by Paul Metcalf
Linda: “What have you been doing?”
and, not waiting for an answer,
“I came home early, I had to tell the foreman I was ill, because I knew something was wrong, I just felt that things weren’t right . . .”
and
“I suppose we’ll have to hire a sitter . . .”
Relaxing my hold on the doorknob, I shift balance to the other foot, take a step, gesture toward her,
“Linda . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t know . . .”
and before I say more she turns away from me, careful to reject what I have to say before I say it, and for this I feel no annoyance, neither at her failure nor mine, but only a great stupid sort of pity for both of us . . .
Linda (turns downstairs, her voice snapping): “Mike Jr.! Get down there! Get into your bed!”
. . . angry now, because she doesn’t want to, will not, cannot face what is with me . . . The boy vanishes with the crack of her syllables, and
Linda (turning at the bottom of the stairs, her words pointed, not directly, but vaguely, toward me): “After all, the kids have to get up for school tomorrow, and you have to work . . .”
Without speaking, I start down the stairs, but again, quickly, she stops me:
“Never mind . . .” (her back turned toward me, her feet now on the floor below
and I: “Linda . . .”
then she, turning partly toward me again): “I’m home now . . .” (and closes the door at the bottom of the stairs).
Pausing, pivoting on the club, my hand on the rail, I stand in the near dark—the only light being that which spills, many times reflected and diminished, through the open doorway above.
For some moments, I am still.
Turning, then, completing the half-circle pivot, I glance at the stair treads above, and take a step upward, the right foot leading, the left dragging heavily behind . . .
(Melville: “But live & push—tho’ we put one leg forward ten miles—it’s no reason the other must lag behind—no, that must again distance the other—& so we go till we get the cramp . . .”
Reaching the upper floor again, the old planks, I pause and look around, to recreate the dimensions of the attic. Walking to the desk, I am conscious of the act, the motions and sounds I make, as on a voyage: the few steps across the boards, from the head of the stairs to the desk. I pick up the cigar, draw on it, and stand for some moments. I recall that
Columbus at first thought he had discovered India . . .
(“They found a large nut of the kind belonging to India, great rats, and enormous crabs. He saw many birds, and there was a strong smell of musk . . .”
. . . thereby lopping off, roughly, one-half the globe: a hemisphere gone . . .
Melville, describing Hawthorne: “Still there is something lacking—a good deal lacking—to the plump sphericity of the man.”
FOUR
I have been holding my head still for some moments, and I experience something like a headache, but not quite the same . . . a wall seems to run through the middle of my head, from front to back, and all of me, the total “I,” is cramped into one side, the right . . .
Melville, describing Ahab: “Threading its way out from among his gray hairs, and continuing right down his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.”
And elsewhere: “Seems to me some sort of equator cuts yon old man . . .”
And PIERRE: “. . . his body contorted, and one side drooping, as though that moment halfway down-stricken with a paralysis, and yet unconscious of the stroke.”
The vision in my left eye dims, all but disappears. I remain still, effectively blind in the left eye. Then, as suddenly as it vanished, the vision returns, starting from a central point and opening over the normal field. There remains something strange about it, however, not as before. I reach for the cigar, which I had placed on the edge of the desk, and am surprised when my hand goes beyond it. Reaching again, my hand this time falls short. There is emptiness in my stomach, and I realize what has happened: I have lost binocular vision—am unable to judge distances. It is only with the utmost care and concentration, now, that I am able to pick up the cigar.
Leaning back in the chair, smoking, I experiment with vision, let it do what it will . . . but there is no change . . . still the strange, two-dimensional sensation. I recall a time when Carl, late in life, experienced something similar, only apparently much worse. For a time he lost three-dimensional vision altogether, the world appearing to him as a flat plane.
MOBY-DICK: “Now, from this peculiar sideways position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears . . . you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?”
Not only this, but Carl’s eyes—set wide apart in his head—seemed to focus and move independent of one another, to receive separate images, imperfectly blended.
“Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him.”
He was expert in dissembling, in making his way among others without arousing suspicion. Only a few of us who knew him well, who knew what he was experiencing, could see him falter and waver, manipulate others into doing things for him that he was afraid he might fumble . . .
“It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.”
The condition of my own vision remains unchanged. Smoking quietly, musing over it, I think that in flattening the world,
as Columbus, at first, saw India for America,
(and as others, much later, while living off the fat, still see only India
one loses the look of the land . . .
And it occurs that when the world comes in upon a man, it whirls in at the eyes: two vortices, gouging the outlook . . .
Melville in Cairo: “. . . multitudes of blind men—worst city in the world for them. Flies on the eyes at noon. Nature feeding on man.”
And Columbus, fourth voyage, engaged with the natives at Belén:
Captain Diego Tristan went upstream to get fresh water, just before the caravels were to depart—his boat was attacked by Indians, and he was killed by a spear that went through his eye. Only one man of his company escaped. All the corpses floated downstream, covered with wounds, and with carrion crows circling over them, for Columbus and his men—their ships trapped by low water inside the bar—to see.
Melville and Columbus, men of vision:
“. .
. my eyes, which are tender as young sparrows.”
“. . . on my former voyage, when I discovered terra firma, I passed thirty-three days without natural rest, and was all that time deprived of sight . . .”
“. . . like an owl I steal about by twilight, owing to the twilight of my eyes.”
“There the eyes of the Admiral became very bad from not sleeping . . . he says that he found himself more fatigued here than when he discovered the island of Cuba . . . because his eyes were bloodshot . . .”
“. . . my recovery from an acute attack of neuralgia in the eyes . . .”
“. . . nor did they burst and bleed as they have done now.”
“. . . and I felt a queer feeling in my left eye, which, as sometimes is the case with people, was the weaker one; probably from being on the same side with the heart.”
And there was the country fellow, a relative of Mother’s (she tried to deny him because he was thought to be not right in his head—lived by himself in a little shack, did odd jobs, studied strange books at night although it was thought he couldn’t read, had difficulty forming thoughts in his head and passing them as words under his hare lip—but there was the name, Stonecipher, and the relationship, some sort of cousin): I remember him trying to explain to me (he used to get up early in the morning and observe the wild animals, gather herbs in the woods to sell to the neighbor women for medicines) what it is about a baby’s eyesight, how it takes days or weeks after birth for the infant’s eyes to focus, and gain depth perception.
“He can’t . . .”
(his great crude hand raised, the fingers spread, coming toward me, as though he were the infant, I the object to be seen, and his hand the agent of vision
“. . . he can’t MAKE THE OBJECT!”
(the fingers suddenly clutched, grasping air before my nose . . . revelation and delight in his face
and early one Sunday morning, when Carl and I were small boys, we went into Father’s room, tried to get him to play with us. He was, or pretended to be asleep . . . we called, pulled, shoved, and jounced, with no effect. We were sitting on him, out of breath, when Carl cautiously approached his face, lifted one eyelid between thumb and forefinger, and peered in. Then he turned to me, the eyelid held open as evidence:
“He’s still in there.”
FIVE
Genoblast,
the bisexual nucleus of the impregnated ovum.
and, the anatomy book, diagram of cell division:
“t. End of telophase. The daughter cells are connected by the ectoplasmic stalk. The endoplasm has been completely divided by the constriction of the equatorial band. It has mixed with the interchromosomal (exnuclear) material. The compact daughter nuclei have begun to show clear areas and to enlarge. u. The daughter cells have moved in opposite directions and stretched the connecting stalk. The nuclei have larger clear areas and less visible chromosome material. v. The connecting stalk has been pulled into a thin strand by the migration of the daughter cells in opposite directions.”
and
“w. . . . The connecting stalk is broken.”
Blastomere,
one of the segments into which the fertilized egg divides. And
Morula,
the mulberry mass, coral- or sponge-like, a mass of blastomeres . . . this hollows into a shell, surrounding a central cavity, and is called a
Blastosphere,
which “becomes adherent by its embryonic pole to the epithelial lining of the uterus. There it flattens out somewhat and erodes and digests the underlying surface of the uterus.”
(Isabel, in PIERRE: “I pray for peace—for motionlessness—for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it . . .”
and for the next two weeks the invader attacks the host, destroying epithelial tissue to make room for itself, and set up embryotrophic nutrition.
MOBY-DICK, The Shark Massacre: “But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till these entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound.”
And on the fourth voyage of Columbus, the men, having eaten all their supply of meat, killed some sharks. In the stomach of one, they found the head of another, a head that they had thrown back earlier into the sea, as being unfit to eat.
“The trophoblast proliferates rapidly, forms a network of branching processes which cover the entire ovum, invade the maternal tissues and open into the maternal blood vessels . . .”
(there was the Royal Order, granting amnesty to all convicts who would colonize the Indes . . .
(the new islands overrun with the undifferentiated
(like the red, rushing growth that fills the space of a wound:
(proud flesh
I shift position in the chair, my eyes having trouble with the typeface before me . . . trying by changing the fundamental balance of my body, of my spine, to alter what I see . . .
“Parallel neural folds rise higher and higher, flanking the neural groove, and finally meet and fuse to form a closed tube which is the primordial brain . . .”
and there are the drawings in the medical book:
embryos, 4 to 10 weeks: the wide-set, bead-like eyes, the pig-snouts, the enormous double foreheads, grotesque, like the masks and carvings Carl acquired in Alaska . . .
“The conclusion is that each organ not only originates from a definite embryonic area or primordium and from no other but also that it arises at a very definite moment which must be utilized then if ever.”
and as I read this, the print, the black letters on white, come into sure focus. I reach to the ashtray—judging the distance with ease and pleasure—and put out the stump of my cigar.
I remain still, enjoying again a sense of refreshment, of well-being . . .
there is this about Columbus and Melville: both were blunt men, setting the written word on the page and letting it stand, not going back to correct their errors, not caring to be neat . . .
(Melville: “It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open . . .”
The orthography, the spelling of both was hurried, splashed with errors,
and both men annotated, scattered postils, in whatever books they read: putting islands, fragments of themselves, at the extremes of the page . . .
There was the handwriting:
Columbus, the early Columbus, man of the ocean-sea and the Indes, confident, level, forward-flowing, the touch light, the form disciplined, not flamboyant (the tops of the consonants rising and curving like Mediterranean lateen sails), exuberant,
and later, as he grew old, writing to the Sovereigns to complain and beg, the words became cramped, the letters thick, the pen bore heavily on the page, the flowing lines conflicted, became eccentric . . .
And Melville: harder, more incised (the Yankee) and crabbed, but, like Christopher, leaning forward against restraints, and on a level line: level with the horizon . . .
Whereas Columbus, complaining and failing, jabbed the page, Melville (likewise failing) withdrew from it, the pen, the thought, the man scarcely forming the word . . .
And Columbus, a very old man, all hope and islands lost to him save only as gout, as crystals at the extremities of his body, permitted his two styles to flow together and become one . . .
(always, however, the line remaining level . . . the only variation being, upon occasion, a moderate roll, the pen riding the page like a caravel coasting a gentle ground swell, among the Indes . . .
JOURNAL DOWN THE STRAITS
ONE
COLUMBUS: “In the dead of night, while I was on deck, I heard an awful roaring that came from the south, toward the ship; I stopped to observe what it might be, and I saw the sea rolling from west to e
ast like a mountain, as high as the ship, and approaching little by little; on the top of this rolling sea came a mighty wave roaring with a frightful noise, and with all this terrific uproar were other conflicting currents, producing, as I have already said, a sound as of breakers upon the rocks. To this day I have a vivid recollection of the dread I then felt, lest the ship might founder under the force of that tremendous sea . . .”
and Las Casas: “. . . since the force of the water is very great at all times and particularly so in this season . . . which is the season of high water, . . . and since it wants naturally to get to the sea, and the sea with its great mass under the same natural impulse wants to break upon the land, and since this gulf is enclosed by the mainland on one side and on the other side by the island . . . and since it is very narrow for such a violent force of contrary waters, it must needs be that when they meet a terrific struggle takes place and a conflict most perilous for those that find themselves in that place.”
The house, the attic, are once more become a ship, but in a different sense, that of a ship struck at different points by contending waters, so that it shivers, the timbers work against one another, and the whole seems scarcely to move. I am still, and it is some moments before I realize that this sensation comes to me, not as from the timbers of the house, but as from those—the rafters, joists, sills, and sleepers—of my own frame . . . my bones being of oak, carved and pegged (the club left as a trademark, unwhittled)—an oaken frame somehow assaulted. I am cramped, unable to move . . .
MOBY-DICK: “For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled hearthstone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.”