells and ancient barnacles and smooth beach pebbles. And bordering the pools were reeds and flags and tiny wax-petaled death-white lilies. By a mound of wet moss was a slim wild blue heron standing on one leg and staring about and preening its blue feathers. And over all the scene was a Pink-Pink Flush. The curving quivering tops of the long grass were Pink with it. The pools were dull Pink mirrors. The barnacles, the pebbles, the death-white lilies were as if a thin bloody veil had been flung down on them. Pink touched the heron's wings, its beak, its head, its glittering beady eyes and spindly leg. The sinking sun shot a Pink broadside of dream-dust all over the marsh: it lingered and hung and floated. Almost I could have reached out my two hands and gathered a bouquet of Pink Flush. The stillness, which was intense, was Pink stillness. O but it was pleasant, pleasant, pleasant, God—it wrapped me in a scarf of Pink sweetness: it filled my throat with Pink honey: it laid on me a gentle eager quiet covetous Pink spell.
Nobody knows how you do it, God. But it is all—Sunset Tint, Yellow-Yellow Moth, Conscious Soul, Poet-Flame—maddening and precious and terrifying and transfiguring to me who live among it. I cherish it as a lonely one may who loves it with passion and is never happy in it. And for it all I thank you, God.
I wrote the Letter on my long-unused monogram note-paper to please my whim, and put it in the envelope and addressed it to God, care of the Whistling Winds. He may receive it—what do I know?—only he knows, and is reticent.
I only know he'll not answer it.