I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 36
WHILE I live so still in this life-space, while I muse and meditate and analyze everything I touch, while I walk, while I work, while I change from one plain frock to the other: in quiet hours roiled tumbling storms of vicarious unhopeful Passion whirl, whirl in me: Passion of Soul, Passion of Mind, Passion of living, Passion of this mixed world: in terror, in wild unease, in reasonless mournful joy.
I never knew real Passion, Passion-meanings, till I reached thirty. It is now I'm at life's storm-center, youth's climax, the high-pulsed orgasmic moment of being alive.
At twenty the woman's chrysalis soul and aching pulses awaken in crude chaste Spring-cold beauty. At forty her fires either have subsided to dim-glowing coals or leaped to too-positive, too-searing, too-obvious flames—her bones and the filigrees of her spirit may be alike dry, brittle-ish. But at thirty her Spring has but changed to midsummer. Poesy still waits upon her Passions.
My Spring has changed, bloomed, burst to midsummer.
Soft electrical heat-currents of being swing and sweep around me. They touch me and enter my veins. But the liquid essences of youth still quell and compass them. I am at youth's climax—a half-sullen, half-smouldering youth which still is youth.
My rose of life is fragrant and aglow. Its sweet pink petals are uncurled and conscious in the wavering light.
Winds flutter and stir and rumple and twist those petals—
To-day is a To-morrow of countless unrests. Large and little Passions beat at me all the blue-and-copper day. I walked my floor with irregular lagging steps. I felt menacing, dangerous to myself, dynamic as nitro-glycerine: and smoothly drearily sane as a bar of white soap. I stood at my window and looked long at the circling range of mountains which skirt this Butte. Nothing else I have looked at, of sea or plain or hill, affected me like that chain of barren peaks. They are arid splendor and pale purple witchery and grief and lasting sadness and deathlike beauty and woe and wonder. Their color quietly stormed my eyes and blurred them with tears.
It was a mood in which any color or gleam or thought or strain of music or note of sad world-laughter or any un-sane loveliness of poetry could enchant or flay or transport me to my frayed last nerve.
There is terror in facing death on battlefields, on sinking ships, in black ice-floes, in blazing buildings. But to me no death, for I fear no death, could be so dreadfully pregnant with in-turning woe and frenzy and all intolerable feeling as facing starkly my futile life.
My life is a vast stone bastile of many little Rooms in which I am a prisoner. I am locked there in solitude on bread and water and let to roam in it at will. And each Room is tenanted by invisible garbled furies and dubious ecstasies. I run with echoing footsteps from Room to Room to escape them: but each Room is more unhabitable than the last. There are scores of little Rooms, each with its ghosts, each different.
In one Room silent voices in the air accuse my tired Spirit of wanton vacillations and barren lack of purpose and utter waste, waste, waste of itself. And they threaten death and destruction. I know that accusation and I hate it: I hate it the more for that it's wholly just. To escape it I run from that Room along a dim passage into another one. In it unseen fingers clutch my Heart. In their touch also is an accusation: of selfishness and waste and want of something to beat for: and in their touch is the savor of wild wishes and human longings and passionate prayers for something warm and simple and real to rest against: and in their pressing clutching turbulent touch is a tormenting half-promise, chance-promise, no-promise: and the hovering inevitable threat of death and destruction. That too I know and hate and half-love: and I can't bear it. So I run out of that Room along a passage and into another. I hear my footsteps echoing as I run.
—as a child when I ran in the early night through a dark leaf-lined tunnel-like driveway the sound of my own flying footsteps on the hardened gravel was the only thing that frightened me. I quite believed there were bears in the brushwood on either side, but fear of them never struck to the core of my child-being like the unknown thing in my echoing steps. And it is fear I feel now from the ghost-sound of my ghost-footsteps running, running away from the little Rooms. It is realer to me now than were my child footsteps to my child-self long ago: it is more definite than my hand which writes this: it is hideous—
Out of a dim passage I run into another little Room. In it some gray filmy threads, like strands of loose cobwebs caught on ceilings, float about. They sweep gently against my cheeks and hands and neck, and cling and twine and lightly hold with the half-felt feeling peculiar to bits of cobwebs on the skin. And it torments my woman-flesh with calefaciant thrills fierce and goading and sweet. There also is the accusation, now against my Body; for tissues and strength wasted: for useless fires meant to warm human seeds to life, meant to make me fruitful, meant to make me bear dear race-burdens: accusation for the cosmic waste of hot objectless desire, for the subtle guilt of a Lesbian tendency, for an unleashed over-positive sex-fancy. With it too is the lowering promise of death and destruction. It also is just. But out of my borne-along helplessness in it comes no culpable emotion because of cobweb thrills and their arraignment but only a wearing wearying despair. I rush out of that Room in shrugging impatience, with only scorn for a threat of death, for a threat of destruction—but with a wild fear of my own flying steps. I hurry and hurry on from door to door: but it's no good. In some other Room my brain is anathematized from frowning walls as an impish demoniac power which I use with no good intent and therefore with bad intent: and again I shrink and run away. In another Room are all the lies I have ever told: I have told legions—my own peculiar lies, gentler on me than truths: they dart around me in the Room like black heavy-winged moths, clouds of them fluttering at my forehead. They drive me out shivering. In another Room four times when I was a not-good-sport confront me in a row like pictures and sting me and make me hide my eyes: I'd rather be a leper, a beast, a maniac than a not-good-sport (for my own precious reasons)—and I rush away again. In some other Room—
—the same galling torment in all the Rooms. Wherever I run with the echo-echo of steps there are Accusing voices and half-formed Prayer and uncertain Yearning and violent yet dumb and inexpectant Protest and the unfailing Threat of death and destruction: not earth-death but universe-death: death and death and death everywhere coming on and on: myself knowing the just note in it all and from it grown numb with some cold and restless terror. Also I know no door I run through with my panic-feet will ever set me free of the bastile except a death door: the earthly death of this tired life—
But it's from this maelstrom that the flashing burning sparkling mad magic of being alive leaps out brilliant and barbarous—and throbbing and splendid and sweet. A merely human hunger comes back on me. Then I want all I ever wanted with a hundredfold more voltage of wanting than I have ever yet known.
I am all unhopeful, all unpeaceful, all a desperate Languor and a tragic Futileness: I am an unspeakably untoward thing.
And already I have been seared and scarred trivially from standing foolishly near some foolish human melting-pots.
No matter for any of it. I want to plunge headlong into life—not imitation life which is all I've yet known, but honest worldly life at its biggest and humanest and cruelest and damnedest: to be blistered and scorched by it if it be so ordered—so that only it's realness—from the outside of my skin to the deeps of my spirit.
It is not happiness I want—nothing like it: its like never existed since this world began.
I want to feel one big hot red bloody Kiss-of-Life placed square and strong on my mouth and shot straight into me to the back wall of my Heart.
I write this book for my own reading.
It is my postulate to myself.
As I read it it makes me clench my teeth savagely: and coldly tranquilly close my eyelids: it makes me love and loathe Me, Soul and bones.
Clench and close as I will the winds flutter and stir and crumple and twist my petals as they will:—as I sit here tiredly, tiredly sane.