This Body I live in is familiar and mysterious.
It is like a book of poetry to read and read again.
It has the owned sentientness of bone-and-flesh, and with it tremors
fine as spirit-emotions.
My Body is more chaste than my Mind, my Heart and my Soul. My Body if
fragile is healthful, and is one with the woman-race: it moves with
the sunlit cosmos. My Mind wanders in sex-chaos and muses on piquant
impure things, enchanting villainies, odd inversions, whatnot. My
Soul--a sweet and an exquisite Thing--its tired wings have borne it
languidly down the dim stairways of many centuries, some leading in
wilful perverted ways. And my Heart is a pagan Heart. Its essence is
flavored with the day and lyric trail of the Sapphic students.
Bodily I am also pagan in the freedom of my owned sex feelings--as
are all women. Most of them do not know it and those who do hide it
in a tomb-like silence, except the brazen, the headlongly honest and
the artlessly frank. I come under none of those heads. I am myself. I
live and ponder alone.
And my Body feels consciously aloof and as a someway separate
individual: with inner organs as eternal hopes, smooth skin as
emotion and drops of blood as thoughts--little drops of sparkling red
virile sweet blood for its thoughts.
I so _love_ my Body as it lives and breathes and moves about, with me
and close to me. It is my so constant companion. It is an attractive
girl, a human being of some charm. I love it for the priceless air
it breathes and the long jewel-days of sunshine it has known: for
the tiny wears and tears of its daily life--the rending of its
magic tissues with each going-up-or-down-stairs, each crossing of
a door-sill. I love it for that it must lie at last pale, pale and
still--still--still--in its grave.
I love my Body for its woman-complexities of sex. I love it for the
lonely lyric poetry of its cell-adventures.
I love my Body for this long journey of woe and loveliness which
it goes, from Birthday to Death-day, in wilding passions of subtle
nervousness: each day a day of bodily beauty and intolerableness and
fear and utter mystery: because life _is_, and because I own a white
smooth-skinned Body, and because the strange, strange Air of Everyday
breathes on it--touches it--always!
_Sincerity and despair_