Mary MacLane - I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

To M T

these Live Fruits from the Withered Garden

It is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana.

The sky is overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy.

And at this point I meet Me face to face.

I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world anddearly and damnably important to Me.

Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and withgreat intentness.

I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flamingtrivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:

I am rareI am in some ways exquisite.

I am pagan within and without.

I am vain and shallow and false.

I am a specialized being, deeply myself.

I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some otherpointes.

I am dynamic but devasted, laid waste in spirit.

I'm like a leopard and I'm like a poet and I'm like a religieuse andI'm like an outlaw.

I have a potent weird sense of humora saving and a demoralizinggrace.

I have brain, cerebrationnot powerful but fine and of a remarkablequality.

I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.

I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.

I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.

I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful inmy truth.

I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.

I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.

I am young, but not very young.

I am wistfulI am infamous.

In brief, I am a human being.

I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arrestingdead-feeling genius.

And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.

So assayed I begin to write this book of myself, to show to myself indetail the woman who is inside me. It may or it mayn't show also atype, a universal Eve-old woman. If it is so it is not my purport. Ising only the Ego and the individual.

So does in secret each man and woman and child who breathes, but isafraid to sing it aloud. And mostly none knows it is that he doessing. But it is the only strength of each. A bishop serving trulyand tirelessly the poor of his diocese serves a strong vanity andideal of the Ego in himself. A starving sculptor who lives in and forhis own dreams is an Egotist equally with the bishop. And both areEgotists equally with me.

Egotist, not egoist, is my word: it and not the idealized one is the'winged word.'

It is made of glow and gleam and splendor, that Ego. I would be itsvotary.

So I write me this book of Memy Soul, my Heart, my sentient Body,my magic Mind: their potentialities and contradictions.

there is a Self in each human one which lives and has its sweetvain someway-frightful being not in depths and not in surfaces butJust Beneath The Skin. It is the Self one keeps for oneself alone.It is the Essence of soul and bones. It is the slyest subtlest thingin human scope. It is the loneliest: tragically lonely. It is long,long isolationbeautiful, terrifying, barbarous, shameful, trivialto points of madness, ever-present, infinitely intriguing to oneself,passionately hidden: hidden forever and forever

It is my aim to write out that in the pages of this Me-book: nodepths save as they come up and touch that, no surfaces save as theysink skin-deep. Only the flat unglowing bloody Self Just Beneath MySkin.

I shall fail in it, partly because my writing skill is unequal tosome nicenesses in the task, but mostly because I am not very honesteven with myself.

I'll come someway near it.

Half inevitably, half by choice, I write this book now.

I am at a lowering impatient shoulder-shrugging life-point where Imust express myself or lose myself or break.

And I am quite alone as I live my life.

And I am unhappya scornful unhappiness not of bitter positive griefwhich admits of engulfing luxuries of sorrow, but of muffled unrestsand tortures of knowing I fit in nowhere, that I driftdriftand itbrings an unbearable dread, always more and more dread, into days andinto wakeful nights.

And writing it turns the brunt of it a little away from me.

And to write is the thing I most love to do.

And I myself am the most immediate potent topic I can find in myknowledge to write on: the biggest, the littlest, the broadest, thenarrowest, the loveliest, the hatefulest, the most colorful, the mostdrab, the most mystic, the most obvious, and the one that takes mefarthest as a writer and as a person.

I write myself when I write the thoughts smouldering in me whetherthey be of Death, of Roses, of Christ's Mother, of Ten-penny Nails.

One's thoughts are one's most crucial adventures. Seriously andstrongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway moreexciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.

I unfold myself in accursed and precious written thoughts. I cast thereflections of my inner selves on the paper from the insolent mirrorof my Mind.

my Mindit is so free

My Soul is not free: God hung a string of curses, like a littlemanacling chain, round its neck long and long ago. Always I feel it.My Heart is not free for it is dead: in a listless way and a trivialway, dead. And my Bodyit is free but has a seeming of somethingwasted and useless like a dinner spread out on a table uneaten andgrowing cold.

but my free Mind

Though I were shut fast in a prison: though I were strapped in anelectric chair: though I were gnawed and decayed by leprosy: Istill could think, with thoughts free as gold-drenched outer air,thoughts delicate-luminous as young dawn, thoughts facile, seductive,speculative, artful, evil, sly, sublime.

You might cut off my two hands: but you could not keep me fromremembering the Sad Gray Loveliness of the Sea when the Rain beats,beats, beats upon it.

You might admonish me by driving a red-hot spike between my two whiteshoulders: but you could not by that influence my Thoughtsyou couldnot so much as change their current.

I am intently aware of my Mind from moment to momentall the passinglife-moments. The awareness is a troubled power, a heavy burden and awild enchantment.

Also what I feel I write.

I am my own law, my own oracle, my own one intimate friend, my ownguide though I guide me to dead-walls, my own mentor, my own foe, myown lover.

I am in age one-and-thirty, a smouldering-flamed period whichfeels the wings of the Youth-bird beating strong and violent forflighthalf-ready to fly away.

I am not a charming person. Quite seventy singly-used adjectiveswould better fit me.