If my fever had stripped itself to the core, then found words for what it was, would those have been its words?
William, I lived among watchmakers, engravers, the crippled man pushing his cart of wheat cakes through the grimy streets—Tall elms and banishments and findings—poorhouses, gardens, public squares—I was broken over and over yet intact. When I think of the portrait Opie did of me, I want to take a cloth and smear it—Leave smudges, marks—No clarity of skin, no—Then you wouldn’t know whose it was, that face. Everything’s taken away, nothing’s ever really kept—I would do this to your portrait too. Gray smudge of forehead, eyes—Gray sweep over everything I wanted, fought for, ever was—
The fever kept building, but how could it go on like that? Why was it still building?
The air increasingly colder, sharp, the trees duller, bare.
Sometimes her hand coming as from nowhere, writing of Skinner Street, cattle markets, butcher shops—things I hadn’t seen. And always the feeling that if I parted my lips and tried to speak I’d hemorrhage from the mouth.
Memory is investigation, Aristotle said. But each time I remembered her, part of me went blank. As if I were meant to answer a list of questions written in invisible ink. So how could I investigate? And what was I seeking?
One may conduct investigations into absences, causation (my books had said this). One can do careful and minute research.
And still I thought: fever-tree, fever-nests, “fever-like I feed.”
One can examine systematically, in detail. “This learning… cleare, playne and open that does search or will investigate.”
The bees were “light horsemen investigating where they maie passe.”
If she returned would I read to her of bees, “light horsemen”?
Meanwhile the air continued growing splinters, scars—crevices hidden in plain sight.
Claire,
Increasingly I came to understand the mind doesn’t live in just one place. Skinner Street, Snow Hill, its butcher shops, the horrid public executions—I moved among them but in my thoughts I was often in the graveyard, that place emptied of his voice, emptied, even, of his breathing, faint rush behind the bushes. The sound of nothing there, like the sound of my mother, that’s what I heard. I craved his voice, those hunger-pangs I felt as I’d listened, even those pangs of maybe I hate him and I want to hurt him but I don’t know why. Craved the way his voice had sought me out, but had it ever really sought me? Or had it simply been indifferent all along? Maybe I had to accept that I was of no consequence, meant nothing. Meanwhile I kept thinking of that desolate place I might run off to where no one could find me. I would carry a letter from him, “My Dear Child, I should fear that if I let you regard me with less abhorrence …” I didn’t know what would come next. Maybe, “… the peace and security of your pure mind destroyed …” Something like that. I’d read it in my solitary cottage. I would be the sole depository of my own secret. I’d become as quiet and extreme as he, as voiceless. Hidden. Merciless. Proud—
Then one day the fever stopped. No blood taste in my mouth, no mix of salt and iron (though off and on for years it would come back). Touching my lips, I felt no wetness. I opened my mouth.
All around me branches were honed to extreme versions of themselves, clearer than I’d ever seen. All the edges of things gleaming. And those edges felt helpful—I didn’t know how else to put it and still don’t—they seemed just wholly themselves, far from human feeling. As if sight could cleanse itself, though I knew this would be a temporary feeling.
Still, at that moment I thought branch, dirt, river-sound, books—
The air untouched by the mind’s complications, moving in and out of the lungs. Not ghosted or complicitous or wanting. Not treasonous or fraught or haunted.
Claire,
Dr. Cline came, and Dr. Lawrence. Our father had sent for them. My skin burned, was covered with red scales and itched. My right hand hurt, my right arm felt always weak, sometimes I kept it in a sling. They said “failure to thrive” and “troubled” and “would be good to send her away for a while.” Said, “tensions in the family.” They couldn’t know the graveyard lived in me, or that the far place where desolation would be my only comfort kept looming in my mind. I was the torturer and the tortured, the one who taunted and the one who crumbled, the one who maybe even murdered (Was he alive? Had he left me or had I left him? Had my wish to hurt him landed like a poisoned needle in his brain? Had he stopped breathing?). Once after Aaron Burr visited our father, he came upstairs to our playroom and pretended to have tea, then came back later with presents of elegant stockings which he was too shy to give us—he carried them home in his pocket still secretly folded. I felt like that—like someone who kept something tight inside her pocket—I couldn’t bring myself to stretch out my hand. My skin red, hot, but I had no fever. His letters in my mind, “My dear Child, I have betrayed you …” “My dear Child, we must separate forever.”
If I’d kept reading … If I hadn’t recoiled … If the words hadn’t harmed me (but how had they harmed me?)… If I could have stepped from the bushes … faced her waiting eyes … then what might have become of her and me, how might things have been different?
Claire,
My skin was burning, every thought seared red and burning. Skinner Street, the butchers’ shops, the grave, the air, his voice. Scales on my arms, parched and burning. Why did I feel such pride as I burned? (Ugly nerves, electrified, raw, flailed much too close to the air). Monarch of my own destruction. Was I showing him that no silence or withdrawal—nothing he could inflict—could rival what I inflicted on myself? That I could outdo him? Or was it he who was writing on my skin until I was all fiery scaliness and itch? Or was it all of those and more? His absence an invisible hand, willful, cruel. I lay in the burning sea of my body. Admired in secret my own fortitude. Turned my face to the wall. Spoke to no one. Scratched until I bled, then watched how the skin, temporarily and with patience, mysteriously reknit. Its smooth rebuke of me. Its desolate faithfulness, but to what?
I could read again, but not out loud.
Sometimes her mother’s hand came in air, sometimes hers. Each of them writing.
I held my books close, moved my lips as I read. The smooth or jagged letters rising in my throat, stopping short of open air. Secretive, withheld inside me.
Though my mind netted words and hauled them in, I knew even the smallest was more powerful than I:
“There are many names for rice in its different stages and qualities, e.g., Ku, the ripe grain or husk; Su, paddy; No Mi, glutinous; Mi, hulled; Fan, cooked; etc. Rice straw is employed to make paper, matting, sandals, rope, thatch, fertilizer and cattle fodder.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“But if our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us, how much more so must these millions of lives which are the essence of History, and which we know not and cannot know!”
As I read, I listened for her breathing, the click of pebbles, faint scraping on the gravestone as she left a piece of bread, though I knew I would hear nothing. I hadn’t forgotten her mother’s words: “shut out from humanity,” “How could I be such a monster?” “branded with shame,” but thought maybe I could live with them, carry them not as enemies but as companions speaking of the life I was given to live. I turned this possibility over in my mind, wasn’t sure what I thought.
I waited for her hand, often young but sometimes older, balancing, unbalancing in air. Leaving edges, marks. And I waited for her mother’s hand. But never for yours, though I carried your laboratory notes still folded in my pocket all those years—
William, Our daughter will learn to read from the letters on my gravestone-Will find the words of me but not my body— Those letters arranged, rearranged, to form a world: stone, ray, one, all, far, tower, craft. And
“mar” as in to harm, as in: hamper, hinder, impair, damage—But “mar” also means the sea: Mar Roja, Mar del Norte—That far uncrossable of me—I’ll be the mar that is to trouble and perplex, to grieve—And mare: swift horse, its terrors in the night— Its said a “mare-stone” keeps away all fright, so maybe I’ll be that as well. I’ll be the “mare” which is a snarled thread. How will she ever untangle me— lost and wild in her mind I must leave her this snarl that is my self—knotted— impossible—The flat basaltic planes of the moon are “mares,” once they were considered distant seas—Nights when she looks up, fierce eyes with their perplexities and angers, she’ll see those planes of moon as me, desiccated, lifeless-Monstrous of me to leave her in this way—And yet… and yet… I feel oddly happy, but how can I be happy?—All the towers in me crumbling, only the word “one” echoing where her cry breaks into such dust—I can’t hear her anymore— (how can I be happy?)—Can’t see the prisons either, the barricades, guillotines, dirty outstretched hands, the mind preying on the body, the washer-girl too poor to buy shoes—
Claire,
This was before “Buy mourning and work in the evening.” Before my “Journal of Sorrow,” and Shelley’s heart snatched from flames on the shore. Before “&I but a shadow,” and “for eight years my soul communicated with unlimited freedom … conversed with him, rectified my errors … obtained new lights and my mind was satisfied.” Before “My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to me as soon as you can—I wish to see you—you are so calm a creature, and Shelley is afraid—.” Before, “They are all gone and I live.” Before “I am perfectly detached from the world, I cannot be part of it.” This was before France, before Switzerland and Italy. Why did I feel so proud? I burned, plotted, thought of him and I was proud. Proud to be burning in that way, to possess a monstrous and consuming passion. To have hurt or been hurt beyond anything I’d dreamed. Faithful listener. Martyr. Scorned. Aldini was traveling across Europe, reanimating corpses with jolts of electricity. Decapitated oxen heads shuddered and opened their eyes. If my skin burned as it burned and I could stand it I knew I could stand anything—the sight of those oxen heads, a murderer’s corpse lifting, suddenly, one rigid greenish hand. His silence had made me a soldier, but of what? Still sometimes I felt the slightest breeze could bend me—
I could read again, so why couldn’t I say the words out loud?—I was alone, there was nothing to stop me. Something inside me sharpened itself, then recoiled, damaging and damaged, an afterwards I didn’t understand. The air against my lips a raw and too-thin skin. Sometimes in my mind, bandaged eyes, her mouth covered with white cloth. I wondered where she was, what she was thinking.
Her hand sometimes old, sometimes young. I could never predict when it would visit. I noticed her strings of misspellings:
untill, agreable, occured, confering, meaness, receeded, hopless, lonly … Seprate, extatíc, sacrífise, desart
saw she had trouble with words that involved doubling. Were there two I’s in until? Two r’s in conferring? She gave until one letter too many, conferring one too few. As if it was too hard to balance the relation of one thing to another, assess what might be companionable, what must stand alone.
Often she wrote Teusday for Tuesday.
She wrote on small slips of paper, then pasted them over other pages. Wrote a name then crossed it out or changed it:
Welford
became
Lovel,
then
Herbert,
then
Woodville.
Next to this a date:
1819.
Some dates were much earlier: On a scrap of paper:
the whole sea of me burning.
Next to this:
1811.
Sometimes her hand stopped in mid-sentence:
“the intricacy and perplexity of” ”unspeakable XXXX doctrines.”
Other times whole lines or paragraphs were scored out:
tell your story that weighs heavily upon you
Time meant nothing to me. Past, present, future, all wrapped up as one. I waited to see what she’d keep, what she’d cross out:
Claire if I could confide in you but I cant
XX I hear the slaughtering of animals in the night
Father says Mr. Burr is so poor he had to sell his watch to buy coals
After a while the quieter I grew the louder and more visible the outside world became. I couldn’t explain it. Wasn’t I part of the outer world as well? And yet I grew more quiet and more hidden.
Robertus Mut and Alanus le Mute couldn’t speak. My books don’t say why. The black-necked swan’s born mute. A Languedoc wine stopped in the process of fermentation is said to be mute. (But I was born with a voice then lost it, if one could say that I was born.)
Coleridge wondered how humankind would seem if mute. And Sir Philip Sidney said there’s a “dubble Speech; the one in the mynde … the other the sounding image thereof.”
If I could hear my voice move outside my mind … but even now this voicelessness, and all these years later. It had harmed her and myself, but how had it harmed us? Those words I read not even mine. There was just the hook of my voice lifting them off the page.
“The flesh of the visible,” one wrote. I think of the flesh of the audible, what’s that? My voice a skin that troubles and frightens me. Didn’t I touch her with that skin as I read? Borderland, strung syllables, breath. Site of harm, layer upon layer of what?
Once the sky over the graveyard filled with eyes. I lay mute and watchful in my fever as if I were one of their kind, but distorted, earthbound, odd. Then the rain came with its broken sounds and the wind, and my mind made sounds also, but they were guarded, watchful, raw.
Claire,
I kept thinking I would go away to that desolate place I imagined—would leave no tracks, everyone giving up on me, believing me dead. I’d walk on bare land, shun all humankind, trust no voices but the birds’. Not even my own. Especially not my own. If he could see my burning skin what would he think? Would he see how he’d harmed me, that absence and quietness also are a form of violence? I lay in the burning sea of my body thinking: red that pools in butchers’ sinks and spews from volcanoes, red fibers of revolutions, red threads sewn into banners of resistance. Red alert, red attempt, red stain on a napkin, red dress. The whole sea of me burning. The visible can’t rest within itself, keeps trying to break violently out or plunge more deeply in. But can do neither. The visible trapped as he and I are trapped. But in my desolate place I’d spend my days reading books, re-reading his letters, though I couldn’t decide what those letters should say. Would they be pathetic attempts to explain why he’d left me, crass manipulations, hooks to still maim me, or the words of a being I’d harmed or even murdered? I listened to your footsteps and Fanny’s in the hall, your complaints and laughter. But everything had changed. I lived in a world of punishment and pride and damage. Red stain embedded in each naked molecule of air—
William, The woman I was is sitting at her writing table filling notebook upon notebook, a child sometimes beside her, sometimes not—I tell her books are skins and nervous systems, not lessons, don’t turn them into lessons—But her hand’s moving fast she doesn’t see or hear me, barely feels the dissonance humming through every layer of her skin—She’s rushing to make points—Single-minded. Urgent. Fierce—But this confusion of surfaces, this—You think I’m in those books and I am, but there’s so much of me that isn’t —Vigilance fails, the visible fails—I’m ambiguous, indecipherable, lost—No name for me, no … I wanted vindication, I don’t think I was wrong to, for myself, for others, but a nervous system doesn’t explain doesn’t argue—Our daughter will feel how being tries to rise through words, how the mind mutinies against itself, violates each seeming certainty until each single thing is several things at once, decentered, precarious, unsolved—I stood in the visible world, a tree with tough roots and sturdy trunk, wind whipping around me—But I was also the shadow of that
tree and the empty space beside it—Ferns that thrive only in the forest’s filtered light, dirt, slugs, earthworms, fallow seeds.
And so I came to understand I would always be silent. The skin of my voice never touching another.
Out of nowhere—out of air—her hand continued to come, moving back and forth in time, though I could never go to her.
My eyes sharpened themselves on the world’s abundant angles, its likenesses and differences, my ears always listening, and my mind. Each morning I opened my books, read to myself all day. Tried not to think of her, of you, of anyone:
“They say there is no straight line in nature. This is a lie: every line exists in nature. But I will tell what there is not; there is no even tint in nature. Nature’s shadows are ever-varying, and a ruled sky that is quite even never can produce a natural sky. The same with every object in a picture, its spots are its beauties.”
Laurie Sheck Page 32