The Blazing World Read Online Free PDF Page B

against the three walls. Five doors had been crudely drawn onto one of the walls. I burst into tears. Then Aven started crying, and my mother tried to repair the situation. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” That was typical. She couldn’t bear to see people distressed. It affected her physically. She would clutch her rib cage as if someone had hit her.
    We all recovered, but before I left in a car service with Aven, my mother looked me in the eyes. It was a severe look, not cold but strict, the way she sometimes looked at me when I was small and had lied or cheated or hit Ethan.
    I remember it because I felt guilty, although I wasn’t sure why. She closed her eyes, then she opened them, and in a calm low voice said, “I’m sorry you were unsettled, Maisie, but I’m not sorry I made him. There are more dreams, I’m afraid, and they must out.” She smiled sadly and escorted us down to the waiting car.
    I can still see her as she turned away from us. I wish I had filmed her then. It’s beautiful out there by the water with the view of the Statue of Liberty, but it was desolate, too, bleaker then than it is now, and the sight of my mother striding away from us toward the brick building under a big cloudy sky made me feel that I was losing her. I used to feel that way after I said goodbye to her at my summer camp. And then—it was just a minor thing—I noticed that she was letting her hair grow, and it looked like a small wild bush on top of her head.

Harriet Burden
    Notebook C

    Where did they come from? The penis with wings, his penis, the empty suit jackets and pants aloft and running with Felix paraphernalia—reading glasses, cologne, gleaming nail file (file X), a blank canvas (hope)—the giant Felix squashed into one of my rooms like Alice, the tiny Felixes lined up in a row, clad in various outfits, husband dolls, I called them. Somehow my father began to come in, too. The book man sleeping on a page of Spinoza, skipping over Leibniz (he loved Leibniz), a small daddy Luftmensch hovering just above a flight of stairs, words inscribed all over his two-piece suit. The elusive one, my elusive ones, began to mingle in the drawings and the sculptures, their faces and their clothes, mergings of desire, maddening beloveds mixed up in Harry’s mind. And anger, too, at their power over me. That’s why they grew and shrank.
    I didn’t know how to make my mother. That would come later. There was some problem rendering a person I had once been inside.
    I did not have to chase her.
    I chased the men howling Look at me!
    Knowledge. I Husserl’s student Edith Stein is the best philosopher on the subject, and she lived it, lived her words. II Philosophy is hard to picture. I began to wonder if I could represent empathy, for example, build an empathy box. I doodled possible forms for the inside. I made notes. I hummed. I listened to the St. Matthew Passion a lot. I understood that my freedom had arrived. There was nothing and no one in my way except the burden of Burden herself. The wide-open future, the great yawn of absence, made me dizzy, anxious, and, occasionally, high, as if I had doped myself, but I hadn’t. I was the ruler of my own little Brooklyn fiefdom, a rich widow woman, long past babies and toddlers and teenagers, and my brain was fat with ideas.
    But then came the loneliness at night, the restless wanting that reminded me of my years alone in my first apartment in the city when I was at Cooper Union. I was hurled back to my young self—the solitary girl artist with vague cravings for a future that somehow involved both fame and love. I began to understand that the feelings I had assigned to my youth were not really about that time of life. The agitation I felt after a long day of work was the same disquiet I had felt as a person who had barely emerged from childhood. I pined for a Someone, a potential personage to fill up the remaining hours. Felix, old friend and interlocutor, delicate, evasive, acerbic,