Genoa (17 page)
Authors: Paul Metcalf
“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.”
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
P
IERRE
:
“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.
M
OBY
-D
ICK
,
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 . . .
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 east 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 . . .
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“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.”
“But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.”
“One of those little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied . . . where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow.”
Sitting cramped, I recall the maternity hospital where, three times, I have taken Linda to produce: the old building, crowded and outdated; the various corridors leading, like the spokes of a wheel, to the hub, the labor and delivery rooms—corridors filled with grunting, sweating, and sometimes screaming women; the labor room
itself often hurriedly converted for a delivery—the building charged with haste and effort to cope with the mighty postwar tide of infants, rushing down the corridors, thrusting into the world.
Again, I am assaulted, the sensation this time largely in my head. There is a sense of separation, the skull, like a case, holding firm under attack, and the brains, separate, trapped within—struggling and pushing . . . I attempt to scream, but the action of throat muscles, as of all else, is suspended, and I am left with silence . . .
(Melville, describing the pyramids: “A feeling of awe & terror came over me. Dread of the Arabs. Offering to lead me into a sidehole. The Dust. Long arched way,—then down as in a coal shaft. Then as in mines, under the sea. (At one moment seeming in the Mammoth Cave. Subterranean gorges, & c.) The stooping & doubling . . .”
Thrusting my body back full length in the chair, I try to break the enclosure, the cramp—but there is no change: each position, each arrangement of trunk, head, and limbs, becomes ultimate, a final one, from which my frame would become a thing made, without life.
Shifting again, unable to create Space, I try to reach with awareness alone, to grasp and control Time . . . and am reminded at once of childhood, when I slipped and fell into the posthole: alone at the end of the corn field, with earth all around me, rising to beyond the top of my head—there is again the dizziness, the volatile awareness, expanding in proportion to my confinement, and the loneliness, the waiting . . .
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then ranged
around the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. ‘Rarmai’ (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced in his hammock.”