own their own lives, where Miaoyu, The One Outside the Threshold, will surely come to harm. Where the rich live at the expense of the poor, but isn’t this just the history of the world?
Baoyu learns these lines:
Naked I go without impediment.
My sole wish now is to roam alone
In coir cape and bamboo hat,
And in straw sandals with a broken alms bowl
To wander where I will.
Imagine Baoyu wandering off on his own, not limping, no longer needing his cane. You asked me to think of the burned faces. I think of them and of the broken alms bowl, and the frescoes you “wrote of with their small, clear moments of fruit, white cloth, measurement, and light.
I think of Baoyu’s and Daiyu’s love for each other. Of Daiyu’s love of books. Of Cao Xueqin, and his friend, Red Inkstone, who wrote in red ink between his words. Imagine if we could do that, you and I… write in between each other’s words …
Part of me still fears you. (All those weeks I stayed away from your letters.) In the lines Baoyu memorized the desire is not to be revealed, but to go off alone. (“In coir cape and bamboo hat.”) And the alms bowl is broken. I wonder what you think of that?
Your Friend,
Clerval
Clerval translates all day, the sentences accumulating like lines on a map, rough pathways into his mind, or Cao Xueqin’s. I follow Baoyu and Daiyu, the yellow roofs of Peking, Miaoyu leaving secret messages in the woods. But when his hand stops it’s as if a fog rolls over the land wrapping them in silence.
I go out and walk, imagine I carry an alms bowl in my hands. To be alone and the alms bowl broken … if I could feel the freedom in that, understand there’s a freedom in that…
Yesterday I came across a kepper. I wonder if you ever saw one? It’s a rough wooden rectangle lodged inside a pony’s mouth to prevent it from eating while hauling fresh-bound sheaves. It must pain the pony to have it in its mouth.
I kept picturing the pony’s eyes. Then the eyes were Claire’s, then Clerval’s. The kepper pressed into their gums until they bled.
Everything was very quiet.
Later when I slept I had this dream, at least this is the part I remember:
(But why would I even tell you my dream? Why would I want to?)
Like Baoyu, I was limping, walking with a cane. Then I was bedridden. I thought if you could see me you’d realize I was weak, pathetic, couldn’t hurt anyone, didn’t want to. Then I wondered if this was true. Every part of me was sore, even my mouth, and I heard—from where?—the word: kepper. When I looked up you were at my bedside, and for the first time I had a name, you called me Black Jade. Then suddenly you were Claire. She was writing the word destroy over and over in her notebook. I told her that’s the word Zhuangzi used, “Destroy quadrants and measures.” Yes, she said, everyone uses it.
Then I woke.
Aosta, Sept 30
My Friend,
It’s been nearly two months since I last wrote. The impairment of sensation now extends to my eyes. Not feeling is a strange form of pain, of difficulty. I’m told the ophthalmic portion of the Vth facial nerve has been affected. This is not uncommon. I no longer blink, normally. Often I can’t blink, at all. Many nights when I sleep I no longer close my eyes. The cornea lies exposed and unprotected. So you see, I can’t keep out the dust, or whatever else it is that moves through the air and towards us.
I’ve not forgotten about the frescoes at Issogne. I’m ashamed that I
But let me tell you about something else today.
I saw something once that’s come back to me vividly. I have no other guide no and in the mind’s roughness and not in tranquility
It’s a simple piece of Attic pottery: a white-ground lekythos from around 450 B. C. Unlike the more common black and red ones (those you’ve probably seen), this one depicts no satyrs or maenads, no epic heroes involved in all manner of dramatic action. Instead, it holds a simple grave offering. In her cupped hand a young woman carries a small vessel like the one on which she’s painted. With the other she holds a woven basket. She’s bringing offerings to the dead soul who stands on the other side of the vase where she can’t see him; he grasps his