makes my mind active.” Before “Yours Entirely.” Before “Then he told us the haze of the storm hid them from him & he saw them no more … when the storm cleared he looked again—but there was no boat on the sea.” Before “(so bitterly).” Before “I often see both he and Dear Edward in dreams.” Before “I see no one. No one at all.” Even then I grieved. Thought maybe I could go to America, its land harsh and unsettled enough to match the brutality of my thoughts. They enslaved people there, “brought their cargo of muscles and sinew from the old world to cultivate the new.” Their soil was “defiled by slavery’s miseries and crimes.” As I had defiled my own mind. Defiled my memories of him, had with my own mind laid waste to myself, my own kindness … burned my own skin … Each night I imagined constructing him—he, helpless, strapped down on a table before me. His voice not under his control. I held off giving him a mouth or throat. Until I didn’t hear the silence of the graveyard anymore but the brutality of my own imaginings, my need not to have been left. Even as I thought this, part of me still felt he had done nothing wrong, that there was something I could never know—that I was wrong, ignorant, to have turned from him and from myself, though I watched my skin grow smoother, whiter, all the while thinking Chains and ropes, experiments, scalpels.
William, A mind must become both unsparing and kind or it is nothing—I tried to see clearly but proximity confuses, distance confuses. It’s just how it is— The mind chained to itself either way— Sometimes our talks unchained me, long evenings by the fire, the words moving back and forth between us as if changed—My eyes less vicious then, less harsh—I wanted to understand the words as you meant them, the angles (surprising) (not mine) from which you saw—I expected, with my breathing shallow and my pulse slowing, I’d turn increasingly inward, everything fading, falling away. But the opposite has happened. Everything outside me more present than myself, though my skin no longer feels it—Skin has little to do with it after all, I wouldn’t have guessed this—Have I already left you? Will our daughter know that feeling of another’s mind close to hers, a hand moving along a page to the rhythm of her hand?— When I was still pregnant… Those days feel far away—Do we grow harsh because most of what we know is inaccessible to us even as we know it? There must be tenderness somehow or there is nothing—I hear her name in mine, branching, intertwined—
Claire,
This was before “mad with introspecting joy,” before “the children bear the journey exceedingly well,” before “my milk comes more easily now.” Before “Dear Love I will meet you at three,” and “Dearest Shelley you are solitary and uncomfortable yet I know how much you love me.” This was before Casa Magni, Allegra, walls, Clara in fever. The burning was gone but my skin had become laboratory glass. I was a vial horribly smooth yet easily shattered, a slide on which samples had been smeared. No nerves dwelled in that skin, no veins or lines or pores—its taut presiding smoothness holding back a world. I could feel nothing. So if he’d come to me then, or if I’d gone back to the graveyard and he’d stepped from the bushes and started to speak, what would I have felt? What would he have thought of my glass skin, newly hardened as it was against him? Or would my skin have suddenly softened upon his return? Or might it have gone on glittering the way loss and hurt and hatred glitter? Meanwhile I became the laboratory, the cage, the instruments of dissection. My days spent imagining his parts. I’d look through the microscope, see the mute cells, skin cells and brain cells like wriggling protozoa. But what did magnification give me in the end? Those cells still impenetrable though I spied on them with my powerful glass eye. Nevertheless, each day I watched them as long as I wanted: my glass eye held them captive, those worlds within worlds of him, the way the early Romans kept fleas under glass until they burned.
Clerval
Carignan was the son of a merchant and never completely happy when Clerval was absent
but in Clairval Clerval I saw the image of my former self; he was inquisitive &