I would have thought. Sometimes when I read it’s as if my eyes finally have a place to go to for a while where my sight feels clearer. I don’t think about how after I close the book the words will come back and maybe drown, or flap and hurl themselves against each other, and how the mind’s like discord in music. I heard Mary talking to Shelley about my “blind manner.” I keep thinking of the Duke of Gloucester’s eyes, that his eyes were torn out, and yet a separate tenderness came after. Somewhere this road still continues—XXX though Shelley says we have to turn back.
What of my own eyes? Why did you give them to me, what did you want them to do for me? “The orbits of the eyes,” Goldsmith wrote, and each day my eyes open to this sky, to her hand that comes when it pleases. My eyes rapt within force fields not their own, obedient to laws not their own. “The Sight of the Mind differs very much from the Sight of the Body,” but I don’t think I can tell them apart. “The blind’s visions are visions of touch,” Bain wrote, so isn’t touch a form of seeing? My eyes cast chains over everything until nothing I touch with them seems free. So isn’t sight a builder of prisons, and watching a form of taking prisoners? Once I came across the term eye-sorrow. Though I don’t know exactly what it is, I’ve often felt how seeing’s somehow sorrowful at the core. Guns are used to sight. The center of a flower is called its eye. Why would I have thought I could find a place where my eyes would seek nothing, my mind nothing? Even here: electric eyes on the airstrips spot and track hostile traffic. Albanov would have known a boat can’t “walk in the wind’s eye,” that the calm at the center of that eye, though quiet, is also desperate. I think of the eye of a furnace, painted eyes on prows of ancient ships—
I wonder who left this copy of Nansen’s Farthest North? Spine broken, green cloth binding torn, it’s inscribed to: Josiah L. Hoale, from his aff grandmother. December 25th, 1897. I look through the index: Arctic thirst; Bacteria in ice-water; Bandaging; Books—longing for; Clothing-deplorable condition of; Cloudberry flower; Dogs—harnesses, kennels, killed by bears, killed by their fellows, paralysis in legs; Eclipse of the Sun; Head shaving; Homeward; Ice—first meeting with, rate of formation, white reflection from; Journals—difficulty of writing; Moons, remarkable; Musical instruments.
XXX but the joy, too, sometimes—the XXXXX and again I think how the mind’s like discord in music. But it’s impossible to find a XXX it’s impossible to find a wild and entire solitude, or one name to belong to
XX
then I go downstairs for breakfast (today we begin heading back) and Mary doesn’t want to look at me I don’t know why. Shelley says I was sleepwalking again, that in my dream the stairs were rushing water there was no way I could get down. He says that’s what I told him but I remember nothing XXXX so what’s seeing when I remember none of what I saw? What’s knowing? So many stairs unbuilding themselves inside my mind. Horace said the soul is at fault which never escapes from itself but how can it escape from itself? Ruins everywhere … and that chain across the valley. Chains of black hills at Maas-Sluis. Yet I want to see everything, no vanishing line noXXX XXXX and nothing making concessions to anything else. I would see the coexistence of all things. The near coin and the far moon—
Not those stairs of rushing water not the way they wouldn’t let me go down—
Church Street, Nelson Square, 41 Hans Place, 1 Hans Place, 13 Arabella Road, so many new addresses. And Mary so often unwell as she lay in her bed those months after we came back, waiting for the baby to be born … and now this … I don’t know how to XXX and sometimes it seems even thinking’s a cruelty
Dear Fanny,
I’m in Lynmouth. They sent me away. I came here the week after Mary’s baby died. She’s sad all the time now. The baby was born too early. They never even gave it a name. Sometimes I just lie here and think: it had no name. Those twelve