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“Dictating his recollections to his friend Rustichello, Marco was intent on the description of things in his memory, and talked as if looking back from the outside. He was not interested in the autobiographical and injected himself into his account very little.”
I kept my eyes to the pages, as if, were I to raise them, I’d feel the air rip against my skin.
One day, without warning, another hand appeared. Whose handwriting was this? It moved close to hers.
I’d been trying to figure out what she meant by,
“We agreed perfectly and yet there was a great dissimilitude in our characters,”
when the other’s hand—its handwriting quicker, wilder, more free—wrote beside hers:
“yet there was a harmony in that very dissimilitude.”
I saw it cancel her words with wavy lines, insert its own. Often it made suggestions:
“I think the journey ought to be Victor’s proposal. That he ought to go for the purpose of collecting knowledge, for the formation of a female.”
Mostly it lived in the margins.
Over time it came often with hers, but never when her hand was small as in the graveyard. At those times her words remained uncommented upon, uncorrected:
Father’s writing an essay on the importance of gravestones. They want to send me away, say it’s for my own good but I feel I’m being punished
I’ll go away to some desolate place. I’m not I’m not gentle like Fanny. Why after all those weeks did he … this silence that angers and frightens me
I lay in the world’s profuse brokenness where, among the many names, I heard a namelessness, private and denied, unspoken.
Claire,
Then one day as I daydreamed of walking in my desolate place, I suddenly felt I could know him without really knowing him. No one knows anyone, the silence between us just more visible, overtly cruel. And all meanings stricken, traumatized, suffering at the core, clawing toward some imagined center. It was as if he was standing there, waiting for me to stroke or hit him, either one. I could make of him anything I wanted. My mind the cage of him, the laboratory, the shackles. I would construct of him what I needed. He my prisoner, my experiment, after all. Part of me pulled back, shuddered at my faithlessness, arrogance, sensed that other being who I knew I couldn’t know (yet I’d felt I’d grasped him in some way) and who had left me. I turned him over and over, a secret rock lifted from the soil, seeing what grew on the damp underneath when no one was looking. I’d find that rock, hold it a few minutes, lose it. Find it again. Turn it over and over. Never really see it. Lose it. Knew I wouldn’t let it go. Slowly my skin grew smoother, milkier, and often people commented on how beautiful my complexion was, though they said I seemed distant, rather cold.
Industrial zones, financial centers, meatpacking districts, train yards, dirt roads. Everywhere I went I waited for that hand, sometimes older, sometimes young. Slender letters slanted rightward, lithe but not delicate, t’s crossed with long, determined slashes.
She corrected misspellings:
not a leaf stired stirred each proceded proceeded imolation
immolation,
or crossed out a word, replaced it with another: better became mild, unhappy became sorrowful. She wrote depressed in my mind then underlined mind, jotted next to it—what?—I had trouble deciphering the word: it looked, maybe, like remorse.
I followed each mark as if it could hold me to the world (but how could it hold me?). It was baffling reading whole strings of words without context:
was made a prisoner and would not disturb You cannot be so
wicked as to murder a child
Tell me you haven’t injured the child through the dark what has
—kept you
There came:
do not understand and ask for my
Then she signed herself:
Yours Entirely, Mary
I wondered about that “Entirely.” There was no date. If she’d come to truly trust another, how had that happened, who was she writing to, and when? (I thought of the hand that had moved so close to hers.)
Then came:
but cannot compose my thoughts it is all so strange You do not write and I despair of ever hearing from you again
Eventually this long, broken string arrived, forming much more slowly than the others:
I am silent and serious … a wrecked seaman’s plank … the air bitterly cold and this sharp wind … I have nothing else except my nothingless self… I have heard from no one. I see no one … the annihilation of study and pleasure … then the stream of thought which has struggled against its [illegible word] through the busy day makes a prison, and sorrow and memory
After that her hand was gone for weeks.
Worldonline bibliomania wikipedia answers.com
If I could find her …
Light fading now between the buildings, reddish glow spreading over the East River.
No hand alights in air. No words take flight before my eyes.
www.bartleby.com/6j/sh/ShelleyM.html
www.findagrave.com/pictures/1617.html
www.answers.com/topic/Mary-Shelley
www.readprint.com./author-71/Mary-Wollestonecraft-Shelley
www.literarytraveler.com/authors/Shelley_Mary_Wollestonecraft.aspx
Yet long ago it came to me, that hand, came often.
I have heard from no one. I see no one. I am ashamed that I
and what am I then in this world?
and these thoughts stain this paper
Claire,
This was before “Shelley’s boat is a beautiful creature.” Before “the reality of my lost life,” and “grief makes my mind active.” Before “Yours Entirely.” Before “Then he told us the haze of the storm hid them from him & he saw them no more … when the storm cleared he looked again—but there was no boat on the sea.” Before “(so bitterly).” Before “I often see both he and Dear Edward in dreams.” Before “I see no one. No one at all.” Even then I grieved. Thought maybe I could go to America, its land harsh and unsettled enough to match the brutality of my thoughts. They enslaved people there, “brought their cargo of muscles and sinew from the old world to cultivate the new.” Their soil was “defiled by slavery’s miseries and crimes.” As I had defiled my own mind. Defiled my memories of him, had with my own mind laid waste to myself, my own kindness … burned my own skin … Each night I imagined constructing him—he, helpless, strapped down on a table before me. His voice not under his control. I held off giving him a mouth or throat. Until I didn’t hear the silence of the graveyard anymore but the brutality of my own imaginings, my need not to have been left. Even as I thought this, part of me still felt he had done nothing wrong, that there was something I could never know—that I was wrong, ignorant, to have turned from him and from myself, though I watched my skin grow smoother, whiter, all the while thinking Chains and ropes, experiments, scalpels.
William, A mind must become both unsparing and kind or it is nothing—I tried to see clearly but proximity confuses, distance confuses. It’s just how it is— The mind chained to itself either way— Sometimes our talks unchained me, long evenings by the fire, the words moving back and forth between us as if changed—My eyes less vicious then, less harsh—I wanted to understand the words as you meant them, the angles (surprising) (not mine) from which you saw—I expected, with my breathing shallow and my pulse slowing, I’d turn increasingly inward, everything fading, falling away. But the opposite has happened. Everything outside me more present than myself, though my skin no longer feels it—Skin has little to do with it after all, I wouldn’t have guessed this—Have I already left you? Will our daughter know that feeling of another’s mind close to hers, a hand moving along a page to the rhythm of her hand?— When I was still pregnant… Those days feel far away—Do we grow harsh because most of what we know is inaccessible to us even as we know it? There must be tenderness somehow or there is nothing—I hear her name in mine, branchin
g, intertwined—
Claire,
This was before “mad with introspecting joy,” before “the children bear the journey exceedingly well,” before “my milk comes more easily now.” Before “Dear Love I will meet you at three,” and “Dearest Shelley you are solitary and uncomfortable yet I know how much you love me.” This was before Casa Magni, Allegra, walls, Clara in fever. The burning was gone but my skin had become laboratory glass. I was a vial horribly smooth yet easily shattered, a slide on which samples had been smeared. No nerves dwelled in that skin, no veins or lines or pores—its taut presiding smoothness holding back a world. I could feel nothing. So if he’d come to me then, or if I’d gone back to the graveyard and he’d stepped from the bushes and started to speak, what would I have felt? What would he have thought of my glass skin, newly hardened as it was against him? Or would my skin have suddenly softened upon his return? Or might it have gone on glittering the way loss and hurt and hatred glitter? Meanwhile I became the laboratory, the cage, the instruments of dissection. My days spent imagining his parts. I’d look through the microscope, see the mute cells, skin cells and brain cells like wriggling protozoa. But what did magnification give me in the end? Those cells still impenetrable though I spied on them with my powerful glass eye. Nevertheless, each day I watched them as long as I wanted: my glass eye held them captive, those worlds within worlds of him, the way the early Romans kept fleas under glass until they burned.
Clerval
Carignan was the son of a merchant and never completely happy when Clerval was absent
but in Clairval Clerval I saw the image of my former self; he was inquisitive & anxious to gain experience & instruction
Why was she writing of Clerval? And why was she changing his name around like that?
(I remembered those scraps of paper I’d dropped in the graveyard.)
Then:
in a most painful degreeMWS.
Where had the S come from? Why was that part of her name? I couldn’t know then how that S would change her.
And:
I am having my character, Walton, write to his sister Margaret—I’ve given her my own initials: MWS
Her hand signed many different ways:
Your Affectionate Companion Mary—W.G.—; Runaway Dormouse; Your own Mary who loves you so tenderly; Adieu Yours MaryS.; Mary W. Shelley; Ever Affly Ys MWS.; I am dear Sir Yours truly MaryShelley; Ever Yours MWS.; Your attached friend Mary W. Shelley; Yrs my dearest friend ever Mary Shelley; I am &c &c MaryShelley; Vostra Affma Amica—Mary Shelley.; Your own Mary; I am dear Sir Yours Obliged MaryShelley
Sometimes she didn’t sign her name at all—
You must forgive [] as I am only convalescing []—and still very weak
I tried to piece together what I could. The lost Atlantis of her. Substance and error. Visibility’s brief promise. Far-off shore—
Claire,
How long could I remain so brittle? Though I imagined him my creation, sometimes even my slave, wasn’t I equally controlled by his silence and withdrawal, my response to him largely making me into what I’d become? And in that way wasn’t I enslaved by him as well? I missed the world. Missed dailiness. Whatever freedoms I might find there. Even so, when I thought of my glass skin, I admired its genius as one admires an ice-field or the cooled gleaming surface of spilled lava. That vial-skin so fierce and without compromise—alien, unforgiving. Father’s friend John Newton had published his book The Return to Nature, remember? But what did that really mean? What was truly natural? And even if the skin were to be left in its natural state, uncovered, and all of us were to go around naked, what of the mind? Nature seemed to me less penetrable all the time—brutal, full of violations, and when I considered my own thoughts I wondered if the human mind is built to turn on itself and others, if this is natural, the ways it complicates, withdraws, turns against, and circles. Even if the Newtons were choosing to go around without clothes, and feeling close to nature in this way, they still lived on their income from slave plantations in the West Indies. So what was I to make of that? Meanwhile, Father worried about money and debtor’s prison. Fanny stayed to herself. You and I passed in the hall like strangers. When finally they sent me away to Scotland, to the Baxters, Father wrote to them of my “excessive reserve.” The sea voyage took 6 days and on board I somehow lost all my money—arrived with nothing. Maybe my skin will feel different in this new place, I thought, maybe I won’t recognize myself and will be free, though I could feel his silence travel with me, his withdrawal as strong and mysterious as ever, and what I came to think of as his “frightening detachment”—this traveled with me also, though I knew I had no idea of what he truly felt.
William, a chalk-white film sifts onto your skin—I’m trying to wipe it away, scrutinize your features, know you—Always I felt a certain barrier inside myself vivid as pain or the smell of kerosene—I turned to the muteness of books, gave myself to them wholly, fearlessly, and often when reading I felt neither female nor male—But with you, with anyone living, it was different—I held myself back—In Paris when they marched the king to his death I was the stranger, alone, watching from outside their language, their history. Even the particularities of their silences differed from my own— That distance was a fact of nature— My distance from you felt more secretive, illicit—I think we are ever-changing meanings to each other—If we could have been facts—Clarities—not immolations of meaning, edges, shadings, risks of meaning, not hiddenness, or—If humans could be actual facts to one another—My child’s body’s clear to me but not her mind—How will you know her, this child? Will she come to understand what an other is— To what extent does a mind construct what it knows, what it touches— What will she construct of me? I listen to your voice your hands turning pages but you were never a narrative as I was not a narrative but clusters of increasing and decreasing perceptions—Uneven. Contradictory—The mind’s never sufficient to its needs.
London, Pisa, Genoa, Naples, Lerici, Putney, Dover, Lyons. It was hard to piece her story together. What was fiction, what fact? Was there always a difference? Was it possible that what at first seemed fiction was more factual than not, and what seemed fact was less truthful in some way?
Letters, journals, notebooks, shadow-shapes of pages: lime green embossed with a delicate fan, cream-colored with the watermark JL. Then white and lined but with no watermark. Sewing holes in some. One page was stamped with a kneeling figure offering flowers within a circle topped by a crown.
Often I read without understanding:
for
The shapes which drew in thick lightnings
read
The shapes which drew it, in thick lightenings
for
seem,
read
seems
for
shrine,
read
shine
for
wait,
read
wail.
Then
—I feel a cold northern breeze upon my cheeks which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has traveled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied this beginning of my journey
And:
—A Storm has come across me—I thought I heard My Shelley call me—the My Shelley—my companion in my Daily tasks—I was reading—I heard a voice say “Mary” We go out on the rocks and Shelley and I read part of Mary, a fiction
Monday 13th S. and H. & C. go to town—stay at ho home net & think of my little dead baby—this is foolish I suppose yet whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts & do not read to divert them they always come back to the same point—that I was a mother & am no longer—Fanny comes wett through—she dines and stays the evening—talk about many things—she goes at ½9—cut my new gown—
One day—almost nightfall—this came:
as if I had already ent
ered my grave
I kept what words I could. Tried to know her. Those shards and darks of who she was.
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These walls so quiet. Across the street, the PARK sign red and blinking.
Infrared security eyes, high-definition face recognition, gesture-tracking video cameras, infrasound, ultrasound, passwords, PINs, lasers, parabolic microphones, X-rays …
Laurie Sheck Page 33