The sound of the sea. The sound of a stone inside the mind. The sound of watching nothing.
Shelley says that he saw her, a naked child rising with clasped hands out of the sea.
But I see nothing.
Waves Absences
In that white, final bed her eyes closed on what? Her hands, clenched or open, reached for what?
What if Boethius’s ladder, the one he saw on the robes of the Goddess of Consolation, just hung in the air, no words beneath or above it, connecting nothing and nothing?
Is that how Claire thinks of it? Her hand unmoving wherever she is. Now if I glimpse her journal at all, I see only blank pages. (Does it matter where she is? In Lerici? Or has she left there?) Has she been given a lock of Allegra’s hair, any keepsake at all? If she lies where curtains puff in and out in wind, does that wind feel unreal to her, irrelevant, some remnant from an abstract, distant world?
And the ladder I climb when I think of you, doesn’t it connect only nothing to nothing? Or am I lying to myself? Do I climb from my face to your face then back again, baffled, empty-handed, or from my silence to your silence? Do I climb from your hand’s first touch to this vanished Arctic sun? Or from the word made to the word alone? From longing to longing and back again?
“You have ceased to know who you are. This is your sickness,” the Goddess of Consolation said to Boethius.
Now that Claire has vanished (but will she stay forever vanished?) now that her hand no longer comes, I feel that ladder shuddering in air. I barely balance on the narrow rungs. My knees shake, it sways but there’s no wind. The horizon line’s uncertain.
Even now I feel your hands on my skin. A faint touch like the last light on a deserted battlefield before night begins to focus and come on.
In her sorrow where is she? And if sorrow’s a place, are its borders silent, sealed off?
Does she stand on a ladder of ash, and sway as the ladder sways? Does she climb from her name to Allegra’s then back again, from the sea to the top of a high wall then back again? From absence to absence? Or does she stare like a statue that can’t know it’s on a ladder at all? Does she climb from powerlessness to powerlessness, from skepticism to anger and then back?
If grief is a place and absence a place, and solitude with its many burning walls …
And I, and she …
I never see her hand anymore or her white sleeve.
Did you stand on your ladder in air? My eyes horrible to you from the start (yellow, blurry, dull), my very being horrible. Were the ladder’s rungs crumbling, were they ash? How could you step off them, and into what?—
All those times she came to me behind my closed eyes or in front of my open, waiting eyes, I didn’t hear her speak, yet I forgot she wasn’t speaking, each word vivid, present as my breath. As if I were hearing every word inside her brain as she wrote it, each pen-scratch, each footstep, every feeling she had of safety or danger. Now a quiet fire spreads inside my brain. My heartbeat’s too loud.
Is this what Franklin heard when he realized he’d never return? This stripped, peculiar quiet, present as anything. This colorless burn. The ones who walked barefoot over snow, having lost even their shoes, is this what they heard? And the ones who lay final and shivering in their frozen clothes.
I feel the quiet of you too. That colorless, lost place in me where once I almost knew you. No hand alights. I lose myself in whiteness, air.
Fanny,
Why do people want to write down their lives? Why did I ever do such a thing? That journal I kept, the last page is just a date, then blankness. If we burned our words, wouldn’t that make a truer picture of the mind?
I dreamed of you last night. You had no hands or feet, but smooth pink stubs completely healed, and you said they didn’t hurt (I couldn’t hear your voice yet in the dream I knew you said this. How does a person hear without hearing?—how did I hear your voice without your voice?). You were revolving in some sort of air, near earth but not touching it. Still, very close, just a few feet off the ground. The earth untouchable to you and yet your eyes took everything in. I never thought I’d dream of you again. Never thought I’d want to write your name or even say it in my head. Everything over. But you’ve come back. Or, rather, I’ve come back to you. Or both. I’ve felt an odd calm since Allegra died. I’m in Lerici, on the Bay of Spezzia, in the house called Casa Magni. The same house where they told me. I’m surprised I can stay here but I can. These past weeks—I don’t know how to speak of them—I found in silence a home but it was as if that home was burning. And yet I could live there. Herodotus said we trust our ears less than our eyes. But I trusted what I heard, which was nothing, or nothing I could use.
I watch the tide moving in and out of the bay. No walls in it, no man-made laws.
Mary lost the child. She hemorrhaged terribly and almost died. Shelley put her in an ice-bath to save her. She’s sad all the time and I don’t know how to … XXXshe says she hates it here, it’s too wild, the waves threatening to flood our ground floor … I don’t mind them, Fanny, but she …
Shelley’s boat’s almost built now.
I write these things as if I’m still alive, as if I have a stake in the world.
The quietness so loud now. I hear it more than these waves breaking against rock—
Though she’s writing again she doesn’t open her journal, just picks up scraps of paper wherever she finds them. Writes to Fanny on the back of Mary’s old accounts:
Washing–3–
Lent Paolo–9–
Washing–4–
Doctor–3–
Baths–4–
Washing–1–7 7
Writes again on the back of Mary’s reading list:
Geographica Fisica, Samson Agonistes, Tales of the East, Horace’s Epistles, Remorse.
The journal’s shut tight in the drawer like the quiet she keeps to herself while she speaks and is helpful and smiles in the house by the sea.
When she finishes writing, she holds the paper to a flame. I watch her do this night after night. The F in Fanny disappearing, then the whole word, the whole page of letters burning. (Why can I never see her face?) Liberty can’t exist apart from simplicity, she said. Is she trying to set herself free?
White curtains blow in and out. Even in darkness, white sound of sunlight, the sea.
Dear Fanny,
Night after night, feeding these pages to the flames, your name to the flames, I think of how words are an odd otherness. Us but not us. “Out of the bitterness of my mouth,” wrote the Psalmist.
Shelley and Edward Williams are missing. They sailed from Leghorn on the 8th. Now Mary and Jane have left to find out what they can.
a water cask bobbing on waves XX a small coracle dinghy
but no trace of no word of
and not secreted behind walls like Allegra not bound by heavy doors with locks and bolts and yet the harm even so the moving sea
So even liberty is a prison XXXXXXX and XXXX
The boat itself was top heavy, rigged like a frigate though extremely small “a winged miniature” someone called it, I cant remember who squall on the water squall of words inside the mind
When I close my eyes the watery surface is blank—
The navigator, Albanov, spent years pleading with Admiral Kolchak to launch a search expedition for his ship, the Saint Anna. Then suddenly, in 1919, he disappeared.
On a paper scrap he’d written, “But where could my ship be? Always this cold … That polar bear I saw dragged itself for miles on its front paws alone, both hind legs broken, spinal cord injured. I found twelve bullets in its flesh. If the ship is still intact somewhere, but what supplies would they have had?—six pounds of meat powder, two of dried apples, three tins of condensed milk. How long could they have lived on that? I find the word lost very painful.”
For years he seemed to have simply disappeared. But he’d been blown apart in a munitions explosion at a train station on the way to see Admiral Kolchak; the body w
as eventually identified from a briefcase and a severed leg.
“Can you define for me what a human being is?” the Goddess of Consolation asked Boethius. “Your eyes are clouded with the cataracts of the human world.” “Would you waste away in your own mind?”
I think of her questions as I watch Claire’s hand holding her papers to the flames, and as I see in my mind’s eye Albanov’s words, the ones that pained him, and his briefcase, still locked, beside the torn body.
Fanny,
When the letter arrived I opened it as Trelawny had instructed. It was from Roberts, informing him two bodies had washed up on the shore. Shelley and Edward Williams. Mary and Jane in the other room, still waiting. (… all those weeks Allegra was dead I didn’t know she was dead … this thin lock of her hair, this stilted miniature portrait I hold … Trelawny said I must watch for any letter that might come—open it and read it.)
it’s festa tonight. There’s dancing and singing from the village—
How can I walk into that room, how can I tell them?
And the Goddess(no) her robes were torn(no) her robes didn’t exist
XXXXX
Dear Mr. Hunt,
I assure you I cannot break it to them, nor is my spirit capable of giving them consolation, or protecting them from the first burst of their despair. Give me some counsel, or arrange some method by which they may know it. Their case is desperate in every respect.
Ever your sincere friend,
Clare
These are the never-returned:
John Franklin, who vanished with his two ships and all his crew in 1845 while trying to find the Northwest Passage.
Ross G. Marvin, who traveled with Peary to the Pole but died on the trip coming back. Some say he fell into an open lead, others that he was murdered.
George W. De Long, whose ship, the Jeanette, was sunk by ice in the Bering Strait. He and his crew escaped in three smaller boats, traveling the Lena River, but one boat was lost, and De Long and the remaining crew starved and froze to death after reaching land.
James B. Lockwood, who assisted on the Lady Franklin Bay expedition. After reaching the highest altitude recorded at that time, he died of starvation.
Charles Francis Hall, who went out in search of Franklin, and mysteriously collapsed on his last journey.
Henry Hudson, whose men mutinied and lowered him and his son into a lifeboat to drift out into the icy sea.
And so many others, their names lost or bundled together into the general category of “crew.”
Fanny,
The watery surface so blank now. It’s July, but I feel ice in me moving and breaking. Shelley walked with a warming fire in his hands. Last August on the morning of his birthday, we rowed out into the harbor. He said to me (but I cant recall why we were speaking of such things): “If I’ve erred it’s on behalf of the weak, not in conjunction with the powerful.” There were seabirds diving here and there, the sun just up and rising.
6 towels Mary. Those marked x—S has read also:
2 neck cloth x Letters from Norway
3 Tablecloth x Mary, a Fiction
2 pillow cases x Political Justice
1 flan pett x The Monk—by Lewis—
x Sorcerer. a novel.
x Thaliba Emilia Galotti
x Barrow’s Embassy to China
Fanny,
It seems so much of what makes us who we are comes not firsthand, not seen with our own eyes, but from a distance—events learned about, heard of, and we hold them in our minds in silence (as I hold you). Alter them, construct them, break them down. Turn them over and over alone. Distance laying claim to whole tracts of who we are … The brain schooled and netted by such distance. Things happen apart from us and we make them our own. Our history. The texture of memory, breath.
Allegra, Shelley … they’re never coming back (their deaths at a distance invisible and wholly real).
Trelawny said came yesterday XXXX He said first there was no sign of anything. Then a punt, a water keg, some bottles on the shore. No other trace for seven days. Until, near Via Reggio, a body washed up, and then another was found three miles farther on near the tower of Migliarino. Shelley and Williams. No sign yet of their sailor boy, Charles Vivian.
Shelley’s face and hands were fleshless. XXXX But in one jacket pocket there was a volume of Sophocles, and in the other a book of Keats’s poems, pages doubled back.
Mary said Trelawny was kind not to try to console her—that would have been too cruelly useless.
The medieval author of the Ancrene Wisse instructed the anchorite sisters not to look down at their pure white hands but to dirty them each day with the soil that would one day be their graves.
If the mind can be stained and soiled by what it knows, by what it’s forced to know, I feel mine so covered now, so saturated, as any pair of hands XXXXXX
So why do I still see so much ice in my mind (not this dirt I think of daily, this dirt I feel covered with and stained by) though I know if I placed my hand on that ice just one time the skin would burn and stick and the fingers freeze—
For a long time she doesn’t come. Then one day I see a page (it looks like part of a journal, though I thought she no longer keeps one—Fanny why do people think to write down their lives?). It says only: Sunday May 7th at three or four o’clock.
Another day I see: having {lost every object of} buried here every thing {may the eye}
{relieve the eye} Appennines darkened black clouds
Then:
Head.
a Large
Medicinalräthin. Alessandro Manzoni.
author of the Conte di Carmagnola
fiss—1 fedelin
fidelin
Angella
All very strange, what could she be thinking? I see all this but not her hand.
For a while when I started to glimpse more of her, her shoulder, her arm, the dark back of her head, I thought I might one day see her face. Now that feels foolish.
I don’t know where she is. Or why her hand is lost to me. Except that grief brings with it great quietness and absence (this I know from when you left me). It takes the mind away from the mind. Abducts the world from the world.
If I wait will she come back? But how could I not wait? Isn’t it this waiting (I think of all those times I saw her hand) that links me, such as I am, to the world.
It’s a small volume of Russian manufacture bound in brown leather. On the inside cover, some Russian words, and Mary’s addresses. She’s in Moscow. (How long since I last saw her?)
Teusday
(she always misspells Tuesday)
May 12–24
(but there’s no year next to these dates)
I have long resolved to keep a journal again and so today have finally provided myself with a book.
When I first came here there seemed no power in myself to keep me alive (every gust of wind recalls Lerici)
I spend half the day not sending letters. Few here know who I am.
Her hand’s moving again. Her sleeve white against white curtains in what looks like a small attic room. Her head turned from me as always. There’s a lit candle on the desk but she doesn’t hold her pages to the flame.
Mary,
I’m in Moscow. I suppose I’m only continuing what Trelawny called my “compulsive emigration to the North.” A year since I’ve written you …
Three years since Shelley’s body was burned on the shore.
Sometimes Trelawny’s still standing in front of me, explaining what happened. How three white wands had been stuck in the sand to mark where the body was, and still they had trouble finding it when they returned. How Shelley would have loved the place—not a single human dwelling in sight. And how Trelawny felt he was no better than a dog or a wolf as he tore the “battered body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it.” I wonder if you hear those words coming back to you unwanted and unasked for as I often do. Just the way he told us. And how he went on to descr
ibe the portable furnace stoked with wood; the difficulty of fully incinerating a corpse out in the open … wine, oil, salt making the yellow flames jump up and glisten … how the heart didn’t burn and he reached in and took it…
Laurie Sheck Page 11