Clearly Verity Loved Her Father as Much as We Love Anybody

Michael Burnham, 

Sister of Spock :

How long has it been 

since you spoke to him? 

Sarek of Vulcan :

— Years.

Michael Burnham, 

Sister of Spock :

Me, too.

…..When I first came to you, I —

I know that you considered 

every possible effect 

a Vulcan education, 

a Vulcan life, might 

have on a human child.

…..What did you want 

Spock to learn from me? 

Sarek of Vulcan :

— Empathy.

Something he would need to understand 

to successfully interact with humans.

Michael Burnham, 

Sister of Spock :

Wouldn't he have learned 

this from Our Mother? 

Sarek of Vulcan :

……Spock has great 

reverence for his mother —

But reverence tends to —

Michael Burnham, 

Sister of Spock :

— Fill up the room.

Sarek of Vulcan :

Indeed.

Michael Burnham, 

Sister of Spock :

So from A Peer, 

A Sibling, you thought —

Sarek of Vulcan :

— Yes.

But I do not think 

I was successful.

I do not think he ever 

fully accepted you.

Michael Burnham, 

Sister of Spock :

He may have.

For a time.

Sarek of Vulcan :

Just a time? 

I'm discouraged 

he did not embrace The Lesson.

Michael Burnham, 

Sister of Spock :

Father, I am confident 

that Empathy is very 

real for Spock.

Sarek of Vulcan :

I can hear the 

missing notes, Michael.

There is something 

about your relationship 

you're not sharing.

It weighs on you.

Despite my departure, 

I will avail myself to you, 

should you choose to 

speak of it someday.

Michael Burnham, 

Sister of Spock :

— Thank you.

Sarek of Vulcan :

In the meantime, 

I suggest you focus on 

The Problem in front of You, 

rather than What is Behind.

STARLING HAD no sense of time. 

Over the days and nights there were the conversations. She heard herself speaking for minutes on end, and she listened. Sometimes she laughed at herself, hearing artless revelations that normally would have mortified her. 

The things she told Dr Lecter were often surprising to her, sometimes distasteful to a normal sensibility, but what she said was always true. 

And Dr Lecter spoke as well. In a low, even voice. He expressed interest and encouragement, but never surprise or censure. He told her about his childhood, about Mischa. Sometimes they looked at a single bright object together to begin their talks, almost always there was but a single light source in the room. From day to day the bright object changed. Today, they began with the single highlight on the side of a teapot, but as their talk progressed, Dr Lecter seemed to sense their arrival at an unexplored gallery in her mind. Perhaps he heard trolls fighting on the other side of a wall. He replaced the teapot with a silver belt buckle. “That’s my daddy’s,” Starling said. She clapped her hands together like a child. “Yes,” Dr Lecter said. “Clarice, would you like to talk with your father? Your father is here. Would you like to talk with him?” “My daddy’s here! Hey! All right!” Dr Lecter put his hands on the sides of Starling’s head, over her temporal lobes, which could supply her with all of her father she would ever need. He looked deep, deep into her eyes. “I know you’ll want to talk privately. I’ll go now. You can watch the buckle, and in a few minutes, you’ll hear him knock. All right?” “Yes! Super!” “Good. You’ll just have to wait a few minutes.” Tiny sting of the finest needle—Starling did not even look down—and Dr Lecter left the room. She watched the buckle until the knock came, two firm knocks, and her father came in as she remembered him, tall in the doorway, carrying his hat, his hair slicked down with water the way he came to the supper table. “Hey, Baby! What time do you eat around here?” He had not held her in the twenty-five years since his death, but when he gathered her to him, the western snaps on his shirtfront felt the very same, he smelled of strong soap and tobacco, and she sensed against her the great volume of his heart. “Hey, Baby. Hey, Baby. Did you fall down?” It was the same as when he gathered her up in the yard after she tried to ride a big goat on a dare. “You was doing pretty good ‘til she swapped ends so fast. Come on in the kitchen and let’s see what we can find.” Two things on the table in the spare kitchen of her childhood home, a cellophane package of SNO BALLS, and a bag of oranges. Starling’s father opened his Barlow knife with the blade broken off square and peeled a couple of oranges, the peelings curling on the oilcloth. They sat in ladder-back kitchen chairs and he freed the sections by quarters and alternately he ate one, and he gave one to Starling. She spit the seeds in her hand and held them in her lap. He was long in a chair, like John Brigham. Her father chewed more on one side than the other and one of his lateral incisors was capped with white metal in the fashion of forties army dentistry. It gleamed when he laughed. They ate two oranges and a SNO BALL apiece and told a few knock-knock jokes. Starling had forgotten that wonderful squirmy feeling of springy icing under the coconut. The kitchen dissolved and they were talking as grown people. “How you doin’, Baby?” It was a serious question. “They’re pretty down on me at work.” “I know about that. That’s that courthouse crowd, Sugar. Sorrier bunch never—never drew breath. You never shot nobody you didn’t have to.” “I believe that. There’s other stuff.” “You never told a lie about it.” “No, sir.” “You saved that little baby.” “He came out all right.” “I was real proud of that.” “Thank you, sir.” “Sugar, I got to take off. We’ll talk.” “You can’t stay.” 

He put his hand on her head. 

“We can’t never stay, Baby. Can’t nobody stay like they want to.” 

He kissed her forehead and walked out of the room. 

She could see the bullet hole in his hat as he waved to her, tall in the doorway. 

CHAPTER 95 

CLEARLY STARLING loved her father as much as we love anybody, and she would have fought in an instant over a slur on his memory. 

Yet, in conversation with Dr Lecter, under the influence of a major hypnotic drug and deep hypnosis, this is what she said: “I’m really mad at him, though. 

I mean, come on, how come he had to be behind a goddamned drugstore in the middle of the night going up against those two pissants that killed him. 

He short-shucked that old pump shotgun and they had him. 

They were nothing and they had him. 

He didn’t know what he was doing. 

He never learned anything.” 

She would have slapped the face of anybody else saying that. 

The monster settled back a micron in his chair. 

Ahh, at last we’ve come to it. These schoolgirl recollections were becoming tedious. 

Starling tried to swing her legs beneath the chair like a child, but her legs were too long. “See, he had that job, he went and did what they told him, went around with that damned watchman’s clock and then he was dead. 

And Mama was washing the blood out of his hat to bury it with him. 

Who came home to us? Nobody. 

Damn few SNO BALLS after that, I can tell you. 

Mama and me, cleaning up motel rooms. 

People leaving wet Trojans on the nightstand. 

He got killed and left us because he was too goddamned stupid. 

He should have told those town jackasses to stuff the job.” 

Things she would never have said, things banned from her higher brain. 

From the beginning of their acquaintance, 

Dr Lecter had needled her about her father, calling him a night watchman. 

Now he became Lecter the Protector of her father’s memory. “Clarice, he never wished for anything but your happiness and well-being.” 

“Wish in one hand and shit in the other one and see which one gets full the first,” said Starling. 

This adage of the orphans’ home should have been particularly distasteful coming from that attractive face, but Dr Lecter seemed pleased, even encouraged. 

“Clarice, I’m going to ask you to come with me to another room,” Dr Lecter said. “Your father visited you, as best you could manage. You saw that, despite your intense wish to keep him with you, he couldn’t stay. He visited you. Now it’s time for you to visit him.” 

Down a hall to a guest bedroom. The door was closed. “Wait a moment, Clarice.” He went inside. She stood in the hall with her hand on the knob and heard a match struck. 

Dr Lecter opened the door. “Clarice, you know your father is dead. You know that better than anyone.” 

“Yes.” 

“Come in and see him.” Her father’s bones were composed on a twin bed, the long bones and rib cage covered by a sheet. The remains were in low relief beneath the white cover, like a child’s snow angel. Her father’s skull, cleaned by the tiny ocean scavengers off Dr Lecter’s beach, dried and bleached, rested on the pillow. 

“Where was his star, Clarice?” 

“The village took it back. They said it cost seven dollars.” 

“This is what he is, this is all of him now. This is what time has reduced him to.” 

Starling looked at the bones. She turned and quickly left the room. It was not a retreat and Lecter did not follow her. He waited in the semidark. He was not afraid, but he heard her coming back with ears as keen as those of a staked-out goat. 

Something bright metal in her hand. A badge, John Brigham’s shield. She put it on the sheet. 

“What could a badge mean to you, Clarice? You shot a hole through one in the barn.” 

“It meant everything to him. That’s how much he knewww.” 

The last word distorted and her mouth turned down. She picked up her father’s skull and sat on the other bed, hot tears springing in her eyes and pouring down her cheeks. 

Like a toddler she caught up the tail of her pullover and held it to her cheek and sobbed, bitter tears falling with a hollow tap tap on the dome of her father’s skull resting in her lap, its capped tooth gleaming. 

“I love my Daddy, he was as good to me as he knew how to be. It was the best time I ever had.” 

And it was true, and no less true than before she let the anger out. When Dr Lecter gave her a tissue she simply gripped it in her fist and he cleaned her face himself. 

“Clarice, I’m going to leave you here with these remains. Remains, Clarice. Scream your plight into his eyeholes and no reply will come.” 

He put his hands on the sides of her head. 

“What you need of your father is here, in your head, and subject to your judgment, not his. I’ll leave you now. Do you want the candles?” 

“Yes, please.” 

“When you come out, bring only what you need.” 

He waited in the drawing room, before the fire. He passed the time playing his theremin, moving his empty hands in its electronic field to create the music, moving the hands he had placed on Clarice Starling’s head as though he now directed the music. He was aware of Starling standing behind him for some time before he finished his piece. When he turned to her, her smile was soft and sad and her hands were empty. 

Ever, Dr Lecter sought pattern. He knew that, like every sentient being, Starling formed from her early experience matrices, frameworks by which later perceptions were understood. 

Speaking to her through the asylum bars so many years ago, he had found an important one for Starling, the slaughter of lambs and horses on the ranch that was her foster home. 

She was imprinted by their plight. 

Her obsessive and successful hunt for Jame Gumb was driven by the plight of his captive. She had saved him from torture for the same reason. 

Fine. Patterned behavior. 

Ever looking for situational sets, Dr Lecter believed that Starling saw in John Brigham her father’s good qualities — and with her father’s virtues the unfortunate Brigham was also assigned the incestual taboo. Brigham, and probably Crawford, had her father’s good qualities. Where were the bad? Dr Lecter searched for the rest of this split matrix. 

Using hypnotic drugs and hypnotic techniques much modified from cameral therapy, he was finding in Clarice Starling’s personality hard and stubborn nodes, like knots in wood, and old resentments still flammable as resin. He came upon tableaux of pitiless brightness, years old but well tended and detailed, that sent limbic anger flashing through Starling’s brain like lightning in a thunderhead. 

Most of them involved Paul Krendler. Her resentment of the very real injustices she had suffered at Krendler’s hands was charged with the anger at her father that she could never, never acknowledge. She could not forgive her father for dying. He had left the family, he had stopped peeling oranges in the kitchen. He had doomed her mother to the commode brush and the pail. He had stopped holding Starling close, his great heart booming like Hannah’s heart as they rode into the night. Krendler was the icon of failure and frustration. He could be blamed. But could he be defied? Or was Krendler, and every other authority and taboo, empowered to box Starling into what was, in Dr Lecter’s view, her little low-ceiling life? To him one hopeful sign: Though she was imprinted with the badge, she could still shoot a hole through one and kill the wearer. Why? Because she had committed to action, identified the wearer as a criminal and made the judgment ahead of time, overruling the imprinted icon of the star. Potential flexibility. The cerebral cortex rules. Did that mean room for Mischa within Starling? Or was it simply another good quality of the place Starling must vacate?

The encroaching condition of Exile

“He was moreover a writer who moved everywhere with a sense of ulterior motive, a sense of greater design, an acute feeling for the historical moment and an overwhelming consciousness of his duty as an artist in the immense and fiery process of social change of which he knew himself to be a part. Shelley's lyrics were mere sparks in this comet's trail.

From the age of nineteen, Shelley passed through a series of personal crises, dictated partly by chance but increasingly by choice, which had the cumulative effect of forcing him further and further away from the family, class and cultural background into which he had been born. By the time his life was cut short, one month before his thirtieth birthday, he was a complete exile, both geographically and spiritually. The encroaching condition of exile plays a highly significant part in his story. 

At the time of his death his reputation was almost literally unspeakable in England, an object to be torn apart between the conservative and radical reviews, but not on the whole to be mentioned in polite London society. In this he was quite unlike his aristocratic friend and rival Lord Byron who, though similarly exiled, always had a tremendous popular following in England, and who by sailing to Greece instantly canonized himself on the altars of English liberalism. 

Moreover, while Byron had achieved perhaps the greatest international readership of the age, Shelley had achieved almost none. Thus while exile had brought Byron fame and the kind of notoriety that is quickly transmuted into fashionable glamour, it brought to Shelley both literary obscurity and personal disrepute. A few days after Shelley's death, Byron wrote to Tom Moore in London, 'there is thus another man gone about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken' - but it was a mistake which his Lordship himself had frequently helped to compound.

Shelley's exile, his defection from his class and the disreputability of his beliefs and behaviour, had a tremendous effect on the carefully partisan handling of his biography by the survivors of his own circle and generation, and even more so by that of his son's. In the first, the generation of his family and friends, fear of the moral and social stigma attached to many incidents in Shelley's career prevented the publication or even the writing of biographical material until those who were in possession of it, like Hogg, Peacock and Trelawny, were respectable Victorians in their sixties, who were fully prepared to forget, to smudge and to conceal. With one exception, almost no significant biographical material appeared until more than thirty years after his death. 

Shelley's second wife, Mary, was the key to his biography both in her own experiences and in her access to papers. Yet Mary Shelley was actually prevented from writing anything fuller than the brief introduction to Galignani's edition of the Posthumous Poems in 1824, and the editorial 'Notes' to the first Complete Works of 1839-40. 

She was prevented partly by the same considerations of propriety as Shelley's friends, but even more by the fact that Shelley's father, Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, specifically forbade any such publications until after his own death, on pain of the removal of the annuity, Mary's only regular source of income, with which she was just able to support herself and her son - Sir Timothy's grandson and heir - Percy Florence Shelley. 

Sir Timothy did not hesitate to remind Mary of this interdiction through his solicitor Whittan, and made the ban singularly effective by outliving his detested son by twenty-two years, and dying at the age of go in 1844. 

Mary, who had contented herself with enshrining the remembered image of her husband in a series of noble and emasculated figures in her fiction, especially The Last Man (1826) and Lodore (1835), died without further revelations only seven years later in 1851.

In the second generation, control of the Shelley papers passed to Boscombe Manor and Sir Percy Florence's wife, Lady Jane Shelley, who made it her life work to establish an unimpeachable feminine and Victorian idealization of the poet. The main obstacles were the irregularities of Shelley's love-life, the radicalism of his political views and the philosophic difficulty of much of his major work. She substituted for them the image of the gentle, suffering lyric poet, a misunderstood man more sinned against than sinning, whose reputation and social standing were gradually rehabilitated. 

Suppression, alteration and even destruction of certain journals, letters and papers here began in earnest; though to be fair these were not much worse than those already carried out by friends like Hogg. But the cumulative distortion became large. Moreover, the vetting and control which Lady Jane exercised over the chosen scholars who were allowed into the sanctuary, notably Richard Garnett and Edward Dowden, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, was strict and to some degree ruthless. This is witnessed most particularly by the entirely unscrupulous handling of the Harriet Shelley material; but there are many other places where the record was intentionally falsified, and details of the more significant ones are discussed in the course of my narrative for they frequently throw much light. They may also be gathered from the Garnett, Dowden, Rossetti correspondence which has been published, and a wild but spirited polemical attack by Robert Metcalf Smith in The Shelley Legend (1945). This crucial period of Shelley studies was crowned by Edward Dowden's two-volume standard Life (1886), whose damaging influence is still powerfully at work in popular estimates of Shelley's writing and character.

The decisive modern reinterpretation of Shelley began in America. It may be said to date from the biographical work of Newman Ivey White, and the textual scholarship of F.L. Jones. Together with a third American scholar, Kenneth Neill Cameron, who became the first editor of the Shelley Collection in the Pforzheimer Library in New York, these men began a movement which has started a complete transformation of the assessment of Shelley's life and work. Their monuments are White's two-volume Shelley of 1940, and Jones' two-volume Letters of 1964; full details of the rest of their work appear in my references. They returned everywhere to original manuscript sources and contemporary material, meticulously comparing printed versions and frequently having recourse to infra-red equipment, and launching a new younger generation of researchers. Any modern English biography must be profoundly indebted to this scholarship, and for me it has been both the indispensable foundation of this book, and an inspiring example.

While the biographic material of Shelley's life has taken more than a hundred years to begin its re-emergence from the penumbra of Victorian proprieties, many of Shelley's actual writings have suffered from an equivalent languishing fate. This too has led to a great distortion in the literary estimate of Shelley's importance. The publishing history of many of Shelley's major poems is a curious one, while the last reasonably complete edition of his prose in England was in 1880. His most important political essay was first published in a limited private edition one hundred years after it was composed, while several of his best poems have only been authoritively edited and printed in the last decade.

With the exception of Carl Grabo's The Magic Plant (1936), and an essay by W.B. Yeats, there is virtually no literary criticism or critical commentary which is worth reading before 1945. Again, details of the history of Shelley publication occur in the body of my narrative where they throw light on Shelley's reputation, as in the extraordinary case of Queen Mab. Probably the most faithful, effective and discriminating of Shelley's earliest publishers were the band of radical pirate printers who fought the battle for a free press in the 1820s, and later the battle for Chartism.

In a field across which immense troops of scholars are now constantly being deployed, one hesitates to claim originality. The reader who asks what is literally 'new' partly misunderstands the nature of this kind of biographical research. It is more the case that perspectives change, 'old' facts and events and documents take on new significance and relations, while fresh local research puts events and experiences in a new setting, drawing in elements that before had not been given proper consideration. What is constantly new is not the past itself, but the way we look back on it. My book will be found to be different from previous biographies in several ways, apart from the original local research upon which it is based. I have used both Mary's and Claire's Journals more fully than previous writers, and for the first time I think Claire is given her full and proper place in Shelley's life. I have offered fully documented reinterpretations of the two great biographical mysteries in Shelley's carcer - the 'assassination' attempt in Wales in 1813, and the problematical 'Neapolitan child born in the winter of 1818. I have made constant reference to Shelley's manuscript working notebooks in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in an attempt to show more clearly how Shelley's great postic themes were gradually conceived and progressively executed. 

Finally, I have redrawn the critical estimate of both Shelley's major poetry and his prose, and attempted to set it as vividly as possible in its immediate physical setting, and against the disturbed and excited political period which brought it into being, and which flashes up through the years towards our own. 

This last is a comparison that I have never presumed to mention, since that has not been my task. But it stands there for anyone who has eyes to see, ears to hear, or heart to feel, sometimes so close that Shelley's life seems more a haunting than a history.

You were FAR from My FIRST Choice --

[T'Pol's quarters]

(T'Pol is sitting on the floor, 

meditating with candles.)

Autistic Queer Woman :

Come in.

Hetero Life-Partner :

You decide to tell me what Vanik said?

Autistic Queer Woman :

Please, sit down.

Hetero Life-Partner :

I've never seen your 

quarters before. Cozy.

(Tucker sits on floor.)

Hetero Life-Partner :

You know you're not supposed to 

have an open flame on the ship.

Autistic Queer Woman :

I was given permission 

from The Captain. 

They're for meditation.

Hetero Life-Partner :

So, what can I do for you?

Autistic Queer Woman :

Doctor Phlox believes that it might help if 

I was to discuss my problem with someone 

I felt comfortable confiding in.

Hetero Life-Partner :

You want to talk to me? Well, I'm not sure 

I'm going to be much help. I mean, 

I've only been in three relationships 

and they all went bust. 

Are you sure you wouldn't rather talk 

to Hoshi or Ensign Kimball? 

She's married.

Autistic Queer Woman :

You were far from my first choice, but 

speaking with someone else would mean 

more people knowing about my situation.

Hetero Life-Partner :

I'll do anything I can. 

What's your problem?

Autistic Queer Woman :

You read The Letter.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Yes.

Autistic Queer Woman :

Then you know that unless 

I leave Enterprise immediately, 

my wedding plans will be cancelled.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Have you talked to -- ?

Autistic Queer Woman :

-- Koss.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Have you talked to Koss about all this?

Autistic Queer Woman :

We haven't spoken in many years. 

Marriages on Vulcan are 

arranged during childhood. 

I've only met Koss four times.

Hetero Life-Partner :

How can you be in love with a guy 

you've only met four times?

Autistic Queer Woman :

It's assumed that we'd eventually 

develop an affection for one another.

Hetero Life-Partner :

So his parents send you an ultimatum? 

He doesn't have a say?

Autistic Queer Woman :

His parents planned the union. 

It's their decision.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Boy. Where I come from, 

arranged marriages 

went out with slavery.

Autistic Queer Woman :

Are you going to give me advice 

or criticise My People's tradition.

Hetero Life-Partner :

I'm still a little fuzzy 

on why they threatened to 

call it off in the first place.

Autistic Queer Woman :

The ceremony was supposed to take place next week. When I decided to remain on Enterprise I requested a postponement. Koss's parents were insulted that I would put off our plans to serve on a human vessel.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Well, Vanik can take you home. Why don't you go marry Koss, then come back?

Autistic Queer Woman :

It's customary for a husband and wife to reside together for at least one Vulcan year.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Maybe he can come to Enterprise.

Autistic Queer Woman :

He's an architect. It would be illogical for him to live aboard a starship.

Hetero Life-Partner :

This whole thing sounds illogical.

Autistic Queer Woman :

-- Your advice, Commander.

Hetero Life-Partner :

What do you want to do?

Autistic Queer Woman :

That is irrelevant.

Hetero Life-Partner :

No, it's not. It's very relevant. 

Do you want to go back and marry this guy, 

spend a year with him, ten years, 

a hundred years, or do you want 

to stay on Enterprise?

Autistic Queer Woman :

I have an obligation.

Hetero Life-Partner :

You've got an obligation to yourself. 

You've spent the last year around humans. 

If there's one thing you should have learned 

it's that we're free to make our own decisions. 

There's a lot to be said for personal choice.

Autistic Queer Woman :

If you'd spent the last year on Vulcan, you would have learned that our commitment to tradition outweighs personal choice.

Hetero Life-Partner :

I respect your customs, but this marriage was arranged when 

You were a kid. A lot's happened since then. People change.

Autistic Queer Woman :

Vulcan's don't.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Really.

Autistic Queer Woman :

My obligation is to my culture, my heritage. 

It has to take precedence.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Sounds to me like you already made 

up your mind. Why the hell 

did you ask me here?

Autistic Queer Woman :

It was a mistake. I apologise.

(T'Pol stands. Tucker goes to leave.)

Hetero Life-Partner :

Did it ever occur to you that you might have postponed the wedding because subconsciously you wanted to get out of it?

Autistic Queer Woman :

That would imply that my 

subconscious mind controls 

my decisions. It doesn't.

Hetero Life-Partner :

Well it happens to humans all the time. 

Maybe you're picking up some of our bad habits.