Laurie Sheck

by A Monster's Notes (v5)

  But the brother and sister XXXX did they XX and if-but It’s getting cold now, the garden will get its first frost soon, any day.

  What of the sister’s empty room? How he passed it many times each day, though he’d always thought he’d be the one to die first—

  And of those taken into the lazar houses it was written: “The leper brothers are to remain by themselves, and likewise the sisters by themselves. They are to have four fires a day as needed for which they will receive two baskets of peat. Every Sunday they are to receive ten white loaves, five for the brothers and five for the sisters. All are to work together for the house and allow no harm to come to it. They are to have a bier for carrying the dead.”

  In the harshness of but no form of attachment can Often I think I wouldn’t know you if I saw you again

  In the foreground of one fresco, the butcher shop’s barred window—

  The man in torn clothes I wrote you of—he’s wearing just one shoe and is off in a corner away from the others—what do the others think of him why do they let him sit there why is he there what is he doing?

  I must close I’ve got to stop now

  Think of the clear mountain water rushing alongside these winding streets—

  Your Friend,

  My Friend, in your last letter you started to write “but no form of attachment can” and then you stopped and crossed it out but I’ve been wondering, No form of attachment can—can what? and the suffering you feel and this question of your open eyes

  Zhuangzi writes of the “blindness of the mind.” I feel this acutely in myself I don’t know how to

  I don’t know how to write to you today

  XX

  Mon—mend shirt

  Tues—buy more ink

  ”qin” means “lute”

  ask Mr. Lin about the “torch of chaos and doubt”

  TRANSLATION OF CAO XUEQIN’S 8TH NOTE:

  A month of dust storms. I stay inside reading Zhuangzi. Only Zhuangzi. Even indoors my lungs burn and my eyes sting. I’ve caulked the window with rags. For over five weeks Red Inkstone hasn’t come. Animals walk with blinded eyes. Sometimes I dream sand’s falling around me faster than I can dig it away I try to speak but make only choking sounds. No sooner is the road cleared than it vanishes. There are so many maimed, deformed people in Zhuangzi’s book. Some have only one foot, one is so bent and crooked his chin nearly touches his navel, his left shoulder juts up above his head. The leper woman fears she’ll give birth to a child covered with sores. Yet Zhuangzi finds beauty in all this. If a man is cast aside he’s useless and to Zhuangzi that’s a form of freedom, of goodness. “The cinnamon can be eaten and so it gets cut down, the lacquer tree can be used and so it gets hacked apart.” Better to be useless. The man who’s seen as undesirable, maybe he can become free? No one wants or asks anything of him, or expects him to be other than he is. I sit inside and listen to the swarming dust. Lambs and goats stumbling and bleating.

  Clerval’s grown thinner, sometimes his hands shake. Now when he isn’t translating he’s reading Zhuangzi. Often he looks puzzled as he reads. Why can I see his face, often his whole body, whereas Claire came to me only in pieces, and mostly with her face turned away?

  It seems what you thought of as my ugliness wouldn’t have bothered Zhuangzi. What I’ve hated in myself he wouldn’t have hated.

  Clerval sits in his hard wooden chair for hours. Sometimes he speaks a few stories from the Zhuangzi out loud (I watch the small movements of his lips), or picks up his pen, translates a passage here and there:

  “One day when Carpenter Shih comes home after rejecting an old, rotting oak tree, it appears to him in a dream. ‘You said I was a worthless tree, that boats made out of my timbers would sink, coffins quickly rot, and vessels break at once. But what are you comparing me with? Those useful trees, the pear, the cherry, the apple?—as soon as their fruit is ripe they’re yanked around, torn apart, and subjected to all sorts of abuse. Their utility makes life miserable for them. But I—I long to be of no use, and though I almost died I’ve finally caught on.’

  “The tree paused, then continued:

  “‘What’s the point of this—things condemning things? Why do you do this? Why did you bother to speak of me in that way?’”

  I could ask the same of you, and of myself.

  Maybe I’m like that oak tree and what you thought of as my repulsive form isn’t so horrible at all. But that oak was part of the natural world—nature made it what it was. And I—I don’t know if that’s the case with me. You made me. If the workings of your mind were, in the end, a distortion of nature, a betrayal of and faithlessness toward nature, then what am I?

  In any case the question holds: “What’s the point of things condemning things?”

  As you condemned me. As I condemned myself, and still do, wishing to be other than I am.

  Aosta, October 17 27

  My Friend,

  It seems so much of what we take into our minds is random, disorganized, haphazard. Why do I know about tallow trees, for instance? I remember that they’re tall XXXXXXX and grow in China, and that their seeds, when crushed and boiled, yield the tallow to make candles. I wonder if you’ve seen them. This, too, I somehow know, though maybe it’s not true: on the road to the monastery of Tien-Dong every 29th stone is engraved with a lotus blossom, and in that monastery the monks wear mantles made of bits of fabric sewn roughly together so that, however fine the cloth, their robes look like a patchwork of rags.

  XXX I’ve gotten afraid of the way my mind is interfering with XXX but then why do I write to you XXX why do I XXX

  But in truth I keep thinking more and more about the sister. It feels-how can I put it?—that she waits inside my mind. XX And when she sat under the walnut tree XXX and what did she XXX and did she read there and which books? I don’t know why I Her eyes, were they locked wide like mine? Her room is XXX I’ve never stepped into her room. But years ago I found a piece of paper crumpled in a crack beside her door:

  Of the two ointments recommended the following may be given:

  Oil of eucalyptus (15.0 ml)

  Honey (60.0 ml)

  Cod liver oil (60.0 ml)

  Zinc oxide (28.4 grm.)

  Bis. Subn. (56.7 grm.)

  If the pupil still does not dilate satisfactorily the following subconjunctival injection may be given:

  Atropine sulphate (0.016 grm.)

  Cocaine (0.03 grm.)

  Distilled water (6.00 ml)

  What am I that I copy this out for you, send this to you?

  monstrous unforgivable or

  How quiet she must have been all those hours she spent under the walnut tree, such quiet she lived in. Her footsteps on the very stones my feet touch daily. More and more I’m drawn to her room, the brass latch on her closed door. I’m sorry XXX I didn’t mean to and of course XXX but I will try again later will still try XXX

  Your Friend,

  … The monks in their patchwork rags … and I a patchwork … and the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me …

  Aosta, November 7

  My Friend,

  For so many weeks I watched my mind moving away from itself, I don’t know how else to put it. Even the air, which I often stared into for hours at a time, seemed more visible, less intact, inside it minute particles swirled and collided—small brightnesses flaring then flickering away. My mind, as I felt it, was several minds at once, clumps of cells, obsessive and enslaved, spinning tightly wound in their strict orbits, then circling farther outward. Everything breaking I saw the frescoed bodies at Issogne become atomized—the objects were still there—baskets filled with fruit, shoes hung on the rack—but the people, the people, they were ashes, dust, swirling in an otherwise calm world. I lived within that breakage, and when I thought of you it was like looking through a dust-storm, your face a crumbling cage of dust.

  That’s over now. Even as I write I’m not making mistakes, as you can
see. I’m not needing to cross out. But what am I to make of what overtook me? My eyes still remain mostly open, and they sting. There’s no reason to hope this will change.

  I think there’s no known world. I don’t know what awaits me. It’s myself that shape-shifts, changes, grows errant, not the world.

  The garden’s less lush now. On one of the mountains there’s a snow-peak shaped like a horn. When the sun sets one half of it glows rose, while the other half darkens. Looking at that slender horn of light, I think of Sordello leading Dante and Virgil toward Purgatory’s gates. It’s nearly sunset; the edges of the valley glow. He explains the Law of Ascent; that no one can go upward after sundown. “There,” he says, “where the mountain makes a lap among its folds: that is the place where we may wait until the new day breaks.” And of the souls nearby, Sordello says, “You can observe them from this rise and follow their actions better, singly and en masse, than if you moved among them in the hollow.”

  Is this how we track each other, you and I, from this rise which is our separateness, these ways that we’re apart?

  In the end Dante drinks from Lethe and the Eunoe, of course, and is purified and set free— “I came back from those holiest of waters new, remade, reborn,” he says, “healed of Winter’s scars; perfect, pure and ready for the stars.”

  So foreign to me, that idea of being “pure,” of being “healed.” I wonder what you’re learning in the East? Or should I say unlearning in the East? This silence between us. Lit snow on the mountain. Winter’s scar—

  Your Friend

  Goddess of the Walnut Tree

  Goddess of Atropine Sulphate

  Goddess of the Atomized

  Goddess of the Rotting Oak

  Zhuangzi’s oak said of the fruit trees, their utility makes life miserable for them. Yet I sit here all day translating, trying to be useful. I don’t know what to do anymore. My friend’s eyelids aren’t useful. But they come into my mind and I feel I’m witnessing something wonderful, exciting (is it awful to say this, and cruel?)—that in their uselessness they’re somehow suddenly alive, the whole idea of eyelids suddenly alive. As if, though I’ve seen them my whole life, I’ve never really seen them before. My head aflame with thousands upon thousands of eyelids. Is my translating useful at all, do I even do it to be useful? I do it because I like the look of characters and letters, brown ink and black, the feel of paper under my hand. I do it because the word “oak tree” suddenly appears and then “subjected to” and Carpenter Shih walks into my mind and I look at him and not at my neighbor who’s perfectly nice or this street with its covering of dust, or the man selling melons from his cart

  Aosta, November 11

  My Friend,

  But the sister. The walnut tree. The crumpled paper. I said I was calm, and I was—my mind no longer so many spinning, breaking minds. I wrote to you of Dante, Virgil, Sordello—I remember it all. I could write that to you, couldn’t I?—I remember sitting calmly at my table. My letter was of the sunset, the hidden, purification, “being healed.” I felt how the figures at Issogne had grown intact again, their graceful forms no longer atomized. I remember being grateful. I remember the feeling of Clarity. The simple beauty of a working hand. The working hands of the figures at Issogne.

  What is necessity what is choice? And of what is the ongoing astonishment of solitude composed? that astonishment so plain in its way, and daily, yet how can astonishment be plain? XXX the mind’s stalwart or delicate faithfulness each tender detonation I XXX

  Her room was as she’d left it. Bed, desk, chair, a wooden dresser with four drawers, eight knobs. A bookcase beneath the sunlit window which framed the horn-shaped snow peak. How could they not have emptied the room before I came? Her clothes still in the drawers, and the little book she kept in which she noted the changes in the garden, what she was reading, reactions to medicines, a few poems she’d copied in her careful hand.

  Why hadn’t they burned all of her things? Taken them away? I touched the white sleeve of her blouse.

  And no more than eight healthy brothers and sisters shall live in the leper house to care for the sick. When either a sick or healthy brother or sister dies their possessions shall remain in the house, and their belongings shall be used by the remaining brothers and sisters and must not be taken away. They shall be used by the brothers if the deceased was a brother, and by the sisters if the deceased was a sister.”

  “No brother or sister shall pass out of that house beyond the bryde.”

  “No brother or sister may disclose, utter or betray any of the secrets of their house, and if by due proof they are convicted of such, shall have but bread and water for thirty days.”

  What do you thinks of this trespass of mine? I know I should not have XXX On the old Roman Road, cruelty, brutality.

  My cruelty more veiled and quiet, if it is that.

  The white sleeve was smooth and soft like my lilies, or any new-formed leaf.

  Your Friend,

  My Friend,

  I—I see you standing in the sister’s room. You touch the white sleeve of her blouse, and I’m touching it too. Why do we need to inhabit another’s gestures, another’s mind? How does this happen? Why does the brain need to dream and imagine at all, to transfer, transpose, and sew, and layer?

  on my fingertips the softness of a sleeve not the roughness of this wooden table

  I don’t want to see or feel these things anymore. Don’t want to think of the sister, the empty room, the white sleeve. If I could leave here for just a few days XXXXXXXXX but where would I go? and with what money? XXX I— XX You think of the sister you lift the latch, walk into her room and I?—I think of Daiyu choosing to die I sit here translating her dying and sometimes it seems wrong—that I’m stripping a veil from her, peeling off her clothes that I have no right to XXX that I XXX “and no brother or sister may disclose, utter or betray any secrets of their house.” But if anyone betrayed Daiyu, it’s Cao Xueqin. He wrote her pain, laid it open on the page.

  My Friend,

  I hold your letters and think of the sister, her white sleeve, her wooden dresser. I think of you standing in that room, then of Daiyu who is choosing to die. She knows she and Baoyu will never marry, and she’s never felt at home in the world. Not even when she wasn’t sick and coughing. She lies on her bed in Bamboo Lodge, feverish, cold. No one comes. Her illness is kept secret from Baoyu. She burns her manuscript book and the white handkerchief Baoyu gave her, then takes three sips of pear juice and dried-longan syrup from a spoon (why does she bother?). Says she wants to go home.

  I translate all this as the light builds and fades, and I feel somehow traitorous, unclean.

  While on my page the maids are laying out Daiyu’s afterlife-clothes, you stand in the sister’s empty room. I think of her fragile body, of the mind not wanting to be in it anymore. Her mind much like your eyes that won’t close—relentless, unsparing, fixed in place.

  I’d like to leave here for just a few days. I don’t want to hear this much quiet.

  Your words are eyes staring from each page. And the gaze inscrutable, though you say you want to write “plainly” and you do. It’s been such a long time since we spoke. I can hear the crickets singing in their bamboo cages.

  Your Friend,

  Clerval

  Clerval reads of the stones of the old Roman road, all the carnage that broke over them, and I walk among old stones, almost feel the seconds breaking over them, each with its brief and too-thin skin.

  If I could go to Nothing At All Town what would become of those seconds, would they follow? And my clapper, my hood, would I still need them? Would each memory of Claire and Clerval, even you, break and flame out? Would I come upon that tree deemed useless by Carpenter Shih, its ruined leaves suddenly beautiful to my eyes, its battered trunk rough and peaceful where it leans?

  But I’m not in Nothing At All Town or in Vast Nothing Wilds. I watch Clerval holding the letters, his sad face as he reads and rereads. His lips moving
as he says out loud to no one, “the sister, the white sleeve.”