if she wasn’t there XX what XXX if XXX Allegra, Shelley XXX I don’t need the ladder but there’s this splinter in my eye XXX this splinter that enables me to see XXX and the snow’s an envelope burning … who wrote on it who sent it… inside it, and inside it burning
XXXXXXXXX
and the waves at Lerici and the
Fanny, Mary,
My fever’s broken. Moscow’s still covered with snow. In winter all distance turns inward, differentiation vanishes. I need to grow strong and healthy like I used to be. I don’t understand how tenderness invents itself but that it does. “Lost and unknown when clothed in words,” Locke wrote, yet this is the only way I have to reach you. Each day I mount a stranger’s stairs. The world is closed in silence to me—I’ve told myself this again and again, but maybe I’m wrong. Think of what the Northern explorers felt when color flooded back into their world. Still, so many of them never returned, or returned only partly— damaged, sullen, numb. For four years I’ve lived among strangers—XXXX I thought consolation was what I needed but now I don’t know. I keep thinking I have this splinter in my eye and at first it bothered me, the way it interfered, black line through every face, each wall, each door. A caught piece of turbulence lodged inside my sight forever—
but it’s become just a part of seeing and I find now I don’t mind it
What’s wholeness anyway—and why did I formerly think of it as something to be prized?
Remember the ruins at Luna, how we loved them
The other night I dreamed a pair of surgical scissors was cutting our red dresses into strips
it wasn’t a bad dream that’s what amazed me—it wasn’t bad at all—
the floor all covered with those strips, a mess of red—
I think of you there are so many conflagrations of mind so many XXX I don’t know how to say it—
(turbulence/ruin)
more and more I feel myself climbing a rope of turmoil and peace, each rough strand inextricably bound to the other, intertwined with the other—
know that I think of you XXX
the two of you wherever you are
the last consolations are torn away—
NOTES
Notes on Perplexity
(When I go to Google and type in this word which seems to mark the place you’ve left me in, this word I want to understand, there aren’t so many entries after all. There’s a perplexity that has to do with statistical models of speech recognition. There’s a Perplex City, which seems to be a game. “Perplex City’s greatest treasure has been stolen … Explore Perplex City through websites, emails, texts and live events. Find the cube and claim $100,000 reward.” I do my research where I can. I forage, hunt.)
So I’ll begin with Socrates, that “self-stinging stingray.”
He stung himself with questions:
“For I am not free of perplexity when I make others perplexed; but I am more perplexed than anyone.”
The meanings of the most common words crumbled under his tongue.
Euthyphro said, “But Socrates, I am simply unable to tell you what I think, for whatever we put forward goes around and around and refuses to stay where we place it.”
(The way the woods I slept in those first nights now sleep and stir in me, their shudderings and complex shiftings, small breakages shot through with slippage, doubt… No stillness in me, no shelter I can touch or trust.)
(Yet maybe there’s a kind of shelter after all in the way things shift, turn ripe with possibilities, uncertainties, the mind un-tombed, the puzzles ever-changing.)
A question is a site of astonishment. “Why has not the universe been used up long ago and vanished away?” Aristotle asked.
And Gertrude Stein: “What is the wind what is it.” “How many windows are there in it.” “What is the difference between ardent and ardently.” “To smile at the difference.”
(Boundaries blur. A question mark seems too solid, too intact a thing. What’s suppose, what’s comfort, what’s else and elsewhere, what’s other, what’s difference, what’s alone?—each word ripping through itself like water, or brain waves in minute vibrations, curving, casting out. I remember plastic models of the brain, perplexity etched into their crevices from the very start.)
“The human mind stands ever in perplexity,” wrote Emerson. “Thoughts walk and speak and look with eyes at me … and make all other teaching formal and cold.”
(I think of you in fever. The more you tried to understand, the more your thoughts bent down beneath that weight, thin lantern-skins flickering. As now, the winds inside me