London, Pisa, Genoa, Naples, Lerici, Putney, Dover, Lyons. It was hard to piece her story together. What was fiction, what fact? Was there always a difference? Was it possible that what at first seemed fiction was more factual than not, and what seemed fact was less truthful in some way?
Letters, journals, notebooks, shadow-shapes of pages: lime green embossed with a delicate fan, cream-colored with the watermark JL. Then white and lined but with no watermark. Sewing holes in some. One page was stamped with a kneeling figure offering flowers within a circle topped by a crown.
Often I read without understanding:
for
The shapes which drew in thick lightnings
read
The shapes which drew it, in thick lightenings
for
seem,
read
seems
for
shrine,
read
shine
for
wait,
read
wail.
Then
—I feel a cold northern breeze upon my cheeks which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has traveled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied this beginning of my journey
And:
—A Storm has come across me—I thought I heard My Shelley call me—the My Shelley—my companion in my Daily tasks—I was reading—I heard a voice say “Mary” We go out on the rocks and Shelley and I read part of Mary, a fiction
Monday 13th S. and H. & C. go to town—stay at ho home net & think of my little dead baby—this is foolish I suppose yet whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts & do not read to divert them they always come back to the same point—that I was a mother & am no longer—Fanny comes wett through—she dines and stays the evening—talk about many things—she goes at ½9—cut my new gown—
One day—almost nightfall—this came:
as if I had already entered my grave
I kept what words I could. Tried to know her. Those shards and darks of who she was.
These walls so quiet. Across the street, the PARK sign red and blinking.
Infrared security eyes, high-definition face recognition, gesture-tracking video cameras, infrasound, ultrasound, passwords, PINs, lasers, parabolic microphones, X-rays …
Everywhere a sense of watchfulness, suspension.
But once the whale calves looked with mild eyes into the whalers’ eyes then past them. If I could have looked into her eyes, what might I have seen?
Claire,
The Baxters were Glassites, that’s what the sect they belonged to was called. They held to the doctrine of “bare faith” (wasn’t my vial-skin stark like bare faith?), believed that faith is the “bare belief of the bare truth”—that truth presides through its starkness, isn’t arrived at through merit or striving but simple assent. I wondered, could assent be simple? They ate nothing bloodied, touched no meat from strangled animals. Their faith pure, severe, unbending. I was trying to break free of my glass skin, make it soft again, yet the feeling of glass had followed me even there. As if I lived in a glass dwelling among others made of glass. I imagined his skin, also, was glass, his heart black glass, so dark it reflected shapes but no clear features. So if I looked into it I might see the shape of my head, but not the eyes to know him with or the mouth with which to speak. And isn’t that how slaves feel?—faceless within the owner’s eyes, annihilated though breathing. I remained there for almost two years, climbed the tall hill called Law Hill, watched the whaling ships entering and leaving the bay, scratched my initials into a back room window. Thought about him. Wondered where he was, how he was doing, was he even alive. All the while I continued to build my laboratory, adding new instruments and devices as he lay on my table, helpless, still partial, wholly mute.
I liked it best when her hand came small and alone as it had been in the graveyard. Then I could think of her as the girl near the bushes, solitary, missing her mother. What would I read to her next? More selections from Marco Polo? Augustine’s Confessions? Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy? The Letters of Abelard and Heloise? Or:
“Wednesday (27th June)—A very rainy day. I made a shoe. Wm and John went to fish in Langdale. In the evening I went above the house, and gathered flowers, which I planted, foxgloves, etc.”
Would she wonder how one makes a shoe? Was it the left one, or the right? Was another made to match it? When, and