Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Praise
Dear
THE LIGHT OF THE MIND - (Four Dreams)
FIGMENT
A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION
TWO WRONGS
THE FIRE
SLIPPAGE
FIRST PHOTOS
SPIRIT
HOW THE JOURNEY WAS
TWO LETTERS FROM SWEDISH ANCESTORS, MUSKEGON, MICHIGAN (1910)
THE BOX
(OCTOBER 21, 1960)
GUSHING
(MARCH 7, 1960)
THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL
BARB AND JANE, PART I
JANUARY 20, 1960)
SLOGANS
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
(APRIL 15, 1960)
(FEBRUARY 21, 1961)
UOFM
(1966)
BARB AND JANE, PART II
A NOTE ABOUT THE BOYFRIEND
OF HER BLOOD
PHIL
FIRST LETTER FROM PHIL
THE BOX
SECOND LETTER FROM PHIL
FRANCE
LETTER FROM FRANCE, 1967
REFRAIN
THE LAW
PHIL’S PHOTOS
ORDER OF EVENTS
LAW QUADRANGLE, SECTION C, SECOND FLOOR
THE PLAN
THE RIDE BOARD
THE GIFT
POSITION
DIGNITY
AFTERNOON EDITION
SKIN
SHOCK
(1966)
OPEN CASKET
THEFUNERAL
ORDER OF EVENTS
CRANK CALLS
SOME QUESTIONS
THE GAP
THEFUNERAL
THE ARGUMENT
SOME QUESTIONS
TWO BULLETS
AT DENTON CEMETERY
THE CALL
SERIALS
TALLY
(FEBRUARY 11, 1961)
ONE LINE OF REASONING
REASONING, CONTINUED
REVELATION
(1966)
DEMOGRAPHICS
NEVER WALK ALONE-NOT EVEN IN THE DAYTIME
A CASE THAT TURNS OUT TO BE UNRELATED for Margaret Phillips
(APRIL 15, 1960)
GOD’S COUNTRY
LEFORGE ROAD
ASIDE
STAKEOUT
HEADLINES
ONE MISTAKE
COLLINS’S STATEMENT
JOHN COLLINS
FILTHY
CONVERSATION
CONVERSATION
MAIL ORDER
CONVERSATION
(1960)
TWO ECLIPSES
TWO ECLIPSES
MY MOTHER STILL DREAMS
BARRICADES
EMILY
STACEY AND TRACEY
LIES
LIES
(OCTOBER 21, 1960)
GHOSTS
(APRIL 15, 1960)
SPITFIRE
JANE-EMILY
WHITE LIVER
THE BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAIN
THE BURN
SISTERS
PRETTY GIRL
REPEATEDLY
HIDEOUS
GETTING SERIOUS
THE SCRIPT
THE ORACLE
A SIMPLY STATED STORY
THE LIBRARIAN
A TRIP BACK
IN THE MOVIE VERSION
RESTLAWN CEMETERY
LEFORGE ROAD, REVISITED
A SIMPLY STATED STORY
KOAN
(OCTOBER 28, 1961)
A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION (REPRISE)
DENTON CEMETERY
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
Jane: A Murder
ISBN: 1-932360-71-9
© 2005 Maggie Nelson
Book design by Shanna Compton
Cover design by David Janik
Cover photograph: Jane, 1961. Family collection.
Printed in Canada
Published by Soft Skull Press
www.softskull.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com 800.788.3123
Cataloging-in-Publication information for this
book is available from the Library of Congress
Some of the writing that appears here is Jane’s own, either from her childhood diary dated 1960-1961 or a loose sheaf of journal pages from her college years. The later fragments are mostly undated; here I place them around 1966, but that date is by no means a certainty. I have taken the liberty of altering the appearance of Jane’s writing on the page and correcting spelling and grammar when necessary. Also, although this is a “true story, ” I make no claim for the factual accuracy of its representations of events or individuals.
For my mother, who took the journey, and my sister, Emily Jane, who has been there all along.
We walk on air, Watson.
There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorous.
There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.
-Sylvia Plath, “The Detective” October 1, 1962
Dear
I understand many people write for therapy—one’s own.
So this epistle, addressed to no one,
is therapy for me. What have I got to say-
oh a lot of crazy impressions about nothing
I imagine
THE LIGHT OF THE MIND
(Four Dreams)
She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She wandered, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying. The holes in her head were perfectly round and bloodless, with burnt-flared edges, two eclipses. The passage of air through the holes felt peculiar, just dimly painful, like chewing hot or cold food on a cavity, the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full.
Sunlight shot around the circumference of each black rind, so that a long shaft of pale light cast out from the center of her forehead, and another shaft streamed behind her.
Is this the light of the mind? Is this the light of my mind?
So I was a genius after all! The thought made her smile, but then she wondered, Why had the light always been invisible? I must have been squandering it, I must have felt only its vaguest rotations. Now what can I do with it? If I could find a lampshade, someone could read by it. I might illuminate entire rooms, entire dungeons, I shine so bright.
But in fact she was losing the light; it leaked everywhere, unstoppable.
She wakes up. Opens her eyes and sees peonies standing absolutely still. The window frames a solid blue mist; it is 5:30 A.M.
She sleeps next to a mirror, sits up and looks into it.
There is one slightly enlarged freckle which she cannot remember having seen before, smack in the middle of her forehead. She watches it, puts a finger to it.
Pale white skin covered with freckles, what’s one more? But the dream! What’s one more.
The air is unbearably wet with mist, and suddenly she thinks she can see the freckle growing-just as the flowers are surely growing; but slowly, slowly.
The freckle is turning purple, a miniature contusion. Then darker purple still, as the flowers begin to grow heavy with their petals. The leaves flop over the edge and begin to dangle to the floor as the spot begins to blacken.
Ever so slowly, the spot becomes a hole.
She wakes up. The mist has dispersed. There is no freckle, no hole. The flowers, however, have opened, and they have turned to face the window.
Soon she will want something-a cup of coffee. She sets off into the day. The sky comes down in
big vertical blue slabs the sun streaks through like bleach.
The flammable suitcase she was carrying without knowing the danger she was in. Just walking down the street in the middle of a spring day. Unseasonably warm. She is singing, “I Wish I Were a Kid Again.” She doesn’t care what people think. She knows she is Cleopatra. She knows her guts are spears.
But soon the fog begins to roll in again, in fingers. For a while the sun illuminates it from the inside, makes it warm. Then slowly the sun moves to the outside, hangs on its edges.
Soon a bakery appears that she has never seen before. There are places like that, places that exist only once, or with only one entrance. Perhaps she has seen this bakery before, in a dream, or in a book still vivid from childhood, the one where a fox bakes éclairs and paces behind the counter.
There is no one else inside. The chairs and tables are strung together with black thread and wire, as if made by birds. She sits down and begins a letter to no one.
FIGMENT
When I tell my grandfather
I am writing about Jane, he says,
What will it be, a figment
of your imagination?
We are eating awful little pizzas
and my mother is into
the boxed wine. I don’t know
what to say. I wish
I could show him: between
figling (a little fig)
and figure lies
figment, from fingere, meaning
to form. As used in 1592:
The excellencie, dilicatnes, and perfection of this figment cannot be
suffi[ci]entlie expressed.
But he doesn’t want to see.
Besides, that meaning
is obsolete. By 1639:
It is a sin to lie, even in God’s cause, and to defend his justice
with false tales and figments.
And by 1875:
We must not conceive that this logical figment
ever had a real existence.
I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea. A tall man meets her on the black sand. You’ve come back, he says. Can barely see her in the sea-light. They make love there, and become horses. As night grows black they become weeds.
She asks him quietly in the dark to tell her about the mother of everything and he did not know of whom she was speaking. She asked the volcano and the volcano belched great streams of wet ash. She lay her head down with fatigue and found her head on a pillow of ink. Upon waking she stretched her arms around the globe and found her fingers weren’t even close to touching.
A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION
“‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ Death-was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.’”
-Edgar Allan Poe
(1966)
Hah! Good luck.
Too bad Franny’s mother
wasn’t right—too bad
I don’t just need
a warm bowl of soup
and a long sleep.
It’s cold in here.
TWO WRONGS
They say elephants can recognize the bones of a dead loved one when they stumble upon them in the wild. They will stop and wander around the huge decaying bones, swinging their trunks, braying in despair.
The voice-over on TV might say, The elephants know that these are the bones of Dolly. They are mourning the loss of Dolly. But Dolly is our name, not theirs.
It feels different to mourn something without naming its name. A fetus, a snake you call Snake, a woman with no Social Security number and the commonest of names.
She was born in Muskegon, Michigan, on February 23, 1946, and she died on March 20, 1969, sometime between midnight and two A.M.
I was born four years later, almost to the day.
Her grave has no epitaph, only a name.
I found her in the wild; her name was Jane, plain Jane.
THE FIRE
According to family lore, there was a great bonfire in which all of Jane’s possessions perished. Her journals, her clothes, her scrap-books, her books, her typewriter, her school papers, her love letters. Her parents supposedly set this fire a few days after she was killed, when they went to Ann Arbor to clear out her things. The way my mother remembers the story, they set the fire outside her room at the Law Quad.
The Law Quad is a grassy, public area, traversed by several cement paths and surrounded by ivy-covered Gothic buildings, one of which is the main law library. Upon returning to the spot, my mother agrees that the idea of my grandparents, two very private people, setting a large bonfire there and feeding Jane’s belongings to the flames seems unlikely.
But questions remain. Where was the story from, and where did the belongings go?
SLIPPAGE
One day rummaging through
the “utility room,” I find
a few loose pages of a journal
I assume is my own: pages
and pages of self-doubt;
a relentlessly plaintive tone;
and a wanting, a raw wanting
not yet hidden in my
poems. But I don’t have
a beautiful, hard-leaning
script, nor was I alive
in 1966. The journal is
Jane’s, from when she was
twenty years old. After
making sure no one’s at home,
I sneak into my mother’s office
and Xerox all of it, then carefully place
the original back where it belongs.
(1966)
You know, for a world that demands direction, I certainly have
none.
Will I be a teacher? Will I go to France?
Really I don’t know how smart I am-
and that above all else keeps me working and working hard.
I’m not sure I’ve a good mind.
I’m not sure I reason well.
I know I can be as confused as anybody else.
I don’t know how I’ll do in advanced courses—
I don’t know how I’ll do on the next econ hourly.
I don’t know if I could be a great debater.
And there are a million other things I don’t know about my
intellectual capacities.
Let’s leave emotional ones alone tonite-they’re in worse shape.
I want so much-to be versatile, charming, warm, deep, intelligent, accomplishing something, loving,
Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit) Page 1