I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 50

by Mary MacLane

Eye when I mean tooth

To-morrow

I WRITE it, and it's a surprising book.

It is not what on the surface it looks to be.

I do not write what my clear Mind may want to say to the white blank paper.

I do not write what my thoughts are saying to me.

Those things are facile, uninformed—flat mental pictures, the writer's craft.

I write what still voices of life: voices trivially frightful in their secret pettiness: voices of all my life—merest living—say to my ancient Soul and my young present Body and what they two may answer.

I am in some sort a wonderful person—and in places I do that, nearly perfectly.

I am also tired and someway whelmed by self-conscious despair, and possessed of a talent imperfect and inadequate to reveal the radiances and shades my being perceives: and in places I fail.

I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood. For no better reason than that my writing hand is not sufficiently dexterous: the little flashing shutters open and shut so quick that the second ones are shut and the third starting to open before I have got written the things I saw through the first ones.

Only not always.