that came like wounded soldiers, determined, emphatic, unafraid:
William, it was cold under the water but I didn’t care—Cold the way the deepest convictions of mind are cold, the deepest contradictions—Rights aren’t favors—Why should the poor, should women, be expected to act grateful’? I’m accused of inflaming their minds. But my voice is almost nothing—I can’t tell if I have a body anymore, can’t see you—Justice mourns in sullen silence. The river a struggle of mind. Accountings of privilege aren’t history. Where is my writing desk, my—Torn pages of light—Out of ideals of liberty and equality-terror, bloodshed—Nothing makes sense. And still one needs to try—This has been such a period of barbarity and misery I shouldn’t complain of having my share. Such pictures in my mind: the King’s head buried under mounds of lime. Marat dug up, re-buried in the Pantheon—At least Robespierre’s finally gone but what of the 7, 000 market women who rose up with such hope, what do they have now? Burke called them “the vilest of women.” Yet they wanted justice, wanted a world that made sense—I don’t know if I have a body anymore—My baby’s hungry I must go into the air—
Claire,
Over time I brought him things, biscuits, chocolate, some bread. Sometimes I imagined we were friends. But often he felt more like a kind of infection to me than anything else—something awful that I’d caught—that burned me yet I didn’t want it to stop. And even though I didn’t fear him, I came to believe I sensed beneath that steady reading voice something I began to tell myself was hatred. Was it hatred of me? Years later when I got smallpox it was as if that hatred was finally writing on my face. Scrawling all over it. That it had been waiting all those years—brewing, taking root, increasing. That he’d planted it somehow, those hours in the graveyard. My ugly, ruined face. I remember walking through the streets glad, finally, to be damaged in that way. The harm visible, overt. The disgusted looks of strangers. Lowered or averted eyes. The giddy justice of it then. Did he hate my fresh-scrubbed skin, the fact that I had a bed to return to every night? Yet he read to me such wondrous things, so why did I even think of hatred? Why did I dream of guillotines, of shredded, mud-stained dresses? Corpses. Atrocities. Bodies floating face-down in the river. Guns. Sabers. Severed limbs—
Week after week of rustling pages. Hush of the river. Clicking of pebble against pebble in her hand. In my mouth the threatened shelter of each word, outlaws, vagabonds, chained yet wildly tender, weirdly free. My voice for hours on end from the bushes, she listening from the other side:
“Curse on all laws but those which love has made.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“Ideas are to the mind nearly what atoms are to the body. The whole mass is in perpetual flux; nothing is stable or permanent.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“An infinite number of thoughts passed through my mind in the last five minutes. How many of them am I now able to recollect? How many shall I recollect tomorrow? Some may with great effort and attention be revived; others obtrude themselves uncalled for; still others are perhaps out of reach of any power of thought to reproduce, having never left their traces behind them for a moment. If the succession of thoughts be so inexpressibly rapid, may they not pass with so delicate a touch as to elude forever?”
∼ ∼ ∼
(I’d lost my Crusoe, which was, in any case, missing its last fifty pages. I could no longer read of making tools, planting corn, and finding Friday, couldn’t know how they’d fared.)
∼ ∼ ∼
“Kue-lin-fu contains three very handsome bridges, each one more than a hundred paces in length and eight paces in width. The women there are also very handsome. The people live in a state of luxurious ease, as the city possesses much raw silk and exports large quantities of ginger and galangal. The city is well-known for a species of domestic featherless fowl clothed in black hair resembling the fur of cats. Its eggs are of a pale violet tint, and are said to taste of rose-petals mixed with fresh rain.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“When thou cam’st first
Thou strok’st me, and made much of me; wouldst give me
Water with berries in it; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I lov’d thee,