In handwriting jerkier, much larger, more clumsy than before, she was writing on stray scraps of paper; her t’s no longer crossed with that strong, steady line I’d grown used to. The curves of her m’s seemed to crumble.
then taken from XXX all burning mute
De
Dear Claire,
but I don’t feel like I’m writing to you anymore. Can’t feel you anymore, or that idea of you I held in my mind. Am I writing to anyone? To him? I keep thinking of how Aristotle said recollection is investigation but I don’t know. My whole body’s a question, everything I am a question XXX And the que And the question’s inelegant, rough, barely reachable with words XXXXX my eye My right eye hurts, I don’t know why. I gave him that large ungainly body, attached to him the words “filthy,” “deformity.” I wonder if that hurt him. But how could he even have known? Didn’t I also make him beautiful in a way— as a troubled sea or a breaking iceberg’s beautiful? I let him speak of delighting in the sight of flowers, let him find, under the trees, a huge cloak to warm himself, let him listen, wonder, read … Still, it was cruel of me, it wasXXX and what was Machiavelli’s tone really when he wrote of the Prince, “let everyone see what you seem, but let no one know you.” he knew He saw the uses of cruelty but thought cruelty should stay hidden, don’t let them know that’s what you are or they’ll try to hurt you, bring you down. Seem to your subjects benevolent, loving. Then hurt who you need to … but in secret… XXXX But I laid him out on a table and my instruments were too blunt, unworthy. And this pain in my head as if something I didn’t even know was protected is now unprotected, something I didn’t think about at all… XXX I still want to go to Italy, to Germany, stillXXXX want XXX
I felt my muteness seeping even deeper and more dark.
The taste of blood back in my mouth, my throat once again an ugly blossom. I couldn’t touch her hand or help her.
my box with the papers being gone
and all being broken
my best love I haven’t heard from you today we have had bad weather
pe Petrarch had many fr dear friends, but the plague ca appeared and
their silent graves were soon all that remained to him of them
I must study—the rest is all nothing
would you buy for me also a gown of a close pink stripe
I do not think that you will XXX find me what I was
he fixed to the binding of his copy of Virgil a record of her death
Claire,
Or, no—I’m not really thinking of you am I? Then who am I speaking to, why do I need to speak to anyone at all? The headaches have … the headaches come more frequently, are stronger. I’m in Italy. Pine forests. Chestnut groves. The fertile valley of Chiavenna. And now Cadenabbia. Mornings I watch the girls walk to their jobs at the silk mill. I watch them and wonder, Do they know they’re being watched? Such distances in me such And always now the light too strong for my eyes and I but a shadow There’s a man here who believes when people pass him on the street they scatter a poisonous powder over him. He grew so frightened he didn’t eat for 10 days. I tried to bring him some tea but he refused me. This morning he finally reached into the deepest corner of a basket of pears, selected one and ate it. such mistrust in us such deformed, peculiar mourning I watched his bony hand, my eyes scattering their poisons, he would have hated it if he knew I watched. Often my hand shakes badly and I don’t know why. Just yesterday I suddenly remembered (after how many years?) that Cervantes lost his hand in battle. Strange to think about that now. My own hand tense, odd, as if burdened by a hidden contempt, but of what? Or as if it’s been in battle also. I try not to think of it, I try … XXXX There’s a sect here that wears woolen clothing even at the height of summer. They’ve done this since the plague when their ancestors pledged that if their village was spared they’d wear only this burdensome dress. The cloth’s a heavy dark-blue with a red stripe around the bottom. Such faithfulness and yet it’s like chains, isn’t it—they were spared but they wear these woolen chains … The mind lets go of so little. I don’t know how to … and … I watch my hand shake and think, what does a hand leave in the end? His hand left me this: “And [softer] constellations [?hover].” Left: “Where Ruin broods over a world” and: “I should not infect my own Mary with dejection.” Left: “leaves no trace of” and “piu fresca che la Maia quando.” All those hours I spent with his copybooks studying, transcribing. Recently I learned the term “silent corrections,” meaning changes a publisher makes to small, assumedly accidental deviations within a text, corrected “silently” for accuracy, without comment: “cunning, intriguing” for “cunning intriguing” or “Mestre” for “Mestri.” “I don’t know why” for “I don’t why.” If there are silent corrections in me, the smallest shiftings, rearrangings, I can barely feel them yet I think they’re there. Everything’s hazy, it’s hard to concentrate, to read, so maybe my mind isn’t correcting itself silently at all but building into itself new errors, deviations … and I just want to look at the girls walking back and forth from the silk mill, go to the Opera, visit the olivewood near Menaggio, not think about this. But then I feel the table against my back— is it my back or his?—I feel the cold instrument, not deft enough as it makes its incision or attaches one horrid part to another … I wonder whose hand it’s in now, the instrument, now that my own hand’s so shaky. Each thought an ignorant wave breaking over me—
She’d grown weaker, had returned to London. As I watched her hand sicken (I was surprised it still came) I felt my muteness spreading even further, past my ugly throat, past anything to do with words.
The Dr. says it’s a “functional derangement in the nerves.” But what’s that? Even he seems puzzled
Now he says it’s a “neuralgia of the heart.” nobody knows what’s wrong with me
they say they can operate to relieve pressure on the spine. But I feel there’s something in my brain, XXXX … and nothing’s like it was … sometimes the whole right side of me goes numb
last night in my dream there were silent corrections but they were correcting the things that were right and not touching the wrong ones. everything is mixed up
“Cosi al vento nelle foglie lievi/ Si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.” six years now since I’ve kept my journal
to investigate: to search or inquire into, to examine systematically … to trace out… to track …
my first Chapter wasn’t good enough. I wish I could re-write it… those letters from Walton to his sister
I need to cross out “situation,” replace it with “solitude,” need to cross out “wonderful” put in “strange”—and my creature, is he cold beneath those trees? I should have kept him warmer
but I also hated him
Need to cross out “Carnigan” and put in “Dearest Clerval” … need to … but that’s Shelley’s hand writing in the margin
“Maie’s not well. Mary continues to feel unwell” “Wander no more from kindling brain to brain”
I’m not gentle like Fanny. Why after all these weeks did he it was his frequent habit to read aloud to me
I have also finished the 4 Chap. of Frankenstein which is a very long one & I think you would like it.
Last Wednesday I saw Dr. Bright at Guy’s Hospital. He said to me, “I am very fond of seeing,” and observed me for some time. He’s diagnosed me with a tumor of the brain.
I loved Italy best but Italy is a murderer I shrank from the monster—he held out his hand but I couldn’t touch it
so quiet now, where is he? I abhor myself in recollection these pebbles in my hand these …
why won’t he take the bread I leave? Why does he have to shrink back behind the bushes? Is he there or has he vanished?
never to reveal to human ears—
I sit in this cold building and remember, but don’t want to remember. I should pick up a book to distract myself, do something, anything. But what would I be without her hand that visited even as it sickened, and those days in the gr
aveyard, the ways she tried to build me, send me north, how she thought for a while that might protect me. Nameless as I am, wouldn’t I be even more so without those few moments she glimpsed me, and how she didn’t run away, even if, over time, a feeling much like hatred—(call him being not creature)—a feeling she didn’t understand—blended with my face, my voice, my silence, until she burned then turned to glass.
Dr. Bright says I have a tumor of the brain I am very fond of seeing,
he said.
Your friend in truest truth Mary Shelley Yours in Exile, Mary W.
Shelley Believe me your affectionate friend
MWS
Votre Amie tres sincere MS Your very true friend MaryW
Shelley Your Runaway Dormouse
MS
Believe me ever Ys—MWS.—
(Maie’s not well … Maie continues to feel unwell)
If, as Giordano Bruno wrote, we can know the world only through its traces (he was burned at the stake for what he thought) then I know it partly from the trace of her hand that came and went without warning, and when young left chocolate, hunks of bread.
There was so much I couldn’t touch, so many ways I couldn’t bear to touch.
“Matter has the capacity to be other than in actuality it is,” Giordano Bruno wrote. Yet I sit here in this horrid body. And I watched her shaking, often-paralyzed hand as she sickened, that hand I couldn’t force into wellness or to be other than it was. There seemed no hidden capacities of the kind Bruno wrote about within us. Still, if appearance is only part of what we are, if seeming is, in the end, a small part of who we are, if there are aspects of our being that have capacities I can’t even imagine, then how might I think of her even now?
If I could have helped her when she sickened, or if she hadn’t sickened like that, or if I’d not been so other, and her sickness not spreading …
Matter is that which “enfolds out of itself, and contains within itself all forms it is capable of taking on,” Bruno said. Even if those forms aren’t visible. So what does that make of her, and of me?
What forms were within her even as she sickened? What forms are within me even now?
In Bruno’s dialogues Theophilus says “all forms of natural objects are souls.”
All forms. If this is so, and you’d believed this, would it have been so easy for you to hate, mistrust, and pull back from my body?
He said the world presents to us a “bewildering number of aspects and angles” from which we must view it.
Maybe this is partly what troubled you, you made something you could never understand.
Yet Bruno believed that, however varying, the world’s unified at its core and imbued with goodness, whether or not we see or feel it.
I remember when she read about his burning, her hand still young then, steady. He’d moved from place to place—France, England, Germany, Switzerland—provoking criticism wherever he went. In Italy he became a victim of the Inquisition, was imprisoned in Rome (the city she most loved—I loved Italy best but Italy is a murderer) and burned there at the stake in 1600. All this I learned as her hand jotted notes, turned pages.
Claire, no, Shelley, no, the one from the graveyard, no, then who am I writing to— to anyone? My hand hardly moves anymore—Do I write on the page or in my mind? (Do I have a voice anymore or has it vanished like his?) I keep thinking of Dr. Bright in Guy’s Hospital saying, “I am very fond of seeing.” In the graveyard I tried to see I wanted to see. His voice like two dilating eyes. Two eyes that held me, took me in. And then I didn’t know how to go on, didn’t know how to live without those eyes. Everything dark. I tried to see him but my mind got in the way. Burning skin, glass skin. I didn’t know that burn can mean a stream, a river, a fountain, a spring. My whole body on fire, but what if I’d known that burn could be water, something nourishing, cooling. Even now that I know it I can’t feel the water. I feel fire, glass skin, the straps on the table. And burn also comes from “burden.” Didn’t I burden him, make him pained and rigid like me? Creature, monster, fiend, dreaded, daemon, wretch, abhorred, miserable … I hobbled him I tried to … I can’t move anymore, my right eye hurts but how can it hurt when I feel numb? The Glassites held themselves apart, refrained from eating the flesh of animals, ceremoniously cleansed their feet… And glass is made lustrous from such modest materials: a fusion of sand and silica or potash. (Shelley liked to learn about such things, he liked to …) His sail going under, and the water dark. I never did kill the one from the graveyard, couldn’t bring myself to do it, though I know I was cruel—. Just left him to be borne away by waves, lost in darkness and distance. Who knows what happened after that? And Shelley under the waves and never coming back. Once when Fanny and I were young and in the garden, she said the worm we found was a glow-worm but I said its other name was glass-worm. She didn’t believe me but I was right. My skin hadn’t burned yet, I hadn’t longed for it to turn to glass, anything to save me from that burning (though that burning made me proud— I could suffer like him, inflict pain, be relentless like him). And I can’t move anymore is this what he felt in the graveyard?—that he wanted to speak but couldn’t? I strapped him down, wanted to know who he was, but my mind got in the way, it still gets in the way. Dr. Bright said I am very fond of seeing, but it’s hard to really see. Does he know his patient’s glass, that I’ve turned again to glass, can he see this? So I’m brittle after all, but when he read to me I wasn’t brittle … and the waves at Lerici and the … and that hand that moved next to mine, that hand in the margins … Is this what slaves feel, is this how his silence felt… Is he even alive anymore and where is he if he is? But what if he can’t die? All those parts he was made from, what if they just go on forever and won’t die? How could I have sent him north like that, alone as he is, if he can’t even die? I watched the girls coming back from the silk mill in Cadenabbia, laughing and talking, watched the frightened man pick out his pear. He would have hated it if he knew I watched him. But if the one who read to me can’t die, what then? Will anyone watch him, will he hate being watched or is that something he needs … Who’ll think of him as I do? … I must study the rest is all nothing … would you buy for me also a gown with a close pink stripe … Petrarch had many dear friends but the plague appeared …my box with the papers being gone, and all the rest broken—
We’re in the graveyard. It’s afternoon, in summer. The River Fleet moving sluggishly nearby. Faint wind in the bushes. Brittle clicking of pebbles in her hand.
I’m reading and she’s listening:
“Secluded-Streamlet Pavilion is one of a number of ‘protecting-stone pavilions.’ Erected around a stone known for its beautiful shape and clear yellow grain, it is also known as Wind and Rain Pavilion. This name is in commemoration of a young woman fighter who, disguised as a boy, sheltered there one stormy night after battle, never to be seen again.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“A plum tree holds the moon; a secluded path is added to fresh wind.”
Laurie Sheck Page 40