“one” echoing where her cry breaks into such dust—I can’t hear her anymore— (how can I be happy?)—Can’t see the prisons either, the barricades, guillotines, dirty outstretched hands, the mind preying on the body, the washer-girl too poor to buy shoes—
Claire,
This was before “Buy mourning and work in the evening.” Before my “Journal of Sorrow,” and Shelley’s heart snatched from flames on the shore. Before “&I but a shadow,” and “for eight years my soul communicated with unlimited freedom … conversed with him, rectified my errors … obtained new lights and my mind was satisfied.” Before “My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to me as soon as you can—I wish to see you—you are so calm a creature, and Shelley is afraid—.” Before, “They are all gone and I live.” Before “I am perfectly detached from the world, I cannot be part of it.” This was before France, before Switzerland and Italy. Why did I feel so proud? I burned, plotted, thought of him and I was proud. Proud to be burning in that way, to possess a monstrous and consuming passion. To have hurt or been hurt beyond anything I’d dreamed. Faithful listener. Martyr. Scorned. Aldini was traveling across Europe, reanimating corpses with jolts of electricity. Decapitated oxen heads shuddered and opened their eyes. If my skin burned as it burned and I could stand it I knew I could stand anything—the sight of those oxen heads, a murderer’s corpse lifting, suddenly, one rigid greenish hand. His silence had made me a soldier, but of what? Still sometimes I felt the slightest breeze could bend me—
I could read again, so why couldn’t I say the words out loud?—I was alone, there was nothing to stop me. Something inside me sharpened itself, then recoiled, damaging and damaged, an afterwards I didn’t understand. The air against my lips a raw and too-thin skin. Sometimes in my mind, bandaged eyes, her mouth covered with white cloth. I wondered where she was, what she was thinking.
Her hand sometimes old, sometimes young. I could never predict when it would visit. I noticed her strings of misspellings:
saw she had trouble with words that involved doubling. Were there two I’s in until? Two r’s in conferring? She gave until one letter too many, conferring one too few. As if it was too hard to balance the relation of one thing to another, assess what might be companionable, what must stand alone.
Often she wrote Teusday for Tuesday.
She wrote on small slips of paper, then pasted them over other pages. Wrote a name then crossed it out or changed it:
Welford
became
Lovel,
then
Herbert,
then
Woodville.
Next to this a date:
1819.
Some dates were much earlier: On a scrap of paper:
the whole sea of me burning.
Next to this:
1811.
Sometimes her hand stopped in mid-sentence:
“the intricacy and perplexity of” ”unspeakable XXXX doctrines.”
Other times whole lines or paragraphs were scored out:
tell your story that weighs heavily upon you
Time meant nothing to me. Past, present, future, all wrapped up as one. I waited to see what she’d keep, what she’d cross out:
Claire if I could confide in you but I cant
XX I hear the slaughtering of animals in the night
Father says Mr. Burr is so poor he had to sell his watch to buy coals
After a while the quieter I grew the louder and more visible the outside world became. I couldn’t explain it. Wasn’t I part of the outer world as well? And yet I grew more quiet and more hidden.
Robertus Mut and Alanus le Mute couldn’t speak. My books don’t say why. The black-necked swan’s born mute. A Languedoc wine stopped in the process of fermentation is said to be mute. (But I was born with a voice then lost it, if one could say that I was born.)
Coleridge wondered how humankind would seem if mute. And Sir Philip Sidney said there’s a “dubble Speech; the one in the mynde … the other the sounding image thereof.”
If I could hear my voice move outside my mind … but even now this voicelessness, and all these years later. It had harmed her and myself, but how had it harmed us? Those words I read not even mine. There was just the hook of my voice lifting them off the page.
“The flesh of the visible,” one wrote. I think of the flesh of the audible, what’s that? My voice a skin that troubles and frightens me. Didn’t I touch her with that skin as I