I move in no stultifying ruts. There’s no real yoke of custom on
my shoulders. My round white breasts beneath their black serge are
concurrent with nothing settled or subservient or discreet.
My Mind goes in no grooves made by other minds. It lives like a witch
in a forest, weaving its spells, revelling in smooth vivid adventure.
When I look at a round gray stone by a roadside I look at it not as
a young woman, not as a person, not as an artist, nor a geologist,
nor an economist, but as Me--as Mary MacLane--and as if there had not
before been a round gray stone by a roadside since the world began.
When I look at a chair with my somber eyes I say to the chair, ‘What
other persons may see when they look at you, chair, I don’t know--how
could I know? But I well know what I see and that what I see is
uninfluenced by other eyes that may have looked at you, were they
Aristotle’s or Galileo’s or an archangel’s.’ There may be equally
egotistic viewpoints--in Waco-Texas, or Japan, or Glasgow-Scotland or
the Orkney Islands, where not? I don’t know--I don’t care. What is it
to me? I know my own virile vision and that it thrills and informs
and translates me as if crackling bright-jagged lightnings broke
along my sky.--
It is a night of whispering breezes and little restless clouds, an
endearing night. It makes solitude a delectation. I walked out in it,
in the glimmering moonlight past buildings and houses and mines and
mounds. My thoughts as I walked were all of Me: how fascinating is Me.
I came in at midnight and met Me in my mirror. I pushed my
three-cornered hat backward off my head, slipped out of my loose coat
and dropped my squeezed gloves. I sank fatiguedly into a little chair
before the mirror, tipped the chair forward on its front legs, rested
my elbows on the bureau and my chin in my hands and looked absorbedly
at myself. Lovingly, tenderly, discerningly, marveling and absorbed
and deeply fascinated I looked at Me in the mirror. ‘You enchanted
one!’ said I, ‘You Witch-o’-the-world! you Mary MacLane!--who you
are _I_ don’t know--what you are I but partly know. You’re my
Companion, my Familiar, my Lover, my wilding Sweetheart--I love you!
I know that--that’s enough. I love your garbled temper, your aching
thoughts, your troubled Heart, your wasted spirit. I know much, much,
much of you and love you! I love your beauty-sense and your proud
scornful secret super-sensitiveness. I love your Eyes and your Lips
and your bodily Fire and Ice’--
--to _know_ oneself: apart from all the world!
One looking at me sees a cold-poised young woman, reserved and aloof,
slightly diffusing insolence and inspiring misgivings.
But I looking at Me see a woman standing high on flame-washed
battlements of her life in whom burn and beat the spirits and
lights and star-discords of uncounted tired lustrous ages. I see me
forlorn and radiant, drab and brilliant. I see me wrapped in a fiery
potentiality of pain and beauty and love and sorrow. I hear wild
voices in Me like horrid-sweet wailing of ghost-violins, muted but
crying loudly in frightful reasonless vital joy and in unspeakable
terror and sadness. I see Me ragged-clothed, bleeding, with
disordered tangled hair and bloodshot eyes, with coarse soiled hands,
broken-nailed, like a criminal’s: a woman of woes. And I see Me
wistful in quiet pure garments like one seeking light. I see Me old
as old sin and young as new Spring days. I see Me un-sanely sensitive
and hardened over--closed in worldly cases: guarded antagonism round
my thoughts, protecting indifference round my Heart, dead silence
round my Soul. I see Me with brains to know, with prescient mind to
grasp, with mobile sense to feel. I see Me all futile, all hopeless,
all miserable. I see Me all poetry. I see Me all wonder, mystery and
beauty. I see Me!--
--much more than that, _this_ Me sitting here! my deep gray wanton
dark eyes: my lips--like pink flowers--with the inscrutable
expression: my white fingers--slim, strong, glossy-nailed, silken at
the tips. My glass gives Me back to Me, sitting by it, languid of
Body, tense of spirit and Mind, bathed in witcheries of Self--