by Laurie Sheck
I held the word creature in my mind, thought of the tender vulnerability within it. It seemed Florensky was expressing an almost-protectiveness toward matter, its unguarded limitations. Though most of what he wrote confused me, the words tender and creature moved in me, a wind that stung but also partly warmed and calmed me.
I knew I should put down my Florensky, and return to the bag of papers I had taken from the island. That it was long past time, even as my hands felt heavy with the weight of Frieda’s absence.
But as I held the bag from San Servolo, my thoughts swerved again to Frieda—how I’d wanted to turn to her yet something in me didn’t. And my love of facts, was that even true? Hadn’t she laid them out before me—the plague islands, the history of Venice—and still I acted like I didn’t hear her. My hands untrustworthy, besieged, deceitful. The room’s surfaces subverted and undermined themselves the moment I even looked at them or touched them. Thoughts tied themselves into tight nooses.
Titian had brought me his kindness of red cloth, but what had I brought Frieda?
Then Titian was standing near the ruins of a castle among pines in a place I didn’t recognize. “I am in Cadore,” he said, “the village of my birth. Though I wrote many letters, little of what I said was personal, so much of who I am is lost. But what can anyone truly know of another? Take my painting ‘Man of Sorrows’ for instance. Vassari attributes it to me, then turns around and at the same time claims it was painted by Giorgione without acknowledging the contradiction. And as to my early life, some say I apprenticed myself to Gentille Bellini, but others say no, it was to his brother, Giovane, and still others say it was in truth to Giorgione, or even to Palma Vecchio, father of the beautiful Violante who I am said to have loved. My biographers write of the ‘darkness that prevails’ when they try to piece together my early life before the new century brought me fame. You may wonder why I am no longer holding the red cloth—but so much remains unknowable, mysterious, obscured. Think of the fragile land you stand on. The hundreds of thousands of pillars hidden beneath the water and St. Marks.”
I tried to accept that there are many things I would never understand. That this is what a life is made of. Hadn’t Florensky tried to say this? And now Titian?
Again I reminded myself it was time to turn to the bag of papers. After all, I had “given my word.” Had promised to follow any hints, however unlikely or absurd, that might lead to the lost notebook or even an idea of what it was or why the one across the ocean sent me.
I needed to believe she was still alive, maybe pacing or waiting for some word from me, but when I tried to picture her all I could see was a white mist.
Titian spoke of Venice’s fragility. But isn’t all thought and intention also fragile, a form of contingency, and to “give one’s word” as vulnerable and imperfect as skin? Why shouldn’t the one across the ocean be lost to me, and I wouldn’t even know it?
I waited a few minutes, then reached into the bag of papers. My hand touched something hard. I had found a thin bound volume.
San Servolo
The Island of the Mad, they call this. San Servolo. Each morning I walk the few steps to the shore and look out at Venice’s buildings in the distance. But to step onto that soil would be like stepping from one skin into another, one mind into another.
And now we’ve been told we have to leave here, that after centuries of use this hospital will be closed forever.
The seizures come more frequently each week. For years I wanted nothing more than to stop them, but something’s pulling me in ways I can’t explain. The air splintering, slowly burning. Light/Dark. Each time one comes I fall through and fall through. A quick glittering, then blackness. Thin rips in the smallest particles of air. The world no longer real, or maybe it’s the opposite—everything suddenly more sharply what it is, bluntly present, yet filled with a strange peace. As if space is scarified yet at the same time wholly composed. My mind watching from some farness, alert but coldly blind. Cells flickering, untethered.
The world wounds and soothes itself in ways I can’t explain.
What are words in the face of this? What is thought?
If there is a dark joy I don’t know how to think of it. But sometimes it comes to me like this light spreading over the lagoon.
I’ll burn these pages before anyone can read them. Maybe weeks from now, maybe years.
What do I even know of this island where I live?
Only some dates, a few names.
In the 7th century the Benedictines fled the Franks and found refuge on this rocky soil. They built a monastery, a bell tower, planted medicinal gardens. Over time, they added cisterns, stables, workshops, many walls. They stayed for 500 years.
When they left it became a dwelling place for lepers.
After that, three centuries of hospitals began—first for wounded soldiers, then for the contaminated and frail, and now this one for “the mad and epileptic.”
This morning while helping to sort the hospital’s records for storage, I discovered the first admitted patient was one Lorenzi Stefani, “a fine Nobleman from Venice, confined in 1725.” “Most illustrious,” the official ledger says—but then goes on to call him “mad.” I’ve been unable to find out anything else about him. Still, I wonder what it felt like to set foot on this island before any other patient had arrived. His footsteps through the halls echoing, too present. His eyes staring out from the cell window at the rows of empty cells. Who sent him here and why? Did he walk the few feet to the shore as I do now and look out across the water at the island he’d been sent from? Was he ever allowed home or did he die here?
I never expected to find the lost notebook, not really, not even for a minute. My eyes were blurring, I grew dizzy. When finally I steadied myself, I tried to accept what I was holding. All my years of reading had taught me a mixture of skepticism and enchantment, the nature of facts and the limits of my eyes before them—how they are more enduring, less corruptible, than the human mind. Now this new fact was before me, but it was something I could barely accept or understand.
For a moment I almost felt the one across the ocean, tense with mysterious waiting, but quickly the white mist replaced her.
All my life I lived within one form of brokenness or another, one aspect of disruption or another—my fragile bones, the blue fissures in the whites of my eyes—so how could I not notice that the pages I just read existed within a fracturing somewhat different from my own but also close to me, familiar. Each seizure a quick slash of lightning.
Then once again my eyes grew blurry.
Again I opened the notebook, started reading:
This morning among the hospital’s uncatalogued documents, I found the “admission of the second mad, Giacomo Marini Baldassarre,” which took place on September 3, 1732. By then the asylum was run by the Fatebenefratelli, the religious order of St. John of God, summoned by The Most Serene Republic of Venice to “provide care and solace for the wounded and afflicted.”
He died in confinement on the 10th of May, 1749. He had lived here for 17 years.
“What is man? What is this sense of sorrow that continues always to exist?” I found this on a sheet of torn, blue paper.
And on another folded scrap: “compassion alone cannot discern the distance.”
“Think of the fragile land you stand on.”—I remembered Titian said this.
But the more I tried to get my bearings, the more fragile the floor beneath me seemed, and the stone streets, all the words inside my mind, as if even a soft wind could break them.
Tonight looking out across the water I thought back to the first time I had a seizure. I hadn’t known the world could be so broken. Always before, when I looked at the sky I saw sky, when I looked at a rock I saw rock. There was weight, mass, equal signs, right answers—the word “is” stronger and steadier than any human brain—all of that made sense, or seemed to. But afterwards everything was different—information no longer a series of locked or open boxes, the earth
more a site of threat and de-coherence than of building. Particles of air sizzled in the too-bright light. The ground suddenly vulnerable, almost desperate, as if even my small weight could hurt it. I missed how before it had seemed almost despotic, oppressive, more durable and impermeable than thought.
There’s a tingling in my right arm now. The red fire’s starting in my eyes.
Now that the red fire is starting, how am I going to read to the one across the courtyard? I promised I would go to her and read each night I could.
And when I think of her, why do I need to compare her to something else—a nameless island in some far-off sea etc.—as if it’s too unsettling to acknowledge her simply for what she is: singular, mostly unknowable.
I wonder if I can still go to her even though the fire’s spreading. Maybe I can manage it for just a short time.
Pilate’s migraine spilled in red waves from his terrace onto the dry plain below. He wanted to pick up the notebook on the stone table beside him, but knew if he did it would crumble to red dust. The sky flared red, and the hills in the far distance. His temples pulsed like a heart that disdains the body it belongs to, wanting only to break free, but air unmediated by lungs is alien, unwilling.
The notebook still open in my hands, I remembered the epileptic’s promise to read to another and wondered who she was.
When she first asked me to read to her I was perplexed. I’d glimpsed her a few times in the courtyard, always with a book in her hands, either walking or sitting on a tree-shaded bench. A small woman with shoulder-length brown hair. She’d probably seen me working on and off in the hospital library, but didn’t say this, just came up to me one day and said her eyes were failing, that she needed a reader and believed I might help her. “It’s Dostoevsky, I’ve been reading his books but my eyes are weak and now the print is blurring.” She was holding a worn copy of The Idiot.
I had suffered a seizure the night before—everything still slightly unreal, the ground wave-like, oddly alert. My head pounded, my neck muscles ached. The air jumped with a slight, nervous glitter, as if straining to recompose itself after hours of tireless breaking.
I don’t remember if I answered or what I said. Here, take these, read them and then think about it, she said, as she handed me a few sheets of folded paper. Just burn them when you’re done.
My right arm is still tingling. The red fire is spreading in my eyes.
As I read, I felt I’d opened a door of veins and skin, something softly beating I had no right to listen to or touch.
And then, in that soft beating, the white, glaring light of my childhood infirmary came back to me, the doctors’ faces unreal in that harsh whiteness, tainted in a way I couldn’t name, their words tainted also, much too real, as they explained the reasons my bones had broken and that this pattern wouldn’t change.
Ugly consonants hung in the florescent air. My book in my hand, my eyes averted.
When they were finally done, I turned toward the small window and the grass, but something in me flinched and turned away. My eyes suddenly wary, unprotected.
Did the notebook writer feel this also in those hours after he seized and fell?—how even the word “is” grows lost and maimed at its pure core, unsteady.
I should burn these notes as she asked me to, I know. But instead, I keep taking them out, reading them again and again, and now what’s worse, I’ve started pasting them into my notebook. I tell myself this keeps them safe, that no one will ever look for them or find them, but in truth my feelings are more suspect and less clear, more selfish. The red fire’s still spreading through my eyes, even this air is stained with redness—
~~~
How can I explain why I need you to read to me?
If the doctors had their way I wouldn’t even be writing this at all. They say it is forbidden for me to keep any private diary, any notes or journal at all, that I need only to rest. That if I were ever to write something down I must immediately hand it over. They will study it, place it in my records. They want to know why I am as I am, and the others before me.
They would think my secrecy a form of evil, or at least a blatant recalcitrance, a problem to be solved.
But to me it is the strongest flower.
If I can’t live among words, what am I? And this book of Dostoevsky’s I carry with me and take out even at night when the doctors insist I try to sleep….If they knew they would confiscate it also.
Can Time frighten itself? Each night I hold the book and wonder.
(They say I need to calm my mind, treat it as one treats a fevered child…)
But I know perfectly well why I am here. I know what is happening to me.
I still haven’t really explained what I need from you and why. I will try again later—
This is what is happening to me:
There are malformed infectious proteins known as prions spreading through my body, opening and folding like strange fans.
This movement is called “conformational influence.” Each day inside my brain, prions hollow out the thalmus.
“Sleep,” Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy, “moistens and fattens the body, concocts, and helpes digestion, expels cares, pacifies the mind, refreshest the weary limbs after long work.”
But I no longer sleep. Or sleep only briefly, tense as these wrong wings inside me.
It’s said there is no cure. Since prions aren’t technically alive they can’t be killed by radiation. This is hard for me to understand…
My pupils will shrink to the size of pinpoints. Already I shiver often. My sight blurs, my forehead’s moist.
For centuries there was no name for this. My ancestors waited in shame to see which one would sicken next. Was it a form of insanity? A punishment for evil deeds? They pulled into themselves, walked with lowered eyes, barely stepped onto the streets of the Veneto. Spoke of it to almost no one. Not even to each other.
Pico della Mirandola called man “plasteis et factor”—“maker and molder of himself.” But I see now this is wrong. There is so little we control, so much mystery and harm inside us.
In the coming months I will sleep even less. Maybe I will grow unable to use my arms or legs, my pulse quickening, my hands agitated, shaking. Some lose all speech and fall into a coma, others hallucinate, but a few remain lucid until the end. I don’t know how it will be with me.
Sleep is a soft covering, I see this now. A place of safety. It’s one of the first things the brain learns even before birth, inside the womb. How does one live without such safety? I guess I will find out. Sometimes I leave my books behind, walk down to the water, try to think about this, but my mind mostly goes blank—
Long ago those who died of this were buried in nine-foot-deep graves. It was thought this might protect the living. The bereaved were warned never to touch their dead—As if staying apart could keep them safe, as if suffering must inevitably come from the outside…
Now that my eyes are failing I would be grateful if you’d read to me. I have been rereading many books by Dostoevsky.
Finding the notebook had been unsettling enough—but now this. How could I possibly accept what I just read?—this illness that echoed so closely the condition of the one across the ocean. It was as if every fracture in my body had come back at once. I longed for the real bridges of Venice, the clear sounds of the canals, anything palpable and likely. But the longer I thought, the shallower my breath became. My body ached. My sight grew dim again, and wary.
When finally I steadied myself, the first thing that came to mind was that Dostoevsky once traveled to Venice. (I learned this years before while scanning.) Given all that had been pressing in on me—prions, fire, seizures, blurring eyes—why focus on this one small fact? And yet I did. It had been years since I’d thought of The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov, each with its epileptic character, or of how Dostoevsky suffered from the same affliction.
What year had it been when he stopped for a few days in Venice before heading to Trieste, t
hen on to Prague? Nearly destitute, wanting only to go home. “This total isolation is difficult to bear,” he wrote. The Idiot was finished by then, his newborn daughter several months dead. In his diary he noted the time and duration of each seizure. In those months they came often.
“What most people regard as fantastic I hold to be the inmost essence of truth,” he wrote. “In any newspaper one picks up one comes across reports of wholly authentic facts which nevertheless seem completely extraordinary, yet they are the truth for they are facts.”
(As I read that, I pressed the scanner’s stop button, copied it down.)
Then I thought once again of how Frieda said I loved facts, and that each time she said it something in me flinched and wondered.
But the world’s facts kept pressing in.
For several days my eyes kept blurring. My walls crumbling, dissolving, reassembling—
Titian was walking over miles of red cloth. “It’s as beautiful as ever,” he said, though thousands of small holes glared up from it like ragged eyes. Then Frieda was beside him, holding a red handkerchief, the moon red and full above her, her face turned toward a shore I couldn’t see. I felt the epileptic’s notebook in my hands, but couldn’t see it. The term “conformational influence” ran through my mind but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t remember what it meant. How could I think if I couldn’t understand the words? Then I realized the notebook was also pocked with holes, small roughnesses I couldn’t mend. The longer I looked, the more numerous the holes became. I wondered if Titian would finally despair at the millions of blind eyes he stood among, but his face was calm, his hands open.