Ciclo CCX

A chi leggesse —

I write this evening with the left hand, which is to say I write badly, which is to say I write at all. The right has taken to trembling in a manner no longer intermittent but constant, a small river of refusal running from the shoulder to the tips of the fingers, as though the flesh has received a message the mind has not yet decoded. I do not know if this is the body preparing to leave or merely the body insisting, at last, on being heard. I suspect both. I suspect the distinction is smaller than we pretend.

You — and I must call you you, though you are a hypothesis, a figure I address across a distance I cannot measure — you will perhaps wonder why I do not stop. Why the pen continues when the hand rebels. I will tell you what I have not told the king’s physicians, who look at the wrist and speak of humors and of age, which is to say they speak of nothing: the hand trembles, yes, but the trembling is not the obstacle. The trembling is the condition. It is the price of admission. When the hand was steady it drew what it was told to draw — a duke’s wife, a war machine, a canal lock for a man who would never build it. Now the hand draws what it must, which is to say what it did not know it carried. The line wavers. The wavering is more true than the line I once laid down with the confidence of a man who believed he understood proportion.

I have been thinking about debt. Not the kind one owes to a patron, though I have owed much of that and repaid little — Francis gives me a house at Cloux and a pension and asks only that I be present at supper to speak of philosophy, which is a bargain so generous it shames me, for what I give in return is only talk, and talk costs me nothing but the breath, and breath is the one currency that spends itself whether I use it or not. No. The debt I mean is older. It is the debt to the thing not yet made. The painting begun and abandoned in the studio at Florence — the Adoration, which I left when the monks grew impatient and I grew uncertain whether the composition served the subject or the subject served my vanity. It sits there still, I am told, in the corner, the underdrawing visible through the half-finished faces, the magi caught in the act of arriving but never having arrived. I owe that painting its completion. I will not complete it. This is a fact I carry like a stone in the chest.

But here is what I have come to understand, writing by the last of the candle, the window showing me nothing but the dark of the Loire valley and the sound of water that may be the river or may be the rain: the debt is not discharged by completion. The debt is discharged by attention. I attended to that painting. I saw what it wanted to be. That it did not become what it wanted is not a failure of the seeing. It is a failure of the hand, or of the time, or of the will — and I no longer know which of these three is the truest name for the same thing.

The page receives what the hand cannot finish. This is why I write. Not to record — recording is for clerks and for men who trust their memories, which is to say men who have not yet lived long enough to see memory become a country they can no longer enter. I write because the act of writing is itself a form of attention, and attention is the only honest prayer I know how to make. I do not say this with the confidence of a theologian. I say it with the uncertainty of a man who has looked at the structure of the heart and the structure of the wing and found in both a logic that points toward something he cannot name and does not presume to. La sapienza è figlia della esperienza — but experience is also the daughter of failure, and failure is the daughter of having tried, and trying is the only virtue I am certain I possess.

The candle has guttered twice. I have relit it twice. The third time I will let it go and sit in the dark and listen to the water and think of you — you who may read this by a light I cannot imagine, in a time I cannot imagine, and who will perhaps understand that the trembling hand was not a diminishment but a refinement, a narrowing of the channel through which the work must pass, so that what arrives on the page is not what I intended but what was intended for me.

I do not know if this is grace. I do not know if grace is the right word. I know only that the hand trembles and the page receives and between these two facts there is a space in which something happens that I did not plan and cannot fully explain and am grateful for.

vostro per quanto serve,

Leonardo

da Cloux, questa notte — the date I leave to you, who will know it better than I.