Margaret
Intercession 1
I am growing impatient, waiting for Mariana’s soul to mature suitably to take upon this duty. She has, so far as I can discern from this remove, solved the problem of Love, having experimented with different numerators and denominators. She has found early what I could not, an opposite who holds her attention fast, whose mind is large enough to keep hers intrigued, and of greater import, a being with whom electric current runs left and right so as to produce a They and a She and a He, each full, whole, beyond its capacity a moment before. Would that she knew it!
This is what I agonized so to express and still now, a century and a half later, they banish me to the prison, yes, it feels such, the confines of Feminism. Of course! What Woman is not a Feminist! “I love most to be a woman,” I wrote, and meant.
Now I reside in a greater prison still, on the reverse of life, where I can identify the quotidien, examine the Progression of Existence, what you name life, see the patches sewn to style this Mariana, this young woman whom I’ve chosen as my pen yet I am unable to bathe with her in books, thought, and imaginations. The Twenty-First Century is nigh and what I scribed in 1845 must for the sake of Humankind’s Future, receive renovation, rejuvenation.
Beyond the body, my boundaries are without limit and with great boundary. If only I could dial Mariana on her telephonic device—how I love that simple contraption, recalculating the physics of communication!—and discuss, as she does at extensive length with her soul mate Red Bird, this endeavor in specific.
Instead, I dwell on the far side of earthly movement and endure the inching of time as Mariana becomes accustomed to her adult self, assembles her life community, commits her heart to what evidently is a Great Love, until she finally dons the cloak in which she will convey Woman in the 21st Century.
Would that I knew how to hold the wand to anoint her! Would that this greatest undertaking find its womb! Would that It be born!
—“The Persuasion,” p. 70
