swallow. How many days has he been gone? Why would Nansen refer to sea-ice as a fisherman’s net? Where’s the icon of Nicholas I carry in my pocket?—I can’t feel it. Nature doesn’t want the presence of man. I thought when you’re alone you’re free but everything’s splintering. Konrad comes back, he’s sobbing. It was impossible for him to get to Bell Island.”
White trees flame inside Claire’s brain. And Albanov lived all those months in a whiteness like those trees she can’t stop seeing. My own brain in those first hours after you left me, didn’t it try to scorch back into oblivious white flame, until there was nothing left of who you were or where you went to, what you did? But something in me kept thinking (though I had no words and can’t remember what such thinking felt like). And Albanov kept thinking, Claire keeps thinking.
See the temple of the Sybil Read Dante (Purgatorio) Read Locke
Trees white and unsparing—and still each day comes and goes—
February. Pisa. Though she writes in her journal almost daily, for long stretches she doesn’t mention Allegra. Instead she takes notes on what she’s reading:
Read Paine. Letter to the Abbe Reynal. Rights of Man—”It is the faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates and to act in unison with its object.”
If I could see the workings of my brain, would I see them change when I think of you instead of her? Does my mind become a different, harsher mind? As Albanov shivered, fevered, walked on ice then couldn’t walk, as he dreamed of sunlit cities, plates of food, did his mind merge with that ice until it remade him as its own?
Paine’s Rights of Man are a monument to the plain and sensible idea of Liberty. And for this glory he was repaid by being refused Burial in any of the Americans’ Church-Yards.
Whenever such examples fall my way I remember Southey’s “Man is the worst of all animals and it is a disgrace to the Oran Outang to be compared with him.”
Shelley and I walk on the Argine. Later he goes to Livorno. Read more Paine: General Clive used to destroy his prisoners by shooting them from the mouth of a cannon.
I dream I’m in Damascus. I don’t look like myself. I’m covered in black cloth. I’m walking on a dusty street carrying water in one hand and fire in the other. The water doesn’t seep through my fingers and the skin of my other hand’s unburned. The Ambassador asks me why I’m doing this. I tell him with my fire I’ll burn Paradise, but I don’t know why I say this or what it means, and I don’t know what I’ll do with the water. I start to feel my hand burning, it pains terribly, the skin’s blackening, almost melting, though none of this was happening until the Ambassador asked his question. When I wake Mary says I was sleepwalking again, is angry.
A XXX Alle
The day is rainy. Write to Shelley. In the evening the Opera. La Cenerentola. Many Masks.
Her hand’s moving slowly—I’m not used to this slowness—as she jots down details of her days, an invisible stone strapped to her wrist. Does she daydream of Allegra?:
Drink tea in Casa Silva. Write to Mrs. Pollock. The weather becomes rainy.
But when she takes her reading notes the hand moves rapidly, scrawls rows of slanting words across the page:
From Locke’s ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING:
*”Extreme disturbance possesses our whole mind … allows us not the liberty of thought”
(but all that matters is liberty of thought)
*”Not content to live on scraps of begged opinions”
*”If thou judgest for thyself I know thou wilt judge candidly, and then I shall not be harmed”
(but the world is largely made of harm)
*”Whatever it be that keeps us so much in the dark to ourselves”
(as I’m in the dark to myself XXX I haven’t even seen where she lives, and why didn’t I… and how could I let her … so much dark in myself so much XXX and what does that say of me? XXX and Mary grows restless)
*”Because man is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts when they lead him ever so little out of the common road”
(I didn’t want to be married … Didn’t want to give her up, yet I told myself “it’s for the best,” so where was my liberty of thought? I’m complicit, custom’s slave, a shackled and defeated thing. Fanny thought I was brave but I’m not.)
*”To be