“‘What’s the point of this—things condemning things? Why do you do this? Why did you bother to speak of me in that way?’”
I could ask the same of you, and of myself.
Maybe I’m like that oak tree and what you thought of as my repulsive form isn’t so horrible at all. But that oak was part of the natural world—nature made it what it was. And I—I don’t know if that’s the case with me. You made me. If the workings of your mind were, in the end, a distortion of nature, a betrayal of and faithlessness toward nature, then what am I?
In any case the question holds: “What’s the point of things condemning things?”
As you condemned me. As I condemned myself, and still do, wishing to be other than I am.
Aosta, October 17 27
My Friend,
It seems so much of what we take into our minds is random, disorganized, haphazard. Why do I know about tallow trees, for instance? I remember that they’re tall XXXXXXX and grow in China, and that their seeds, when crushed and boiled, yield the tallow to make candles. I wonder if you’ve seen them. This, too, I somehow know, though maybe it’s not true: on the road to the monastery of Tien-Dong every 29th stone is engraved with a lotus blossom, and in that monastery the monks wear mantles made of bits of fabric sewn roughly together so that, however fine the cloth, their robes look like a patchwork of rags.
XXX I’ve gotten afraid of the way my mind is interfering with XXX but then why do I write to you XXX why do I XXX
But in truth I keep thinking more and more about the sister. It feels-how can I put it?—that she waits inside my mind. XX And when she sat under the walnut tree XXX and what did she XXX and did she read there and which books? I don’t know why I Her eyes, were they locked wide like mine? Her room is XXX I’ve never stepped into her room. But years ago I found a piece of paper crumpled in a crack beside her door:
Of the two ointments recommended the following may be given:
Oil of eucalyptus (15.0 ml)
Honey (60.0 ml)
Cod liver oil (60.0 ml)
Zinc oxide (28.4 grm.)
Bis. Subn. (56.7 grm.)
If the pupil still does not dilate satisfactorily the following subconjunctival injection may be given:
Atropine sulphate (0.016 grm.)
Cocaine (0.03 grm.)
Distilled water (6.00 ml)
What am I that I copy this out for you, send this to you?
monstrous unforgivable or
How quiet she must have been all those hours she spent under the walnut tree, such quiet she lived in. Her footsteps on the very stones my feet touch daily. More and more I’m drawn to her room, the brass latch on her closed door. I’m sorry XXX I didn’t mean to and of course XXX but I will try again later will still try XXX
Your Friend,
… The monks in their patchwork rags … and I a patchwork … and the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me …
Aosta, November 7
My Friend,
For so many weeks I watched my mind moving away from itself, I don’t know how else to put it. Even the air, which I often stared into for hours at a time, seemed more visible, less intact, inside it minute particles swirled and collided—small brightnesses flaring then flickering away. My mind, as I felt it, was several minds at once, clumps of cells, obsessive and enslaved, spinning tightly wound in their strict orbits, then circling farther outward. Everything breaking I saw the frescoed bodies at Issogne become atomized—the objects were still there—baskets filled with fruit, shoes hung on the rack—but the people, the people, they were ashes, dust, swirling in an otherwise calm world. I lived within that breakage, and when I thought of you it was like looking through a dust-storm, your face a crumbling cage of dust.
That’s over now. Even as I write I’m not making mistakes, as you can see. I’m not needing to cross out. But what am I to make of what overtook me? My eyes still remain mostly open, and they sting. There’s no reason to hope this will change.
I think there’s no known world. I don’t know what awaits me. It’s myself that shape-shifts, changes, grows errant, not the world.
The garden’s less lush now. On one of the mountains there’s a snow-peak shaped like a horn. When the