In the quest for the woman-in-skirts, some of us fail to notice that
the woman-within may be partly and helplessly a perverse wench,
attesting by default to all the oversights of her masculine lord: us.
It was a remarkable discovery and explained occasional tendencies of
numbers of my gentlemen companions.
Given another five years, caliph, and you could resolve this
situation--this exotic act of the inner She who rules whatever crannies
her master shuns in conscious male conceit.
If you happen to be the kind of person who, out of mere idleness, or
from scientific motive, or in our poor common cause, is willing to
trephine his own soul for a better look, you will find such dances
going on there, such images and integers of the complicated flesh.
If you announce the results, however, you are liable to go to Hecate.
Hecate County, I mean.
Unless you do so, that is, in plain wrapper and with a Ph.D. Cf.:
"The inner natures of all men and women partake of the natures of the
opposite sex--a psychological phenomenon in some forms openly expressed
by modern society (O moms, O Mummers!), but in other forms suppressed
with the full force of public opinion. What public opinion suppresses,
the individual endeavors to conceal both from himself and from society.
Nevertheless, were the individual _not_ equipped with the psychological
elements of the opposite sex, comprehension and sympathy between the
two would be impossible. And this 'feminine' quality of a man--for
example--may even project on real women, in inverted form, those
universal, adolescent feelings toward his own sex which the conscious
adult man repudiates. Hence, as Cadwallader, Pratt and Razzle say, in
their lucid monograph--"
But if you express the results in terms of palpable feelings and
acts--rather than in this lack-life lingo of pedagogy--the very gents
and gals who share the same sensations will rise as one (owing to
the general habit of suppression) and breathe down your neck with a
blowtorch.
When you see them coming you will know what troubles them that they do
not know.
It is, always, their responses to your perceptions.
Themselves--not you.
Yvonne, to put it in the terse form, like Gwen,
was also in a sense a shimmering fragment of a dislocated inner me.
If you are distressed by her,
the time has come to bore a hole in the thick skull of your own soul
and see the remarkable tittup going on there.
Lightning struck a graph on the sky.