Laurie Sheck Read online

  When I think of Bernardino Telesio’s view, time seems almost lonely: it exists by itself, and can exist unaccompanied by motion.

  To Giordano Bruno, change is a necessary condition for the perception of time, but not for its existence.

  Einstein said, “For us physicists the separation between past, present and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”

  (Last night I dreamed I sat at a wooden table on which there was a bowl of fruit, a writing pen, a notebook. On the notebook’s cover was the letter C. I wanted to open it and read it. When I looked down I had no hands. My arms were the silvery rose-white of fish underwater, stumps that ended in healed, imperfect seams. There’s so little I can know or touch or even think, and yet it’s there. And what if you hadn’t believed you thought me into being? What if you had sensed that maybe I existed all along, that nothing you could do could make or unmake me? That Time is stranger than we thought. That Time itself, not you, had made me.)

  Descartes believed God by his continual action re-creates the body at each successive instant. Time, therefore, is a divine process of re-creation.

  (But if there’s constant re-creation isn’t there also constant crumbling, de-creation, and I myself a relentless conflagration, though I can’t see myself this way. Inside of me, a crumbling and a burning always—)

  What of this idea called space-time? In 1908 Hermann Minkowski proclaimed, “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, have vanished into the merest of shadows, and only a kind of blend of the two exists in its own right.”

  (This feels so much less lonely, less disturbing, than Telesio’s view of Time that exists unaccompanied, always and ever by itself.)

  Yet Santayana said, “The essence of nowness runs like a fire along the fuse of time.”

  (Now seems less and less a solid entity to me, and time more a series of shifting, intersecting planes. Tenses fall away, the nowness. Claire picks up her pen, opens her notebook, raises her hand, starts to write. Where is she? And when? From what place do I watch her? From what time? I can almost touch the crispness of her sleeve, or the wet ink, each page a fractured, beating thing.)

  According to Stannard, “In four-dimensional space-time nothing changes, there is no flow of time, everything simply is… It is only in consciousness that we come across the particular time known as ‘now.’”

  And for Grünbaum, “Events simply occur … they do not ‘advance’ into a preexisting frame called ‘time.’”

  (Could it be true what I’ve read—that there’s no physical experiment that can distinguish among a state of rest, a state of constant velocity, and a state of gravitational free fall?)

  A “Block Universe” is the idea that time is somehow laid out in its entirety all at once—a landscape made of time where all past and future events exist together.

  (I’ve felt this but have had no words with which to say it.)

  Lloyd wrote, “For the Quinean, what differences we see between past, present and future pertain to our limited mode of access to reality.”

  (Would that mean the buildings of imperial Rome still stand—it’s just that we, caught in the net of the present, can’t see them? And that the buildings of future cities already exist, though we can’t see them either?)

  And Weyl, in 1922: “The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness crawling upward along the lifeline of my body does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image.”

  (I’m sitting on the bench with Eudemus. It’s morning or afternoon or night. I watch his blue-veined hand curl around his staff. And I’m on the table where you made me. And in the forest alone, scavenging for food. I’m almost touching Claire’s hand. I hear her slippered footsteps on the stairs. Her face is young then older then young again. Over and over Socrates is born, lives, dies. Zhuangzi dreams himself a butterfly. Or a butterfly dreams itself Zhuangzi. The sky’s dark or not, the water calm or not, the snow fallen or not. My footsteps on ice, my tracks in the grass.

  I can’t know what the physicists know. How there are more than four dimensions, such things as defy our habitual ways of thinking. Borges wrote of time: “It is the tiger which destroys me but I am the tiger.” Where is he now? And you? And Claire’s hand on the page, all this ice I feel inside me, and the night, the day, the measurements we use: millisecond, second, minute, hour … season, eon, era … as if such things could be measured, as if there weren’t this fire in the skull, and in that fire a hand, perplexed and burning, reaching through it—)

  ICE DIARY

  I’m now far north. Archangel. Salt winds from the White Sea mix with naphtha and lignite from the shipyards. Sea ice cracks and groans, breaks on itself, breaks farther. So much whiteness violently dividing. Then stillness: ice locks in around the ships, seals them like footprints left in wax, or pharoahs, mummy-wrapped, trapped and burning inward. For months each hull’s a secret violently kept, volatile and cryptic. Shore lights flicker like something slowly starving.

  If I still had a voice, if I could speak. But who would I speak to even then? These notes as if written in invisible ink. And the taste of blood in my mouth, or is it the memory of… And those bushes where I hid …

  This morning I found a single stick ornamented with Chinese glass beads. Also a Kufan coin, a blurred list of provisions, a pair of oilskin breeches, a cap. A harsh quietness in them like the silence of those ice-locked hulls. Something helpless in them too, as if as they lay there in the ice they felt unremembered and remembering, unconnected yet somehow still connected—but to what? (Though of course I knew they could feel nothing.) Where did they come from—what lost ships?

  But so many years since … And inflamed from blinding snow … And so far from … But I don’t want to think about that now …

  Even this town’s frozen through. Stone walls still stand though most of what they guard’s long vanished. A few abandoned fortresses, a monastery, the mouth of the Northern Dvina nearby.

  If I could see behind the shuttered windows—hands moving and changing even now—but I don’t want to see such things again, want only to leave. It’s said the more you draw toward true North the farther it recedes. Still, I want to feel it.

  This sting of salt. This shocked and changing emptiness of air. No trace of seabirds, wolves. Slaves built the canal here. Soon I will go farther.

  Why when I close my eyes do I see a woman’s hand floating in black air? Often now I see it. One of my books says it’s not great events that incite the mind, but the slightest things that twist and batter us about. That slight, delicate hand, the uncertainty I feel each time I see it. But whose is it? And why does it come to me? Why would a mind need to see such a thing? Why would mine?

  Protagoras said there’s nothing in nature save doubt. And Nausiphanes said that of things which seem to be, nothing is more existent than the nonexistent. Parmenides said there’s nothing certain except uncertainty. I don’t know. But I look out on this ice-locked harbor and think of the ice inside my mind, how little I can know of anything.

  Barriers. Snow blindness. Doubt.

  How will I get to a place where even these closed shutters don’t exist, where even the icebreakers don’t come?—no human face for miles, no human hands.

  Augustine wrote: “Hear how it glows. Smell how bright it is. Taste how it shines. Feel how it glitters,” then said we can’t do those things. But this quiet glows, acrid smells from the saltworks glitter then grow dull. It’s almost night now. But what’s now? Time shifts back and forth—sometimes I open my eyes onto old wooden houses, mica works, monasteries, fisheries, at other times the same land’s deserted. None of my books has explained this to me, or even said that it happens.

  (And those bushes where I hid, all the books I once read there. But I won’t think about that now.)

  Wind quickens, glows, stark as the place inside my mind where I hear nothing, remember nothing. Sometimes your face is gone from me, then I feel almost peaceful,
but that never lasts for long.

  (And if touch were bearable … or memory… or the voice of…)

  Archangel Monastery’s high walls have seven gates, eight towers, black cannons still embedded in the stone. It once housed over three hundred monks, and hundreds of servants, artisans, peasants, lived on the surrounding grounds. In the scriptorium, hands drew in colored ink, birds, animals, and flowers. Those hands must have wanted to leave something beautiful behind, though the land’s desolate, and the blue-painted ceilings with their little gold stars have peeled, are badly faded.

  Each time I think of going farther north, I consider what I’ll leave behind. Illuminated books where letters turn into animals and birds alight on those letters (such things I hope to still hold in my mind). But also faces that might remind me of yours, or even mine. Gestures. Eyes.

  “Taste how it shines.” “Feel how it glitters.” But something in me obliterates everything, keeps only this cold—its one clear syllable with its frozen walls.

  Where do you end and I begin?

  When I opened my eyes that first time, did you find in my face faint traces of the paths your hands had stitched, small declivities in a landscape made of flesh? Did you feel again the taut pull of thread as you blended one dead part with another, fastened one sallow patch of skin onto another?

  Now I walk alongside the harbor wall and think of Mikhail Lomonosov, author of the world’s first treatise on icebergs, wonder why he was imprisoned for a year. A fisherman’s son, he was born near here in Kholmogory in 1711. In his father’s shack he hoarded the few books he could find, vowed to study in Moscow even if it meant traveling the whole way on foot.

  We are “feathers in a raging fire,” he wrote.

  Wrote, “words that contain the vowels e, i, y, and u in their first syllable should be used to depict tender subjects, while those with the vowel sounds o, u, and y coming later, are fit to describe things that cause fear.”

  What words, then, would I use for you? Or for that hand—delicate—which comes to me so often now in air?

  (And if it’s true we’re born into reason and language, but are we? If attitudes are pictures, or … And what are “tender” subjects?)

  “A cold fire envelops me,” he wrote. “The icy oceans are burning.”

  (But there can be no proof of… And so few traces of who anyone has been. Is a voice a thing that flees, then vanishes? I want only to read.)

  Lomonosov believed in the fluidity of bodies, that although the universe is stable, what dwells within it isn’t isolate or unchanging. Nothing’s purely itself but exists in relation to others. When an object moves another it’s transferring its force to the one it touches, so nothing’s ever really lost.

  If you could have seen me in that way, believed my existence diminishes nothing, subtracts from the world exactly nothing. (And my voice long fled … this vague fever I feel… this sense of shame even now.)

  I look out on all this whiteness. The frozen port he saw as a boy. Did he think he could walk over snow all the way to Moscow? Where will I travel to, and how? If true North’s unreachable—but I don’t believe it’s unreachable. What will I find if I get there? What vowels rise in my mind, the tender ones, the harsh?

  Why do I even speak these things to you? You who I never see and never will.

  Lately when I close my eyes I see only this: a woman’s white sleeve, her hand moving across a page, writing. The hand leaves steady markings in its wake—light chestnut-brown or black or darker brown. Sometimes it crosses out words, sometimes whole sentences, builds fences of x‘s, drops ink stains on the page. Sometimes it turns the paper to the side, writes over and across words already left there. Or it halts as if netted, a sudden clenching of the tendons at the wrist. The first few times I could see little of the page but now that’s changing.

  Each night I wait for it—that white sleeve gathered at the wrist, that small determined hand. I read what it leaves:

  Tonight I’m remembering Snow Hill. They called me Jane then, not Claire. Mother and Godwin never once called me Claire. Cold nights under flimsy blankets—as if that very name, Snow Hill, was seeping into the walls and through my bones. The square where the public executions were held stood barely 100 feet from our front door. The year we arrived (I was 9) they hung Haggerty and Halloway for the lavender merchant’s murder. 28 people were trampled and suffocated in the crowd. Mary and I barely slept, thinking of that crush of feet like cattle’s hooves, and all those faces suddenly unable to breathe, mouths useless holes. Afterwards I walked down the street alone, past the milliner shops, furriers, coffee dealers, wondering what strange creatures we are to inflict such things on ourselves. Minds contaminate themselves and actions grow ruinous. I feel this in myself—ruin prodigious and luxuriant as plant-life. It flourishes, this crumbling, this destruction, and yet there’s also—

  It was around that time I searched through Mother’s things for my birth certificate. But it seems there’s no record of my birth or baptism. Some say she was put in a debtor’s prison shortly after I was born (so was I in that debtor’s prison too?) then relieved and set free through a charitable subscription. A few years later she met Godwin. I’ve no name for my father. Maybe it’s better this way.

  Snow Hill—I still feel its coldness in my bones, and how after a while I wanted only to leave. Though I loved the books on the shelves and sometimes the eyes that watched me, the eyes I watched back. How watching is a kindness and a shackling both. The chain of it, the net, the binding. And I remember, above the doorway, the stone face of Aesop reading.

  Seawater ice holds my weight when I walk, but black ice is thin, can’t be trusted. Sometimes I don’t know which one I’m on. The wind’s a fist in my mouth. I bend down, huddle on the ground, try only to breathe. Or I come back inside, say her name to myself: Claire. Air.

  Why do I wait for her?—that hand and the walls of ink it builds and leaves.

  Claire. Air. Care. Clear. Claire.

  At first glance the hand’s delicate, but I see now the finger bones are strong. Lately she comes before I even close my eyes, that hand lingering in the air and writing. Forty degrees below, sixty degrees below. Her white nightdress thin, yet she seems to feel no cold.

  Her face not visible to me. I never see her face.

  We were four children from four different fathers. Mine unknown. Charles’s unknown (though he and I had the same mother). Then Mary whose mother died when she was born, and whose father is Godwin. And Fanny, who was older, seven when we met, daughter of Gilbert Imlay—but I don’t think she ever really knew him. So that even though Fanny and Mary shared the same mother they have different last names. And they always seemed so different—Fanny quiet as if carrying a secret dulled and locked away behind her eyes, a drowned girl staring out. That girl slowly turning, adrift in brown water. William was born later, so in total we were five.

  Maybe this is why I love ruins, feel almost peaceful when I visit them— however strange and adamant in their otherness they are, I’m returning to a place I somehow know. We were fractured from the start—waves hitting a brittle rocky shore, a bowl of patched fragments. So how could we just be kind to one another, alert to one another (each with our own jagged edges, our damage). (And staring out from Fanny’s eyes the drowned one lost in the muteness of water.)

  Sometimes I secretly followed Mary to St. Pancras graveyard, watched her sitting by her mother’s grave. Her face turned from me. The back of her head a small night I saw but couldn’t enter—

  Sometimes she leaves whole sentences and paragraphs, other times just scraps. Once she lit a corner of the page. I watched it curl and burn until only a few words remained:

  find no

  and

  awaken strong against Fanny without.

  (I think of your lost face, the way you left me. So much lostness in one single skull.)

  I keep dreaming of snow, I don’t know why. Last night for instance, Hadrian was ordering snow-lions built all over Ro
me. But I’ve never even been to Rome. And how could snow-lions survive beneath the Roman sun? He said he wanted them because they were impossible, that if the people loved him they would find some way to make them.

  When I woke I remembered we’re in France.

  For weeks we walked and plotted in the Charterhouse Gardens—Shelley Mary and myself, making plans to leave England. Godwin suspected nothing. But there’s danger even in certainty (maybe, even, especially in certainty). As we crossed near Calais a storm rushed the boat. Everything reeling. A strange look on Mary’s face, like someone walking through a house they sense will soon burn down but no one believes them. At the time I had no words for what I saw. Her skin much too white, her hands shaking.

  Today a Swiss gentleman asked Mary and Shelley if they ran away for love and they said yes. Then he asked me. “No,” I told him, “I came to speak French.”