under heaven will learn skill for themselves. Burn tallies and seals and the people will revert to their natural simplicity. Break measures and scales and they will no longer quarrel. Abolish all the sacred laws of the world and the people will discuss things freely.”
So you see, my friend, I wonder what Zhuangzi would think about your cloak, your hood, your clapper, the sound it makes inside your mind.
It’s dry as dust here. Each day I wipe from my pillow a fine layer of grime.
Your Friend, as always,
Clerval
When I think of the way Clerval and his friend hold and comfort each other in their minds (even though they never speak, and Clerval won’t even send his letters) I wonder how it feels to be welcome within the mind of another, to believe another’s mind will take you in. What if Locke was mistaken and words aren’t a covering, a cloth made of wrongness?
Sometimes lying awake, I feel a pair of small hands beside me, lingering, waiting. How can I explain this? Yours were large and harsh. But these are more like the hands of the sad servant girl in Cao Xueqin’s book, or the girl who was kidnapped and can no longer remember her name. They’re waiting, but for what? I think they want something to lift up to the eyes of the body they belong to, something I can give them, but I don’t know what it is. And those eyes—would they be partly trusting and willing, partly not, like Clerval’s friend? Then my chest tenses, my eyesight goes wavy, the night’s suddenly cold again and vacant.
Aosta, June 23
My Friend,
I confess I think, much about my left hand these days.
Do I speak to you as from behind a hood, a cloak, and in my hand a warning bell, a clapper?
Do you listen to me as from behind a wall where the air is safe, your breathing safe?
If you’d stayed here would you have come to fear me? Would I have recoiled from you, preferring the petty study of this festering burn on my left hand that troubles me because I cant feel it at all or figure out when or how I even got it?
When I first wrote to you my pen didn’t hesitate along the page; I didn’t worry over what I was saying or how. I don’t know why or how that happened. But now something else has come into me, a feeling of recoil. I picture your face. Then I picture your face turned away. As if I need for you to turn away. Why would I do this?
I think of my garden wall, of all the earth’s many, many walls. Walls with leper’s windows, the Great Wall of China. I search for them in my Atlas at night. Walls for protecting towns, for fortresses, for farms, for fields, for keeping back the sea.
This morning I read the Purgatorio again. That passage where the Envious sit with eyes wired shut, “eyelids pierced and sewn with iron wires, as men sew new-caught falcons, sealing their eyes to make them settle down.” I think I was an envious person once. And yet, when I think now of the people outside these walls, the ones I often envied as a boy and for years after, I don’t really envy them anymore. But shouldn’t my envy have grown greater, not less, given what’s befallen me? Shouldn’t I want to be like them, want to take from them what’s theirs, resent them for what they still have? Yet I watch as from a great distance, a place I’ll never return from, a gap composed of space and time. A tenderness, a certain feeling of protectiveness even, comes over me—for the ones I think of and the small, vulnerable dailiness of their lives. I once saw a woman with terribly skinny arms; the sharp, elongated bones seeming almost to poke through, and I think of each and every one of them like those arms—so easily breakable, so fragile.
I want them to go to the market and be all right, to laugh with each other and talk, over dinner and play with their children and go to their jobs and have celebrations and longings and dreams and plans and be all right. I don’t envy them or hate them. I cant say if they just seem unreal to me now, part of something I can never touch or be part of again. I don’t know. But I think of their fragility, always of