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69 - I, Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane · I, Mary MacLane

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  Speaker 1: Chapter sixty nine of I Mary mac Lain by Mary
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  Speaker 1: mac Lain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Lynn Thompson, Chapter sixty nine, An Ancient witch
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  Speaker 1: Light to Morrow. Also I am some way the lesbian woman.
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  Speaker 1: It is but one phase, one which slightly touches each
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  Speaker 1: other phase I own, and in it I am poetic
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  Speaker 1: and imaginative and worldly and amorous and gentle and true
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  Speaker 1: and strong and weak and ardent and shy and sensitive
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  Speaker 1: and generous and morbid and sweet and fine and false.
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  Speaker 1: The lesbian sex strain, as an effect, is reckoned a
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  Speaker 1: prenatal influence, and as I conceive it comes also of
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  Speaker 1: conglomerating carnations and their reactions and flare of some thus bestowed.
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  Speaker 1: It makes strange, hard, highly emotional, indefinably vicious women, turbulent
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  Speaker 1: and brilliant of mind, mystically overborne, overwrought of heart. They
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  Speaker 1: are marvels of perverse, barbaric energy. They make with men
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  Speaker 1: varied flinty friendships, but to each other they are friends, lovers, victims, prayers, masters, slaves,
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  Speaker 1: the flawed fruits of one oblique sex inheritance, except two breeds,
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  Speaker 1: the stupid and the narrowly feline. All women have a
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  Speaker 1: touch of the lesbian an assertion. All good, non analytic
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  Speaker 1: creatures refute with horror, but quite true, there is always
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  Speaker 1: the poignant, intensive personal taste, the flare of inner sex,
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  Speaker 1: in the tenderest friendships of women. For myself, there is
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  Speaker 1: no vice in my lesbian vein. I am too personally fastidious,
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  Speaker 1: too temperamentally dishonest, too eerily wavering to walk in direct
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  Speaker 1: repellent roads of vice, even in freest moods. There is
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  Speaker 1: instead a pleasant degeneracy of attitude, more debauching to my
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  Speaker 1: spirit than any mere trivial train on vice would be,
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  Speaker 1: and a fascination in it tempers my humanness with an
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  Speaker 1: evil feeling power. I have likely kissed and been kissed
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  Speaker 1: by lesbian lips in a way which filled my throat
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  Speaker 1: with a sudden, subtle pagan blood flavored wistfulness, ruinous and
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  Speaker 1: contraband breath of bewildering demoniac winds smothering mine. Lesbian essence
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  Speaker 1: is of mental quality. There are aggressively endowed women whose
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  Speaker 1: minds are so bent that they instinctively nurture any element
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  Speaker 1: in themselves which is blighting an ill omened and calamitous
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  Speaker 1: in effect. There are some to which the natural inhibition
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  Speaker 1: of their own sex is lure and challenge. There are
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  Speaker 1: some so solitary by destiny and growth that the first
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  Speaker 1: woman friend who comes into their adolescence with sympathy and understanding,
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  Speaker 1: wins a passionate lesbian adoration, the deeper for being unrealized.
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  Speaker 1: There are some so royally giftedly incongruous in trait that
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  Speaker 1: they are prone to catch and hold any additional twisted
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  Speaker 1: shreds afloat in human air currents. Each of those influences
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  Speaker 1: biases the mind of me, which is none the less
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  Speaker 1: a clear visioned mind which rates no thing a truth
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  Speaker 1: which it knows to be a lie, though it batten
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  Speaker 1: on the lie often here and there around this human world.
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  Speaker 1: The twisted and perverted and strongly false concepts are the strong, actual,
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  Speaker 1: working facts. And the straight road is myth, myth existent
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  Speaker 1: but in visions. I don't understand why it's so. I
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  Speaker 1: know it is so, not only so with me, so
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  Speaker 1: with millions whose stars stangled, not always but often. The
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  Speaker 1: deep dyed lesbian woman is a creature whose sensibilities are overbalance,
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  Speaker 1: whose imagination moves on mad low flying wings, whose brain
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  Speaker 1: is good, whose predilections are warped, who lives always in unrest,
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  Speaker 1: whose inner walls are streaked with gaarish heathen pigments, whose
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  Speaker 1: copious love instincts are an odd mixture of mirth, malice,
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  Speaker 1: and luxure. Its effects in me, who I am straight,
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  Speaker 1: made in nothing, but strongly crooked, is to vivified tenfold
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  Speaker 1: or a hundredfold or a thousandfold. In my shaded vision.
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  Speaker 1: The womanness of any woman whose inner or outer beauty
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  Speaker 1: arrests and stirs my spirit. I see in some woman,
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  Speaker 1: some girl, any who attract me. Be she a casual acquaintance,
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  Speaker 1: or a Victorian poet dead fifty years whose poetry and
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  Speaker 1: portrait live, or an actor in a play, or a
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  Speaker 1: sweet browed friend, or an old master. I see one
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  Speaker 1: such as if all her charm were newly painted and
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  Speaker 1: placed near me, shining wet with delicate fresh paint. It
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  Speaker 1: is bewitching to look at. It has a deep, seductive
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  Speaker 1: fragrance of smell. It is luxuriously aromatic to all my
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  Speaker 1: known senses and true senses unknown. Float from my deeps
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  Speaker 1: and rise at it. The stranger becomes a dearly poignant
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  Speaker 1: fancy to dream over my friend turns into a vivid
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  Speaker 1: goddess whose fingers and hair I would touch tenderly with
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  Speaker 1: my lips. Because of it, A little flame, pale but primal,
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  Speaker 1: leaps from the flattest details of life in such a
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  Speaker 1: mood adventure. A window shutter bloom, a hair brush glows,
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  Speaker 1: A sordid floor has gleams upon it. These bewildering, frightful,
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  Speaker 1: beautifulnesses in this life, with all the same inherence which
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  Speaker 1: makes me some way lesbian, makes me the flow of
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  Speaker 1: the setting sun, strewn with overflowing gold and green, vases
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  Speaker 1: of fire and turquoise, a sly and piercing annihilation of beauty, wonderful,
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  Speaker 1: devastating to feel, oh, blighting breaking to feel, oh, deathly
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  Speaker 1: lovely to feel it is the bewitched obliquities that run
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  Speaker 1: away with me, grind, gnaw eat my true human heart,
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  Speaker 1: like bright, potent vitriol. What God means to do with
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  Speaker 1: such gifts and phases, I don't and don't understand. I
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  Speaker 1: never get anywhere as I think it out. I don't
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  Speaker 1: know shades of rights and wrongs. Since that ancient wis
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  Speaker 1: has found more trueness of human feeling, in me than
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  Speaker 1: has any simplicity. My life knows it began, they say,
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  Speaker 1: with Sappho and her dreaming students in the long ago
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  Speaker 1: vales of Lesbos. It may be, I daresay I know
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  Speaker 1: it did not stop there. And I know that Greek, French, Scotch, Indian, Welsh,
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  Speaker 1: Japanese all women sense its light lyric touch. For myself,
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  Speaker 1: I know only it is part and parcel of my tangled,
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  Speaker 1: tired coil. I don't know whether I am good and
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  Speaker 1: sweet in it, or evil and done toward, And I
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  Speaker 1: don't care. End of Chapter sixty nine