MARY MAC LANE / About me

“I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.
Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with great intentness.
I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the Caming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:
I am rare — I am in some ways exquisite.
I am pagan within and without.
I am vain and shallow and false.

[...]
I’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse
and I’m like an outlaw.

[...]
I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint,
fanciful in my truth.
I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.
I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.
I am young, but not very young.
I am wistful — I am infamous.
In brief, I am a human being.”

Mary Mac Lane (1881-1929)

From Sarah N.Prickett, thenewinquiry.com/essays/a-woman-under-the-influence