“The air filled with a profusion of sounds—I was convinced they were real: the soft whirring of motors, of electric batteries and switchboards, the ticking of many clocks. Delicate, methodical sounds. They were of subtle, varying textures, and spoke to me of some sort of allotment, containment and order. No one could have convinced me they weren’t real. When they suddenly vanished from my ears I grieved for them for days.”
“I’d think of place-names. Resolute Bay. Arrival Heights. Focus my mind on them. Cape Walker. Sheerness. Good Hope. I’d dwell even on Great Slave Lake and Icy Cape. Anything precise, specific.”
“I felt Wilson’s arm on my back though I’d lost him in the blizzard weeks before. Whichever way I moved the arm moved with me. Always that weight, a drenched heaviness like cloth retrieved from a river. I never got used to it, though I came to accept it—that arm a rough peninsula across my back, turbulent, unsoothed, remorseless.”
As I feel her arm on me now, though she’s far away, has never seen me.
These weeks of fever—Mary, Fanny, no these weeks of XXXXXXX the mind can’t be perceived, not really. How will I save enough money to leave here when I can barely give my lessons? XX I remember the molecules were rearranged when the red rose turned into the white. M Kaisaroff says I must go to the Baths of Toeplitz, near Dresden, that she knows a family that will take me. But I XXX and the waves at Lerici XXX and the snow XXX and when I wanted consolation most… XXX Stratagems. Concealments. Such clamor in these houses, yet the household slaves stand in silence, they don’t dare answer or answer only in the blandest terms. I must plan more lessons. Dr. Jenish says I can’t stay in this cold, I won’t get better. I don’t know if my sickness is of the mind or of the body and I feel embarrassed not knowing. Silence comes to me more and more—it’s silvery, a kind of metal. I must plan my XXX When the Princess Montemiletto told us of being trapped under her ruined villa after the earthquake and hearing pure, utter silence for the first time in her life, she spoke of it as horrifying yet her face conveyed a certain enjoyment, even an odd peacefulness and wonder XXXX and immolating one’s own wishes or
LESSON:
PUNCTUATION
—Modern punctuation was designed to clarify syntactic structures rather than to indicate breathings. Along with the printing press came codifications of spelling and capitalization.
but what of all that isn’t codified & can’t be—in me, in anyone
— and this precariousness I feel, this XXX
and the waves at Lerici the shore the wind the rocks at Lerici
Allegra, Shelley
—For a discussion of modern punctuation, look at Ben Jonson’s English Grammar (1617)
… this snow all around me … such hot snow. Boethius was alone in his cell the whole time, wasn’t he, she didn’t come to him not once not really she didn’t speak to him at all XXXXXX he made it all up he needed to make it up XXX the walls so high and so hot now and this snow all around me white-hot XX the ladder wasn’t there—there was never a ladder there—or maybe there was a ladder after all maybe she came to him maybe XXXXX and her robes XXX and on her robes there was a ladder but this snow is so hot now these high walls
Pushkin’s friend Chaadev says this is a time of madness, says about this country: “what have we ever created, we Russians, what have we ever invented?” Says Russia stands outside of time without past or present or future, “an orphan cut off.” Calls all Russians, “nomads” in their land, “strangers” to themselves. The Czar has placed him under house arrest, doctors visit him every day. Pestel and Ryleev have been hanged in the courtyard of the Fortress. Volonsky’s exiled to Siberia for 20 years of hard labor while his mother accepts a new diamond brooch from the Czar, and says of her son, “I only hope there will be no more monsters in the family.”
Mostly there’s silence. Arrests in silence. Thoughts in silence. Disappearances in silence. Everything violent, intransigent, difficult, unresolved, covered by this whiteness, this hot snow, these fevers I feel, but if I left here … And anyway everywhere’s a jagged splinter in the eye in one way or another, and it’s not bad to feel it, the splinter—If the reconcilable’s a cloister, a jail, then I don’t want that cloister, that jail X XYXY I should plan more lessons. I should XXX But how can I make corrections on their papers, what is a correction anyway and this snow so hot now these walls I haven’t the least idea how to XXXX and the snow and the
Dr Jenish says rest, just rest. But I feel this splinter in my eye and the snow so hot so thick and Boethius felt the soft cloth of her robes she held it to his eyes but what if she wasn’t there XX what XXX if XXX Allegra, Shelley XXX I don’t need the ladder but there’s this splinter in my eye XXX this splinter that enables me to see XXX and the snow’s an envelope burning … who wrote on it who sent it… inside it, and inside it burning
XXXXXXXXX
and the waves at Lerici and the
Fanny, Mary,
My fever’s broken. Moscow’s still covered with snow. In winter all distance turns inward, differentiation vanishes. I need to grow strong and healthy like I used to be. I don’t understand how tenderness invents itself but that it does. “Lost and unknown when clothed in words,” Locke wrote, yet this is the only way I have to reach you. Each day I mount a stranger’s stairs. The world is closed in silence to me—I’ve told myself this again and again, but maybe I’m wrong. Think of what the Northern explorers felt when color flooded back into their world. Still, so many of them never returned, or returned only partly— damaged, sullen, numb. For four years I’ve lived among strangers—XXXX I thought consolation was what I needed but now I don’t know. I keep thinking I have this splinter in my eye and at first it bothered me, the way it interfered, black line through every face, each wall, each door. A caught piece of turbulence lodged inside my sight forever—
but it’s become just a part of seeing and I find now I don’t mind it
What’s wholeness anyway—and why did I formerly think of it as something to be prized?
Remember the ruins at Luna, how we loved them
The other night I dreamed a pair of surgical scissors was cutting our red dresses into strips
it wasn’t a bad dream that’s what amazed me—it wasn’t bad at all—
the floor all covered with those strips, a mess of red—
I think of you there are so many conflagrations of mind so many XXX I don’t know how to say it—
(turbulence/ruin)
more and more I feel myself climbing a rope of turmoil and peace, each rough strand inextricably bound to the other, intertwined with the other—
know that I think of you XXX
the two of you wherever you are
the last consolations are torn away—
NOTES
Notes on Perplexity
(When I go to Google and type in this word which seems to mark the place you’ve left me in, this word I want to understand, there aren’t so many entries after all. There’s a perplexity that has to do with statistical models of speech recognition. There’s a Perplex City, which seems to be a game. “Perplex City’s greatest treasure has been stolen … Explore Perplex City through websites, emails, texts and live events. Find the cube and claim $100,000 reward.” I do my research where I can. I forage, hunt.)
So I’ll begin with Socrates, that “self-stinging stingray.”
He stung himself with questions:
“For I am not free of perplexity when I make others perplexed; but I am more perplexed than anyone.”
The meanings of the most common words crumbled under his tongue.
Euthyphro said, “But Socrates, I am simply unable to tell you what I think, for whatever we put forward goes around and around and refuses to stay where we place it.”
(The way the woods I slept in those first nights now sleep and stir in me, their shudderings and complex shiftings, small breakages shot through with slippage, doubt… No stillness in me, no shelter I can touch or trust.)
(Yet m
aybe there’s a kind of shelter after all in the way things shift, turn ripe with possibilities, uncertainties, the mind un-tombed, the puzzles ever-changing.)
A question is a site of astonishment. “Why has not the universe been used up long ago and vanished away?” Aristotle asked.
And Gertrude Stein: “What is the wind what is it.” “How many windows are there in it.” “What is the difference between ardent and ardently.” “To smile at the difference.”
(Boundaries blur. A question mark seems too solid, too intact a thing. What’s suppose, what’s comfort, what’s else and elsewhere, what’s other, what’s difference, what’s alone?—each word ripping through itself like water, or brain waves in minute vibrations, curving, casting out. I remember plastic models of the brain, perplexity etched into their crevices from the very start.)
“The human mind stands ever in perplexity,” wrote Emerson. “Thoughts walk and speak and look with eyes at me … and make all other teaching formal and cold.”
(I think of you in fever. The more you tried to understand, the more your thoughts bent down beneath that weight, thin lantern-skins flickering. As now, the winds inside me shock the leaning trees, the smallest storms inside my brain releasing … Mind’s a perilous place, it knows how each horizon crumbles.)
“And there shall be signs in the sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth there shall be distress of nations in perplexity at the roar of the sea and rolling waves …”
“O Lord, increase my perplexity concerning Thee!” wrote Ibn ‘Arabi in the thirteenth century.
He wanted to be guided by bewilderment.
There’s another prayer: Let me be undone, unsewn, disrupted.
For perplexity disables the will, disables tyranny.
Ibn ‘Arabi retells the story of Noah. Only those who refuse the ark are truly holy. Having turned their backs on the ark’s rigid structure, they choose to die instead in the vast waters, the multiplicity that perplexes (as God perplexes): They drown “ecstatically in the wider seas.”
“Perplexity lifts the servant out of his servanthood, causes everything to shimmer and change.”
To be perplexed is to wander truly and well. There’s no single destination to arrive at.
(And yet sometimes I wish for a clear answer, a something that consoles the mind. Maybe the sea can console, how it’s not one single thing but wave upon wave building and dissolving, the way a face wanders through itself all of its life, the quiet deluge of it streaming. Still, some nights when I can’t sleep, or days I think of you, or days I’m frightened by my thoughts, the needled wings inside my fingers, my heart…)
Augustine ended his Confessions with a puzzle: the last word he chose, aperietur, meaning “will be” or “shall be opened.”
Those who later transcribed his text altered its ending to “amen,” as if to shut that perplexing door he had left open.
Disquietude. Perplexity. The words: “perhaps,” “will be,” and “shall be opened.” Endless space …
(Some nights I dream I’m in the sea. Cold slits of light ride miles of viscous black. The water’s full of doors opening and shutting, soft fins or lungs that somehow function underwater. The burlap sack I wear, stitched with every letter of the alphabet, bulges out from my body then flaps back then bulges out again as the letters begin to disintegrate and then drift off, drift away, until I’m alone and drowned but still breathing among the many scattered letters, each gash and sway of them traveling far from the built systems, the built world …)
Notes on Dr. Joseph Vacanti and
Dr. Robert Langer
Dr. Joseph Vacanti directs the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Langer is a professor at MIT. He’s known for his “highly profitable engineering successes,” blurring the lines between engineering and medicine. He won the 1998 Lemelson-MIT Prize, at $500,000 the largest single cash prize for invention in the United States.
They are considered the “fathers of the field of tissue engineering.”
In their lab, they have grown a human ear on the back of a hairless mouse.
(That hunchback, that winged creature in a cage … four-footed, unable to see itself or know, as I didn’t know.)
Specially bred to lack an immune system that might reject human tissue, the mouse nourishes the ear, which is composed of human cartilage cells distributed throughout a scaffolding of porous, biodegradable polyester.
(And if a mind could be bred not to reject?)
(Yet how it breeds desolation even as it thinks this—)
When the ear has fully grown it’s removed from the mouse and transplanted in a human host.
The cells re-create their proper functions, blood vessels attach to new tissue, and the scaffold melts away.
(But there’s that shadow-sense of how it came to get its shape, its beginnings in a cage.)
They have not yet been able to grow human nerve tissue.
They hold many patents. Dr. Langer alone holds over three hundred licensed to over eighty companies.
Their patents include No. 5,759,8305770,193, and No. 5,770,417 These are available for viewing online from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C.
Advanced Tissue Sciences, a biotech company in La Jolla, California, has licensed these patents and is preparing clinical trials.
(But what profit was there for you who made me?)
In an interview Dr. Langer mentions a possible collaboration with MIT’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences to control the weather. His only criterion for a project, he says, is that it be done in a reasonable amount of time and have a reasonable impact.
(Reason is a fragile wing. I feel such perplexity when I try to reach and catch it.)
He and Dr. Vacanti met in the mid-1970s as young researchers in the lab of Dr. M. Judah Folkman.
Their lab has produced a wide range of body parts—cartilage, bone, ureters, intestines.
In 1986, while standing in shallow water at Cape Cod, Dr. Vacanti noticed the seaweed’s branching networks. It occurred to him to seed cells along branching scaffolds like theirs.
(I don’t know if they have families. I don’t know what they like to eat.)
They are in search of “elegant solutions.”
Dr. Vacanti has seen many of his pediatric patients suffer.
(That he would want to do good, want to heal what can’t itself heal… This I can understand. Was there something in you that you also felt the need to heal?—a powerlessness, some sense of wrongness? Did you think that making me might cover grief with power, cover fear with willfulness, control? But what if you’d believed that a flaw—in you, me, anyone—could be beautiful in its way? That irregularity can be beautiful, lack and damage beautiful? Always I’ve had to ask myself these questions, have lived within these questions …
And what of how cells, experiments, methods for building new tissue, become property and the division of property—profit, loss—immense wealth amid squalid poverty? How to think of the idea of ownership, the idea of being free?)
Notes on Marco Polo
(The more I think I’m finally certain, the more uncertain I become. Even as I hold you in my mind, does this mean I truly know you? I glimpsed you for an instant, then you fled. So much of what I thought was knowledge knots and then undoes itself. I map the routes of you—customs, motives, patterns, cruelties, fears; your face afloat in me in sleep.)
In 1298, in a prison in Genoa, Marco Polo dictated his account of his twenty-four years in Asia to his fellow prisoner, a writer, Rustichello.
They called their account A Description of the World: “Here you will find all the greatest marvels and the great diversities …”
The book is also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, and Il Milione (A Thousand Marvels).
Of the 150 medieval and Renaissance versions known, no two are exactly alike. No copy of the original exists.
In the “F Text,” considered the most reliable, the book is sometimes referred to as “my” book, sometimes as “ours.”
(I picture them in their cell, two strangers become friends. Rustichello writing in Franco-Italian, asking, “What did you see?” Marco leaning close to him, saying with the confidence of one who has seen many things and so knows the diversity of the world, “In the Baku peninsula there is a fountain which jets oil in great abundance, not good to eat but good to burn,” and “In the province of Cathay is a sort of black stone that is dug from mountains where it runs in veins. When lighted it retains fire much better than does our wood. It gives heat through a whole night and the next morning.” When they tire, they lie down on the hard floor, and if Polo has spoken of a city with twelve thousand bridges, they walk among those bridges, waves slapping stone arches, gold light on the water.)
Laurie Sheck Page 14