Nothing created nor destroyed! Mary Lamb sings all the way down Bennett Street, euphoric.
I am not sure, she cries, that the Gazette realizes our former youthful hunger has but been transformed!
…& I knew what she meant. Late-summer air pressing my skin was now unbearable like the insistence of a lover when one is sated. The air itself our lover! The scent of rain our passion. Utterly sensual, the feeling of simply being alive; it can ache just to walk down the street. I am ransacked as the bee unpetals her late rose. By accident the passing bee unhinges the last pink flake…& then what? The swelling of the hip. The filling of the hip with paste, not liquid—orange, not pink. The sweet, pasty sugar & a gnarled star atop it all—oh nothing is destroyed, only transforms. This is a fact all women know before being told by Monsieur Antoine Lavoisier. Spring in a woman’s body is hardly sensual compared to autumn & winter—when, against ice & snow & monochrome of black & white—against skeletal life in the waste ground along the Thames or the edges of our beloved Lakes—the fruited hip with its gnarled star is the fragrant rose transformed from soul to body in a transubstantiation not of church altar & not of the body of any man whether that man be young or old.
Matter, marvelled Mary Lamb as she hauled the Gazette out of her bag to examine it once more. Why only matter? Did Lavoisier think only matter matters & did he not realize how matter extends into feeling & perception?
I halted beside her while a man with pots dangling from his belt & a hen under each arm had a mind to crash into us on the downhill cobbles.
Mind where you stop, he says—a pair of right cows!
This is where you are wrong, Sir, said Mary Lamb, for I am a lamb & my friend here, she is your quintessential goat.
He spat at us but she deflected the gob with her newspaper & off he tromped with a page of it stuck to the rump of his fattest hen.
Dear Lavoisier, we wrote at the Lotus Café on the bits of paper I was never without in case an idea came into my head in field or steeple of wherever I might walk in this life.
We, authors Mary Lamb and Dorothy Wordsworth, thought you might like to see our list of things which, besides matter, are neither created nor destroyed. We feel we owe it to Science to suggest the following additions, though our list is by no means exhaustive, we realize.
Only look at us as one pair of observant women whose advanced Age allows us to imagine we have noticed a few things that behave like Matter and that we believe are of the same category, being of denser or more amorphous concentrations…
Our advanced age, laughed Mary Lamb, pleased with herself.
Allows us to imagine! I said, getting into the spirit.
Here, then, is our list of items which, like Matter, we Believe “ne se perd, et ne se creé,” but only transform:
Tears
Love
Yearning
Hunger
Rage
Pain
Ecstasy
Thirst
Unknowing
Agony
Jealousy
Mourning
Humiliation
Triumph
Dream
Wind
Cloud
Rainbow
Abandonment
Companionship
Hatred
Terrible Mistakes
Together we compiled a list that was in danger of using up my entire store of spare pocket-paper.
Our list went on.
Our list could have been endless.
Over some entries we laughed & over others we cried.
I had not been prepared for the feelings our list would unleash & I did not realize until trying to sleep that night & thinking it over, that it was not the list that made me feel loss or gain or love or wrongness or any other feeling.
No, it was not the list.
But it was the making of the list, & it was the companionship of Mary Lamb during the making. For she was the one who saw so much that had, for me, remained unspoken for years.
Antoine Lavoisier’s name, when you break it apart as I often do break words to see what falls from their cracks, contains the word la—feminine form of the—& vois—a form of the French word meaning to see.
…& I thought, as I broke his name in the lamplight filtering from Russell Street, how Mary Lamb herself was more of a she-who-sees, a seer—mad or not mad, I did not care what men called her—more of a seer than any eminent scientist.
Where will we send our letter? she asked me. To the celestial academy where Lavoisier is eating the fruits of his discoveries? He will be swallowing a heavenly profiterole at the moment, bless him, & perhaps washing it down with cognac…
In the end, we addressed our letter to the void.
It has taken me a while to realize how insignificant I am to others.
I was propelled, in youth, not by beauty—I was never a beauty, far too intense & strange for that! But my lovers did not find me insignificant. Far from it! Quincey marvelled at my concentrated self which he said was as if a pinpoint contained the night. Both he & I were so small compared with the others in our lives—tiny, really, the two of us weighing no more than one normal-sized man or plump woman, he said.
Night-time was for us the most wonderful invention!
…& I think it was because Darkness let us dissolve in it & become inky sources of our new wild thoughts. No need to fit expectations. Night covered our strange strength & those nights were the best I have known even if they are shattered now in our memory so that neither of us can be sure of their having passed.
I do not use the word insignificant—once my brother separated himself from me, once he became the husband of Mary Hutchinson—did I come loose from my own claim to being a person whose words were of worth?
Even before London, when only a few of my teeth were gone—I remember telling Mary Lamb, It’s all finished now—meaning entanglement with men, even men small or strange. Yes, the teeth went & then it went—my significance. But I am not truthful here. Long before I became invisible did I not see a hundred women cast aside like lumps of old clothes, disconsolate, going about their unimportant business of kneading & needling & needing & keening & all the other insignificant things a lump of woman will do once men render her unseen? Once brother & lover have discounted her, as did her father before them?
Says Mary Lamb when I visited her in London to reconstitute my teeth: You must become felt to yourself. You will look out the window that I have dressed in a bridal curtain for your pleasure, & you will see the fern shines green against it, & the room reflects a projection of shadows from the street, & you will breathe & not succumb to the idea that you are supposed, once again, to find some way to pretend you are indispensable. For you are not indispensable.
What you are, says Mary Lamb, is something else. That something is what you need to find, & to find her, it is good to lie down & allow being, not working. This is nearly impossible I know, but it is your medicine. What happens in your chest-cave then in your bowels & even in your heretofore pronounced dead womb & its dormant orchid? Feel!
How did you do it? I asked Mary Lamb. How, without a friend like you are to me, did you navigate the sea between fifty & sixty so that you stand here intact & strong?
Oh, says Mary Lamb, you forget I have spent many months in a madhouse where for days & weeks & months on end, stretching, yea, into years, no one asked of me a thing. For I journeyed beyond the boundaries of their own desires. So I did not have to unpot a herring for any man, no herring of any sort did I have to provide…& in the place of all herrings with their silver scales & their concentrated smells & all else about them, in their place grew a bushel of silver scales for me alone, made of my own vision, my own tolerance, my own feelings & desires. You do not e
ven know what your own feelings are, do you, my dearest Dorothy?
…& I had to admit to Mary Lamb that she was right.
For two weeks I was like a sleeping maiden in her shadowy parlour.
She left me alone.
It is not, as some say, as if she polluted my mind with her insanities.
No.
The only insanities have been mine, made of layer upon layer of Unvoiced things that have piled up in my body since I was first the beloved of men who include my brother. In their gaze I was not myself. In their gaze my own layers, my geology, built up & towered flakes of silver & cream-coloured stone made—as stone is made—of components leaf-shaped & changeable & moist. Permeable to begin with, but in the end—though I do not want it to be my real end—impermeable slices nestled one upon the other like leaves of shale.
I remember—& of my two Marys, Wordsworth & Lamb, the latter would agree & the former would not—I remember being one of the men or at least akin to them in my own mind, for years. Sprawled on the ground, thinking. Marvelling & thinking all the complicated thoughts a writer thinks when confronted with the majesty of the world & the squalor—is life convoluted or harmonious? Will humans destroy the world or learn how to echo its spherical movement in the heavens’ harmonious exultation? I thought along those lines as I tore our bread in three & shared it with Wm & Sam. Grass pricked our legs alike & shadows of the same willows shielded us from the sun. We heard the same crows caw & saw the same rainbow. Wm & Sam listened to me & my words mingled on our pages with their own & many times my words became their own. We all agreed. Our minds were more interesting than the holy trinity for none of us was separated body from spirit but manifested both. There ran transparent stairs from the cellars in our bodies to the resplendence of our minds, & our words were the light. I was lit & I was one of them.
No, says Mary Wordsworth—just because you & I were deprived of mothers does not mean we should not learn how to be proper women! Look around you. Remember correctly instead of in a longing daze. Who made the bread you tore in three?
When I knew I was no longer one of the men—once Wm married Mary & she became—everyone called her—I had to call her—my sister—though Wm promised me—he promised on their wedding night she would be our wife. But the world called her my sister & Wm did not correct the world.
…& with my sister I was now suddenly left behind—I have never got over the shock of this.
Again it happened with Quincey. Oh he found me to be a wild boy with startling eyes! A boy small like himself, tattered & dissolved at our edges & fit only for the out-of-doors in a storm, along with the ragged leaves & all the things that were like us windblown—until he found the little farm-girl & married her! Then I became no longer Quincey’s boy friend. I suddenly faded into the same woman I had become in the eyes of Wm & Sam…& this was the second shock from which I am still reeling, & which causes my bowels to shut down if I do not wrench myself with an effort far greater than anyone knows.
The first shock was realizing I was no longer one of the boys.
The second shock came after Wm & Sam stopped including me, & after Quincey also found a wife—what is it about their finding wives that made me obsolete? The second shock was that, No, I had never been one of them.
Not in our youth & not in our age. What had I been? They loved my thoughts, it is true, but did not hear me utter them. Rather, they imagined that my ideas had flown to them from the same invisible wind that flows to all men, & that my ideas counted among their discoveries.
Once married, they somehow remembered I too was feminine, like their wives.
Whereas before they were wed, I was a magic stick blown from a wild tree & accompanying them in their windblown travels. A pointer, a wand, a branch from the Tree of knowledge.
After their marriages Wm & also Sam & Quincey would listen for an hour to the yammering of the most menial servant—yes even James our poor manservant who grew up in & out of the workhouse, Wm regards as superior to me in matters requiring any decisiveness…hired him—a poor, simple soul, thinks Wm, but reliable enough to coax my beloved sister Dorothy out of her troublesome agitation here at home or in the house of Mary Lamb, a woman who has refused to swallow a thing. Mary Lamb, a dangerous influence!
Mary Lamb, with whom I am not one of the boys, have never been one of the boys, am not interested in the boys.
With Mary Lamb I knew this.
Not interested in the boys is the meat I chew on with my new teeth after our fortnight in London. This is the carnage I am damned if I will be prevented from swallowing & once I swallow it, I will work on digesting it for the rest of my life. My bowels will thrash like seaweed thrashing offshore, & the household here at Rydal will have to accommodate my wildness. James Dixon are you still reading this?
Are you with me?
You, who are different in some elemental way that my brother has failed to notice. You, who are also not one of the boys. You, who have built our little carriage in which we can travel wherever we want to go, without them.
Of course, Mary Lamb is right again.
Our brothers do not worry in the least, upon waking, whether or not they are useful. They, no matter how old they grow, do not think, There is as if a layer of powder settling upon me & rendering me less & less useful not only to the outer world, but to myself.
They do not then ponder, & what is the entity I have just named Myself & why is it still lying down at noon?
Our brothers can sleep, geniuses as they are, through noon & on until ten o’clock at night with only a changed word in a second verse to show for it & perhaps not even this. Perhaps there is no change at all in their work, only a subtle change in their minds, a change bestowed by sleep, the sleep necessary to men of great thoughts & words. Men whose words are worth something or whose silence is worth even more & is different from the silence of their sisters.
The silence of sisters is reproachable! For should sisters not be talking of tasks, of errand lists & prices, of economies & time? Women face the clock-face unlike the way in which men face it. Men face the clock not to gauge where they have fallen short of time, but to note how long it might be before the next meeting with another man. Which meal is imminent & which visitor must be given sway? Get the sisters to set the table while we veer to the sill & gaze on distances & conclude, If this therefore that.
Whereas for sisters it is, If this, well then, this it is…& if that, then, simply that. Thus the world for sisters develops into myriad efflorescences; a panoply of surprises! Whereas our brothers must control each minute, & if their minutes prove uncontrollable, well, it is because they are forced to live in a maddening world containing sisters & trees & thunder.
So it is that on waking I am beset by forces, colours, sensations, crowding in on me & making it hard to get up while at the same time making it impossible for me to remain lying down, or to claim reverie, or to—forbid this!—wonder what it might be like to let things be & not work each second of the day towards my life being considered worthwhile.
My brother, says Mary Lamb, is worthwhile simply by placing his silhouette against the window & resembling a dark poet. I could say the same thing of Wm if I dared.
Accomplishment, says Mary Lamb, is a woman’s word. A man has no need of this word as he fulfills it by virtue of having been born & having not yet died. Simply by occupying space in his neutral-coloured garments that we have stitched with our thousand thousand tiny hand-stitches & clapped with our irons & bleached & starched & laid on the rocks to brighten in the sun with a brightness of angels…simply by donning this angel-white shirt & partly-covering it in a cloak so as to hide the brightness until needed in some important conversation…simply by being clothed in this bright & dark garb, by standing straight & tall, by gazing abstractedly into an inner poem…thus do our brothers outrace us while we labour toward accomplishing all they have s
et out for us to do by their mere existence. Accomplishment does not exist for them as a word, because for it to do so would imply that there is a time before perfect completion in themselves—a hole, if you will; a gap or a lack preceding the whole & complete man…& no such space exists.
But sisters are space embodied without form. We are the void. We are the gap, the hole, the time before. Accomplishment is our word & our reason for lying in agony for some time before rising, if we are able to rise at all. Accomplishment is for us inaccessible. Evasive. Always ahead. A state of being whole by gazing into our inner word that isn’t a poem but is some other form of story or meaning—this is a wholeness that cannot exist for us as long as men stand like gnomons & define timelessness for themselves alone.
So says Mary Lamb.
Oh, she cautions, but we love our brothers.
We love them, she says, with a sick & pitiful persistence because we have been made to love them through a demon calling to us in the night whilst we sleep, & in the day we have been made to cry after that love, that nightmare, half-remembered yet wholly compelling—our disease of the soul.
…& Mary Lamb will soon go off again to the madhouse but I will not.
I hang on well enough to remain in the land of normal people. Wm, for one, could not bear to have me disappear into the place where Mary Lamb goes. Without my gay shadow at the hem of his days, he might not believe quite so hard in himself, in his genius, in his poetry. He might fall off the edge into a kind of bog with nobody, not even our wife Mary, quite understanding what it is that he needs daily spooned for him to continue with his usual abilities.
One line after another, spoonful by tiny, exquisite spoonful, do I feed Wm the words the world thinks are created by himself alone.
Alone, for Wm, means Himself plus his insubstantial Sister.
Only in bed in the morning, in the ghastly time before I get up, do I dare imagine that my brother Wm & I are two, not one, not himself alone. Once I rise I cease to be Dorothy & recommence my twinship, my kinship, my death.
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