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