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 calefacient 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.
* * * * *