He might come in the figure of a precise mystic-looking little old
man, punctilious of dress and manner like an English duke on the
stage. He might wear overwhelmingly correct afternoon attire, with
spats and a monocle on a wide ribbon. It someway fills my peculiar
trivial concepts of God: mystic-seeming because he is the God of the
dead dusty hosts of Israel, and punctiliously modern because he is
also the God of new-poeted radium-gifted Now. A God like a druid or
like Aladdin’s genie, such as I fancied as a child, or like Jove or
Vulcan, would seem an inadequate and unsuitable God. What would such
a one know of the shape and fashion of my two plain dresses, and of
my shoes, and my breakfasts, and the charmed surface joy in the back
of a magazine? God, to be God to me, must know all those things.
And if he only bespoke me in thunderous preludes touching souls’
triumphant apotheoses--bold and intolerable ecstasies beyond heaven’s
last poignantest door--it would be nothing to my purpose. Those my
poet-brain can make for me if I wish. But I’d like God to explain me
the little frightful puzzles which thrive all around me in the wide
daylight of this knife-and-fork-ness.
God might come walking lightly in and perhaps seat himself
fastidiously in my chastest chair. He might cross one knee over
the other. He might adjust his monocle and regard me through it
speculatively or sadly or politely-wearily. I should be outwardly
calm but I might feel an inward panic: lest he go away again without
having told me a fact.
I might say to God: ‘God, if you please, this small blue vase on my
window-sill--I see it and I touch it and I love it--will you tell me,
you who know, _is_ there a blue vase there or is there no vase?’
And God might merely glance at the vase through his glass and
daintily hold his white handkerchief crumpled-up in his gray-gloved
fingers and might merely say: ‘Madame, you have eyes with which to
see the vase and hands with which to touch it and sentiments to lend
it charm for you, no doubt. Then why not let them inform you as to
its actuality?’
And then I might say, with a weariness equal to God’s: ‘My senses are
pleasant--they are sweet--but they do not inform me, or they inform
me wrong. Because they don’t plainly tell me whether it’s a Blue
Vase or a Blue Shadow--just for that I burn in little disconcerting
hell-fires, and vulture-thoughts with beaks and talons come and tear
me in the night, and I starve and decay trivially, and my life is a
flattish ruin and a tasteless darkness and a slight shallow death, a
death in the sunshine--I am fed-up with a sense of _death_ because of
pricking doubts as to my blue vase’s realness.’
To which, again, God might reply with his head tilted to one side,
tranquil and impersonal: ‘As to that, Madame, there may be less death
in doubt than in certainty about your vase. You might in discovering
it discover in yourself no right whatever to the sunshine--no right
to live in it, no right to die in it.’
And I might answer, with some insolent feeling: ‘I should wish to
discover the _fact_ about it though it proved to me I don’t exist
and never existed--that I’m a dust on a moth’s wing, and at that
alien--not belonging there.’
Upon which God, for what I know, might only shrug-the-shoulders.
In that identity he might shrug-the-shoulders or break-the-world with
equal omnipotent plausibleness.
But I might try again. I might say: ‘One thing _feels_ realer than my
blue vase--this blue-and-green Necklace which my Soul wears. It is
rare and recherché but my beautiful Soul is very tired from wearing
it. Will you please unclasp it for me?’
And God might say, deprecatory: ‘Pray, Madame, do you consider what
portion of the beauty you mention may be in the Necklace? Should I
unclasp it--it is doubtful whether you would recognize your soul
without it.’
To which I might answer, with more insolent feeling: ‘I don’t know
anything of that and I don’t care for it. I only know I want the
Necklace off. To wear it makes me languid and frenzied and worn--full
of wild goaded saneness and the wish to go violently mad.’
And God might answer: ‘Permit me to express my regrets for those
sentiments which, I should add, I neither concur in nor refute nor
deny nor share.’
There I might be: conversationally whip-sawed.--God is full of works
of beauty, serene and miraculous: Gray Lakes and Blue Mourning
Mountains and Deserts beneath the Moon. Those have quietly ravished
me many and many a night and day--and will again, and still again, in
pacing To-morrows.
But I can’t tell What O’Clock it is by them. And if God were by me
and I asked him the time the odds are all that he would look at the
toy-face of my little ivory toy-clock, which sets on my desk where I
can see it myself, and tell me the time by that.
But though he is thus perplexing he knows the right time and could
tell me it.
For that restlessly I wish God would make me one brief visit.
I wish that though he should so godlily baffle me and divinely bore
me.
_A profoundly delicious idea_