I bear the detailed infliction of being a person with a tired mixture
of patience and indifference and scorn.
I say on Monday, Damn the ache in my left foot: on Tuesday, Damn
that rattling window--I hate it: on Wednesday, Damn this yellow
garter--it’s too tight: on Thursday, Damn my futile life: on Friday,
Damn the solitude: on Saturday, Damn these thoughts: on Sunday, Damn
my two dresses.
But I pronounce each day’s Damn in a half-perfunctory half-preoccupied
tone, more from duty and fitness than from conviction. I intently
mean each Damn, but the scornful indifferent patience which is my
spirit-essence leavens each one. I swear at my life’s perversities
with only a fatigued contempt due partly to bodily fragileness but
mostly to a cold continently reckless mood which is clasped on me
like a strong stupefied devil-fish. In this mood I should murmur the
same gelded Damn if I found myself penniless and foodless in strange
streets: if I became suddenly deaf: if my Body were being lashed with
whips or raped by a Mexican bandit. I should murmur the same worn
Damn if I were this moment on a gallows with the rope around my neck
and life were dearly madly precious.
I mark that with my musing regrets. I remember in the strong young
furies of eighteen each new day of my life was filled with passionate
poetic blasphemy, protests and rebellions of youth. Those were not
tired, not acquiescent, not indifferent to slings-and-arrows, but
firey-blooded quick-pulsed breathless brave young Damns.
There is splendor in being brave in a fighting attitude, but in being
brave through indifference there is no splendor.
But it is only toward calamity and adversity and worldly untowardness
that I feel indifferent. Fighting blood is stirred in me if not
against the hated things then for the loved things. I could fight
and I could die, and love it, to save poet-lusters, poet-fineness,
poet-beauty from the world’s flat griefs. In that, which I feel warm
and real and sparkling in my blood, in some splendor for me.
--and also I could die for my country: and there is fighting hatred
stirred in me against its foes--
But in poetry there is nothing that evokes a lusty curse against its
vulgar adversaries. Poetry floats too high upon its dazzling wings. I
get delicately drunk from watching it till I can see the wings’ Gold
Shadow touch its foes and magically split them into dust-atoms.
So then the morale of my Damns remains perfunctory.
But they are apt and useful. They fit into the nervous rhythms of my
life. They mark time in my spirit’s flawed action. I begin each day
with a Damn of sorts. I end each day with a Damn of sorts. At midday
sometimes it’s, ‘Damn the terrifying ignorance of people.’ In the
dusk a deep-felt Damn of the blood. In the night another. And at my
late eating time a negligible Damn.
A wonderful word, Damn. It means enough and not too much. It means
everything in life, and roundly nothing.
Without Damn my day would lack tone. Damn richly justifies each
pronouncement of itself in word-value, substance-value and musical
resonance. It harms nobody and it helps me. It destroys nothing and
it strengthens me. It damages my annoyances and mends me somewhat.
But--perfunctory, desultory, tiredly insolent, it would be thrilling
to think the hot fire would sometime be back in my Damns. Better that
than Youth’s faith in my dreams. Better that than the _jeune-fille_
beauty in my hair. Better than even Youth’s ichor in my veins:
Youth’s fire in my Damns--
But there is dearness in this mood, which is indifferent and scornful
and slightingly patient, though it wants splendor. Let my Damns be
always brave, always contemptuous of disaster to me, and they will be
first-water value though their kind alter never-so.
_To God, care of the whistling winds_