China. (As this North in me also leans, grows errant, is odder and less stable than I thought.) Every night for three months he observed the course of the polestar, and three times every night for five years recorded the changes of the moon for his Celestial Atlas. In his Dream Pool Essays he explained how the magnetic needle compass could be used for navigation. It’s said he was the first to identify true North.
(If I could talk to him, if he were here. But these distances in me, immeasurable, without markers.)
My book says he was an astronomer, mathematician, pharmacologist, botanist, encyclopedist, diplomat, general, hydraulic engineer, inventor— also a finance minister and governmental state inspector. He was Head Official of the Bureau of Astronomy, and, at one time, Assistant Minister of Imperial Hospitality. He improved the designs of the armillary sphere, the gnomon, the clepsydra clock, the sighting tube. How could he be and do all those things? The way this ice goes on in glaring sameness makes it all the harder to imagine such multiplicity within one single life, one brain, one being.
It’s said after his father died he withdrew from the world in mourning for three years. Once, out of a deep mysterious sorrow, he attempted to drown himself in the Yangtze River.
(As Claire’s hand’s mysterious even as I read the things she leaves.)
Only six of his many books survive. Even his tomb was destroyed.
Did Dream Pool Essays even exist, or is it, like Inventio Fortunata, heard of and talked about but maybe never seen? And what of his Record of Longings Forgotten at Dream Brook, in which he wrote of his youth in the isolate mountains, has that been lost too?
When I focus my eyes they’re met by raised white ridges, low white plains. Whole stretches barely touched by human thought. Cape Flora. Cape Mary Harmsworth. Bell Island. Alexandra Land. White Island. Teplitz Bay. This archipelago with its hundreds of ice-covered islands. “A glacial prison,” one called it. But another said, “The most beautiful place on Earth.” And others: “the edge of the world,” “a circle of mysteries,” “a sheer blank,” “a longing.”
(If touch were possible … If I could understand resemblance … Or are objects made of thought as well as matter?)
Now, here and there, airstrips, military installations, wooden huts, radar stations, abandoned makeshift camps, a graveyard. Every now and then the sound of fighter planes landing, taking off.
(Shen Kuo, is this what you dreamed of?)
I wait to see the northern lights, remember how Payer described them after being ice-locked for two years: “Waves of light drive violently from east to west, but are they shooting downwards from above or upwards from below? Rays move fast as if racing each other. In the center is a sea of flames. Is it red or white or green? It seems to be all three. Everyone stops moving. It’s impossible that such violence isn’t accompanied by an equally violent sound, but we hear nothing. Then just as quickly as they came, they vanish.”
Are thoughts a form of violence? And human wishes seeded with a hidden violence?
I look out on this white ice, wait for something to destroy itself in me, immolate and fly past itself in me. I hear light waves, icebergs, flames, fighter planes practicing maneuvers overhead. But not your voice in my mind. Not your wishes or the way you left me.
Mary’s writing a story called “Hate”—I don’t know why We walk most of the day sometimes ride in a diligence, but we hardly have money for such things. At Nogent and St. Aubin the houses were rubble, the people left so poor by the war they just laughed when we asked them for a place to stay. Soon Mary will be seventeen.
She’s writing in an oblong notebook bound in red leather with a broken metal clasp. Some of the pages burned at the edges. Writes the name Mary Jane Clairmont on the inside front cover. Crosses it out. Turns the page, writes August 13, 1814. Turns it again: a pencil sketch of a face. On the next two pages there are words in someone else’s hand: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate” and “Nondum amabam & etc., (August. Confess., Bk. III, Cap. I).”
Has it been hours, days? Her hand continues writing:
But sometimes IXXX sometimes I don’t feel bold though I don’t say it. We walk through narrow streets of old towns, past buildings black with age, the sky black with rain, and I don’t understand what