Laurie Sheck Read online

  I dream of liberty.

  I think now there’s no privacy of the mind. But if I could have it would I hear a truer grammar? Not this yes yes I must and order order order follow done. Always at a sentence’s end a period or question mark. But how many thoughts happen in that way, end precisely in that way—And does each thought even have an ending at all, or should we call whatever happens then something else, something we have no words or punctuation for? I can almost feel the punctuation marks crumbling, balance crumbling. Everything more skewed and wavy. Haphazard, rough, but it still makes a kind of sense. Nothing balances anything. Nothing exactly matches anything else. The abyss inside each word even as I write you—all I know is that it’s cold. I walk on rigid ice floes of linked words that keep me, in their brittleness, from what? They’re white as coma.

  Fanny. Allegra. Each one of you adrift on your broken ice floe, alone.

  (she is so small and I let them … how

  could I have let them?)

  And I with no verbs to clamp onto you, seizing.

  I watch from my white shore. At least there’s that. But there’s little I can see … really almost nothing …

  Maybe it’s good that I can’t seize you … (but what of Allegra?)

  In my mind the fires claw so high, climbing and spitting.

  Uprisings Guillotines Slaves

  Flesh/Property

  You, Fanny. And Allegra. You. Her. You. Are you bound on your ice floes or unbound? Or bound, unbound, at the same time? And what grammar is there for that, what ways of saying?XXXI have no … So many walls of words when I think that I can’t reach her—

  She’s writing in a small notebook of Italian red marbled paper. Rome, 1819. Inside the front cover, a list of Italian coins:

  Gratze, Soldi—Bajocci—Grani —

  Lira, Paoli, Carlini, Piastra Francesconi

  Centisimi, Pezzi. Ducati.

  Quattrini

  She writes

  Guardi

  then erases it (I watch her do this but can’t know why she wants to).

  Then:

  Ne le me voglie ognor stringe e rafferme a cennit altrui (in my desires I am always pulled to and fro by someone else).

  Is she thinking of Allegra? Or of Mary and Shelley? Or of Godwin, or Allegra’s father? Or of all of them and more?

  Below, notes for a book on Italy:

  On the Manners and Customs

  On the (Belle Arts) I Pictures and Statues

  On the Music and the State of the Opera

  Then:

  Letter for Bologna Passport Blk. Silk Stockings & Shoes Ivy Leaves

  (I wonder what this means)

  Palazzo Verospi Al Corso Roma

  Why does watching make me feel more seen?. As if a chain, not rough but tender, not enslaving, links me to another. How the parts of that chain, though rigid in themselves, combine to move flexibly and freely. I know that she hates chains (she wrote this), thinks only of the ones that fetter and restrain. But her hand moves through the air, linking one letter to another, one sentence to another—a good chain—until her voice becomes visible, an almost-nearness.

  Fanny,

  If I could have just one lock of her hair … or, no, that’s not enough. In Bagni di Lucca I rode a horse so fast the world spun away and when I fell I was glad. Nothing but blackness, cold and unfeeling. But first, right before I fell, my brain flashed with white light. All the trees in my brain were what thunder would look like if thunder could be seen. Then I had to stay inside for many weeks, but I still saw the white trees in my brain—that poisonous, unsparing light. (I think of you on the bed in Swansea—laudanum coursing through you—good shoes still on, and your silk stockings, your good clothes …). Herculaneum, Vesuvius, the Bay of Baiae, Paestum, Pompeii—When I could walk again I saw them. But what does it mean to be in the world, to walk through the world? Even through ruins? I want an unchained mind, I want XXXXX And I feel more and more that there’s as much distance, if not more, between the places within ourselves and the distance between one person and another. Everything various, unhealed. Coded spaces, spaces cast apart and cast away, irretrievable, inchoate, choked: all this inside one mind. And I can’t XXXX but then I think I must try … XXX I see the scorched trees again, the white light XXXXXX and still each day comes and goes.

  After ninety days of struggling over ice, Albanov was flooded with feverish dreams. “I hear angry voices outside, someone’s trying to break down the door.” “Colonies of walruses, crouching in silent contemplation, drift past on floating ice-chunks, then I see their heads are horses’ skulls.”

  He finds the remains of an old camp. A large boulder engraved with the words Stella Polare. A wooden cross, painted red. Shreds of dirty, mildewed cloth. Crates and boxes buried in ice. “It was like digging up the ruins of Pompeii.” Inside: spoiled powdered eggs, pemmican, sausage in sealed tins. The name Ziegler embroidered on red silk. Cans of spoiled coffee and oats. Pharmaceutical jars. A drawing of a dogsled.

  “Konrad wants to set out for Bell Island. I’m too weak but he says he’ll come back for me. He’s left some quinine tablets and food but I’m not hungry and it’s hard to swallow. How many days has he been gone? Why would Nansen refer to sea-ice as a fisherman’s net? Where’s the icon of Nicholas I carry in my pocket?—I can’t feel it. Nature doesn’t want the presence of man. I thought when you’re alone you’re free but everything’s splintering. Konrad comes back, he’s sobbing. It was impossible for him to get to Bell Island.”

  White trees flame inside Claire’s brain. And Albanov lived all those months in a whiteness like those trees she can’t stop seeing. My own brain in those first hours after you left me, didn’t it try to scorch back into oblivious white flame, until there was nothing left of who you were or where you went to, what you did? But something in me kept thinking (though I had no words and can’t remember what such thinking felt like). And Albanov kept thinking, Claire keeps thinking.

  See the temple of the Sybil Read Dante (Purgatorio) Read Locke

  Trees white and unsparing—and still each day comes and goes—

  February. Pisa. Though she writes in her journal almost daily, for long stretches she doesn’t mention Allegra. Instead she takes notes on what she’s reading:

  Read Paine. Letter to the Abbe Reynal. Rights of Man—”It is the faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates and to act in unison with its object.”

  If I could see the workings of my brain, would I see them change when I think of you instead of her? Does my mind become a different, harsher mind? As Albanov shivered, fevered, walked on ice then couldn’t walk, as he dreamed of sunlit cities, plates of food, did his mind merge with that ice until it remade him as its own?

  Paine’s Rights of Man are a monument to the plain and sensible idea of Liberty. And for this glory he was repaid by being refused Burial in any of the Americans’ Church-Yards.

  Whenever such examples fall my way I remember Southey’s “Man is the worst of all animals and it is a disgrace to the Oran Outang to be compared with him.”

  Shelley and I walk on the Argine. Later he goes to Livorno. Read more Paine: General Clive used to destroy his prisoners by shooting them from the mouth of a cannon.

  I dream I’m in Damascus. I don’t look like myself. I’m covered in black cloth. I’m walking on a dusty street carrying water in one hand and fire in the other. The water doesn’t seep through my fingers and the skin of my other hand’s unburned. The Ambassador asks me why I’m doing this. I tell him with my fire I’ll burn Paradise, but I don’t know why I say this or what it means, and I don’t know what I’ll do with the water. I start to feel my hand burning, it pains terribly, the skin’s blackening, almost melting, though none of this was happening until the Ambassador asked his question. When I wake Mary says I was sleepwalking again, is angry.

  A XXX Alle

  The day is rainy. Write to Shelley. In the evening the Opera. La Cenerentola. Many Masks.

  He
r hand’s moving slowly—I’m not used to this slowness—as she jots down details of her days, an invisible stone strapped to her wrist. Does she daydream of Allegra?:

  Drink tea in Casa Silva. Write to Mrs. Pollock. The weather becomes rainy.

  But when she takes her reading notes the hand moves rapidly, scrawls rows of slanting words across the page:

  From Locke’s ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING:

  *”Extreme disturbance possesses our whole mind … allows us not the liberty of thought”

  (but all that matters is liberty of thought)

  *”Not content to live on scraps of begged opinions”

  *”If thou judgest for thyself I know thou wilt judge candidly, and then I shall not be harmed”

  (but the world is largely made of harm)

  *”Whatever it be that keeps us so much in the dark to ourselves”

  (as I’m in the dark to myself XXX I haven’t even seen where she lives, and why didn’t I… and how could I let her … so much dark in myself so much XXX and what does that say of me? XXX and Mary grows restless)

  *”Because man is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts when they lead him ever so little out of the common road”

  (I didn’t want to be married … Didn’t want to give her up, yet I told myself “it’s for the best,” so where was my liberty of thought? I’m complicit, custom’s slave, a shackled and defeated thing. Fanny thought I was brave but I’m not.)

  *”To be in the mind and never to be perceived”

  *”So wholly strangers”

  Fanny,

  When I read Locke I feel almost comforted. As if he were looking into my mind, loosening the chains in my mind. “Extreme disturbance possesses our whole mind … allows us not the liberty of thought”—I read that and feel seen. And then I think, if I can let myself think about that, then maybe I can find some liberty of thought after all. Maybe disturbance, if recognized and not flinched from, can lead somehow toward liberty, not away … the way Arctic ice is said to heave and break before it loosens and moves free. But then I close the book and remember how Thomas Paine was put on trial for his thoughts: “Certain False, Wicked, Scandalous and Seditious Libels Inserted in the Second Part of the Rights of Man.” And I think of Allegra far away.

  and the instability of and a mind ashamed of its own being (though Paine wasn’t ashamed) (and yet they shunned him for this thoughts, wouldn’t allow him proper Burial)

  How does Understanding turn inward, make thought truly its own?

  (You lay down on that strange bed and gave your mind away to the laudanum. You wrote again and again the word “affraid.” And Allegra can’t possibly understand why I’m not with her.)

  Why do the workings of a human mind have to frighten and threaten other minds? Why must I keep my thoughts about my child silent?

  This is the last day of Carnival. We drive on the Lung Arno with the children. Masked.

  Fanny, I’m reading Locke again. I wish you could have read him. Instead we kept ourselves awake so many nights—remember?—frightening each other with stories like those of Virgilius who was condemned to be burnt for asserting the Antipodes or in other words the Earth was a globe habitable in every part where there was land. He was killed for that thought only. As if we had to prove to ourselves that thoughts are dangerous, our minds—moving— dangerous, even, maybe, murderous (would we have been Virgilius or would we have been the ones who murdered him, or both?).

  But Locke says: “a supposition of the mind of something otherwise.” (He doesn’t flinch from that “otherwise”)

  And Fanny, he says: “How the very nature of words makes it unavoidable for many of them to be doubtful and uncertain in their significations.” (but you were afraid of your doubt, and it made you feel ashamed)

  He says: “So many parts of ideas which are not visible in action.” And: “is not settled or certain.”

  “The great disorder that happens in our inability to penetrate the real.”

  “We have our understandings no less different from our palates.” (I think this might have comforted you)

  And: “Lost and unknown when clothed in words.”

  Soon we’ll move from these rooms to other rooms at the Piano of Casa Frassi, closer to the Arno, where Shelley can have a study of his own. It’s been a cold winter. But what are these words as I write to you?—”Lost and unknown when clothed in words,” Locke wrote. Shelley fills notebook after notebook, as if coming to a truer life on each page, as if finding—what?—on each page?—he writes upside down, sideways, every which way. But when I write there’s always something lost and unknown that I can’t find. Sometimes I look at my journal and it’s a cliff broken off and whatever I might have meant, or tried to mean, is in the air past where it stops. All the instability, all the movement of mind, the waves and currents of my mind, fluctuations, uncertainties—I don’t know how to say them I don’t know how to, not in words but all I have are words, what kind of clothes are they what kind of covering and of what? XXX And Locke said, “is not settled or certain” and wrote of our “inability to penetrate the real.” I feel this all the time, Fanny, like the snow blindness we read of as children. The snow blindness we feared.

  Must sleep now. Will read more tomorrow. Light rain.

  When Sherard Osborn’s expedition went in search of Franklin’s ships, they carried ice saws ten feet long. They thought they could protect themselves by cutting huge holes in high glacial ice, then inserting their ships for shelter. All around them floes and massive icebergs collided. But even vigilance has limits. In those narrow passages the ships were thrown over on their sides.

  Nothing’s still or safe, Claire wrote to Fanny. In my thoughts I move among walls of shifting ice, massive barriers of breaking ice, carry in my hands the weight of ice. I don’t walk along a riverbed like Claire, or dream I’m in Damascus.

  This ice I carry in my mind, does it harm or protect me, or both? “Lost and unknown when clothed in words,” Claire quoted Locke. This question’s a cloth thrown over a wonderment I have no other way of saying.

  How else can I know Claire but through her words? That hand filling pages in air, pages she sometimes even burns. But if words keep her “lost and unknown,” if, in the end, they’re a covering and little more, then does my vigilant watching mean almost nothing? There’s no way to draw close to her and know her.

  Locke wrote of “our inability to penetrate the real.” But I want to know who she is, it matters to me who she is. What if words are the real, not just a covering, or clothing?

  Still, Locke wrote, “to be in the mind and never to be perceived.” So is each mind a shut, secret place? Is this, in the end, what it means to be alive: to be in the mind but never truly perceiving or being perceived? Do words cover over that one fact—its icelike core—or try to? Still, if words are only cloth, that cloth is intricate, intriguing.

  If words are as much concealment as anything, and myself far from her or anyone, how could I have thought you might know me?

  Each time I read the words she leaves, even if I distrust (and I do) my own mind (Locke said we “are in the dark to ourselves”) something in me wonders, waits, listens.

  Fanny,

  There’s this place of fade in me, I don’t know how else to put it. Where I go away from myself, from everything, or it’s as if there’s an away in me, vast lake or shadowland where I’m drowned for a while, thin cut of light among a larger, grayish dark.

  I do my chores, I sweep. Sweep this, sweep that. I concentrate on the swish of the broom. The back and forth of the stiff bristles, a metronome or clock, but with more swerve, more yielding. As if to bring me back, that steady motion. Ash, dust, paper, insects, hair.

  I put things in my mouth. Chew bread, chew olives, cheeses, lemons, bits of cake. Thinking all the while: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Thinking, this is, this thing in the mouth and down the throat. The press of it, the texture. That it’s real and I’m in the world where a t
ongue tastes what it’s given and a footstep makes a sound. Where there’s a floor, a table, metal, wood-grain, dirt. But I can’t feel it, not really. Each word grows strange, as if shedding itself inside my mouth. As if, were I to speak (but I don’t speak) my voice would be a strangled, mutant thing. As when a word’s said over and over until it makes no sense, or makes an other, farther sense that travels toward a denser, farther air part breathable, part not—stare stare stare stare stare stare stare. Like that. The stars in it and stairs and are’s and air and the emptiness it climbs and how it can’t wholly climb it after all and so falls back into itself hammering and hammering, but at what?