days she lived without a name and now when we remember her what are we to call her? Or do we say: “it”? “It” was born too early, “it” died. I turn each chilly idea over in my mind while nearby the sea moves like a higher mind that understands it’s incapable of knowing. Jessamine and Honeysuckle twining over my cottage window, but I’d rather see the London soot, anything angular and hard.
Today, I don’t know why, I was thinking about how you always misspell afraid—you write “affraid.” Two f’s in it as if doubling its power in some way, and I’m sorry we didn’t take you with us when we left for France, you think Mary and Shelley despise you but they don’t. But there’s this look of fright in your eyes, something breaking in you bit by bit, but maybe I’m mistaken.
You told me you didn’t think I’d ever be able to live alone. But I feel an almost violent tranquility. I distrust the surmises of our minds, Montaigne wrote. And here it’s as if all surmises have fallen away, I’m wonder and error and uncertainty and no one watches or criticizes or worries. As if I’m not even a Claire or Clary or Jane or Mary Jane anymore, but nameless or … Not hidden away but not seen either. Two ridges of mountains enclose the village. If I walk up the hill near Mr. Foote’s I can see the whole valley. When I read a book a voice comes close to me and knows me. I wonder if you feel this too?
What are you reading? Are you feeling stronger? If you and Mary are both sad I don’t know how I’ll but you always seem sad. Remember what Ovid wrote?—”When eyes behold eyes in pain, they become painful themselves.”
I think of your eyes.
Your sister,
Claire
Claire wrote of ruins as a place I somehow know … so how could we just be kind to one another… each with our own jagged edges, our damage. Are icebergs ruins too? They carry inside themselves pebbles, boulders, dust. I never knew they concealed so much roughness, that beneath those gleaming surfaces such damaged, displaced dark lies hidden. (I think of the Chinese stick I found in Archangel.) Under whiteness and light, so many ruined worlds.
Each time I see them, I remember her white sleeve, her hand leaving jagged letters that only even hint at who she is. But what of her face I never see? Her face. Her faces. Why do I make her plural like that? She signs her name so many different ways, as if there’s no one name to belong to. To have so many names, has that made her almost nameless? Is there something in her that feels, like me, unnamed?
Fanny, I’ll write more later. There are silences in us which I fear will never be broken. Sometimes I think what I know of you is your small French watch, your red pocket handkerchief, your brown-berry necklace and your purse. Such things as you lay out on the table at night. I’m ignorant and worse.
This milky midnight light. Icebergs drift through a white veil. Whiteness of her sleeve, of absence.
When I lie down, pieces of Nansen’s index drift like icebergs in my mind: Books—longing for. Dogs—paralysis in legs. Journals—difficulty of writing. Moons—remarkable. Wind-clothes. Wounds. Wrist-sores.
I distrust the surmises of our minds, Claire wrote to Fanny. More and more I trust within my mind almost nothing. In my dream Nansen’s paralyzed dog keeps trying to stand but its legs are useless twigs. I watch it though it hates being watched. It tries to hide itself, turns its face to the side. It wants somewhere private to die, but there’s nowhere private in the ice.
When I wake I feel ashamed.
Nansen felt he had no choice but to feed the weaker dogs to the strong.
Why do I want to tell her these things? And of books that are longed for, journals that are hard to write.
(And myself hidden. No mask to tear from my face.)
I wait for her hand, then see the dog lift its eyes one last time, ice-locked and dying, thirteen months from solid land.
When her hand returns it’s not writing. She’s holding, instead, a letter from Fanny, spreads it flat on a wooden surface in the sun.
Dear Claire,
Papa has given me this space of paper to fill & seal. He says you and Mary and Shelley have gone away to the Continent again. There are such silences in