I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated (11 page)

From unripe bananas; from bathless people; from a waist-line that slopes up in the front: kind Devil deliver me.

From an ordinary man; from a bad stomach, bad eyes, and bad feet: kind Devil deliver me.

From red note-paper; from a rhinestone-studded comb in my hair; from weddings: kind Devil deliver me.

From cod-fish balls; from fried-eggplant, fried beef-steak, fried pork-chops, and fried French toast: kind Devil deliver me.

From wax-flowers off a wedding-cake, under glass; from thin-soled shoes; from tape-worms; from photographs perched up all over my house: kind Devil deliver me.

From soft old bachelors and soft old widowers; from any masculine thing that wears a pale blue neck-tie; from agonizing elocutionists who recite “Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night,” and “The Lips that Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine”; from a Salvation Army singing hymns in slang: kind Devil deliver me.

From people who persist in calling my good body “mere vile clay”; from idiots who appear to know all about me and enjoin me not to bathe my eyes in hot water since it hurts their own; from fools who tell me what I “want” to do: kind Devil deliver me.

From a nice young man; from tin spoons; from popular songs: kind Devil deliver me.

From pleasant old ladies who tell a great many uninteresting, obvious lies; from men with watch-chains draped across their middles; from some paintings of the old masters which I am unable to appreciate; from side-saddles: kind Devil deliver me.

From the kind of man who sings “Oh, Promise Me!” - who sings
at
it; from constipated dressmakers; from people who don’t wash their hair often enough: kind Devil deliver me.

From a servant girl with false teeth; from persons who make a regular practice of rubbing oily mixtures into their faces; from a bed that sinks in the middle: kind Devil deliver me.

And so on and on and on. And in each petition I am deeply sincere. But, kind Devil, only bring me Happiness and I will more than willingly be annoyed by all these things. Happiness for two days, kind Devil, and then, if you will, languishing widowers, lisle-thread stockings - anything, for the rest of my life.

And hurry, kind Devil, pray - for I am weary.

March 9

It is astonishing to me how very many contemptible, petty vanities are lodged in the crevices of my genius. My genius itself is one grand good vanity - but it is not contemptible. And even those little vanities - though they are contemptible I do not hold them in contempt by any means. I smile involuntarily at their absurdness sometimes, but I know well that they have their function.

They are peculiarly of my mind, my humanness, and they are useful therein. When this mind stretches out its hand for things and finds only wilderness and Nothingness all about it, and draws the hand back empty, then it can only turn back - like my soul - to itself. And it finds these innumerable little vanities to quiet it and help it. - My soul has no vanity, and it has nothing, nothing to quiet it. My soul is wearing itself out, eating itself away. - These vanities are a miserable substitute for the rose-colored treasures that it sees a great way off and even imagines in its folly that it may have, if it continues to reach after them. Yet the vanities are something. They prevent my erratic, analytical mind from finding a great Nothing when it turns back upon itself.

If I were not so unceasingly engrossed with my sense of misery and loneliness my mind would produce beautiful, wonderful logic. I am a genius - a genius - a genius. Even after all this you may not realize that I am a genius. It is a hard thing to show. But, for myself, I feel it. It is enough for me that I feel it.

I am not a genius because I am foreign to everything in the world, nor because I am intense, nor because I suffer. One may be all of these and yet not have this marvelous perceptive sense. My genius is because of nothing. It was born in me as germs of evil were born in me. And mine is a genius that has been given to no one else. The genius itself enables me to be thoroughly convinced of this.

It is hopeless, never-ending loneliness!

My ancestors in their Highlands - some of them - were endowed with second sight. My genius is not in the least like second sight. That savors of the supernatural, the mysterious. My genius is a sound sure earthly sense, with no suggestion of mystery or occultism. It is an inner sense that enables me to feel and know things that I could not possibly put into thought, much less into words. It makes me know and analyze with deadly minuteness every keen tiny damnation in my terrible lonely life. It is a mirror that shows me myself and something in myself in a merciless brilliant light, and the sight at once sickens and maddens me and fills me with an unnamed woe. It is something unspeakably dreadful. The sight for the time deadens all thought in my mind. It freezes my reason and intellect. Logic can not come to my aid. I can only feel and know the thing as it analyzes itself before my eyes.

I am alone with this - alone, alone, alone! There is no pitiful hand extended from the heights - there is no human being - ah, there is Nothing.

How can I bear it! Oh, I ask you - how can I bear it!

March 10

My genius is an element by itself and it is not a thing that I can tell in so many words. But it makes itself felt in every point of my life. This book would be a very different thing if I were not a genius - though I am not a literary genius. Often people who come in contact with me and hear me utter a few commonplace remarks feel at once that I am extraordinary.

I am extraordinary.

I have tried longingly, passionately, to think that even this sand and barrenness is mine. But I can not. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it, like all good things, is beyond me. It has something that I also have. In that is our bond of sympathy.

But the sand and barrenness itself is not mine.

Always I think there is but one picture in the world more perfect in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness. It is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves. Nothing could be more divinely appropriate. The art in it is ravishingly perfect. It is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world for all time. As I see it before my mind I can think only of its utter perfectness. I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed. The deed and the art are perfect. Its perfectness ravishes my senses.

And within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and barrenness - knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine - is only second to it.

March 11

Sometimes when I go out in the barrenness my mind wanders afar.

To-day it went to Greece.

Oh, it was very beautiful in Greece!

There was a wide long sky that was vividly, wonderfully blue. And there was a limitless sea that was gray and green. And it went far to the south. The sky and the sea spread out into the vast world - two beautiful elements, and they fell in love with each other. And the farther away they were the nearer they moved together until at last they met and clasped each other in the far distance. There were tall dark-green trees of kinds that are seen only in Greece. They murmured and whispered in the stillness. The wind came off from the sea and went over them and around them. They quivered and trembled in shy, ecstatic joy - for the wind was their best-beloved. There were banks of moss of a deep emerald color, and golden flowers that drooped their heavy sensual heads over to the damp black earth. And they also loved each other, and were with each other, and were glad. Clouds hung low over the sea and were dark-gray and heavy with rain. But the sun shone from behind them at intervals with beams of bronze-and-copper. Three white rocks rose up out of the sea, and the bronze-and-copper beams fell upon them, and straightway they were of gold.

Oh, how beautiful were those three gold rocks that came up out of the sea!

Aphrodite once came up out of this same sea. She came gleaming, with golden hair and beautiful eyes. Her skin glowed with hints of carmine and wild rose. Her white feet touched the smooth, yellow sand on the shore. - The white feet of Aphrodite on the yellow sand made a picture of marvelous beauty. - She was flushed in the joy of new life.

But the bronze-and-copper sunshine on the three white rocks was more beautiful than Aphrodite.

I stood on the shore and looked at the rocks. My heart contracted with the pain that beautiful things bring.

The bronze-and-copper in the wide gray and green sea!

“This is the gateway of Heaven,” I said to myself. “Behind those three gold rocks there is music and the high notes of happy voices.” My soul grew faint. “And there is no sand and barrenness there, and no Nothingness, and no bitterness, and no hot, blinding tears. And there are no little heart-weary children, and no lonely young women - oh, there is no loneliness at all!” My soul grew more and more faint with thinking of it. “And there is no heart there but that is pure and joyous and in Peace - in long, still, eternal Peace. And every life comes there to its own; and every earth-cry is answered, and every earth-pain is ended; and the dark spirit of Sorrow that hangs always over the earth is gone - gone, - beyond the gateway of heaven. And more than all, Love is there and walks among the dwellers. Love is a shining figure with radiant hands, and it touches them all with its hands so that never-dying love enters into their hearts. And the love of each for another is like the love of each for self. And here at last is Truth. There is searching and searching over the earth after Truth - and who has found it? But here is it beyond the gateway of heaven. Those who enter in know that it is Truth at last.”

And so Peace and Love and Truth are there behind the three gold rocks.

And then my soul could no longer endure the thought of it.

Suddenly the sun passed behind a heavy, dark-gray cloud and the bronze-and-copper faded from the three rocks and left them white - very white in the wide water.

The yellow flowers laid their heads drowsily down on the emerald moss. The wind from off the sea played very gently among the motionless branches of the tall trees. The blue, blue sky and the wide, gray-green sea clasped each other more closely and mingled with each other and became one vague, shadowy element - and from it all I brought my eyes back thousands of leagues to my sand and barrenness.

The sand and barrenness is itself an element, and I have known it a long, long time.

March 12

Everything is so dreary - so dreary.

I feel as if I should like to die to-day. I should not be the tiniest bit less unhappy afterward - but this life is unutterably weary. I am not strong. I can not bear things. I do not want to bear things. I do not long for strength. I want to be happy.

When I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought, - and one would not be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it was just exactly as lonesome. And when I was ten everything was very hard to understand.

But it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said, - I will know so much when I am seventeen. But when I was seventeen it was even more lonely, and everything was still harder to understand.

And again I said - faintly - everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been - and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.

For I know that it will not be different.

I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.

It is very, very lonely.

It is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick.

It is more than I can bear.

Why -
why
was I ever born!

I can not live, and I can not die - for what is there after I am dead? I can see myself wandering in dark and lonely places.

Yet I feel as if I would like to die to-day.

March 13

If it were pain alone that one must bear, one could bear it. One could lose one’s sense of everything but pain.

But it is pain with other things. It is the sense of pain with the sense of beauty and the sense of the anemone. And there is that mysterious pain.

Who knows the name of that mysterious pain?

It is these mingled senses that torture me.

March 14

I have been placed in this world with eyes to see and ears to hear, and I ask for Life. Is it to be wondered at? Is it so strange? Should I be content merely to see and to hear? There are other things for other people. Is it atrocious that I should ask for some other things also?

Is thy servant a dog?

March 15

In these days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.

My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once - green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness - it is only itself. It has a great self, a wonderful self.