“he” and “his.” “His wife says he’s dead.”
(And I who have no name. And you who didn’t name me.)
Yuan Mei saw the ice as a place of annihilation and namelessness, a way “too terrible to traverse.” Though he said there was a cave if only you could find it, and on the other side two statues thirty feet high—one a man riding a great tortoise, the other taming a serpent with his hand.
Fanny,
While walking with Count Boutourlin in his library earlier today, I began to fear his blindness is contagious, that over time it will afflict me too. I know this is ridiculous, but as we walked and I read the spines of his books out loud as he increasingly likes me to do, my eyes began to blur, a white film spreading over them soft as the “a” in your name. If I told Mary she would say this is just another “wild project in the Clairmont style”—that I’m running away with things, making trouble. And yet, I could feel a coldness coming into me, its white namelessness spreading. Or I was a mountain of ice—or was it salt?—but a mountain that could see, and a chisel was chipping away at me until the air whitened and thickened with all those particles set loose from what I was. I had no choice but to look through them—everything filmy, unclear. If Allegra’s put in a convent it will be almost impossible to get her out. My claim is bare and obvious, yet amounts to almost nothing. There’s a woman I met here who’s six feet tall and is reputed to have disguised herself as a man so she could study medicine at Jena. But we’re not like her, Fanny. Or—am I?—or could I be? Sometimes I wake with your name on my lips and I want to say, Fanny, no, you need a stronger name, not those soft sounds that you have now—that fragile “f” like a feather, that gentle “a”—but something more fortress-like, more hard. Allegra’s delicate; I would take her to the Baths of Lucca. That day when she was christened Clara Allegra at St.-Giles-in-the-Fields, I heard my name go into her, mysterious and sharp. Mary’s Clara was christened that day also. The knife of my name going into them. The air cut by that sound. Yet that “C” in Clara, when recited as part of the alphabet, sounds not like a cut at all, but indistinguishable from “see.” As I see her now before me though I haven’t set eyes on her in years. As I see you. Still, so much ice and salt fills the air, its whiteness spreading—The loss of you. The cold fact of where she is.
Blake saw the North as “Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.”
To Olaus Magnus it was a region of “demons, unspeakable derision, diverse shapes under the Seven Stars.”
In the Chinese Mountain-Sea Classic it is a land of “deformed ghosts … over sixty days’ travel from the kingdom of Kiao-ma.” The few people who live there dress in dirty deerskin, eat from earthenware dishes, have mouths on the tops of their heads.
To the Anglo-Saxons it was a place of “souls with bound hands.”
Fanny,
The towns called Bagnacavallo. That’s where the Convent is. Just north of Ravenna. A small place of towers and old walls surrounded by fields of tangled vines. But what does it matter if I picture it or not? The winters there are bitterly cold. My mind’s wonderings mean nothing, my picturing changes nothing. In the now-irrelevant and alien territory of my mind I see walls she looks out on each day. The wall surrounding the courtyard is 30 feet high.
Locke again and Locke
allows not the
and keeps us so much in the dark
(she’s only just turned 4, the convent demands double fees as she’s several years younger than the youngest others)
and allows not allows not
and
lost and unknown when clothed in words—
For the first time I see her sleeping, her arms wrapped around her head, the long sleeves of her nightdress white against white sheets. Are the convent walls building behind her closed eyes, and Allegra behind them? Walls thirty feet high, then higher, walls of white stone. Wherever she looks there’s a labyrinth of walls, their quiet like this ice.
Fanny, I cant see her face anymore. As if this earth and its human processes have fallen from me, or rather I from them. Or I’m a stone disintegrating on the ground while the wall I wasn’t needed for grows stronger, more