How have I driven myself out? Into this frozenness, this severity I think of as your very being. I inflict it over and over on myself where I dwell in the unforgiving whiteness of my mind. Yet each day I bring another’s life close to mine, and watch her hand move across the page, so what does that say of who I am? Liberty can exist only in simplicity, Claire wrote. If I feel my voice stripped to the very core, and feel her voice not as clothed but burning from the very core, am I any closer to liberty? I still see those walls strong and imposing in her mind—
Fanny, if I could touch one frail rung on her gown would it crumble? If she came to me … if that ladder were … if that cloth with its many folds and fine threads … But I wont let myself think it. No. Boethius was deluded—a desperate man about to die. Still, she “gently put her hand” upon his chest. She brought to him an “unassuming silence.” She didn’t flinch from the fevered workings of his mind.
Dear F no Fanny, I no XXX the walls are so high I cant feel you anymore, cant—
not even you— In the secrecy of my mind I and there’s no place for and suddenly alone and apart
the walls grown so high and so many (you in your never-here, yet you were here)
these walls in me so stiff and ladderless and of such stone as cant be crumbled
such quietness swarming such rips of distance ice, ice
And always this inexplicable feeling that I will never see her again—her face lost behind walls and fevered—
Must steal her away must climb somehow some ladder must find
some scheme or wager
Shelley writes to me of the “thoughtless violence” of my “designs.” Says, “it seems to me that you have no other resource but time and chance and change … Come and look for houses with me in our boat—it might distract your mind.”
But Boethius couldn’t leave his cell, he couldn’t “look for houses.” Locked away as he was, he asked the Goddess of Consolation many questions.
“Ask me whatever you want and I will answer you,” she said.
Mostly she answered him with questions: “Would you for all that just waste away in your own mind?” “Is a happiness that will withdraw from you valuable even so?” “Do you think that a man’s power amounts to anything if he cannot ensure that what he can do to someone else someone else cannot do to him in turn?” “Can you define for me what a human being is?”
Then she told him, “Fate is the arrangement that inheres in the things that have motion, the unfolding of order in time.”
Until after much talk, she seemed finally pleased, “I have been waiting for this condition of mind in you.”
This condition of mind … but the walls are so high and so many
and the somehow-knowledge that I will never see her again I cannot and yet
would kidnap would deceive would— XXXXX
So quiet now. My hand on the page a powerless, too-quiet thing—
“Can you define for me what a human being is?” the Goddess of Consolation asked Boethius. I stand in this frozen world and ask myself that question. Austerity, precarious chance, a desire for order—all these live and grow inside the mind, but how can I answer her question, how can I…
And starvation, slavery, cold. Sacredness and fire.
There is a tale in which a poisoner’s tears are sharp as glass. But Boethius’s tears weren’t hard, she wiped them from his eyes with her soft robe. That robe had been torn, it was damaged, so even she who was immortal wasn’t free from harm. Even so, she came to him and comforted him, healed him in the “dwelling place” of his mind. Or maybe she didn’t heal him exactly but rather led him to understand that his suffering wasn’t ugly, I don’t know.
I came so far north to not think of such things. Yet more and more they seem the only things worth thinking. Claire’s hand. Those too-strong walls. The ice she feels. The volcano Hecla erupting in a land of cold.
I’m in Pisa now with Mary and Shelley. Strange how even when the mind’s in danger, deeply harmful to itself, cutting and cutting, there can be this outer smoothness over everything. It’s as if some steady hand were drawing me, making of me something I’m not.
They want to distract me, I know. They don’t want me to think of all those walls.
but if actions are monsters … I see black vapors over the parent marsh … and the eye is scarcely quick enough to follow …
If my hand were the one to draw her, placing her firmly in the world … But when I think of you in your laboratory, trying to make me into what you believed I should be, I feel no desire to draw anyone. I wouldn’t know how to in any case, and couldn’t, far away as I am and other. She wrote of the commotion of earth inside a statue, so even if I gave her a statue’s calm smoothness, I’d only be covering (as Locke wrote of words) who she truly is.
Mary and I sit all afternoon reading and studying, our tables piled high with books. I’m translating Goethe’s Memoirs. Shelley works alone in another room. He no longer uses sugar in his tea, it’s produced by slave labor.
They sit there as if the world were calm, but what is safety? Quietness is composed of what, covers what? (She doesn’t mention Allegra.) I see the back of her head in the white room, and her white sleeve, how as she writes her hand grows less steady.
“You have ceased to know who you are,” the Goddess of Consolation said to Boethius. But isn’t the mind largely hiddenness and error? Yet she led him closer to the “dwelling place of his mind,” cautioned him gently not to “waste away” within his mind.
April. Mary’s pregnant again. Shelley’s having a boat built, he plans to sail it in the Bay of Spezzia come summer. I try to watch him with calm eyes as I know this is what he wants of me. The courtyard here is filled with flowers. If I were to say to them “in this painful activity of mind” they wouldn’t look up, the flowers, which is why I watch them, which is why I talk to them, which is why … but then I pull back and go inside.
And Boethius was mute when the Goddess of Consolation found him. She wanted him to be able to speak again of what he’d seen, to talk of all he’d learned and thought and felt, to remember who she was and that he’d known her.
Boethius is dead. Executed without witness. I see his empty cell. Stone slab of bed. Barred window. The Goddess of Consolation promised she would accompany him to the Land of the Dead but I don’t believe it—I think he’s alone wherever he is. Bones. Emptiness. I can’t help what I see. A name carved somewhere on stone. Even though she wiped his eyes with her robe, even though she spoke to him with kindness.
I think of Allegra’s face all the time now, though Mary says it’s better not to speak of it. Of how I can’t see her, can’t look into her face XXX this blindness I feel XXX and Gloucester was blinded but a strange tenderness came afterXXX then sometimes her hand suddenly flies into my mind—
XXXX can’t concentrate XXX must concentrate, must
Of Archilochos we have not one single work entire and most of the context’s fallen away
Sometimes what’s left is just one word: Recompense. Plums. Or a few brief, broken lines:
]so[
I then, alone]
I would trace these fragments like a hurt and beautiful face. Her face.
Did Boethius read the Greek poets, did he translate these lines as I do now?
Her face far from me. (so close) Fragment 243: “Lips covered with foam.”
Can’t concentrate. Must. Must concentrate—
The book. Must look at the book. MustXXXXXX
Archilochos’s mother was a slave so they say. He, a native of Paros, so they say. First half of the 7th century B.C. Killed by a man named Crow in a battle or a fight.
“Wandering hungry,
Wild of mind,”
“Here the papyrus is torn,” says my Greek book. “Here it is too tattered to read.” And the Goddess’s robe was tattered, ripped by violent men, and still she came or did she? Did she stand in Boethius’s cell, or in the coldness of his mind?
Allegra’s face, her warm brea
th in my breath. The inexplicable feeling that I will never see her again—
I watch her reading as if she’s on an icebound ship, though she’s in a white room in Pisa with Mary and Shelley. She turns pages as if words could, could what? She in such danger … and so quietly … What does she find in those pages? Does her mind feel less endangered, less alone?
On the second Grinnell expedition, the surgeon Isaac Hayes carried three books in his clothes bag as he trudged for an entire winter over the ice. “Never had I valued books as I did then, three small books that I came to love well during that long winter.”
For his Arctic voyage of 1818, Captain John Ross arranged for a shipboard library of twenty-five books, and in 1850, Captain William Penny stocked his ship, Sophia, with eighty.
When I first came here, I thought I wanted to get away from the human world. Yet I seek Claire’s shoulder, her hand, still wonder if I’ll see her face, turn page after page wherever I can find them. Pages of human thinking, human want. So what does that make of this solitude in which I live?
Some ships carried their own printing presses. There were pages printed on red silk, and thousands of tiny “balloon papers,” “cylinder papers,” “bottle papers,” held for a while then cast off into the sea. There were pages imprinted with delicate lyres, and others embossed with a Tuscan ornamental face. Ink froze on the rollers. When paper grew scarce they still wanted to see words, printed them on handkerchiefs and their own shirts. On linen and wash leather. On whatever they could find.
They read by lamplight through the merciless winters.
Wednesday: Read Schiller. Thursday: Read Adonais. Went with Countess Tolomei to buy linen for Mary. Read a Canto of Purgatorio. Translated from Phaedrus. Dreamt this night that S. had been to Bagnacavallo and had returned bringing Allegra to me. When he came I was watching ants on the pedestal of the statue of Ceres. The Chinese proverb says “the wise man fears calm.” Saturday: Read Anastasius. Read Cabale und Liebe. Sometimes I dream the pages have eyes of their own and look at me and watch me, but then Shelley comes into my room and tells me I ought to be more gentle with them and careful as they’re fragile and quite blind—
Fanny,
Most of the time I don’t write to you anymore, I know. Just write in my journal or on scraps of paper. My mind far even from you. Always I see the convent walls and her face behind those walls.
Even in my journal I keep obliterating things. Write them, cross them out, make them unreadable. Scribble series of nonsensical letters over the words.
I’ve tried in vain to
Both the Bojti’s children are sick with the measles, but already improving. At least their faces are real in front of me. I haven’t seen Count Boutourlin for many weeks.
At this time of year a white fog covers the whole city of Florence. It’s so thick you can’t see a tree five steps ahead.
Shelley wrote, “Do not think my affection & anxiety for you ever cease, or that I ever love you less although that love has been & still must be a source of disquietude to me.”
Some nights I dream many dreams though I don’t want to. In one I’m in Pisa, a violent Earthquake’s expected (I remember you wrote of Mt. Tamboro, how cold the air got after).
Who was it that wrote, “There is no country, faith or sacred cause but passes eventually into slavery and walls”?
Your Sister,
On their ships the men wrote on linen and wash leather, on handkerchiefs and their own shirts, on whatever they could find, so mustn’t words have been of some comfort to them? Why else would they have bothered?
But she’s scribbling over almost everything she writes, destroying each word with brown ink:
“but I am bound upon a wheel”
no letters write to M write to S
Under the reign of Philip Augustus Poetry was inserted in an official list of “futile & Criminal Arts”
“You do me wrong to take me out of the grave—”
through her robe not vices but kindness but if I could feel her if
Shelley tells me “to temper myself to the season” refers to the “thoughtless violence of my designs”
But what does he think heXXXX
and destroy and scatter the
Why do I even bother to write on these pages? Still, I get up or lie down and words come into my mind I don’t know what I’d be without them coming into my mind. But where is she in all of these words? I can’t find can’t find her in words
All this obliterated, thickly darkened, drowned on the white page.
They’re huddled in the other room. We’ve come to this half-ruined house by the sea, in Lerici—Shelley insisted we come here, and so quickly, our furniture’s not even arrived, everything’s in boxes. I hear their muffled voices through the door: termites gnawing in a wall. Mary, Shelley, and the Williamses, all here. When I walk into the room the voices stop. I know Allegra’s dead.
Fanny, I,
No, not you anymore not anyone
“Little slow fevers,” they say. Consumption or Typhoid.
How invisibly harm passes from one being to another.
Tracelessness Convulsions
and the ladder on her robe … no
Fanny, I, X no
Sound of the sea lapping and lapping. Sound of a stone inside the mind.
May. I tell myself it’s May. But she died in April. So all those days after her death, and I didn’t know she was dead, I got up and got dressed and ate and went to sleep and she was dead, and I ate and laughed and translated Goethe and it rained or didn’t rain and I went with Edward and Jane to look at houses but none were “quite right” and I ate and slept and read and she was dead. April 19th she died. Her eyes looking at what, her hands holding what?
The nineteenth-century British traveler Lucy Atkinson wrote of the North, “as I headed through it I felt I was bidding farewell to the world.”
Another said he had come “to a strange planet. I wouldn’t have thought it part of our globe.”
And another: “reality is thinner here than anywhere else.”
Curzio Malaparte saw “a frozen lake with a whole cavalry regiment of horses dead in ice that had set in one moment of Arctic nightfall.”
An old riddle describing an iceberg goes: “The monster came sailing, wondrous along the wave, it called out its comeliness to the land from the ship; loud was its din; its laughter was terrible, dreadful on earth; its edges were sharp. It was malignantly cruel…”
But Rabelais had Pantagruel, at sea in the Arctic, suddenly hear lost, frozen words all around him (the words from the dead of great battles), which he plucked from the air. They thawed right in his hands—alive again and warm with blazing colors, changing shapes.
But how can I accept that for almost two weeks her death was kept secret. Shelley kept it apart in his brain. It was a hostage he held in his brain. And my brain couldn’t tell, couldn’t see it.
What’s a mind then, what’s thinking? What does it mean to know something, or …
(her face in fever, her face changing then stopping, draining white—)
And the Goddess of Consolation said to Boethius, “Absolutely every fortune is good.”
“But how can that be?”
“Concentrate. You see, I think adverse fortune does more good for mortals than favorable. The latter, in the guise of happiness, only sweet-talks empty lies, while the former is true, and reveals her honest instability through change, whereas the latter binds tight the mind.”
But my mind couldn’t see, couldn’t know, was bound tight as any, still is.
I don’t want her “honest instability” … and her robes are torn anyway, the violent men tore them—
They’ve embalmed her body, have sent it—where?—to be buried. No one will tell me.
Laurie Sheck Page 10