Laurie Sheck

by A Monster's Notes (v5)

  My Friend,

  I had a few feverish days but I’m better. I think it was my thoughts that made me sick. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I must look like when I sleep, each blank and staring eye wide open. Maybe I wanted to hurt myself in that way, focusing as I did on what seemed to me a horrible sight. At least no one can see me. But I see myself in my own mind, and what am I to do about that?

  I think about how the cornea is meant to be protected. How, like the mind, the body needs a way to close itself off. These visible or secret shelters of ourselves …

  I’m still too tired to write much. I’ve traveled far, but I’ve gone nowhere. I think, of Polo, of the soldiers on the Roman road. The world remakes itself in strangeness. Unshelters itself always. Even in my garden, my tower, even here.

  Maybe this is why the brother and sister who lived here before me couldn’t bear to look upon each other’s face. They would have seen how far they had traveled from what they’d thought of as themselves, each other, the world.

  Have you seen the elaborate temples carved into stone cliffs, and the many decorated statues inside them? Is it true that, unlike them, the Confucian temples are stark and nearly bare? I think I would like those best of all, though I know some call them cold.

  I must stop now.

  As Ever, Your Friend,

  Cao Xueqin, I picture you and Red Inkstone, two friends hunched over a manuscript, looking into each other’s eyes. Once he signs himself “Winter Night,” I don’t know why. But my friend in Aosta can’t close his eyes, can’t… and I’m far away from him. If I knocked on his door he wouldn’t let me in

  Working notes

  Guanyin is the Goddess of Mercy Goddess of the hood and clapper Goddess of eyesight Goddess of Lekythos and Issogne Goddess of locked doors

  X

  XX

  Baoyu says odd things yet I find this makes him all the more believable.

  Says, “Last night I dreamed the spirit of the apricot tree came to me to ask for a string of white paper money.”

  I wonder if Red Inkstone wanted this small dream taken out. Too many dreams in this book, he said.

  XX

  Goddess of the lame Goddess of fires

  My Friend, What words aren’t weak and unconvincing against affliction? What intricacies or plainness of argument don’t falter and collapse? I think of your eyes and XXX cannot XXX and now lost XXX each locked window bolted door

  XX

  Cao Xueqin writes of Baoyu: “His cheek was badly blistered but luckily no damage had been done to his eyes.”

  When Daiyu is ill she grows ashamed and wants no one to see her, turns her face to the wall.

  I close my eyes and obliterate the smoke trees on the hillside. Open them, bring them back. Close, open, close. A child’s game, but not. Then I’m looking out on the floating city of Canton. All that water one large eye that can’t close.

  My Friend,

  When the Goddess of Disenchantment comes to Baoyu in a dream she hands him the manuscript book of twelve songs called The Red Chamber Dream. “Read this,” she says, but also warns, “These songs are our laments for mortal people and worldly events, no outsider can truly understand their meaning At first they will seem to you as bland as chewed wax.” And in fact, Baoyu sees at first “no merit in these disjointed, cryptic songs.” He’s attached to this world of silks, swords and servants, the various flowers in his garden, delicacies carried on trays, teas brewed from the purest snow-water. (But you know this already from my other letters, the letters I don’t send.) Still, he listens as the songs are sung, and reads the text before him.

  (Why do I tell you this, my Friend? The Goddess wants Baoyu to look past this world of appearances, yet you can’t stop looking even for one second-is there a way one can look at the world and still look past it? Do you close your eyes inside your mind? I think of you being forced to read the world over and over, and I wish I could … I don’t know what comfort is anymore, I suspect I never knew. The Goddess calls Baoyu by name, speaks to him directly, but I, who have no powers or songs like hers, how am I to reach you? I don’t even know your name.)

  “Those who see through the world escape from the world,” says one song. And another: “What remains of the generals and statesmen of old?/Nothing but an empty name.”

  But my friend, what of your eyes that can’t “escape from the world” as the song put it? Your eyes that can’t turn away? What of your hidden, secret name? You sit in the sun, or lie in bed at night, always with those wide-open eyes, but does something in your eyes turn inward? “You must realize the vanity of love in your dusty world,” the Goddess tells Baoyu. So often in books there’s this image of the world as dust and our needing to look past it. But it’s real dust that hurts your eyes, the cornea stings and festers.

  In many passages in Cao Xueqin’s novel, Baoyu’s encouraged to look through this world of appearances. At one point he’s told the story of a wealthy man who goes to Shaozhou in search of a teacher. Finally he finds him in a monastery on Mount Huangmei where he takes work as a cook to be near him. Each day from behind the kitchen door he listens to the monks composing Buddhist gatha. One morning the most senior disciple recites:

  The body is a Bodhi tree,

  The mind a mirror clear;

  Then keep it cleaned and polished–

  Let no dust settle there

  The man’s hulling rice in the kitchen when he hears this. For years he’s spoken almost nothing. But now he recites his own version of that song:

  The Bodhi tree is no tree,

  The mirror no mirror clear;

  Since nothing actually exists,

  Where can any dust appear?

  The teacher hears this from the other side of the door, opens it, passes on to him his robe and alms bowl.

  How little I know of you. Not even your name. Nothing in the mind is clear or clean or polished. And still I keep thinking of your eyes, that something hurts your eyes and they don’t close. I lie in the dark, feel how my own eyelids shut as in gentle protection. As if they were another’s careful hands. I don’t know what’s real in the world, this place of no-mirror. When I sleep I dream of Baoyu and Daiyu but not of the man next door or the tree outside my window.

  “The Bodhi tree is no tree.” You who I can’t see, I think of how the eyes need shelter, even if the world (our world such as it is) isn’t real.

  Your Friend,

  Clerval

  Why does my mind return to you the way dreams return to the site of a fire? As now, Clerval returns to the letters describing the leper hospital, the atlas, the island of Gloskar—each page that gave him nightmares. He leaves his translation work untouched, barely lifts his eyes as he reads, rereads. When evening comes he doesn’t open a new one but picks up his pen and writes another letter he won’t send.

  My Friend,

  I never answered your question about the Confucian temples, if they’re stark the way you’d like them to be. There’s one not far from here, the Kong Miao, with beautiful old cypresses in the courtyard—the oldest trees in Peking. But I wouldn’t call it stark. You approach through a large gate, then two sets of steps lead to Great Achievement Hall. Between them, on a huge turquoise stone, dragons fly through fire and water. Farther on there’s another hall with large stone tablets engraved with the names of Confucian scholars, over 50,000 from three entire dynasties; also numerous steles on which Confucius’ Thirteen Classics are engraved. There’s a building called the Pavilion for Sacrificial Animals and another called the Well Pavilion. And others still… So you see, it’s quite elaborate, though it was much smaller and plainer, I’m told, when first built in 1304.

  Maybe somewhere far from here there’s a starker, simpler temple. Often I’ve imagined it. A bare room of uninterrupted quiet (but is there such a thing as uninterrupted quiet?) with one stele or two propped against a wall. But what could the words on those steles even say? Maybe they’d best be left blank.

  You have your tow
er and your solitude, though your solitude is never simple, I know. And in that solitude you want to hear about distant temples, their quiet resembling yours but inhabited by others. I, too, would choose the plainest temple, the plainest room. What if the words on those steles were indecipherable? What if there were no steles at all—

  Your Friend,

  Clerval

  Aosta, October 8

  My Friend,

  My mind wanders—forgive me. The quiet and solitude in which I live is more and more a labyrinth where I turn one corner then another not knowing what I’ll find. I never know what I might come to next-past or future, my own face or yours, the copper mines dug into the hillsides, or the narrow, winding streets where I once walked—the Rue du Foller, the Rue des Prisons …

  I wonder about the brother and sister who lived here before me. Did they visit the frescoes at Issogne? Did they go together more than once? Did they think back to them years later, especially to the one of the apothecary with its neat row of nineteen labeled jars lined up on a shelf behind a man weighing medicine on a scale, his hand delicately poised, as if a hand were a mind that could contemplate, assess, decide. Did they wonder, as I do, about the man in torn clothing sitting in a corner of the shop, using a large mortar and pestle. One foot is bare. His left elbow pokes through his sleeve. His face is dirty. Why is he there? The finely dressed woman, the only customer in the shop, turns the other way.

  I can’t XXX and the corners keep coming, the turns XXX and I can’t XXX and if you

  When you were here did you see the old Roman arch, the Triumphal Arch of Augustus as it’s called? It’s visible from my window where it frames a view of mountains and glaciers. But the thing that’s always puzzled me is that it’s blank—there’s nothing carved on it at all. All the slaughtering and conquering that led to it, the wiping out of the entire Salassi people (and of those not killed, 36,000 were sold as slaves) and yet the arch is blank. How could that have happened? Even its pillars are plain, not fluted. Why would there be no inscription, not a single leaf or figure, not one word of triumph? Often I turn the corner of this labyrinth in which I live and it’s there, suddenly, before me: that question of blankness, that arch of gneiss and quartz that expresses nothing, states nothing, depicts nothing. Or is it the dulled shadow of a prideful power? Or could it be a hooded face? Or a face that has no features? Or is it a cold refusal to account? A summons at once arrogant and sealed… I don’t know … I only …

  Forgive me, I XXXXXXXXXX

  After the sister died, did the brother remember alone? Did he think, of Issogne?

  And when he passed the walnut tree under which she used to sit…

  XXX and when he passed XXXXXXX

  But have I told you that alongside some of Aosta’s streets, streams of cool, fresh water from the mountains still run clean? Sometimes I hear them, though I’m told that’s not possible from here.

  I hope you’re well. That you carry some warmth in your sleeves.

  Your Friend,

  I’ve said my mind returns to you, always to you. Yet the more I watch Clerval as I watched Claire, the more you start to fade, sometimes for whole hours at a time. When I dream I dream of the leper’s eyes, not yours. I dream of those who’ll never dream of me.

  I say their names as I walk or watch or sleep: Claire. Clerval. (I carry my clapper, don my hood.) Claire. Air. Care. Clerval. Clear. Err.

  Claire: Care:

  I’ve learned that care has more meanings than I thought. It’s another name for the tree called Mountain Ash, though I never thought that care could be a tree. It’s an archaic term for a textile used for cloaks. It means to sorrow and to grieve, to mourn and to lament. It’s mental suffering, and the expression of that suffering. Mourning dress is called the cloth of care. A care-bed is a bed of grief.

  Yet care means less sad things as well: it’s the “charging of the mind with anything,” and is “regard arising from desire, inclination.”

  One gives care, takes care of. The shepherd “tends his fleecy care.” A man stands guard “with watchful Eye Fix’d on his youthful Care.”

  As I fix mine on Clerval and Claire and Clerval’s friend …

  In the name Clerval, I also hear: to “err,” from the Latin errare, which means to wander, stray, roam, ramble.

  (How would I even have come to know their faces if I hadn’t been forced to wander from the start?)

  Birds “err upon their course.” And: “He erred so ferre by strange londes that he passed the flood of Ganges.” Clerval would like that line, having come to live so far from where he started. Men “erre Within the wildernesse.” You erred within a wilderness of mind as I did, and still do.

  When you first began to make me, didn’t you set out on a course you couldn’t possibly understand? Then I opened my eyes and you pulled back, became a rigid, frightened man. You found yourself in another wilderness where everything was frozen, and then it froze in me.

  the delicate tissue of the vulnerability of

  If I could know your name

  XXX

  Baoyu’s name means that which is most precious and solid. It’s said to protect him.

  “You referred to him by name,” a woman from outside the mansion’s gates accuses Baoyu’s faithful servant, Qingwen.

  “You should call him ‘Young Master.’ Using his name shows lack of respect.”

  “So I called him by his name, did I?” Qingwen replies, flushed with anger … “As for using his name, we’ve done that since he was a child— on the Empress Dowager’s orders. At his birth didn’t they have his name written out and posted up everywhere so that everybody would use it, for fear that otherwise he might die young? Why, even the water-carriers, night-soil collectors, and beggars use it. The more it’s said the more he’s protected. You don’t have any business here—go back to mucking about outside the gate where you belong.”

  But I call you no name, I call you My Friend, I call you … I don’t know … there’s no name to protect you …

  I want to say your name as Cao Xueqin said “Red Inkstone” and the two looked into each other’s eyes

  TRANSLATION OF CAO XUEQIN’S 7th NOTE:

  Sometimes I start to get very cold. I fear for Baoyu. He has no interest in status, honors, official advancement. How will he protect himself? It’s not up to me to protect him. I have to take him down this path. But sometimes I just want to stop, pull back, close my eyes, shut out his fevers, his wounds, the way he has to walk with a cane. His family’s crumbling, their money and luck’s running out. The dynasty’s corrupt. Red Inkstone says I have to be accurate, not pull back from what I see. Daiyu will die because there’s no place for her in this world—she won’t be allowed to marry Baoyu, it’s not in the family’s interest. She won’t marry out of duty her spirit refuses to be fettered—there’s no one else she loves. She’ll burn all her manuscript books. But sometimes I just don’t want to write it, don’t want to see it in front of my eyes

  I remember preparing for the state examinations. Of course I was expected to become an official like my father. I read and read. But one day when I looked up my mind went black, then I saw in that blackness Zhuangzi’s words, white as phosphorus: “Why not plant it in Nothing At All Town or in Vast Nothing Wilds?”—Just that.

  Aosta, October 15

  My Friend,