Nothing mattered but her hand in air:
I long for some circumstance that may assure me that I am not utterly disjointed from my species
Why would she write that? She who had Shelley. Her skin looked older, dull.
most women I believe wish that they had been men—but I don’t wish to change my sex & do not think my talents would be greater if I had been born male these hours that have destroyed my happiness but all my many pages future wastepaper surely I am a fool yet cannot forgo the hope of loving & being loved I am a fool—poverty-stricken—deformed squinting lame I will bury myself alive among flowers
That page was torn off and another appeared:
Winter passed, and summer.
Her hand looked young again, the skin brighter, smooth:
Henryclerval Carnigan was the sons of a merchant an of Geneva and an intimate friend of my father’s when he was only nine years old he wrote a fairy tale which was the delight and amazement of all his companions
it was with these feelingsthat I began the creation of a human being. As the minutenesssmallness of the parts formed were a great hindrance to my speed I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make him of a gigantic stature
Here S’s hand crossed out
“him”
wrote
“the being”
instead. The rest of the page was in her hand:
But how How can I describe my emotion at this catastrophe; or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form. His limbs were in proportion and I had selected his features h as beautiful handsome.BeautifulHandsome; Great God! His yellow dun skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair wasof a lustrous black & flowing
I came to believe she was constructing some skewed version of me. A version she needed to believe. Yet she used the words handsome and beautiful—what was I to make of that? All the while I imagined the two of them curled in their bed. My eyes a hushed river as I watched.
Why had she written, I am a fool—poverty-stricken—deformed squinting lame? Why had she feared herself utterly disjointed from my species? And how odd that she’d describe me as handsome, even beautiful. I who was the one cast out, disjointed, deformed. What had happened to make her so despairing?
William, I’m thinking of margins—How what’s written in them isn’t governed by the monarch text, that central ruler—How there are margins of rivers, woods, systems, habits of thought—In his Optics Brewster wrote, “the central parts of the lens refract the rays too little”—But margins are active, wild, refractive, not obedient to the laws of the center—I want to dwell among the smallest things, the cast-aside, banished, dismissed, discounted—There are hands at the barricades making visible the margins in air, can you see them? Such margins where the poor fail, thrive, suffer, go on—I would live on the margin of doubt—Lilies are marginals—Any plant flourishing at pond’s edge—I would breathe from those edges—We married, should we have married?—All those books I wrote, their texts are disappearing in front of my eyes I see this right now, but the margins remain someone’s writing all over them I walk into them alone, my feet stepping among so many questions, calculations—No monarch of my mind, no town square, no penal code, no prisons—
Wasn’t she trying to create a story that would move into the silence and confusion we’d become? She needed to take hold of me, explain me. I saw there was a violence in her need.
Her hand moved back and forth in time:
I have been an altered being since your silence
I tried to keep you, feeling the while that I had lost you
Do not think that I am not fully aware of the defects on my part that might
call forth your reprehension
How hateful I must have appeared to you thought presses & stings me
I have known no peace since that summer—
I never expect to know it again—
Were I to say forget me, would you reply? I cannot forget you
I can only be an object of distaste to you—
so isn’t it best then that I be forgotten—
Could those words be addressed to me? Yet I was sure they weren’t. Then:
by the magic of words between the most barren clefts into the regions of frost
the destroyer the murderer the creature
I have also finished the 4 Chap. of Frankenstein which is a very long one & I
think you would like it.
I believe William Gifford advised John Murray against publishing my
Frankenstein. Murray rejected it on June 18.
When I can get out and about again The blue eyes of your sweet boy are
staring at me as I write this.
Sir, I am anxious to prevent your continuing in the mistake of supposing that
Mr. Shelley is the author of this juvenile attempt of mine and from which I
abstained from putting my name. I have kept my authorship of Frankenstein
concealed out of respect to those persons from whom I bear my name.
and loathed his deformity and had created a fiend whose unparalleled
barbarity the death of my little Clara soon William fell ill and
we were frightened i
you see how blind we mortals are—We came to Italy thinking to do Shelley’s health good—but the Climate is not warm enough to be of benefit to him & yet it has destroyed my two children—
to loose lose two only & lovely children in one year— Shelley says that he will finish this letter—
Claire,
If I could experience him as an unhealed injury I carried within me, keep him alive in me like that, would that be less wearying, more practical, maybe even more effective and efficient, than keeping him strapped down without a throat or mouth? I considered giving him a voice—not his voice exactly, but the voice of the wound in me speaking. Something like that. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want anything so rampant as what had happened with my skin—imagined instead a coin-shaped wound near the heart, but festering, signaling its redness to my brain. That summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati and then traveling through the Alps, through all those huge storms, looming peaks outside Chamonix, rumors of a gigantic glacier edging ever closer, that summer of those discussions of the slave-trade, the Treaty of Paris securing for France slave-trading rights for another five years—through that whole summer of your secret pregnancy, remember?—I tried to hear his voice as the voice of a wound that, if I could both feel and contain it, might make me less vicious, less cruel. Wouldn’t a wound be something I’d want to tend? Might I even feel toward it an odd tenderness, protectiveness, knowing it couldn’t heal itself? His voice not chains all over me this time but fleshy, raw, unable to close over, form a scar. And still I felt a cruelty in myself, the need to hurt him, make him pay. The words monstrous and murderer festering in my brain. But what had he murdered?—the deluded place in me that thought there could be answers, clear meanings in the world? Or the place that believed abandonment, fear, and shame could be eluded? Or the place that hoped I might one day hear my mother’s voice? Of course when anyone asked how and when he’d come to me (after my book they asked often) I gave contradictory accounts—”In a waking dream,” I’d say, or, “Everyone was making up stories and I couldn’t think of one, and then …” Or, “We’d been reading Mrs. Utterson’s translation of German fantasy tales, Tales of the Dead, and in one of them a gigantic spectre was doomed to kill all the heirs of his house with a kiss.” Such distance between any breathing thing and another. Is seeing always partly a travesty of seeing, touch partly a travesty of touch?—though of course I never touched him. The brain a desperate, entrapping thing.
I stand upon a precipice and cannot
The vale is like a vast Metropolis]
I have been reading Calderon without you.
This from his hand, not hers. Then:
Italy. I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether
from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not.
I felt I’d glimpsed something hideous. Those two whose hands moved side by side finishing each other’s letters, helping with each other’s books, who slept entwined in the night—even between them a loneliness, a wrongness. (I thought of her sad skin, the redness spreading.)
His hand continued:
Concealing and containing And the atoms of chaos And the waves of-its chaos are
Making captivity a barren coffin
I sold my watch, chain, & etc which brought 2 napoleons 5 francs
I was not before so clearly aware how much the colouring of our own feelings throws upon the delineations of other minds
We arrived at Paris. Mary showed me the papers in her box, promised I could read and study them. I intend to claim this promise.
His hand returned a few more times through the next weeks. Then abruptly, not at all.
Meanwhile I kept reading. Pictured them reading also to each other. Their words in air made clear they often did this:
Teusday 21st
(she was misspelling Tuesday again)
Shelley reads Livy and then reads Gibbon with me till dinner; Monday 8th— buy Shelley a pencil case—talk with him for hours—read Ovid together— S. finishes the 17th canto of Orlando Furioso; Wednesday 23rd—Mary not well. Visited Minerva Library. Brought home Adolphus’s Lives to reads with her in the evening.
My books as close and real to me as flesh. Often they seemed almost to breathe:
“Noble deer.
But man lives in huts, wrapped in the garments of his shame …”
∼ ∼ ∼
“What does it mean to speak of Hölderlin’s madness? The official record tells us he loses his mind toward the end of 1806. Released from a clinic after a year’s unsuccessful treatment, he will spend his remaining days in a small tower overlooking the river Neckar, passing his time playing the flute, reading, going for long walks, and every now and then, under the mysterious heteronym of Scardanelli, composing a few small, rhymed poems.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“The Cha no yu, or tea-making ceremony, is an elaborate ritual invented, so it is said, in the sixteenth century by the great Hideyoshi, to turn the thoughts of his men away from war. Perpetual peace was to be kept by means of pursuing artistic grace. Although this policy failed, it gave rise to a flowering of the ceramic arts.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“Nothing sets us upon a change of state, or upon any new action, but some uneasiness. Uneasiness is the great motive that works on the mind.”
Now there are no hands to wait for. I look out at the stone face across the way, the PARK sign, read MTA posters as I ride:
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. THERE ARE l6 MILLION EYES IN THE CITY. WE’RE COUNTING ON ALL OF THEM. BE SUSPICIOUS OF ANYTHING. PLEASE TAKE YOUR THINGS. OR WE WILL.
Call the anti-terrorism hotline: 888-NYC-SAFE · Be alert to unattended packages or luggage · Be wary of suspicious behavior · Take notice of people in inappropriate or bulky clothing especially in warm weather · Keep an eye out for exposed wiring or other irregularities · Report anyone tampering with surveillance cameras or entering unauthorized areas · Be wary of someone nervously checking belongings or clothing · And remember, if you see something, say something.
REMEMBER. YOU ARE THE EYES AND EARS OF THE SYSTEM.
Didn’t your world fill with suspicion because it had me in it? From the moment I opened my eyes, you couldn’t trust who you were, what you had made or done, what I was or might become. Yet mostly you said nothing, until maybe those last hours of your dying. In that way weren’t we alike?—we kept our secrets, fed the isolate silence of our eyes.
William, Do you remember when Dr. Singleton told us some day they’ll invent a cream that’s a barrier between skin and toxic chemicals—You just rub it in, it leaves an invisible glove on your hand—But what if the workers’ materials, the air, weren’t toxic?—Even the barriers in our cells, will they try to make them more vigilant, less supple?—When the water went into my lungs I thought maybe I could be the water, but they fished me out, they—And hands are barriers, and eyes. Sometimes when my pen moved across the page there was no barrier between my thoughts and the words—Between the things I felt and the people I wrote to, the person I thought myself to be—But that happened rarely— Why did it have to happen just rarely?—Our new daughter, what barriers will she find in the world she’ll grow up in without me?— What barriers will rise up in centuries to come?
Why was her hand absent for long stretches? His was always hurrying. I knew from her pages his body often pained him.
One day he wrote that animals were slaves:
They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
This was in his
“A Vindication of Natural Diet.”
Though I’d eaten only leaves and berries, never tasted flesh, I hadn’t thought of animals as slaves until he wrote that, realized he was right. If he could recognize that animals had “social feelings” might he recognize such traits in me?
He was the one, kind, protective, who held Mary as she slept, calmed Claire, looked for a house for them in Hampstead; who sold his watch to buy them food and passage. The one who wrote,
I went the other day to see Allegra at her convent, & stayed with her about three hours … at first she was very shy, but after a little caressing …led me all over the garden & all over the convent, running … and showed me her little bed and the chair where she sits at dinner …
One day, his hand left this:
The conclusion wonderfully
I pondered that a long time. Though I envied him his life, I imagined his voice not faltering in his throat. Wondered how she felt each time she heard it.
Claire,
Even as I wrote my book part of me believed he’d try to find me, that one day he’d come back—that in the end he couldn’t forget me. But the longer his silence continued the more I remembered the hatred I once sensed in his voice, though I never could be sure that it was hatred. Maybe it was loneliness or fear or … Meanwhile each morning I pursued the construction of my creature: “with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes,” I wrote. (If he ever read it, if he ever sought me out, wouldn’t he be particularly pleased by ‘speculative’?—that gesture toward the nature of his being.) Wrote: “Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.” But the fact of his not coming ate away at me. If it was true he’d been cold and cruel all along, if he’d planned all along to vanish and so pain and haunt me, then what was I to make of all the words he’d read me? Had they been weapons? Traps? Subtle instruments of coercion? If he had never felt what he read, then all along I was the one strapped down and he the scientist experimenting, controlling. It was I who was his creature. But how could I know? How could I interpret silence? Often in the afternoons Shelley’s hand moved next to mine as I went over my work, assessing how I’d built my creature, built cruelty into him, and longing, betrayal. I wrote in gray ink, not brown, different from my letters, the gray of her gravestone or the pebbles I held in my hand as I listened.
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