Laurie Sheck Read online

  Salt. Sweet. Bitter. Sour. Salt.

  I didn’t know how the mind travels so far from itself. And the hands— ignorant creatures that need so much to mean; to have a purpose, a task; that need to act.

  In such a fade the words go out of my mind, and I’m webbed in a gray light where once I was Claire and once again I will be Claire but not now, not quite, so what am I, and you, what were you when you also felt this as I think you did, a grain of salt placed on your tongue, sharp, edged, and then (stare, star, staircase, stanchion, stain) it dissolves and you’re nothing, but not bodiless either, not quite that.

  Who would choose to come here? Wind blows at the speed of sixteen feet per second. Huge ice-fields lock and batter. (Lock. John Locke. Unlock.) Still so many came, they chose this.

  Nansen had this dream: “I’ve finally reached home but feel ashamed because I can’t give any account of what I’ve seen. I’ve forgotten everything.”

  As if ice could lock the mind, lock language, make of the tongue a frozen, helpless thing. (Some days I feel the ice inside me harden even farther, the white of erased pages. When I sleep I have no dreams, no hands across a page or bright domes on the horizon.)

  Nansen recorded another dream: “People ask me what it was like among the drift ice but I forgot to take accurate observations. I just look at them in silence.”

  “So wholly strangers,” Locke wrote. “So many parts of ideas which are not visible in action.”

  Yet sometimes I feel almost happy, locked in, locked apart, where no human mind can find me. As if it weren’t odd to be solitary after all, though each day I still wait for her hand.

  When Nansen reached home, did he enter a loneliness deeper, more intricate than any he’d known or could explain? He who in his dreams couldn’t speak of anything he’d seen—

  “Lost and unknown when clothed in words”

  Fanny,

  I keep thinking of Locke’s “to be in the mind and never to be perceived” and “our inability to penetrate the real.” Keep thinking if I could have facts, plain facts. And live safely in those facts. But do facts ever seem plain, or even safe at all? (My child away from me is fact, your death in Swansea, fact.) Salt is composed of the metal sodium & of a green air called chlorine. Soda is composed of the metal sodium and oxygen gas. Those are facts, I suppose, plain facts. But so, too, is the way straw’s put before the door of a dying man so he won’t hear the rolling of carriages going past. And the water in Lake Asphaltites contains bitumen which will take the bloodstains out of cloth. And Caligula adored his horses but hid his men in the woods where he fell on them and butchered them as enemies so in Rome and the Provinces word could spread of his great victory.

  Even so I try to think of facts but then I think, “It was fear first in the world made gods.” I think of the power of what we feel.

  The other planets no doubt have other elements than ours—if a sufficient degree of cold could penetrate the air above our Earth it would freeze to a white mist, but on Saturn where the cold is more intense this doesn’t happen so its air must be made of other elements than ours. And might iron, which is here the hardest metal, there be the softest, and would it serve in a thermometer as quicksilver does here? I go to my books, I try to think about what is, but even the nature of what is seems very strange and changing.

  and I fail in the very tenderest

  Mary asked Henry Reveley if we could borrow his Encyclopedia while he’s away in England. Now Shelley walks around reading a great quarto Encyclopedia with another volume under his arm.

  I read Rights of Woman and Letters from Norway. Read: “He who keeps his grief within his own breast is a cannibal of his heart.”

  Read: “O Monster! Mixed of insolence & fear/ Thou dog in forehead, but in heart, a deer!”

  Is that what I am, Fanny? Is that what anyone is?—XXX

  Her hand’s working very hard to obliterate the words:

  I find it strange

  First she covers them with x’s, then dark lines:

  I find it strange that such a hatred should.

  She stops. I don’t know what she’s not wanting to say.

  Then:

  Clara died in Mary’s arms … and if Mary hadn’t been traveling to where I …

  Died in the hall of an Inn where they were waiting for a doctor

  But I can’t Fanny, write it XXX

  Her hand crumples the paper.

  I wait for what seems several hours, then:

  Discord! dire sisterly: of the slaughtering power,

  M Book IV, Iliad

  F—

  XXXXX———

  The date doesn’t matter. Time is an odd otherness. (So long since I’ve written.)

  This is what I want to say: I didn’t know when I was sitting for that stupid portrait, or visiting the Colosseum, its arches and recesses like so many caves, its thorn trees in blossom, that all the while the Tiber marshes were growing stagnant in the heat, the malarial mosquitoes breeding.

  William fell ill with a high fever. Convulsions for days and then an exhausted silence like a lidless eye. He died on June 7th.

  Mary’s face now Arctic and extreme. Planes of injured, shifting ice.

  There’s an Arctic in me too. I step outside into the heat, the grassy walks, wildflowers growing from the ruins, but vast ice fields build in me (they’ve been building for some time) and they feel neither hostile nor astonished nor kind. I cross thin sea ice, wind scraping my face. Ice so fresh it’s not even dusted with snow.

  She writes:

  Augu

  then stops. Leaves two blank pages. (She’s come almost to the end of her notebook. Will she come back to me after this? I get afraid she won’t come back.) (What is it she doesn’t want to say?) Then:

  The next two pages are missing. Did she write on them then tear them out?

  Then:

  Fons tua quo fugiens delapsa est Lympha? Quid undis (Ye streams of the fountain, why have ye fled?

  Tot factum? Quonam est ustus abe? igne liquor? Where is all the water gone?

  In lacrimas abii totus: quodcumque liquoris What fiery sun has exhausted the ever-running spring?

  Mi fuit, omne hausit jam cinis Agricola. We are exhausted by XXXXX

  “Slaves be by their own [compulsion?] in mad game

  break their manacles & wear the name of

  Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain”

  (she scribbles this quickly)

  And:

  Comedy: a picture of Human Nature worse & more deformed than the original (Aristotle)

  Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound thou all producing Earth, and thee, Bright Sun

  That’s all. Her hand lingers for a minute. She closes the notebook and is gone.

  Who would choose to come here? These were their ships:

  the Terror

  the Erebus

  the Half-Moon

  the Ayde

  the Gabriel

  the Michael

  the Mermaid

  the Moonlight

  the Saint Anna

  the Sunshine

  the North Star

  the Fox

  the Hecla

  the Griper

  the Fury

  the Advance

  the Jeannette

  the Polaris

  the Fram

  the Neptune

  the Alert

  What would I name mine? The Mary Harmsworth? The Clariae? The Absencia?. The Locke? The Shen Kuo? The Clairville? The Unsigned?

  Fanny,

  Mary shivers all the time now. I think of places in the Arctic: Great Slave Lake, Repulse Bay, Icy Cape, Obstruction Rapid. Then of all the vast stretches that have no names—those most of all.

  So many hands moving across their secret pages:

  “… a weariness of heart, a blank feeling. Always it is night now,” wrote one whose ship was stranded in the ice.

  And another:

  “October 12th Wednesday. One hundred and twenty-second d
ay. Breakfast, last spoonful of glycerin and hot water. Dinner, willow tea. We can’t move against this living gale of wind. Last night I dreamed I was wearing a breastplate of ice.”

  “October 15th Saturday. One hundred and twenty-fifth day. Breakfast, willow tea and two old boots. Buried Alexy in the afternoon. Laid him on the ice of the river, then covered him over with slabs of ice.”

  And:

  “Everything is blurred, sometimes doubled. I dreamed I looked everywhere for my dog. He’d slipped away before I could harness him. I called and went peering around the hummocks. Finally I left camp without him, certain I’d seen his good face for the last time. Empty ridge upon ridge of ice-pack before me. Then he reappeared and looked at me with consoling eyes. I meant to whip him but his eyes disarmed me.”

  And:

  “I’ll probably never see you again. You should know I saw a red poppy breaking through the snow. How is this possible? Also white shifting shapes, like arches. Whether land or light I couldn’t tell. Mostly there are no forms anymore, no cumbrous reality—only this odd glow I’ve gotten used to and which nonetheless irritates my eyes so that now I’ll stop writing.”

  Fanny,

  I’m staying up late, writing down these lines from Heraclitus—

  “Everything gives way, nothing stays fixed” and “Homer was wrong in saying, ‘Would that strife might perish from amongst gods and men.’ For if that were to occur, then all things would cease to exist.”

  Do you believe him, Fanny? Do I?

  Such cold air tonight, even here. There are reports that Parry’s ships have found the Northwest Passage—

  Casa Baldini

  Via del Giglio

  Passato Santa Maria Maggiore

  Inghilterra Via Valfonda

  Casa Frassi Casa Bojti, Firenze

  Pisa (Shelley & Mary) Casa Galetti Casa Silva

  Her hand comes and goes, writing addresses on the inside front cover of a newly bought notebook.

  Then:

  rich in nothing but deformities

  (but why would she write this?)

  And:

  ashamed of

  (I remember how Montaigne wrote of wanting to shame his own mind. As mine often feels ashamed, though it’s not clear to me why). Again, she breaks off.

  Then:

  Dream of Allegra. She was on the road from Ravenna to visit me.

  Animation which is the Child of Liberty In the fifth mystery we see and then we don’t see

  Io non piangeva si dentro [m] impietrai (I did not weep, so stony I grew within)

  the wild world abounds in uncertainty and dispute

  I try to know where she is, wonder if I’ll ever see her face, try to scrutinize her fragments of thought. Why do I say “fragments of thought” instead of thought itself? Why look for completion, steadiness, uniformity? How much has that to do with the true workings of the mind? Why shouldn’t her thoughts break, swerve, mix in with silence? Just as I see her hand, never her whole body, yet that hand’s an entire being in itself, clothed in words, but only partly.

  Fanny,

  I don’t know how to think of time anymore, what it is, what it isn’t. I used to picture it always moving forward, unified, strong, a relentless progression. But it feels fractured to me now, sharp with broken bits and edges that clash and intersect, refusing pattern. Or not refusing, exactly—maybe that’s too willful a word—it’s more that pattern is irrelevant to what it is. As if there’s no clear past, present or future, but something constantly disintegrating and re forming itself, a place not quite a place where objects and faces live and flourish and don’t live and don’t flourish and miss each other, meet, and miss again, intersect and part, stay and disappear, reappear. Always this crumbling and reassembling, my brain raw where it touches.

  All these things, then, together, Fanny: Mary has another baby boy named Percy Florence. Virgilius is condemned to be burnt for insisting the earth’s a globe, habitable in distant parts. Lead mysteriously floats on Lake Asphaltites which smells acrid and is the color of the sea. I move to Florence, Shelley pays a family to board me. Berkeley denies the existence of matter. I have nightmares about Allegra. In one we walk in the Boboli gardens among terraces, small evergreens, statues, fountains. She’s crying because she has a deformity. She won’t tell me what it is. Augustine writes, “The world was made not in time.” In the square a beggar crawls on all fours and politely salutes a barefooted washerwoman carrying a bundle on her head. Keats dies. Parry hears the ice floes groaning.

  And still I use the word “now” as if it’s somehow sewn into my skin—or is it a fire on my spine?

  Rain. The pocked surface of the Arno shining—

  Fanny, ever since I wrote to you last night I’ve been thinking about the word “or”—

  I think of the “or” in order, terror, fortress. It seems there are so many alternatives inside each single word and feeling, each idea (so are we wrong, then, to think of them as single?), that there exists no singular direction in the brain, not really, but many directions conversing with each other, wondering against and in and through each other. Or and or and or. “As if she were still here, or,” “or if I hadn’t agreed to,” “or had she known beforehand that,” “or if I hadn’t told him,” “or if safety existed,” “or hot as I am there’s this chill in me also.”

  Or if I didn’t look like this. Or if my voice hadn’t vanished. Or if you hadn’t made me. Or if Claire could see how I watch her. Or if sledges didn’t break and dogs go blind. Or if they had a better map. Or had they not gone there. Or if ice didn’t kill. Or if there were no such thing as distance.

  I wake from a dream of Claire’s hand turned to ice.

  She writes in her journal:

  myself a stranger on the earth to whom nothing belongs—and having no permanent township on this globe.

  Writes:

  language tied by laws.

  And:

  Shelley writes to me, “Poor M begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled.” Then writes that he misses me—misses “your sweet consolation, my own Claire.” (yet he sent me away, they both did)

  That word “console”—it’s meant to be calming but why do I feel something isolate inside it?—a place where I, where anyone’s, alone. “This greef is crown’d with Consolation,” Shakespeare wrote, but I wonder. I remember a tale in which pilgrims were consoled by a star created to guide them on their journey—but that seemed sentimental. Nothing guides anyone. What does Smeaton mean when he says that one misfortune becomes a consolation for another? And AllegraXXXand I can’t I don’t understand how that’s so. And in Shelley’s notebook: “Earth can console.” He likes to use that word

  Her hand stops, closes the notebook, disappears.

  Parry’s ships wintered over for three months in Winter Harbour but couldn’t get past the ice to the west. For three months they barely saw sun: “From half past nine till half past two, the sun afforded us sufficient light for writing but for the rest of the twenty-four hours we lived, of course, by candlelight.” Even the men’s breath was dangerous. It froze on beams as they slept, then melted in the coal-fired heat of day, mildewing the sheets. Eyelids stuck to the telescopes’ eye-pieces. Fingers froze onto sextants. By mid-October deer and ptarmigan disappeared. They saw wolves, clearly starving, and a single white fox. “The sea is now entirely covered with one surface of solid, motionless ice … the rapidity with which it builds has become so great as to cause us to spend several hours each day cutting it. Three to five new inches of ice in twenty-four hours …”