I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human DaysMacLane, Mary
General
I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days
MacLane, Mary
MacLane, Mary, 1881-1929; Montana -- Biography; Women authors, American -- Biography
--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--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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