Laurie Sheck

by A Monster's Notes (v5)

  Everywhere a sense of watchfulness, suspension.

  But once the whale calves looked with mild eyes into the whalers’ eyes then past them. If I could have looked into her eyes, what might I have seen?

  Claire,

  The Baxters were Glassites, that’s what the sect they belonged to was called. They held to the doctrine of “bare faith” (wasn’t my vial-skin stark like bare faith?), believed that faith is the “bare belief of the bare truth”—that truth presides through its starkness, isn’t arrived at through merit or striving but simple assent. I wondered, could assent be simple? They ate nothing bloodied, touched no meat from strangled animals. Their faith pure, severe, unbending. I was trying to break free of my glass skin, make it soft again, yet the feeling of glass had followed me even there. As if I lived in a glass dwelling among others made of glass. I imagined his skin, also, was glass, his heart black glass, so dark it reflected shapes but no clear features. So if I looked into it I might see the shape of my head, but not the eyes to know him with or the mouth with which to speak. And isn’t that how slaves feel?—faceless within the owner’s eyes, annihilated though breathing. I remained there for almost two years, climbed the tall hill called Law Hill, watched the whaling ships entering and leaving the bay, scratched my initials into a back room window. Thought about him. Wondered where he was, how he was doing, was he even alive. All the while I continued to build my laboratory, adding new instruments and devices as he lay on my table, helpless, still partial, wholly mute.

  I liked it best when her hand came small and alone as it had been in the graveyard. Then I could think of her as the girl near the bushes, solitary, missing her mother. What would I read to her next? More selections from Marco Polo? Augustine’s Confessions? Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy? The Letters of Abelard and Heloise? Or:

  “Wednesday (27th June)—A very rainy day. I made a shoe. Wm and John went to fish in Langdale. In the evening I went above the house, and gathered flowers, which I planted, foxgloves, etc.”

  Would she wonder how one makes a shoe? Was it the left one, or the right? Was another made to match it? When, and out of what?

  Her hand still leaving fragments from a life I could barely understand:

  those heavy hours but I have nothing

  Dear Sir I am in great want of a book which describes minutely the Environs of Constantinople

  and shut out as I am

  I am impatient for the papers I mentioned. I wish particularly also for my two journal books—(one a green covered book & the other a little one bound with red leather). I shall not be easy until

  Walk out—work—S comes down on friday evening

  3

  4 10

  1–19

  5

  3–15

  2–19–9

  1–11–116

  3

  2 6

  75

  5 “5

  I

  –

  10

  Unable to endure the aspect of the I had created

  He then took me into his and showed explained to me his various machines

  Teusday 26th—Walk—read Pamela—Shelley reads Gibbon—in the evening S goes out to take a little walk and loses—himself—

  Clary in an ill humour—Shelley sits up & talks her into reason

  I felt great relief in studying with my friend Clerval, and found not only instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists. Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating to a degree I never experienced in studying the authors of any other country.

  So the days passed. My reading the words she left so briefly in the air before me.

  William, There’s a dream I meant to tell you—I was in Lisbon, Fanny Blood and her baby had just died. The walls were covered with her botanical drawings, plants from England—She’d wanted to draw the plants of Lisbon but Mr. Curtis wouldn’t let her—I lay in a white bed next to hers and after a while a nurse came in, handed me my baby. Such a small soft bundle. From the moment I held her I knew she was glass, and that glass had shattered—There were cracks like fault lines all over and through her but the outer form still held—I got up to get help but when I stood I was glass, a broken vase but moving—No one was around it was so quiet I went back to bed, picked her up, held her, looked into her newborn eyes— This is what I want to tell you— There were no cracks no fault lines in the eyes — Whatever it is that’s word-blank in me, word-blind and word-deaf and leaving, I want to say I saw her newborn eyes and nothing stopped them— Nothing hurt or labeled or restrained them—They looked out with such great calm and pleasure—How does the mind move when it no longer moves in word-time?—What was she thinking, she who had no words?

  I could see she kept track of everything she read:

  1814

  Mary. Those marked /—S. has read also

  x Letters to Norway

  x Mary, a Fiction

  x Wordsworth’s Excursion

  x Madoc. By Southey. 2 vol

  x Curse of Kehama

  x Sorcerer. A novel.

  x Political Justice

  x The Monk—by Lewis—

  x Thaliba

  x The Empire of the Nairs

  x Queen Mab

  x St. Godwin

  The list broke off, then continued:

  1816

  Mary

  x Park’s Journal of a Journey in Africa

  Peregrine Proteus

  4 Vols. Of Clarendon’s History

  x Modern Philosophers

  The Opinions of Different Authors upon the Punishment of Death, selected by Montagu

  Erskines speeches

  X Caleb Williams

  Had she kept lists of what I’d read? Or had she hated all along those rough sounds that broke from my throat?

  Claire,

  It was wearying controlling him, constructing him but giving him no mouth, no means of speaking, yet I couldn’t stop. I’d feel my own lips harden as I spoke, tendons rigid, constricting in my throat. This was when Robert Owen was pursuing his “experiment in perfectibility”—he believed in fundamental human goodness, but I knew I could never perfect what I was making. He persisted in so many ways mysterious, unyielding. So a slave’s a mystery too, I thought, a slave’s an other unconquered after all. No one owns anyone. I sailed back home on a ship called the Wishart. Thought about that word with all its innocence and bitterness. The allies were entering Paris, claiming liberation. Bonaparte dethroned. One rigid power replacing another. There would be a monarchy again, the restoration of the Bourbons. That same corrupt monarchy my dead mother had despised. How could I dethrone myself without replacing myself with another unjust power? Something merciless in me, unkind, unforgiving, monarchy or not. And he, impoverished, uncompleted, without rights, still strapped on the table. Each night as I built him I made sure to keep him unfinished. As much as I built his flesh how could I even begin to build his thoughts, the private currents of his brain? Those parts of him that knew but wouldn’t speak. England felt strange when I returned, I’d been so long away. Like him, I belonged nowhere, wondered where I might go. Knew I’d take him with me.

  The more the other’s handwriting came with hers—he finishing her letters, his words in her margins, she signing a letter

  your own Mary who loves you,

  —the more I felt like a ghost. Why had I wondered if she missed my books, the graveyard? How could I have been so foolish?

  “A truth wastes away when it becomes integrated into other ones,” I’d read. Had I merely been of use to her until she’d met him? Each mind, the book said, “preserves and suppresses, realizes and destroys.”

  Meanwhile I watched their hands moving closely together. Their words intertwined and overlapped. Each following and guiding. The quiet shore of them. Wing-beats. Turnings. Consent.

  Often they wrote of a monster, a creature, a feared being. It pained me, but I wasn’t surprised.

  Where she wrote,

  I
sprung on him that I might destroy so hateful a monster,

  the other wrote above those words then continued in the left-hand margin:

  and impelled by all the feelings which can arm one being against the existence of another

  Where she wrote,

  A creature whom I myself had created and endued with life,

  he crossed out

  creature

  wrote in:

  being.

  She wrote,

  I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetuate some new wickedness. I had an obscure feeling that all was not over

  and he added,

  there was always fear so long as anything I loved remained alive.

  His hand so often in the margins:

  distrusting the very solace

  and

  lulled

  and then,

  my disorder owed its origin to some uncommon & terrible event

  When she wrote fast she left out letters:

  remeber for remember

  —his hand inserted the

  m.

  The more I watched, the more I felt alone. Still, I didn’t want them to stop. Feared one day her hand would leave forever.

  William, I see you and the children eating breakfast—Or they’re outside in the evening fighting and playing—Sometimes I see my hand writing, “the unswervable principles of justice and humanity,” something like that, or “send me some ink,” or “I’m glad there’s no perhaps”—I see Goethe’s book we were reading. Words I underlined but can’t remember why: mortal, selfishness, traffic, impulse, flies, great, little. Why underline those above others?—I hear your voice say “it’s cloudy”—Then you’re telling Dr. Clarke you won’t attend my funeral—I see moths, candles, a horse running away from you (though that’s something I never really saw), Fanny Blood in fever, my father hitting my mother on the stair—I hear the black doors of the Thames, their hinges—My hand writes, must learn to brave censure, “I’m not fond of vindications, “Fanny sends her love to Henry”—I watch all these words brightening, fading— I can’t tell if I have skin or has it vanished? How vivid everything is now that it’s leaving—The trees’ soft pulsings, Joseph Johnson’s kindness to me, Fanny Blood’s botanical drawings—

  Not once did she change because I thought of her or watched her. What would I have changed? Her love of him, her blindness toward me and toward herself, our days in the graveyard, her rage at what she thought I was?

  When flowers open they’re said to “watch.” My watching had little openness in it.

  I was “vigil-strange,” “vigil-wasted,” “vigil-patient,” “vigil-keeping,” “vigil-blind.”

  www.google.com

  search for: maryshelley mary shelley monster mary w shelley

  mary wollstonecraft shelley mary shelley creature mary wollstonecraft

  godwin mwgodwin shelley maryfannyclaireallegra

  [refine search] [key words]

  [Push the refresh button. Redirected to]:

  My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley—Home Page

  ON THIS SITE YOU WILL FIND EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MARY SHELLEY. THERE ARE PAGES DEALING WITH HER LIFE, HER FAMILY, HER FRIENDS AND HER NOVELS.

  But I was not confined to my own identity—

  she’d written that in air. So how could I have found her? How could I find her even now?

  Claire,

  Why couldn’t I forget him? Not even after those beginning secret hours with Shelley, our love for each other, our thoughts of running away. When Shelley gave me Queen Mab, I pretended I was reading to a girl on the other side of the bushes in a graveyard. Or I’d sit in my room wondering what he’d think of the tiny printed hands in the margins of Shelley’s notes. Those notes reminded me of how he wandered through so many texts, surprising me—I never knew what would come next. I felt a sudden softening in myself as I thought this, the laboratory far from my mind, the idea of him strapped to the table much too far from my mind. So I pulled back, strapped him to the table once again, took away his mouth, his tongue, sometimes took away a hand, a leg, made sure he was powerless, unfinished. In Queen Mab Shelley celebrated liberty, equality, critiqued the monarchy, commerce, religion. Yet the copy he gave me had been printed with his name deleted—he feared reprisals—so what liberty did he really have? What walls did he stare into? What hiddenness even in him? Even more than the poem I loved the notes best—: “beyond our atmosphere the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave.” “In one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun from the earth.” “The plurality of worlds,—the indefinite immensity of the universe, is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe.” He cited Nicholson’s British Encyclopedia, our father’s Enquirer and Political Justice, the Bible, Homer, Lucretius, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Sale’s Preliminary Discourse to the Koran, Rousseau … Worlds within worlds unfolding on the page before me. Seventeen notes in all. He wrote of how “we see a variety of bodies possessing a variety of powers” but we are in “a state of ignorance with respect to their essences and causes.” Wasn’t I in a state of ignorance? Though I’d strapped the one from the graveyard onto the table to control him, I was ignorant all the same of who he was, the truths of him, of what he thought and how he’d come to grow so silent. Hume, Locke, Newton, Plutarch, Lambes Reports on Cancer, Thomas Cadell’s Return to Nature or a Defense of Vegetable Regimen—I read on and on through those notes as if in challenging my mind they could tame me, maybe even make me burn or dismantle the table where I held him. Instead, I polished that table even more, tightened the straps, sharpened my instruments. Collected, hoarded, rearranged—

  A few times his hand came alone. I felt like a ghost as I watched, but grew to feel a certain tenderness as well, wondered who he was.

  His hand wrote feverishly, leaving cross outs and drawings. There were ink blots, water stains, burns, some on pages so small they’d fit into a pocket.

  Once he filled up a whole sheet of paper with just this: Na na, na na ná na. Why would he do that?

  He’d write something, suddenly stop, then weeks later write the same words in other notebooks, though not one of them was filled. Often he wrote in several at one sitting. Great swirls of words. Yet he was the one who was patient with Mary, pausing to hear her, soothe, consider.

  He came in fragments just like her:

  in a sea and my sail has been torn the tender and impartial love overcoming all insults and crimes

  thus the life of a man of virtue and talent who should die in his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than the life of a miserable Priest-ridden slave

  the laws of nature have undergone violation

  Over the faint penciled words:

  Yellow & black & pale & hectic red,

  one day he wrote in blurred dark ink a draft of something else,

  Una Favola,

  which began

  “l’ imagine di questa angelica donna ci sedava,

  When he wrote too fast, or wrote in streaming rain (the letters blurring, misshapen), or spilled ink on his pages, I imagined making of myself for him some sort of shelter. Still, I wished him gone, remembered her hand and those pebbles, days she left chocolate, hunks of bread.

  Claire,

  I finally managed to shed my glass skin (to this day I’m not sure how this happened), but part of me was always in the graveyard waiting for him to come back. We live in the present and not. Days passed and years—so many visible events and changes, those outward manifestations so often mistakenly equated with a life. Our running away to France, you and Shelley walking together for hours, the village of St. Aubin among the trees, then those first days in Italy, so much that I wrote in my notebooks: “Dream my little baby came to
life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire and it lived—I al awake & find no baby—think about it all day—Fanny comes a little before 9.” When my babies lived for a while I felt their cries, always went to them quickly. Nothing more real to me than them. Watched how they turned their infant hands in front of their eyes, a wild wonder at the thing before them. I think they didn’t realize those first months the hand was attached to their body, not something mysteriously visiting that at any time could suddenly be gone. Everything vivid: Shelley’s hands, his kindness, the way we shared a notebook, finished or began each other’s letters. All the while wasn’t part of me expecting him to come back, to finally explain, to make the cruelty or mystery or inevitability or whatever it was of his silence more overtly explicit? Maybe I could release him from the table then, imagine him at large in the world with a life of his own. But of course he never explained. My waiting had a cruelty in it, this I knew—a shard of something sharp or weapon-like wrapped inside a longing, a jewel hidden in layers of gauze. He didn’t come and so I kept him strapped down, though sometimes I also felt I sheltered him in some way—that my waiting did this—if a shelter can be partly cruel, ambivalent, ruthless. Sometimes I believed my waiting kept him warm—