Laurie Sheck

by A Monster's Notes (v5)

  Sometimes that man, Roberts, the one who found the boat, is standing in front of me. He shows me a trunk filled with Shelley’s books and clothes. Tells me they found a hamper of wine that Shelley bought at Leghorn, the corks partly broken; wine and sea water mixed in together. He reaches out his hand to me and in it are two memorandum books of Shelley’s, perfect, undamaged. Then he points to a pile of books at his feet, tells me he’s cleaned them—mud had glued the pages together.

  I work as a governess. Yesterday I taught the children about Lavoisier’s system of Molecules and the experiment he tried with roses. A red rose washed with muriatic acid becomes perfectly white. Then, viewing it through a microscope, you can plainly see how the molecules which had been lying one way when the rose was red, have been decomposed and now in the white rose are lying quite another way.

  I think of such rearrangement often—

  Sometimes your name turns to air inside me. Mary. Air. The “M” dropped off and the “y” fled away. And my own name, too, mostly now just air. Or not quite that, maybe, but what are we now, the two of us? What were we then? This snow falling heavily as I think of you, as I so often do, even though you’ve had no word from me for so long.

  Tonight I see the dark window behind her, white curtains pulled back, and for the first time since I’ve watched her she looks cold, a blue blanket thrown over her nightdress as she writes:

  Smirna in Russian means gentle. “smirnyi”—quiet, peaceful, from mir peace (I say this to myself every morning but don’t feel it)

  Dear F

  and a {thin} veil before the mind and all things which destroy

  (Shelley gave me his shawl, it’s all I have left of him)

  Her lost face always her lost face a table in the wilderness this seclusion shipwreck of mind

  I see so many unhappy people I can’t complain of the singularity of my fate

  Then:

  There was a well-known drink in Greece from Homer’s time onward, the kyke&n—it was made by stirring barley and grated cheese into a cup of wine, and since these couldn’t dissolve the whole mixture had to be kept in motion until it was drunk. Heraclitus says our world is like this drink. Existing things aren’t at rest. Strife is the nature of the world. So justice IS strife.

  always the waves at Lerici the wind at Lerici—

  The window whitens a little, fills with swirls of snow. Her hands—deliberately, slowly—fold a piece of paper into quarters, then eighths. She writes M. Gambs on the outside, lays her head on the pillow, tries to sleep.

  All night the same dizzying dream: You’re washing my cells in muriatic acid like Lavoisier’s rose. I feel them rearranging themselves and their directions. Then I’m looking through a microscope, taking notes, as you took notes on me. What, precisely, am I documenting? Does it matter if the cells of the white rose are different from the red? Why does it matter? No one has explained this to me. Still, I feel I should take notes as you did. Then I’m standing on a great plain of ice. Your hand, warm as breath, is nearby me, though I see no trace of you. The air’s perfectly clear.

  On Parry’s second Arctic voyage, the ice grew so vast—icebergs two hundred feet high, pancake ice and bay ice—he decided to winter over near Winter Island. “One day a very beautiful ermine walked right up onto our deck, though we were over four hundred yards away from land.”

  With so much pared away he believed he saw more clearly: “In the fire-hole kept open in the ice alongside us, multitudes of small shrimp rose and cleaned—in the most beautiful manner—any skeletons to be found there. The bones, turned the color of salt, were wholly smooth. Each day I watched this cleansing as if it were a ritual or prayer.”

  As each night I watch her planning her lessons in her attic room, snow filling the window, thickening on the sill. Sometimes I wish she could see me or that I still had a voice with which to reach her. But maybe it’s better that I don’t. Parry watched from his separateness the ermine walking, shrimp whitening and cleansing the bones, and not one gesture passed between them, not one breath.

  To pass the months, Parry’s men asked for an evening school. Almost all of them could read a little; some could even write, though they’d long been out of practice. Mr. Halse superintended the classes on the Fury, and Benjamin White, a seaman who’d briefly been to school, became the schoolmaster on the Hecla. By Christmas day, there were “sixteen copybooks filled by men who, two months before, barely knew their letters.”

  Mary,

  I stay up late thinking about my lessons, planning what to teach tomorrow. Sometimes my mind drifts back to the books we shared, those hours we spent reading in so many different rooms, in Italy, in England. That big table in Pisa piled high with books where we read and talked and studied while Shelley was writing in the other room …

  Do you remember Sappho’s poem that ended, “But everything can be endured because”—There was nothing after the “because”—whatever had been there had been lost.

  I prefer Sappho’s line the way we have it with its brokenness, its silence. Isn’t it the silence that feels true, the not-knowing?

  Let me know how you are. Past midnight now, the snow still falling …

  Fanny,

  I didn’t know you would come this far with me, and yet—

  We live among things that destroy us yet we still exist. There’s no escape from the scrutinizing misconstructions and efforts of the mind, though all I wish for now is quiet. Your mind alien to me, finally, as mine would be to yours were you alive, as mine is to Mary’s and hers to mine, as anyone’s is to anyone else’s.

  I think you would hate this sprawling city. Its streets narrow and twisting, still pocked and ruined from the war. Numerous trains of slaves walk about the houses. Not much thrives here, even the fruits are grown out of sight in the hothouses. They give you black bread and bitter coffee, and imitate the French endlessly. If only they would consent to be Russians!

  Far away, Mary writes in a book she calls her Journal of Sorrow. It has no drawings or reading lists in it anymore, she says what she keeps now is a book of silence. Each night I write in my Journal of Ice and Snow, if I were to name it, though I feel no impulse to name anything.

  Sometimes when I sleep I see a bone the color of salt in front of my eyes. Just a single clean white bone.

  But I’m not a shadow as Mary says she is. Russia has a million soldiers and at least ten and sometimes fifteen in every hundred die from dreadful conditions and malnourishment. Even now when there’s no war. Why think of the world as otherwise? Why should I think of my hardship as larger or more important than it is? And anyway Heraclitus believed that the world is made of strife and we are wrong to think otherwise. Sappho wrote, “to a single sapling most of all do I compare you.” So there’s that too—those words that draw the mind and somehow calm it—

  XXXXXXXXXXXX Notes for Possible Ideas for Lessons

  How the eye XXXXXXXXX

  * How the eye works the character of light and color—

  if Allegra were a color, and Shelley a color … if those

  colors were vanished from the earth, and they are

  Erasmus Darwin suggests this experiment: “Place a circular piece of white paper in sunlight. Cover its center with a smaller circular piece of black silk. In the center of that place a still smaller circle of pink silk, and in the center of the pink one a smaller circle of yellow silk, in the center of that one a smaller one of blue silk. Look steadily a moment at the central spot, then close your eyes, place your hand an inch in front of them so as to prevent too much or too little light from passing through the eyelids, and you will see the most beautiful circles of colors, different from the colors of the mentioned silks.”

  Fanny,

  The window’s dark. I cant see the snow. I don’t see Erasmus Darwin’s colors. Only my face ridiculously staring. Soon it will be spring and I’ll go with the family I work for to the country, to Islavsky, where the River Istra flows into the Moscow River through deep woods.
I’ll plant a garden there with Dunia, help her build a dollhouse. When I speak it’s as if my voice comes from another’s mouth. There are so many balconies here, if it were warm we could walk out on them, one after another. Pascal said that the center of the universe is everywhere but its circumference nowhere—

  If you who made me had given me lessons as Claire gives lessons, what might you have taught me? It’s summer. We sit beneath the trees at Islavsky, near Stone Mountain, by the banks of the River Istra. You’re not disgusted when you look into my eyes. I don’t mistrust you, though I know I was made differently from others. Maybe you begin with Heraclitus: “Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.”

  “So,” you say, “let’s look at Leonardo. He observed minute particulars with great care. Look at his drawings, his studies of anatomy. Of birds and the precise workings of their wings. Of the veins in an old man’s leg compared to the veins in a young man’s leg. He asked what is the difference. Of the chambers of the heart, the fetus in utero. Of the larynx, the thyroid gland, the muscles that, in motion, create gestures. He rendered Leda’s head from various angles on one small piece of paper—face bowed, eyes cast down, then her braid seen from the back. He made designs for flour mills, canals, engines. When peasants brought him shells and corals from the mountains, he worried over their meaning for twenty-five years. How had they gotten so far from the sea? What did that say about geology and the history of those mountains?”

  You speak and I listen. We examine his architectural plans, mechanical devices, renderings of tunnels, cords, knots, levers. We recall how he bought birds in the market only to open their cages, set them free.

  But then whatever it is that enslaves and disorganizes my face creeps back into me. I don’t want to hear your voice. Don’t want to see your hands turning pages.

  “Can you define for me what a human being is?” the Goddess of Consolation asked Boethius. I would pose this same question to you beneath the trees at Islavsky, by Stone Mountain, not so that you’d give me an answer, but in order that you might ask this of yourself.

  Fanny,

  Now that the snow’s gone, now that we’re not in Moscow but at Islavsky, you’d think I’d feel warmer but I don’t. It’s odd, this cold, and I remember May’s face after Clara died and then William, the way she turned Arctic and extreme. This wind like the waves at Lerici—Church bells echo village to village—

  I have a friend here, Hermann Gambs, he works as the boys’ tutor. In our spare time he teaches me history, science, philosophy, astronomy. So I’m learning too, not just the children. It makes it bearable to be here. We walk on Sand Hill and Stone Hill. We walk by the granary and in the woods by the Moscow River. He writes poems and signs them C. Clairmont, I don’t know why.

  Lately I don’t think about my name, or the way I used to have so many names.

  We gather strawberries, we go to the dairy. I give lessons from 9 to 4. but this fault {renders} renders There is an extreme narrowness in myself I would walk out of. The children like me to read about Captain Sir John Ross’s Arctic Voyage and Parry’s first Voyage in the Hecla and Griper. They marvel at the presence of red snow, the amateur plays performed on board, the newspapers they published when iced-in. Also that the crew saw the Croker mountains clearly though they didn’t exist. All this excites their minds.

  But what of our minds, Fanny, yours and mine? What does it say about us that you’ve followed me this far, still follow me, that I still speak to you in this way … I’d never have thought it. Last night I stood on a fragile ladder of rope. It hung in the air, a thin and fraying thing, so how could it support me? I didn’t know where I was—in Italy, Moscow, Snow Hill? I saw no identifiable doors or roofs or streets. And the air itself was hurt, but how can air be hurt? Everything scorched by the withdrawing countenance of itself. When I woke I thought of you though I don’t know why.

  It’s said that on Parry’s first voyage he reached Melville Island, that his ships broke clear of the ice—

  It’s winter again. She’s back in Moscow. She writes in her journal and also on pieces of lined paper, making notes for lessons. Sometimes she leaves both on the desk, moves back and forth from one to the other:

  Hatred between the Greeks and the Trojans a commercial hatred

  Possible lessons: reign and death of Charlemagne Caesar’s

  calendar Marco Polo’s

  journey to China

  Then:

  Lerici—which will always float across my mind, shining in my dark history

  I have forsworn sleep in Russia Never did I sleep so little—

  (S’s face) (if our sky were scarlet, not blue)

  but there was scarlet fever in the village. We left Islavsky Dunia had become very ill—I went to her at 8:00 and didn’t leave her until 5 the next morning when she died. All night her chest grew more oppressed, her cheeks a burning pink. I held her upright to prevent suffocation. At five in the morning the doctor came with orders to apply leeches behind the ear and sinepismes of mustard on the legs. But she died too soon for this. She was the same age as Allegra. She was dressed in white, laid out upon a table. Tapers and tall candelabras burned all around. On her face the yellowness of death. All the peasants came to say goodbye. The doctor said we could have saved her if we called for help sooner. But it seems doctors always say that. In the room all was light but the And Allegra so long dead now

  Fanny,

  The snow’s come back. I hate it, but maybe it’s better than the warm winds I felt all summer, the way Lerici lived in them. M. Gambs often talks of the immensity of the universe. Our sun, he says, along with 65 other suns (but how could he, or anyone, come to this precise calculation?) revolves around another sun whose size can barely be imagined. And another sun, a third one, exists beyond that… So we are nothing, really, each one of us. Specks, but much, much smaller even than that. Yet still pierced through, still

  For the first time she turns her face in my direction, though of course she doesn’t see me. I see brown eyes, the vague, changing contours of her face, her small closed mouth. But soon it’s as if she’s pulling away (or is it I who draw back, but why would I?), a small brown-haired woman wearing a white nightgown, pressing her hands against a window in a room minute as a dollhouse, so remote I barely see it. If she were to take out her journal and write, how could I even see the words? And yet she’s turned toward me … as if it were possible … as if… For a moment my voice almost presses back into my throat. But it will never come back into my throat.

  When she turns away, the pen and paper come back:

  the hazard of my eyes, Newton wrote to Locke the disintegration of forms

  Madame Pomikoff says the Russian state is governed only by a coffin and a name

  Mary says she’s a shadow now

  There’s no one here to whom I can speak freely. As if a waxen black seal were over my mouth (but maybe it’s of no importance, I don’t know that I want to speak to anyone anyway. And they’d be appalled if they knew I was Godwin’s daughter, a “free-thinker”). Today I called at Lenhold’s and found a letter from Mary. Got into the carriage to read it. I remembered that night we looked out over the water and sensed Shelley wouldn’t be coming back. The water itself and itself as far as we could see. A blank, unthinking thing.

  Franklin, Lockwood, De Long, those lost explorers, what did they see in their last days? A loved one’s hair softly floating? A face watching from behind a white veil? A wondrous city? Bowls of ripe fruit? One delicate pink foot dipped into water? An envelope addressed in their name? Or maybe shoelaces, metal screws, a spoon, a piece of twine—something useful they once had and wanted back. Whatever it was they saw—out of their own desire, out of the mind’s extremest need—did they reach out, try to touch it? As silence touches silence, and snow, snow.

  Mary,

  Snowfall again. “Mad with introspecting joy” I sometimes think to myself in these hours I spend alone, but what does that even me
an?

  I’ve been reading the northern explorers (the children I teach like this, though lately when I give my lessons I feel far away, as if I were on some ice shelf and the children on another … I’m fond of them and am trying to change this). Often they felt someone else’s presence behind them when no one was there. Or tasted a taste so distinct they were sure there was something in their mouth. But in fact they’d eaten nothing. Or felt a length of soft hair brush their arm, or heard, out of the whiteness of ice, a sudden clear song or a voice speaking straight into their ear.