The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook O

September 23, 2003

The summer people are gone, and the island is chill and brown with patches of burning reds. The surf frightens me these days, and I keep my distance, staying close to where the beach meets the grasses that bow down in the hard wind. Today it made a noise that made me think of a great hoarse animal calling out to no one in particular. I am alone. I have lost Bruno now, too, lost him to my schemes and my rage and my failure. I wanted to bite the world bloody, but I have bitten myself, made my own poor tragedy of things.

And I feel even older alone. My belly is always bloated, even though I am thin. I eat alone, and the food doesn’t look as good as when he is with me. I have pains, vague abdominal aches that I wonder about. Sometimes at night they scare me, but in the morning I chide myself for hypochondria. My wrinkled face surprises me. I don’t know why. I know it is wrinkled. Knowing is not seeing. I have tried to work here, but I cannot. It is as if all the worlds in my head are dying now, my blazing worlds, which I have clung to with my whole being, are slowly being snuffed out. And I sit in front of the fire wrapped in blankets reading Paradise Lost again, slowly, slowly, taking in the dense language I know so well. This afternoon I arrived at Eve’s dreadful meal, the big turn in the old story. The flawed, stupid, vain woman has eaten the damned fruit. “Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint.” She has done it for knowledge, to know more, to be illuminated. How I understand it. Yes, light up my head. I will do anything to know, to know more. Adam is horrified, but he cannot leave her. “Flesh of flesh, / Bone of my bone, and from thy State / Mine shall never be parted, bliss or woe.” And it was like my own fat man speaking to me, and I cried on the old paperback edition I’ve had here in the house for all these years. No one has loved me better than Bruno, and yet, it cannot work between us.

I have become hard.