Laurie Sheck

by A Monster's Notes (v5)

  What I feel now is unsparing distance. I think of how strange it is that this heavy, lumpy substance which is the body can produce such a thing as thought. I’m stamped by a tenderness I don’t understand. Everything far from me. And still I feel this tenderness—what is it? How is it possible to feel both things at once?

  Mr. Ichebaiff said last night that Schlegel has proved no nation can civilize itself. Now that Dunia has died, I go among various households giving lessons, I can’t remember if I told you. When I think of you I see your face but never hear your voice. On my skin the mysterious pressure of what’s vanished and what’s stayed. Writing to you, it’s as if my hand doesn’t belong to me but is a stranger’s and I watch it move across the paper with such purpose. The brown ink making a path to you, but not.

  Inside this metal box, loose pages from a journal, or are they unsent letters? Holding them is like holding the utter loneliness of the body.

  Oct 6

  “I walk each day and try to make the walks seem different even though nothing in the landscape changes. How else can I stay sane? I could walk 150 miles to the north or 300 to the west and not see any notable difference either way. Lately I’ve divided my route into the stages of Marco Polo’s travels; I’ve wandered now from Venice to China. Or I move back in time, watch the slow pulsations of the Ice Age. Or I speed the centuries until ice surges in a zigzag from New York to California, obliterating all but the tallest peaks. For centuries there’s nothing but obliterating ice, then it melts and the whole earth turns ocean.”

  Nov 7

  “The silence of this place is as solid as any sound and merges into an indescribable evenness along with the dark and cold. This evenness fills the air with a sense of unchangeableness; it sits across from me no matter what I’m doing.”

  “I’m getting absent-minded. Last night I put sugar in my soup, and tonight I plunked a spoonful of cornmeal mush onto a board where the plate should have been.”

  Dec 14

  “I think I am close to going out of my mind. A sense of rolling vacancies everywhere. The notion that I’m dying won’t leave me. Still, there is something animal and automatic in me even now.”

  When I first began to read these, I expected to sense whoever wrote them hovering at the edges of my body, a shadow crouching when I crouched, sitting when I sat, pacing behind me as I paced. But he’s as far from me as anything. We stand on either side of an unbridgeable gap. Though the evenness he writes of floods into this air, finds me.

  Mary,

  I remember how even as a girl you kept a place inside your mind where you touched the “distant inequalities of ice.” Felt its dominance, its shifts. Now, in Moscow, I feel I’m at the farthest Pole.

  I cannot XXXX (and even the trackless wilds no longer XXX) XXXX is this how the mind comes to itself finally, is this how XXXX

  The snow falls and falls and I read accounts of the North (the children still like this). “Only the cold is real,” writes one. “Beneath the aurora the snow is different shades of silver-gray, not white as one would imagine,” writes another, and “were it not for my lame shoulder I should be making better progress.”

  M. Gambs says man is a disastrous and discordant atom among the greater elements. But aren’t elements also embattled? Do you remember how as children we’d say And Morning’s a Rose and Day’s a tulip, and Night’s a lily, and evening’s like Morning again a Rose, singing out our perpetual chain of flowers. Your mother long buried in the ground by then—so of course you knew better than to believe in such a pretty chain. Fanny and I and the others, we also knew better. And in Naples when we saw the gray upright columns of the shattered temple—

  XXXXXXAnd still this snow. So much of it. Your face so far from me. And your voice.

  One explorer wrote, “Then something approaching gratitude flowed into me, my lantern was still working.” And another: “Though I have no appetite I’m forcing myself to eat. I’ve begun to read again. The temperature is minus 50.”

  The windowsill’s piled high with snow. Sometimes it seems all this whiteness is covering my name, that I no longer have any name … XXXX still, I look out on the snow, its broken lines falling sideways and into me (though how could they fall into me?) touching me like something I listen for but only partly understand—

  Ever since Claire turned to me I’ve been wondering why I was able to briefly see her face, and why, after I glimpsed it, she suddenly seemed distant. Mostly she comes only in pieces—a hand, a white shoulder, the dark back of her head. Some pages of her journal but not others, some letters but not others. Maybe this is all one person can know of another, as close as one person can ever get to another. When she wrote “mad with introspecting joy,” I wondered if I was mis-seeing, or if she’d made a mistake, the way she always misspells Teusday. Yet the more I think of it the more it makes a kind of sense.

  Fanny,

  Remember the freed Roman slave Epicharis? She went into a silence where no one could find her. This snow now, this

  She’d been part of a plot to end the corrupt rule of Nero. When it was uncovered, Natalis denounced his friend Piso and implicated Seneca; Scaevinus named Lucan, Quintianus, and Senecio. Lucan implicated his own mother.

  But Epicharis said nothing.

  I think of silence often now—mine, yours, Allegra’s, Shelley’s, May’s. (The silent “h” in ghost, the silent “s” in island.) How it cuts into each word—lives in my eye, a thin splinter. Often here it’s 20 or 30 below. I walk among the houses carrying my lesson books, my pencils. Inside the rooms such chattering, such loudness, everyone getting on each others’ nerves, but sometimes I feel moments of serenest calm out in the cold as I walk between one house and another. If I spoke openly and said what I believe, if they knew of May and Shelley and how we’d lived, they wouldn’t want me here, wouldn’t want me near their children—XXX wouldn’t

  I wonder if Epicharis felt the silence pressing down into her flesh, then strong and metallic in her throat, or did it live solely in her mind?

  Often I feel a door inside my throat slowly closing, though I speak barely anything aloud. Inside each word so many chains and conflagrations—

  Fanny,

  Sometimes Italy floods back into me and for a moment I’m not cold. I never know when it will happen or why. Not the walls and the horrible sea but the Then the cold comes back and I think of all I don’t let myself say) XXX

  M. Gambs says there’s a painter in Spain who lives in a world of silence and vibration. His house is outside Madrid and he paints directly onto the plaster walls. In his 70’s now, he no longer titles his paintings. Once he boasted about being the King’s painter and of all the money he made, his fancy carriage, etc. But then something terrible came into him—illness, two wars, the sound of self enclosure.

  M. Gambs described the paintings, or at least what they’re rumored to be. Ever since, I’ve been seeing one of them almost constantly—on one brown/gold wall, a dog’s head occupying only a very small corner of the picture peers over a dark hill of—is it sand?—and it’s struggling not to drown, not to be drawn completely down and under. Small head at the edge of the world—You can’t see the body or paws, only the way the head strains upward, so much dirt and vacancy around it, so muchXXX—

  So little can be explained. In this intense cold I, in the intense cold of XXXI,

  M. Aconloff wants me to read Hannah Glasses The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy with his daughter. He found it at Gualtier’s bookshop, and thinks it will be an “entertaining” way for her to improve her English. And M. Amfeld wants me to start Matouschkin’s Journal of his Travels to Asia with his son. So you see I’m quite busy.

  XXXX But Fanny, that small dog-head at the edge of the world—its one visible, wide-open eye XXX—

  Epicharis who would not speak who would not

  and died rather than speak

  LESSON:

  THE SILENT LETTER IN ENGLISH:

  Examples of the silent “b”: climb,
numb, comb, debt, subtle, plumb (as there is a numb place in me, a speechless debt and silent climbing)

  —Examples of the silent “g”: though, light, gnaw, gnarled (the “g” in Allegra isn’t silent… but I feel the silent space of her, the “g” in light that’s her body, her voice …)

  And on and on, through all the letters …

  Silent “s”–island, silent “p”–psalm, silent “u”–guest, guilt, guide, dialogue, tongue (my tongue a ghost of what it was …)

  __

  And there are silent combinations

  There are few rules to learn, but presences—one can learn the presences—

  (silence embedded in any question, any wish, in my wrist as I write this—)

  Fanny,

  For hours I’ve been trying to compose my lesson on silent letters, but it’s as if Epicharis IS each one of those letters and stands now in so many words, determined, irreproachable, fierce. Stands there and stands there. She’s solid and intact while sounds whirl around her—Whatever they do they don’t matter to her, can’t penetrate her at all.

  She can’t speak, won’t speak—that part of her is over now, she knows this. Think of the “h” in hour, the “l” in talk, in calm, the “n” in column.

  When I went in my sledge to the Kaisaroffs earlier this evening, I felt for a moment suddenly nowhere, that the earth is composed, if only we could feel it, of molecules of nowhere … Then M. Kaisaroff opened the door and I was suddenly back and Moscow was a somewhere again and words came out of my mouth as if they had no silences inside them, as if Epicharis, as if she had not… XXXXXXXXXX

  M. Pomikoff says there are rumors that Constantine will refuse the Russian crown, that he intends to resign all his rights. It’s late. I have to get up early to finish my lesson—must get up to XXX I’m thinking of the silence in “leopard,” “have,” “give,” “weave,” “fasten” XXXXX must finish my XXXXXXXXXXXXX— must finish—XXX must—

  As she builds her lists of words, I think of how you’re like the silent letters they enclose, wedged inside each thought I have, each cell. I feel the faint vibrations at her throat—but how can I feel this when she’s so far and other?—as she says into the air to no one

  none, none, none,

  then

  climb, ghost, thought, enclose. Island, island, island. Answer is ghosted, whole, ghosted.

  I read her lips as she does this. The silent h stands hand’s so often fevered as once you stood near me wondering what features to add next, what aspect of my being. Did you suspect you left in me a frightening silence, some gap, desolate, uncontrollable, unsolved, unfinished? Was that partly why you feared me?

  So how could I know you? How could you know me?

  Fanny, the night’s very still. The depth of winter. The doctor came today. It hurts me to speak and my chest hurts. With Alexander dead the serfs wont be freed. Nicholas has had himself proclaimed the new Czar. Already there are many arrests.

  Why is it I speak to you when I speak inside my mind? Not once to her, never to her. Though her hand brings me so many words—thought, light, thistle, Wednesday, meant.

  She’s lying in her narrow bed. It seems she’s too tired to write, throat and chest convulsive with coughing: I see this but don’t hear a sound. Her hands are much paler than before.

  She takes out her journal.

  charged with snow and the desolate,

  she writes, then:

  invented by tenderness

  (I wonder what she means even as I sense it’s true.)

  My journal has been a long time interrupted. I am increasingly quiet inside. And the precariousness of in Greece Mavrogenia is a heroine, says she will only marry a freeman that you must fight for your liberty she’s armed, leads her own band of followers in the uprising

  Then:

  This snow burying itself in itself. Dr. Jenish came again today, gave me the Lives of Saints to read, says it passes the time XXXX XXXXXXX but the waves breaking at Lerici, the wind at Lerici XXXXXXXXX and this muteness I feel in my throat and in my brain, I think of it as white, I don’t know why. The shawl Shelley gave me, the one thing I have left from him. I wrap myself tighter.He walked with a fire in his XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  Fanny, Mary, no, I feel such muteness in my mind. I read of Saint Drugo. Also known as Saint Droux or Saint Druon. All is broken off in me now, all is and the waves at Lerici the rough shore

  He’s the patron saint of muteness. His well-born mother died at his birth and at 18 he became a penitential pilgrim, then spent 6 years as a shepherd. He seemed to find peace in this, but it wasn’t peace he wanted and he set out on his pilgrimage again. He suffered a disfiguring injury. The book won’t say what it was. I think it must have been something with his face, that something monstrous happened to his face … like the man I saw years ago in London whose face was red scars criss-crossing where his eyes and nose had been, and lopsided darkness for a mouth. Saint Drugo built himself a narrow cell, ate only barley-bread and ashes, hid himself away for 40 years until his death.

  The doctor says my eyes are inflamed. But it’s my throat that stings: I think of the words I can’t say and the waves at Lerici the wind the boats the shore at Lerici XXXXX What would Shelley think of it here?—Innumerable arrests and imprisonments, a “third section” of secret police to monitor “subversives.” Today at Kazan University they suspended the study of anatomy and astronomy, calling them “impious.”

  Saint Drugo is also the patron saint of coffee and coffeehouses, of sickly and homely people, broken bones, and shepherds, cattle, gallstones, orphans. Shelley would have smiled at this, said something mocking. Such a clatter of voices in this house, always such clamor. When I wrote my lists of silent letters I didn’t think for some reason of my own name, Claire, the silent “i” inside it—

  Sometimes I imagine standing over you as you lie on the couch in that dim, shuttered room where you made me. You’ve got one of your fevers-it seems you’re always having fevers. A “cold shivering” you murmur, pulling the blanket up over your shoulders, bunching it around your neck. (As Claire shivers in fever, and I feel helpless as I watch.)

  Every season’s battling inside you—you’re burning and freezing, shivering and red with sweat. From time to time you write in your notebook. “I can no longer observe any outward object with the faintest pleasure,” “but I resolve to remain silent—I’ll tell no one of what truly troubles me,” “exploded systems and useless names.”

  I stand there, a dark and beating heart.

  Beneath all those fevers, was there a North inside you too, vast miles of silence as far as you could see? I don’t know what to feel as I think this. My thoughts freeze: I look upon you as if you’re an object encased in museum glass. Your head sarcophagal, exotic as a pharaoh’s. Each path to you buried, useless, uncertain.

  Smirna means gentle quiet, peaceful, from mir, peace

  and enlivens what seemed to be dead but how is that possible?

  fight and gain your liberty, Mavrogenia said

  Psammeticus wandered much and a long while alone then we go to the garden to gather black currants

  we gather strawberries we go to the dairy this snow this hot snow I can’t count the number of balconies at Islavsky there

  are so many I stroll with Marie Ivanova from one to the other

  All Allegra

  I don’t want to be ashamed of my own mind

  Her fever’s building (the locked silence in my throat is building). She closes her eyes, wipes her forehead with a cloth. Does she think of Boethius even once? Does she feel a hem in air, or only coldness?

  (If my voice weren’t lost, if she could see or hear me. But what comfort could I give even then?) And the ones who were trapped by ice for so long, the ones who survived, what did they think as they struggled and waited?:

  “I decided I needed strategies that would make me capable of a protracted and profound self-containment. To keep myself focused, I imagined a pair of surgical sci
ssors cutting hundreds of red dresses into two-inch strips.”