Her lists of words included: Sequel. Accretion.
She kept the business cards of: World Plastic Extruders; Joe & Manny (General Contracting of all kinds); Alfred Covered Wire; Toy Balloon Corporation; John Boyle & Co. (Outdoor, Industrial, Marine Fabrics); Paris Lighting Fixture Co.; Arko Metal Products, and AEGIS Reinforced Plastics. (Manufacturers/Consultants).
She died in New York City on May 29, 1970.
Notes on Albertus Magnus
He believed contemplation is the highest form of human happiness.
He asked many questions.
“Do there exist many worlds or is there but a single world?” “Does the sight of the pains of the lost diminish the glory of the beautified?” Of what is our intelligence composed? What is the distinction between truths naturally known and truths that are mysteries?
This was in Germany, in the thirteenth century.
(Those days when I read behind the bushes, the words lifted me over threshold after threshold yet I never moved. All those dirty pages found in gutters—even the ripped ones, those with missing parts, still posed their questions, and each question was a wound and partial healing: “The proper names of things are the rays by which we”—by which we what? Or, “Why is the race of man so timorous as to need to believe more in things that are not, than in things that are?”)
He built a Box of Secrets. Three sides were lead, three gold engraved with the signs of planets.
(Mary also had a secret box. She took it with her to France when she ran off with Shelley. But somewhere along the way she lost it.)
Nothing much is known of his early education. Most who knew him thought him exceedingly slow.
(When I consider that word “slow,” I wonder why it’s used to indicate some lack or flaw. Clerval, translating, considered so many choices, ways of saying, pausing to wonder which was best, knowing there’s never one that’s perfect. Why shouldn’t such choosing be slow? I think of the “owe” in slow—how feeling one owes the world an honest faithfulness, and trying to fulfill that, can be mistaken for malingering, distractedness, forestalling.)
When he was a child, a woman in white came to him in a dream. This happened more than once.
“She appeared to me again, her white veil stained crimson, the scent of vanilla in the air …”
One night she leaned close to his ear, breath warm against his skin and asked, “At what would you like to excel?” Cold dark air all around him, the others sleeping in the quiet house … “I would like to do philosophy.” She told him she’d grant his wish, then whispered, “because you don’t choose to study divinity, this will be your punishment: some years before you die you will forget, suddenly, everything you know.”
He never saw her again.
(Did he think of her often after that, as I think of you? Did he draw that crimson veil into his mind, wonder how it came to be stained? Where had she gone? Would she ever come back? Why the scent of vanilla, not cinnamon or roses? If she ever came back to him— though he knew she wouldn’t—would her veil be white, or must it always remain stained? Sometimes, unthinking, did he feel her warm breath at his ear?)
He built a brass man named Android. This took him thirty years.
It’s said to have uttered sounds to him. He asked it many questions.
(Speaking to it, did he think of the woman in his dream, how she came to him and whispered, all the ways he wanted her back? In building it, was he trying to find her replacement?—though that idea’s too reductive, straightforward, unlayered.)
His friend and former pupil, Thomas Aquinas, believed the Android was evil and had it destroyed.
Alone as he was, he continued writing books and teaching; took years paraphrasing the complete works of Aristotle for others to study.
Convinced that Aristotle had produced certain works now missing, he made them up himself.
(As I imagined writing in Mary’s margins, amplifying, correcting. As Red Inkstone wrote among the words of Cao Xueqin. As anyone who reads leaves invisible markings in the margins as they wander among another’s thoughts.)
His writings range over vast areas of inquiry: logic, mineralogy, psychology, metaphysics, zoology, meteorology, botany.
He paraphrased Euclid, Porphyry, Boethius, Peter Lombard, Gilbert de la Porrée, and Pseudo-Dionysius.
Legend claims one day he turned a snowy garden into a garden of green leaves and singing birds for an entire afternoon. (This I don’t believe.)
“Do things exist in themselves or are they the constructions of our minds?”
The intelligence can accomplish “a summoning of the good.” The essence of the human soul is its intellect.
In De Mineralibus he wrote, “The aim of natural science is not simply to accept the statements of others, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature.”
(I remember Aristotle wrote, “Memory is a form of investigation,” wondered if Mary would agree. And myself a question, and every thing I think a question.)
He believed in direct observation, rejected the notion of the music of the spheres.
He valued silence as an integral component of music.
(Mary, Claire, Clerval… all those years there was such silence as I watched, and yet I somehow heard them.)
He wrote about the sleep of plants, the origins of riverbeds, the character of light in the air’s lower strata.
One day late in his life he suddenly forgot everything he knew.
Three years before his death, the archbishop knocked on his door and asked if he was there.
“Albertus Magnus isn’t here,” he replied. “He used to be here. He is not here anymore.”
He died in Cologne, Germany, on November 15, 1280.
METROPOLIS/THE RUINS AT LUNA
They’re all gone now—Claire, Mary, Allegra, Clerval, his friend in Aosta, Shelley under the sea. I can’t watch their hands move across their secret pages, or how they hold themselves in sleep.
I’m here in a city of neon and digital billboards, news zippers, vibrating pixels swarming to make faces. Vast terrain of glass and steel and blasted towers.
I don’t watch Claire picking out her silent letters anymore, or Clerval folding his friend’s last letter, putting it back onto the stack. I don’t lean to hear the rustle of paper, the scratch of a pen across a page (though all that time I watched I could hear nothing).
I remember Lerici, I still see the ruins at Luna. And ice caps, lepers’ hoods, Chinese gardens (how each section of a garden had a name, but I have no name).
In this abandoned building, the cold sea I crossed to get here still swells and withdraws inside my bones. And all those years I crossed—their silences are walls, lost countries.
Lerici. Archangel. The sea.
There’s a sea, also, in this book someone left here. By the light of my bare bulb I read of whale calves feeding from their mothers even as harpoons rain down around them. Then: “But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being … I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.” Did Claire ever feel that, or Clerval?—how the waters aren’t wholly terrible even as they fill with carnage.
I close my eyes, feel them through the skin of distance. Claire. Clerval. Their absences more loud than anything, louder, even, than yours.
Baoyu walks off into the snow. The Goddess of Consolation does or doesn’t come. Claire stands at her cold window. Clerval sleeps with his head on the table, then steps outside to watch the smoke trees in the distance. His friend can’t close his eyes.
Aosta. Cape Mary Harmsworth. Lerici. Issogne. Great Slave Lake. The ruins at Luna.
Outside: car horns, car alarms, buzzings and rumblings from things I can’t see. The dark here glows and shudders. The birds don’t sleep. Wires cross the sky.
Those years I watched Claire and Clerval, I wondered what would they think if they could see me? My black lips and yellow eyes, my odd proportions, all the signs of something botched, unwanted. Would they have run from me as others ran?
But here I step outside and it seems no one sees me. Not the hurrying ones, or the slower ones dragging a bad leg, carrying too many packages in their arms.
I don’t know if I walk on the street or in my mind.
Back inside, I dust off rows of books propped up where the floorboards meet the walls, live awhile among the whale calves who “though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights” serenely revel. They eye the whalers quietly. Beyond them lies the frantic wall of whales who know they’re being hunted. But could the whale calves also know this? Can panic grow so deep it turns to a strange calm and stillness?
Above the nursing calves the water’s almost delicate, unstricken. Whalers have a name for this, a “sleek,” that “enchanted calm … at the heart of every commotion.”
Claire’s face. Clerval’s. I felt that sleek-like presence as I watched. How there was a calm that bound me to others, that arose because I felt bound to those others, though neither could see me. And though I’ve lost them, like the whale calves that see the whalers yet look past them, I look past these walls and remember what I saw.
Cold in here. No heater. Sirens cut the sky. The windows glitter, cracked and damp above the rush-hour traffic.
Last night I met Claire in a dream. It wasn’t the same as watching her, but grayer, more impoverished. It was strange to hear her speak:
“You left me standing in Moscow in the cold. What did you think you were doing? Why didn’t you try to find me after that? Instead you took up with Clerval, got all wrapped up with Clerval. Maybe you’re more like Victor than you think. You take such an interest in my walls, seize them for your own. But what do you know about walls? Allegra lived and died behind walls, but you, in truth you probably crave them … Look how you watched me all those years and not once did you ever try to reach me.”
Across the street, a stone mouth’s been blasted away. Nearby, on St. Marks Place, two limestone eyes can’t close behind their iron grating.
I lie down on the floorboards, think of whale calves, try to sleep.
My book says a wall is “a structure built around a garden,” “a site of torture,” “a wailing place,” “the steep portion of a wave about to break.”
In my sleep, the whale calves circle far from the frantic wall of whales. What gentle bond holds them not in slavery but in trust, and is that trust a kind of freedom?
Waking, I take another book from the floor. Inside it Bartleby stares at the wall, barely speaks. He works as a clerk in an office on Wall Street, his small window facing a brick wall.
“Here is the money, you must go,” says Bartleby’s employer. “But he answered not a word,” just stood there “like the last column of some ruined temple.”
(And my voice long fled. And the things I thought to say but couldn’t.)
He’s been fired but won’t leave. Finally he’s taken as a vagrant to the Tombs where he dies curled up beside the courtyard wall.
The whale calves eye me unafraid—am I sure they’re unafraid?—as they look into my eyes then past me while Bartleby’s still breathing, his pale hands hanging useless at his sides. Does he sense the whale calves, too, though he can’t see them? I can barely tell my breathing from his own as the whale calves circle even closer and still he doesn’t see them, or does he sense them circling, nursing, looking past him in a calm, deceiving wonder. Those calves so vulnerable, their mild, unguarded eyes … Then suddenly I think of Mary, remember that first time I…
But I don’t want to think about that now. Why must I remember that now?
For so many years I tried not to think of her, or thought of her only as Claire’s sister, hazy as through dust storms or smog. I didn’t want her to come back, but she’s come back.
Dear Claire,
Now that we live apart and I don’t see you face to face anymore, now that all but one of my children have died, and your Allegra has died, maybe now I can tell you, but why do I even want to tell you?
I was a girl when he came to me. This was before Shelley. Before France, Italy, any of it. I would go to her grave, sit there wondering what it would be like to have a mother.
I think I have a fever now I think I Truth burns itself up or goes suddenly, horribly cold; it seems there’s no neutrality, no balance (though that’s not what they taught us—I think of Socrates with his measured, steady questions). And when I try to feel what thinking is, it’s not a series of faithfulnesses but of betrayals, treasons, crumblings. (Remember the ruins at Luna?) There’s so much extremity in us, outside of us … and we call it the ordinary, we call it…
I have become a shallow
This is ordinary: I was a body coming out of another body that died. That died because of my body. This is ordinary: famine, oppression, slavery, carnage, misunderstanding, hatred, love, sun, hostility, squalor. Why do we think the ordinary is benign, why do we …
I would sit there like an idiot by her grave, waiting—for what? I was 8, then 9. Some afternoons, some nights …
Thought a violent thing to me, in me (though I kept this mostly to myself). I still feel this, that thinking is a violent act. The smoothness of skin a kind of lie.
When I heard rustling in the bushes, I wasn’t afraid. I’d been sitting there for hours, as usual. He stepped mildly toward me, one large hand over most of his face, his head bowed above hunched shoulders.
But maybe I should stop this right now, say nothing more. I don’t know. So why sign my name at all, and still I sign it—
Your sister,
Mary
But I don’t want to think about this. Why must I think about it now?
I sit on the floor with my computer. I’m not sure what kind it is or how it works, I just found it in a trash bin, brought it back. If I can get the screen to light, the hum that means it’s working, to begin …
The instruction manual refers to “troubleshooting,” “finding information,” and “support.” (Isn’t this the kind of thing you would have mastered in an hour?)
(Mary suddenly quiets as I do this.) (And Claire and Clerval, lost beings from another world.)
Modem. Cable. Control panel. Ethernet. FireWire.
Trackpad. Power button. Safety. Restart. Sleep. Cancel. Shut down.
Brightness controls. Volume controls.
I think again of Bartleby silently facing the brick wall, his hands pale and listless at his sides. As once, long ago, I also wouldn’t speak, or rather, unlike Bartleby, couldn’t, the words violently severed from my throat, and nothing I could do could bring them back.
Claire,
I sat there in St. Pancras graveyard. The end of summer. The River Fleet moving sluggishly nearby.
I don’t understand stillness, I was thinking—I remember this clearly—thinking, what could be odder than stillness though it’s everywhere? Rock. Bone. Knife. Death. Table. My brain ached as I thought this … I was 8 …
He moved very slowly, his chin pressed down and inward where it met his left shoulder.
This is the cemetery of St. Pancras, I said to myself, and St. Pancras is the Patron Saint of Children, but he couldn’t be St. Pancras, his head’s still attached, and he’s too old. Yet he didn’t seem like other humans.
Black lips and yellow eyes. Long black hair.
For weeks he came to me. Mostly he stayed hidden in the bushes, would speak almost nothing of himself. Not even when I asked. Read to me from books. Seemed to know who I was.
It’s the ordinary that frightens—water, rock, stillness, absence, faces. Thriving gardens. Anchors. Skin.
For weeks I listened as he read.
And then this also comes back to me, a voice as from the graveyard—but before the graveyard—I can tell by what it says that it’s her mother’s, though I don’t exactly hear it, it’s more like shapes in air, though shapes more sensed than strictly seen:
William, my hands are cold—I’m writing this in my head so I know you’ll never read it, I couldn’t hold a pen if I wanted to—I know I’m
going to die— The unfound of me the I told you “our animal” would be born today and she was— But there’s something spreading in me I can feel it—It was all an experiment, wasn’t it? I only ever wanted to be a continual experiment. They’ll call it Sepsis or Puerperal fever. They won’t let me nurse her, will say my milk is poison, put puppies to my breasts to drain them—You’ll write the exact time of my death in your notebook, nothing more. You who have so many words—We thought we were going to have a boy, but we were wrong. So she’s a Mary like me. Silence is a refinement on cruelty—A hawk’s wing. A blade. A blank page. I didn’t know chaos could be so serene—Delicate almost, but also fierce—When I gathered watercresses and thyme—Nevermind—My brain’s on fire, I must go into the air—
Laurie Sheck Page 28