Yes. They did. And they are all dead. I cannot believe that they are all dead.
November 1, 2003
I am back to my blazing mother Margaret. Margaret, the anti-Milton. She gives birth to worlds. It is not God who speaks here, but Nature:
All paines I can take,
Will do no good, Matter a Braine must make;
Figure must draw a Circle, round, and small,
Where in the midst must stand a Glassy Ball,
Without Convexe, the inside a Concave,
And in the midst a round small hole must have,
That Species may passe, and repasse through,
Life the Prospective every thing to view.II
Mad Madge had no children of her own, no babies to raise up into adults. She had her “Paper Bodies,” her breathing works, and she loved them dearly.III
“So do I likewise not persuade myself, that my philosophy being new, and but lately brought forth, will at first sight prove master of understanding, it may be, not in this age, but if God favour her, she may attain to it in after times: And if she be slighted now and buried in silence, she may perhaps rise more gloriously hereafter; for her ground being sense and reason, she may meet with an age where she will be more regarded than she is in this.”IV
I will leave my bodies behind me, too. I am making them for hereafter, not for the bruising present with its cold, dismissive eyes.
The witch hides herself in her castle by the sea with the bear, her friend and lover. That is how the fairy tale has ended. The old witch and the old bear live happily and sadly together ever after.
December 1. The Natural Mask. That’s me. I am the natural mask. It’s Maisie’s idea. I used the words for Raccoona once, and she’s adopted it for the film about her mother and now she’s letting me explain myself to the camera, me, H.B., in all my pseudonymous mania, and I’m explicating and expounding and pontificating and we’re having good fun together. Now you’ve got a hoarder, a schizophrenic, and your mother, I said to Maisie, a perfect trio. And my Maisie smiles. I can’t tell all. I must keep some secrets, of course, but the telling has almost made me feel that I might be understood. Is it such a vain hope?
Aven looked long and tall and thin today. She has entered what I call “high middle childhood.” She examined my mischievous little people, turned red when she saw my copulating pairs, and laughed wildly at my Ursula who’s taking a shit. She let me draw her into my lap today, let her grandmother revel in the tactile pleasure of holding her young body close to my ribs. I put my nose into her short brown hair. Today, it smelled vaguely of apples.
I. “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 179–204.
II. Quoted in Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy During the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 41.
III. In Sociable Letters, published in 1664, Cavendish writes to an imaginary lady friend. In letter CXLIII, she tells her correspondent about her habit of keeping copies of her manuscripts until they are safely printed, after which she burns them: “But howsoever their Paper Bodies are Consumed, like as the Roman Emperours, in Funeral Flames, I cannot say, an eagle flies out of them, or that they turn into a Blazing Star, although they make a great Blazing Light when they Burn; And so leaving them to your Approbation or Condemnation, I rest, Madam, Your faithful Friend and Servant, CL.” Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson, eds., Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (Toronto: Broadview, 2000), 81–82.
IV. Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1668), ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12–13.
Harriet Burden Notebook T
January 15, 2004
When he told me about the CT scan, I watched his mouth move. I remember his teeth had a gray tinge to them in the afternoon light from the window behind him and that the photograph on his desk faced away from me and there was a small price sticker on the back, peeling away from the wood. The words came methodically, but now I recall only their effect — a breathless paralysis. He made sure I understood there was no cure, and that it had spread, that complete surgical resection was unlikely, and even if it were, ninety-eight percent of those patients also experienced a recurrence. Still, he wanted me to check into the hospital immediately for surgery.
They do not protect you. Dr. P. did not shake his head sadly. He did not meet my eyes. I suppose that’s how they do it. They do it all the time, after all. I am one of thousands. This was his method, delivering information for me to process.
When I asked him if there was a stage five, his eyebrows went up. No, he said.
Sure there is, I said. When you hit stage five, you’re dead. That’s what you’re telling me, right? I’m dead.
He did not like my impudence. He did not like it at all, and I was glad he did not like it. I was going home to see Bruno, to discuss it, to register it. When I stood in the street with my hand in the air to hail a cab, I was still frozen, terror high in my throat as I looked around me amazed at what I was losing, city and sky and pavement, the swift and slow-moving pedestrians, and the color of things. It will vanish with you, every color, even the ones that have never had names but are perceived plainly enough. Incalculable losses.
In the cab, I looked at the back of the driver’s head and at his photo plastered on the window between us. I guessed he was from Somalia, a Somalian driver, and I thought to myself, He does not know he is carrying a dead woman in his backseat, taking her to Red Hook, just a stop away from hell.
January 27, 2004
I read what I wrote before the knife cut me open and they rearranged my innards for five hours. My naïveté makes me howl with silent laughter. Hell is here now, and its name is medicine. I have been gutted like a fish: uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, appendix, and a part of my bowel have disappeared. They threw my diseased organs into a pail in surgery, and someone must have come along with gloves and a mask and removed them to a special diseased organs disposal area. Where do they go? I am trussed up with tape, cut vertically from my navel down. I cannot shift my position in bed without gasping in pain. I cannot sit. My ankles and feet have ballooned to three times their size, and, along with my arms and hands, they have turned to ice. I cannot eat. I am terrified of every evacuation. Every excretion brings fresh agony. And the operation was “suboptimal.” This euphemism would be hilarious if it weren’t so grotesque.