… And inflamed from blinding snow … And so far from … But I don’t want to think about that now …
Even this town’s frozen through. Stone walls still stand though most of what they guard’s long vanished. A few abandoned fortresses, a monastery, the mouth of the Northern Dvina nearby.
If I could see behind the shuttered windows—hands moving and changing even now—but I don’t want to see such things again, want only to leave. It’s said the more you draw toward true North the farther it recedes. Still, I want to feel it.
This sting of salt. This shocked and changing emptiness of air. No trace of seabirds, wolves. Slaves built the canal here. Soon I will go farther.
Why when I close my eyes do I see a woman’s hand floating in black air? Often now I see it. One of my books says it’s not great events that incite the mind, but the slightest things that twist and batter us about. That slight, delicate hand, the uncertainty I feel each time I see it. But whose is it? And why does it come to me? Why would a mind need to see such a thing? Why would mine?
Protagoras said there’s nothing in nature save doubt. And Nausiphanes said that of things which seem to be, nothing is more existent than the nonexistent. Parmenides said there’s nothing certain except uncertainty. I don’t know. But I look out on this ice-locked harbor and think of the ice inside my mind, how little I can know of anything.
Barriers. Snow blindness. Doubt.
How will I get to a place where even these closed shutters don’t exist, where even the icebreakers don’t come?—no human face for miles, no human hands.
Augustine wrote: “Hear how it glows. Smell how bright it is. Taste how it shines. Feel how it glitters,” then said we can’t do those things. But this quiet glows, acrid smells from the saltworks glitter then grow dull. It’s almost night now. But what’s now? Time shifts back and forth—sometimes I open my eyes onto old wooden houses, mica works, monasteries, fisheries, at other times the same land’s deserted. None of my books has explained this to me, or even said that it happens.
(And those bushes where I hid, all the books I once read there. But I won’t think about that now.)
Wind quickens, glows, stark as the place inside my mind where I hear nothing, remember nothing. Sometimes your face is gone from me, then I feel almost peaceful, but that never lasts for long.
(And if touch were bearable … or memory… or the voice of…)
Archangel Monastery’s high walls have seven gates, eight towers, black cannons still embedded in the stone. It once housed over three hundred monks, and hundreds of servants, artisans, peasants, lived on the surrounding grounds. In the scriptorium, hands drew in colored ink, birds, animals, and flowers. Those hands must have wanted to leave something beautiful behind, though the land’s desolate, and the blue-painted ceilings with their little gold stars have peeled, are badly faded.
Each time I think of going farther north, I consider what I’ll leave behind. Illuminated books where letters turn into animals and birds alight on those letters (such things I hope to still hold in my mind). But also faces that might remind me of yours, or even mine. Gestures. Eyes.
“Taste how it shines.” “Feel how it glitters.” But something in me obliterates everything, keeps only this cold—its one clear syllable with its frozen walls.
Where do you end and I begin?
When I opened my eyes that first time, did you find in my face faint traces of the paths your hands had stitched, small declivities in a landscape made of flesh? Did you feel again the taut pull of thread as you blended one dead part with another, fastened one sallow patch of skin onto another?
Now I walk alongside the harbor wall and think of Mikhail Lomonosov, author of the world’s first treatise on icebergs, wonder why he was imprisoned for a year. A fisherman’s son, he was born near here in Kholmogory in 1711. In his father’s shack he hoarded the few books he could find, vowed to study in Moscow even if it meant traveling the whole way on foot.
We are “feathers in a raging fire,” he wrote.
Wrote, “words that contain the vowels e, i, y, and u in their first syllable should be used to depict tender subjects, while those with the vowel sounds o, u, and y coming later, are fit to