thoughts break, swerve, mix in with silence? Just as I see her hand, never her whole body, yet that hand’s an entire being in itself, clothed in words, but only partly.
Fanny,
I don’t know how to think of time anymore, what it is, what it isn’t. I used to picture it always moving forward, unified, strong, a relentless progression. But it feels fractured to me now, sharp with broken bits and edges that clash and intersect, refusing pattern. Or not refusing, exactly—maybe that’s too willful a word—it’s more that pattern is irrelevant to what it is. As if there’s no clear past, present or future, but something constantly disintegrating and re forming itself, a place not quite a place where objects and faces live and flourish and don’t live and don’t flourish and miss each other, meet, and miss again, intersect and part, stay and disappear, reappear. Always this crumbling and reassembling, my brain raw where it touches.
All these things, then, together, Fanny: Mary has another baby boy named Percy Florence. Virgilius is condemned to be burnt for insisting the earth’s a globe, habitable in distant parts. Lead mysteriously floats on Lake Asphaltites which smells acrid and is the color of the sea. I move to Florence, Shelley pays a family to board me. Berkeley denies the existence of matter. I have nightmares about Allegra. In one we walk in the Boboli gardens among terraces, small evergreens, statues, fountains. She’s crying because she has a deformity. She won’t tell me what it is. Augustine writes, “The world was made not in time.” In the square a beggar crawls on all fours and politely salutes a barefooted washerwoman carrying a bundle on her head. Keats dies. Parry hears the ice floes groaning.
And still I use the word “now” as if it’s somehow sewn into my skin—or is it a fire on my spine?
Rain. The pocked surface of the Arno shining—
Fanny, ever since I wrote to you last night I’ve been thinking about the word “or”—
I think of the “or” in order, terror, fortress. It seems there are so many alternatives inside each single word and feeling, each idea (so are we wrong, then, to think of them as single?), that there exists no singular direction in the brain, not really, but many directions conversing with each other, wondering against and in and through each other. Or and or and or. “As if she were still here, or,” “or if I hadn’t agreed to,” “or had she known beforehand that,” “or if I hadn’t told him,” “or if safety existed,” “or hot as I am there’s this chill in me also.”
Or if I didn’t look like this. Or if my voice hadn’t vanished. Or if you hadn’t made me. Or if Claire could see how I watch her. Or if sledges didn’t break and dogs go blind. Or if they had a better map. Or had they not gone there. Or if ice didn’t kill. Or if there were no such thing as distance.
I wake from a dream of Claire’s hand turned to ice.
She writes in her journal:
myself a stranger on the earth to whom nothing belongs—and having no permanent township on this globe.
Writes:
language tied by laws.
And:
Shelley writes to me, “Poor M begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled.” Then writes that he misses me—misses “your sweet consolation, my own Claire.” (yet he sent me away, they both did)
That word “console”—it’s meant to be calming but why do I feel something isolate inside it?—a place where I, where anyone’s, alone. “This greef is crown’d with Consolation,” Shakespeare wrote, but I wonder. I remember a tale in which pilgrims were consoled by a star created to guide them on their journey—but that seemed sentimental. Nothing guides anyone. What does Smeaton mean when he says that one misfortune becomes a consolation for another? And AllegraXXXand I can’t I don’t understand how that’s so. And in Shelley’s notebook: “Earth can console.” He likes to use that word
Her hand stops, closes the notebook, disappears.
Parry’s ships wintered over for three months in Winter Harbour but couldn’t get past the ice to the west. For three months they barely saw sun: “From half past nine till half past two, the sun afforded us sufficient light for writing but for the rest of the twenty-four hours we lived, of course, by candlelight.” Even the men’s breath was dangerous. It froze on beams as they slept, then melted in the coal-fired heat of day, mildewing the sheets. Eyelids