Shelley and Mary, their little William and Clara, Allegra and myself. We traveled past the Alps, past mountain torrents in the valleys. Near Mt. Cenis snow at the road’s edges was as high as our carriage. This comforted and excited me—that alien landscape where I could become something other than myself, anonymous, unnamed, no need to hide from anyone or pretend I’m not my child’s mother. Where I could be a machine of flesh pulsing around a chainless core, a creature foraging, exploring. Cascades of ice hung in immense masses from the tops to the bottoms of the Precipices! A stream flowed between two snowy banks. We passed some Alpine bridges.
The Descent was beautiful—
Sometimes I’m quiet as a bird roosting in the night. Sometimes the Operations of the Mind are so strange to me I might as well be a piece of metal or wood. Then I know I’m afraid. But mostly I feel alive with my child. Shelley writes of being “entangled in the cold vanity of systems” but sometimes, when I forget I have to give her up, I can almost feel those systems fall away—myself finally outside them—
Mostly I jot down the mundane details of my days:
Sunday April 12th: Play chess with Shelley in the evening.
Monday April 13th: Walk in the Morning. In the Evening go to the Theatre of the Marionetti. Play at Chess. Read the Life of Tasso.
(Often I try not to think … I know what’s coming … I wait for my child to be taken—)
Read Locke. Read Davanzati’s Tacitus. Read Berrington’s History of the Middle Ages. Very pleasant Evening.
I write in my journal, but all the while the creature in me forages through ice and deep snow. Waits for what’s coming. Sleeps where? Tries to hide itself where? And then here and there, suddenly, as out of nowhere, the black acid of bare branches, a bare rock.
I wanted to come to this cold place where your face would be ash to me, or less. But now when her hand doesn’t come, or comes only briefly, the eyeless glare of ice almost frightens me; I think of crushed ships, all the men who wrote journals no one would read, and sought an elsewhere they could never find.
The Barents Sea. The Kara Sea. White Island. Mt. Misery. Cape Mary Harmsworth. The small islands called Existence Doubtful.
Cape Allegra. Cape Clara. Cape Wonder. Cape Ruthless. Cape Abandonment. Cape Custom. Cape Longing. Cape Remain.
Dear Fanny,
Sometimes I feel I’m on a frozen Sea. My map’s torn, and anyhow I feel stupid even looking at it since it depicts the sea in gradations of soft blues and greens but the water around me is a rigid, violent white.
to never return to and there is no reason
at once captive and eruptive nevermind
The map’s suggested route toward land is laid out in lines red and broken—
Fanny,
Allegra’s in Venice. She was taken from here the day after my birthday. I’m 20 now.
I write this to you as if a human voice makes sense. As if words are beads strung orderly and sanely. But I think now the mind’s all edge and precipice. It has no grammar but itself. I don’t know how to—
XXX and the cruelty of XXXXXX and no way to begin to
Such twists and turns, Fanny, such slashings overall—
Custom is its own punishment. The within cracks and buckles, stutters, rallies, fails. I dream of conflagrations nightly. I think of the cleft of de-creation embedded in every sentence, every breath. I think angrily of Logic’s ramparts. Noun this, noun that. Subject, predicate, verb, verb.
We line them up so neatly, but they’re not, and the mind …)XXX and my own thinking … and what hides inside each word and in between them (and how could I have let them take her?)
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