Merely from the view-point of outward intellect this book of myself
is oddly difficult to write.
My most-loved thing to do and my hardest thing to do is to write.
It is hard to catch and hold with mental fingers one’s own emotions
and then doubly hard to write them. A feeling is something without
the words and without even the thought. To put it into the thought
and then into the words is a minuter task than would be the
translating of a François-Villon poem into Choctaw.
It’s a knowing person who realizes her own emotions and a knowinger
who recognizes what is what, who is who, which is which among them.
I look inward at Me and I see an emotion of World-Weariness and
want to write it. I write it as nearly as I can. But when I have
done--it’s not World-Weariness that I wrote but its twin-sister,
Boredom-of-the-Moment, which happened to be next the other when I
looked. I am glad to have transcribed Boredom-of-the-Moment. It is
the finer and thinner and more elusive of the two. But how and why
did I fail of World-Weariness?
But sometime when I aim at Fear or Resentment or Surprise it may be
World-Weariness I’ll bring down unexpectedly with a clean wing-shot.
When I set out to write the Look-in-my-Eyes it may be the
Feel-of-my-Fingers that comes out in my round writing. Another time I
think I’m writing my Bad-Tooth: until I get it written when it turns
out to be my little Eye-Wrinkles.
Having failed of the thought often I fail of the words. When I have
a particularly M.-Mac-Lane thought to express I review the top tier
of my vocabulary of words to find proper ones for it. They are all
very nice words in that top-tier--neatly washed and dressed and
hair-brushed and tidied-up, like the children in a small private
school: words like Necessary and Irresolute and Crockery and
Inconvenience and Broth and Apprise: good words and useful if one’s
thought is radical or risky and wants conserving. I call some of
them to me and question them and consider them and ponder a bit, and
decide they will none of them suit. Then I go to the bottom tier, the
unkemptest of words in the untidiest attire: words like Traipse and
Nab and Glim and Hennery and Chape and Plash. And I at once reject
those as too carelessly bred for my terse thoughts to associate
with. (But for my uncombed ungroomed grimy-faced thoughts I turn to
them.) Then I glance over a tier of mysterious words, spruce but
with indefinable vagabond faces: such as Whelk and Mauger and Frush
and Gnurl and Yare and Hyaline. They are expressive but of a kind
it’s well to use with caution, the kind that may trip up thoughts
that would make them their medium and lead to slips ’twixt cups and
lips. So I dismiss them with a mental reservation of one or two to
use if I fail to find right ones among the less mysterious. Then I
turn to a tier that represents the virile middle-class in words, the
lower-case words, the mob and riot words, the words for poets and
anarchists and prophets: such as Adroit and Nightingale and Gallows
and Gutter and Woman and Madrigal and Death. And I say, ‘Without
doubt here are my words.’ But I use discretion. I know that tier of
words to be of the nature of bombs, of strychnine, of a dynamic force
resistible against all human and wordly substance. They also must be
used cautiously and with a sparing hand. With caution one can handle
a bomb, and sparingly one can eat strychnine, and one can control
any dynamic force by studying its tendencies and keeping out of its
direct road. It behooves one to heed those conditions in broaching
the countermining counter-irritant words if one would avoid blowing
oneself analytically broadcast.
So I may have found the right sort of words and measured their
possibilities and pitfalls. But again: it’s a nerve-racking task
to choose out one word from seven, one from five, one from two. I
see two words which may be the only proper ones out of ten thousand
to bear my thought. The two may be Echo and After-glow, each an
unacknowledged half-sister to the other: meaning respectively
something living and growing and vibrant in my spirit-ears, and
fading and dying and radiant before my spirit-eyes. But because my
spirit-ears may glow bright and hot from what they heard, or my
spirit-eyes may seem to themselves to gaze a moment at a soundless
sound--an Unheard Melody of Keats,--I miss the raylike distinction
and I write After-glow when my true word was Echo.
But another time I write Echo perfectly and masterfully to my own
delight: having meant After-glow.
So it is. There’s no plain sailing on this analytic sea. And if there
were it would be not worth while. I want nothing, nothing, nothing
that comes easily. What comes easily I distrust, be it love or
language. It afterward proves dead-sea fruit. What I suffer to get I
know to be life-food even if it drugs or pains or poisons me. It is
one lesson I have learned.
Without doubt it is so with everybody, all around. One sees only
surfaces, husks. Anyone looking casually at this Me sitting writing
might say, ‘How easily and smoothly and well she writes. How kind
of God to give her so light a task in life. How complacently go her
working hours.’ And I looking casually at--oh--Miss Lily Walker
singing and swaying and glancing sideways in a gorgeous Broadway
chorus--I might say, ‘How easy a task in life has _that_ brainless
gazelle. To work with her body and not even with the sweats and
sinews of it like a scrub-woman, and not with the facile shames of
it like a lorette, but with the grace and suppleness and beauty and
suggestions of it, aided by a soprano throat and a soprano face--with
only the effort it wants to fling it all over footlights. And that
pastime gets her her livelihood.’
But whoever marks me writing as one doing an easy task because I
write along rapidly enough considers nothing of my mental travail
for the thought, my blind grope for the language, my little nervous
anguish of choice among the double-edged and triple-pronged words:
and the neat concise failure of the result.
And no, I do not thus comment on Miss Lily Walker. I have
an appreciative pleasure in her charm and suppleness and
bird-and-butterfly prettiness. But after a bit of contemplation and
analysis of her surface I deduce the unconscious struggle it may be
for Miss Lily Walker to be supple on nights when she does not feel
supple, the thin agony of being sweet when she does not feel sweet,
the neurotic torture of being seductive _regularly_--by the night:
the more that perchance the struggle always _is_ unconscious. Her
brain being required in her body it’s to be assumed there’s none in
her head. But I can deduce a nervous red heart beating illogically
somewhere in her being protesting dumbly sometimes against one irking
item, sometimes against another, sometimes against all the items in
Miss Lily Walker’s scheme of life, but beating and beating on, like a
little automatic drum wound up tight and tossed into a maelstrom to
beat itself out.
I’d like--like with breathless eagerness--to read the analyzed being
just beneath Miss Lily Walker’s skin.
Everybody--every human being--is wildly _Real_: radiant and
desolate.--
With no amount of temperamental struggling could Miss Lily Walker
analyze a psychic emotion of her own and then find the right
word-combination to write it in.
With no conceivable effort of mine could I manage to be supple when I
do not feel supple.
So Miss Lily Walker and I are quits at this game.
It totals up evenly, all ways around.
Nobody gets through one Real day--though it be a dayful of Real
lies--without a demoniacal struggle of soul or a heavy blow on the
personal solar plexus.
And I make not even the intellect side of this book, which is a
Realness to me, without sweet fine sweatings of blood.
_Instinct--a ‘first law’_