freedom is … and yet I want to understand. Then the land opens up again but even the rocks in their wild freedom seem bare and awful and I didn’t want to ever think of them that way. They rise over each other, jut against each other. I don’t want to return to Skinner Street, not ever. Those rats that ran over my face at the Inn where we first slept, I still feel them. Even now they run through my mind, and in my mind Shelley says, Stop thinking, it’s good to think but not the way you think.
Why must there be an immense chain thrown across the barrier-valley between France and Switzerland? It’s attached on both sides to the highest mountain peaks in times of War. Ugliness cast over the land. These scarrings we bring to the land. Yet they had a revolution, they tried to make themselves free.
I want to see the Alps.
I tell Mary and Shelley my name’s Claire now. Only call me Claire.
Shelley’s hurt his ankle so we walk more slowly. Immense forests on all sides—
Trapped in ice for two years the Russian ship Saint Anna drifted northward for 2,400 miles. There was no coal or wood left for heating. Little food. For light and some warmth they burned bear and seal fat mixed with machine oil. The navigator, Albanov, and a few crewmen, finally set out by sledge in search of land, traveling for ninety days over ice and glacial rock to reach Cape Flora.
(As I wandered from you from the start, though I had no place in mind to get to, only knew I was alone. You’d looked at me and fled.)
Of the ones who remained on board no trace was ever found.
Albanov kept a diary: “I have severe pain in my eyes and write only with great effort. The route is so difficult we managed only two and a half miles in spite of our efforts. Last night there was thick, freezing fog. Understanding the movements of pack ice doesn’t make it any easier to cross. I have been having persistent nightmares. I dream there are only two of us left. But every few minutes I walk over to my sole companion who’s busy digging in the ice and ask about a third. I am sure there is a third. When I wake my legs are swollen and painful.”
What have I wanted from this North? Albanov dreamed of Christmas dinners, plates piled high with fruits and steaming meats. He dreamed of music, dancing, warm blue sea.
He craved darkness: “This dull light makes one’s eyes so terribly painful. Only in complete darkness does the pain gradually abate, allowing me to open my eyes again.”
What do I crave? Not the darkness you left me in. Not the sense you must be beside me in that dark.
If I had been permitted to remain in silence, and fled away and climbed some rocks—no one watching or caring what I did—& so on and so forth from step to step—XXX maybe then … but the words burn and crowd too close to one another and everything’s anarchy sometimes, no King of me no steady Queen—I wake in the night wondering what I belong to, what to name myself, where I am.
I’d like to know what a Pack Horse is. I’d like to know why this stove doesn’t work. Shelley says we have to travel back to England because the stove doesn’t work and we’re cold but that makes no sense. I thought I’d never see those cliffs again. Didn’t want to see them again. Every side of me shut sometimes.
At first I thought the Alps were white clouds. Then I saw they were really the Alps—peaked and broken. Everything’s clean in Switzerland. Everyone suddenly hospitable and cheerful. We asked a Swiss man why everyone seems so happy, “Ah it is because we have no King to fear! When we have paid our rent to the Seigneur we have nothing to dread. We don’t even have to take off our hats to him.” But it’s impossible to find a wild and entire solitude, the people multiply, the land’s too lush and easily tamed, no spot’s deserted.
Inside the mind so much is hard and unmeaning. Every side of me shut sometimes. And myself without government. So be it. My self without. I would like to know what safety is. I would like to know what freedom is. I would like to know why Mary sickens often, fevering and weak,