In dim corners of my mind there sleep, hidden away and naked, the
freakish children of my imagination, waiting in silence for art to
clothe them with language that it may present them in decency upon the
stage of the world.
My Muse, as fruitful as the marriage-bed of poverty, and like those
parents who bring to birth more children than they have means to rear,
is ever conceiving and bearing in the mystic sanctuary of the
intelligence, peopling it with innumerable creations, to which not my
utmost effort nor all the years that are left to me of life, will be
sufficient to give form.
And here within me I sometimes feel them, all unclad and shapeless as
they are, huddled and twisted together in confusion indescribable,
stirring and living with a dim, strange life, similar to that of those
myriad germs which seethe and quiver in eternal generation within the
secret places of the earth, without winning strength enough to reach the
surface and transform themselves, at the kiss of the sun, into flowers
and fruits.
They go with me, destined to die with me, leaving no more trace than is
left by a midnight dream which the morning cannot recall. On certain
occasions and in face of this terrible idea, there rises in them the
instinct of life, and trooping in formidable though silent multitudes
they seek tumultuously a way of escape from amid the shadows of their
dwelling-place forth to the light. But alas! between the world of idea
and the world of form yawns an abyss which only the word can bridge, and
the word, timid and slothful, refuses to aid their efforts. Mute, dim
and powerless, after the unavailing struggle they fall back into their
old passivity. So fall, inert, into the hollows by the wayside, when the
wind ceases, the yellow leaves which the autumn storm blew up.
These seditions on the part of the rebel sons of my imagination explain
some of my attacks of fever; they are the cause, unrecognized by
science, of my excitements and depressions. And thus, although in ill
estate, have I lived till now, walking among the indifferent throngs of
men with this silent tempest in my head. Thus have I lived till now, but
all things reach an end, and to these must be put their period.
Sleeplessness and fantasy go on begetting and producing with monstrous
fecundity. Their creations, crowded already like the feeble plants of a
conservatory, strive one with another for the expanding of their unreal
existences, fighting for the drops of memory as for the scanty moisture
of a sterile land. It is needful to open a channel for the deep waters,
which, daily fed from a living spring, will at last break down the dike.
Go forth, then! Go forth and live with the only life I can give you. My
intellect shall supply you with nutriment enough to make you palpable; I
will clothe you, though in rags, so that you need not blush for
nakedness. I would like to fashion for each one of you a marvellous
stuff woven of exquisite phrases, in which you could fold yourselves
with pride, as in mantles of purple. I would like to engrave the form
that must contain you as the golden vase which holds a precious ointment
is engraved. But this may not be.
And yet, I need to rest. I need, just as the body through whose swollen
veins the life-blood surges with phlethoric force, is bled, to clear my
brain, inadequate to the lodging of so many grotesqueries.
Then gather here, like the misty trail that marks the passing of an
unknown comet, like atoms dispersed in an embryonic world which Death
fans through the air, until the Creator shall have spoken the _fiat lux_
that divides light from darkness.
I would not that in my sleepless nights you still should pass before my
eyes in weird procession, begging me with gestures and contortions to
draw you out from the limbo in which you lead these phantom, thin
existences into the life of reality. I would not that at the breaking of
this harp already old and cracked the unknown notes which it contained
should perish with the instrument. I would interest myself a little in
the world which lies without me, free at last to withdraw my eyes from
this other world that I carry within my head. Common sense, which is the
barrier of dreamland, is beginning to give way, and the people of the
different camps mingle and grow confused. It costs me an effort to know
which things I have dreamed and which have actually happened. My
affections are divided between real persons and phantasms of the
imagination. My memory shifts from one category to the other the names
of women who have died and the dates of days that have passed, with days
and women that have existed only in my mind. I must put an end to this
by flinging you all forth from my brain once and forever.
If to die is to sleep, I would sleep in peace in the night of death,
without your coming to be my nightmare, cursing me for having doomed you
to nothingness before you had been born. Go, then, to the world at whose
touch you came into being, and linger there, as the echo which life’s
joys and griefs, hopes and struggles, found in one soul that passed
across the earth.
Perchance very soon must I pack my portmanteau for the great journey. At
any moment the spirit may free herself from the material that she may
rise to purer air. I would not, when this moment comes, take with me, as
the trivial baggage of a mountebank, the treasure of tinsel and tatters
that my Fancy has been heaping up in the rubbish chambers of the brain.