Genoa

by Paul Metcalf

  There was Tashtego, dipping sperm oil by the bucketful from the whale’s head:

  “. . . but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! poor Tashtego—like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!

  ..........

  “‘Stand clear of the tackle!’ cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.

  “Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging—now over the sailors’ heads and now over the water—Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The next a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every one counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.

  “‘Ha! ha!’ cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.

  “‘Both! both!—it is both!’—cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.

  “Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;—he had thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way—head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected.”

  As a boy, Carl went through a period of monumental hay fever marked by no ordinary sneezes, but by explosions, one following another in rapid succession so that they seemed continuous, his eyes, nose, and mouth become fountains. I see him now as I came upon him one day, where he had gone to isolate himself during an attack, in an unused room of the house. Glancing at me, through bloodshot, aqueous eyes, he turned, in sequence, to the four points of the compass, saluting each with a shattering blast that doubled him over, scattered spray to the walls, and brought his forehead nearly to his feet. Subsiding a moment, shoulders and head hanging to one side, he turned to me and spoke, the words running together in his wet mouth:

  “I must have the ocean in my head.”

  And there were allusions, legendary in the family—to a difficulty immediately following his birth. The doctor diagnosed Hydrocephalus Internus:

  “In infants, the most notable symptom is the progressive enlargement of the head. The fontanels remain open and are tense, and often the sagittal suture fails to close . . . The bones of the skull are thin. The face of the child appears small because of the cranial enlargement and the bulging overhanging forehead. The hair is thin. The skin appears to be tightly stretched and the veins are prominent. The thin orbital plates are pushed downward, with displacement of the eyeballs, so that each iris and often a part of the pupil is covered by the lower lid, and the sclera is visible above. Optic neuritis, followed by optic atrophy, results from pressure of the distended third ventricle upon the chiasm. Strabismus is usually present. The child’s head has a tendency to fall backward or to one side, and cannot be held erect. The extremities and trunk are thin and there is rigidity, especially of the abductor muscles. Late in the disease there is spasticity. Convulsions are caused by pressure on the cortex. If the child walks at all, it is with difficulty. Mental development is usually arrested and varying degrees of mental deficiency result, depending upon the amount of ventricular distortion and the severity of the pressure.”

  But the condition disappeared, as mysteriously as it had arrived, and the doctor could only assume that there had been a rupture or absorption of adhesions. This was the beginning—the headwaters, perhaps—of a series of unique medical phenomena that occurred throughout Carl’s generally robust life.

  Shifting in the chair, I get to my feet, stand up, and look down at the row of books: the medical books. I think again of my diploma, unframed, and of the back-breaking burden of dollars and hope—my own and my parents’—invested in my education. There is the sound of television and children from downstairs. Sitting again, leaning on my elbows, I recall a visit to a hospital ward, when the doctor, knowing me for a medical student, pointed out a crippled youth, and asked me, half-facetiously, what I would do for him:

  there was the face, the

  white-blue face, and the body,

  the young man, band leader,

  he had sleep-walked out a

  second-story window to be found

  legs paralyzed

  from the hips down,

  hands stove,

  and the eyes,

  the pale blue watery

  eyes . . .

  they sent him home, and

  he lives now, on a narrow board

  of a bed, day and night,

  smoking,

  attended by a mother who

  shuts the door . . .

  What would I do:

  to bring back,

  to save,

  to return,

  a not very talented musician . . .

  And there is Melville, in WHITE-JACKET:

  “Strange! that so many of those who would fain minister to our own health should look so much like invalids themselves.”

  And Carl, reading Melville:

  “In the case of a Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess . . .”

  And, again, the way he held the book, possessing it, as though the open halves of it were themselves two plump, whitish lobes . . . he smiled broadly, smacking his lips.

  Letting my eyes close, and my arms hang over the sides of the chair—I experience motion once more,

  not this time as the house pitching, the stocks dragging, but as a thing, familiar, expected; as a man might climb into his berth before his ship is underway, and then the motion, the departure, the gentle slipping away from the wharf, comes as a thing good and confirming.

  Melville, regarding MARDI, in a letter:

  “. . . proceeding in my narrative of facts, I began to feel an incurable distaste for the same; & a longing to plume my powers for a flight, & felt irked, cramped & fettered by plodding along with dull commonplaces,—So suddenly abandoning the thing altogether, I went to work heart & soul at a romance which is now in fair progress . . .”

  The illusion I have is of being split from head to toe, as in hemiplegia or an imperfect twinning process—with separate circulation on each side, the blood rushing furiously. There are no recalls, no flashing images, no digging in and rooting of the body—rather, the beginning of a journey such as I have never before taken

  GENOA

  ONE

  THERE WAS THE MAN from Genoa, who went to sea at fourteen, and


  “I have been twenty-three years upon the sea without quitting it for any time long enough to be counted, and I saw all the East and West . . .”

  A Man

  “. . . of a good size and looks, taller than the average and of sturdy limbs; the eyes lively and the other features of the face in good proportion; the hair very red; and the complexion somewhat flushed and freckled; a good speaker, cautious and of great talent and an elegant latinist and a most learned cosmographer, graceful when he wished, irate when he was crossed . . .”:

  Christopher Columbus.

  The wind rises again, sifting through the cracks at the eaves, and I draw close to the old chimney. My head seems large, and my legs feel as though joined, wedge-shaped. I read

  that twenty-five thousand years ago Cro-Magnon man invaded Europe, from unknown origins. He was tall, averaging above six feet, and had a large brain case, larger than any known man of the present. Settling in southern France, he pushed over the mountains, to the Spanish Peninsula. He worshipped bulls, and buried his dead facing west,

  the direction in which he migrated, moving, perhaps, all the way to the brink, the eaves of the unknown ocean, to Cabo de Sao Vicente, which Columbus called “the beginning of Europe.”

  Eastward on the map, there is Genoa, at the northernmost pitch of the Ligurian Sea, with land and water falling away southwestward,

  just as, beyond Gibraltar, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, from Palos the ocean falls away from the land, again southwestward,

  and farther eastward, there is Crete, progenitor of Greece . . . but

  “‘A man overboard!’ I shouted at the top of my compass; and like lightning the cords slid through our blistering hands, and with a tremendous shock the boat bounded on the sea’s back. One mad sheer and plunge, one terrible strain on the tackles as we sunk in the trough of the waves, tugged upon by the towing breaker, and our knives severed the tackle ropes—we hazarded not unhooking the blocks—our oars were out, and the good boat headed round, with prow to leeward.”

  Melville in MARDI, with Jarl the Viking, stole a whaleboat and escaped the ARCTURIAN— “. . . and right into the darkness, and dead to leeward, we rowed and sailed . . .”

  As earlier, with Toby, he had in fact jumped ship to the valley of the Typee, he now, in the same south seas, with northman as companion, fictively jumped ship into open waters, and

  “. . . West, West! Whitherward point Hope and prophet-fingers; whitherward, at sunset, kneel all worshipers of fire; whitherward in mid-ocean, the great whales turn to die . . .”

  sailed westward to fabulous Mardi

  (to be greeted as a white god from the east, as Columbus and his men were greeted in the Indies . . .

  Melville, out of the known cosmos of the sperm whaler, leaped to the unknown . . .

  “. . . I’ve chartless voyaged. With compass and the lead, we had not found these Mardian Isles. Those who boldly launch, cast off all cables; and turning from the common breeze, that’s fair for all, with their own breath, fill their own sails. Hug the shore, naught new is seen; and ‘Land ho!’ at last was sung, when a new world was sought.

  “But this new world here sought, is stranger far than his, who stretched his vans from Palos. It is the world of mind; wherein the wanderer may gaze round with more of wonder . . .”

  To guarantee escape—a thousand miles at sea in an open boat were not enough—Melville cut off the father ship, the whaler from which he fled,

  “For of the stout Arcturian no word was ever heard, from the dark hour we pushed from her fated planks.”

  and thus made of himself an Ishmael—wanderer in space.

  But for Melville, space and time are one . . .

  “Do you believe that you lived three thousand years ago? That you were at the taking of Tyre, were overwhelmed in Gomorrah? No. But for me, I was at the subsiding of the Deluge, and helped swab the ground, and build the first house. With the Israelites, I fainted in the wilderness; was in court, when Solomon outdid all the judges before him. I, it was, who . . . touched Isabella’s heart, that she hearkened to Columbus.”

  I become aware now of a different sensation, and realize that it has been with me for some moments:

  It is the sound of silence. Wind and rain have vanished, child and home noises from below are hushed. I have fallen into a void, have journeyed to beginnings earlier than I have yet discovered. I sit still, clamoring for a sound; my head feels huge, my body and legs are one.

  “If therefore,” as Einstein says, “a body is removed sufficiently far from all other masses of the universe its inertia must be reduced to zero.”

  And Bondi: “This in turn implies that it is possible to introduce an omnipresent cosmic time which has the property of measuring proper time . . .”

  And further: “A separate time-reckoning belongs therefore to every natural phenomenon.”

  “The picture of the history of the universe . . ., then, was that for an infinite period in the distant past there was a completely homogeneous distribution of matter in equilibrium . . . until some event started off the expansion, which has been going on at an increasing pace ever since.”

  Stubb, in MOBY-DICK: “I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable . . .”

  And Melville, in a letter: “. . . & for me, I shall write such things as the Great Publisher of Mankind ordained ages before he published ‘The World’—this planet, I mean . . .

  Again, in MOBY-DICK: “When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons . . . I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s gray chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible.”

  Rousing, shifting myself, I feel impelled to break through the silence. I find it an effort, muscular, involving sensation at once stiff and pliant in the inner ear, down the sides of the neck, and in the shoulders; and it is not until I rise to my feet and tap my fingers sharply on the desk, that I realize the silence has been altogether subjective—wind and rain have not ceased, the children are still below; I have been controlling these sounds, turning the volume down, as in functional deafness. Experimenting, I realize that the volume is still down, that I wish it to be that way. For an instant, hope and excitement flash through me, so that, in this moment, my two feet are equivalent and normal. This passes quickly. I sink into the chair, and the old sensations of deformity, actual and projected, overtake me, in the silence. I am at once clubfooted and footless.

  Melville, describing a calm: “At first he is taken by surprise, never having dreamt of a state of existence where existence itself seems suspended. He shakes himself in his coat, to see whether it be empty or no. He closes his eyes, to test the reality of the glassy expanse. He fetches a deep breath, by way of experiment, and for the sake of witnessing the effect.”

  “The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned . . .”

  “But that morning, the two gray firmaments of sky and water seemed collapsed into a vague ellipsis . . . Every thing was fused into the calm: sky, air, water, and all. Not a fish was to be seen. The silence was that of a vacuum. No vitality lurked in the air. And this inert blending and brooding of all things seemed gray chaos in conception.”

  And there is Ahab, in MOBY-DICK: “. . . not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”

  An odor—the odor of sulphur—comes to me. I turn my head variously, but the odo
r persists. Powerful, sourceless, it pervades the attic. I reach for the medical book, and read

  that at one time there was a popular theory, disproved in 1668, that slime and decaying matter were capable of giving rise to living animals, and

  that the human spermatozoon was discovered by Leeuwenhoek in 1677 . . .

  It was believed, according to the theory of preformation, that fully formed human bodies existed in miniature in either the sperm or the ovum; all future generations were thought to be encased, one inside the sex cells of the other, and it was calculated that the egg of Eve must have contained two hundred thousand million human beings, concentrically arranged, and that when all these miniatures were released and unfolded, the human race would terminate.

  (There is the drawing (Hartsoeker, 1694) of a tiny human organism, crouched over, huge-headed, encased in a sperm cell. A dark star, four-pointed like a compass, covers his pate . . .

  And there are the other drawings:

  The testicle, the ovary, the

  head of the sperm, in the

  shape of an egg . . .

  the uterus pear-shaped, the ovum,

  round, like a planet . . .

  the egg, the pear,

  the planet,

  with the flagellum for energy . . .

  Glancing at the picture: “Human spermatozoon. Diagrammatic.”

  and the text: “The head is oval or elliptical, but flattened, so that when viewed in profile it is pear-shaped.”

  I am aware again of internal sensation, and there is a sudden identification:

  “The human spermatozoon possesses a head, a neck, a connecting piece or body, and a tail.”

  It is this—the huge-headed and long-tailed sensation—that I have been experiencing for some time. Pliant as a creature out of myth, I am—nerve, blood and muscle—disciplined and reshapen. My head is black, the skull-bones inflated, retaining their thickness, but become enormous, cavernous, so that all of me is within the head, only the tail remaining outside: flagellant, spring-like . . .

  Again there is motion, this time with awe and terror; for whatever my condition, the condition of thought and flesh, the reality in which I am formed and deformed, in which I am known to myself and to others—all is become mutable. I am monstrous, my head merges into the attic, the attic into blackness . . .