Genoa (18 page)
Authors: Paul Metcalf
and
B
ARTLEBY
:
“The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew underfoot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein by some strange magic, through the clefts grass seed, dropped by birds, had sprung.
“Strangely huddled at the base of the wall—his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones—I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused; then went close up to him; stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping. Something prompted me to touch him. I felt his hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down my spine . . .”
and there was Navidad: first toehold, first bit of land secured and colonized, in the New World: the inhabitants, to a man, wiped out . . .
Waiting now, the very quality of it sinking in me, so that waiting becomes a kind of desperation, hopelessness, I remain huddled, cramped and desolate, as though dead . . .
Homer, T
HE
O
DYSSEY
: “. . . a sea broke over him with such terrific fury that the raft reeled again, and he was carried overboard a long way off. He let go the helm, and the force of the hurricane was so great that it broke the mast half way up, and both sail and yard went over into the sea. For a long time Ulysses was under water, and it was all he could do to rise to the surface again . . .”
and Leucothea, marine goddess, white goddess, “. . . rising like a seagull from the waves, took her seat upon the raft . . .” and spoke to Ulysses:
“‘. . . strip, leave your raft to drive before the wind, and swim to the Phaeacian coast where better luck awaits you. And here, take my veil and put it around your chest; it is enchanted, and you can come to no harm so long as you wear it. As soon as you touch land, throw it back as far as you can into the sea, and then go away again.’ With these words she took off her veil and gave it to him. Then she dived down again like a sea-gull and vanished beneath the dark blue waters.”
An enchanted veil . . .
(The medical book:
(“It is inferred that the human embryo . . . forms an amnion cavity in its solid ectodermal mass.”
(“If the tough amnion fails to burst, the head is delivered enveloped in it and it is then known popularly as the ‘caul.’”
The caul—an enchanted veil—presumed to bring luck, to prevent shipwreck, and to save from drowning . . .
(there was the one advertised in the
London Times—
May 8, 1848
—
the owner asking 6 guineas, the caul “having been afloat with its last owner forty years, through all the perils of a seaman’s life, and the owner died at last in his bed, at the place of his birth.”
The pressure is growing, and my body, pushed tight against it, is now immovable; tremendous effort is exerted, at every point and plane of skin surface, to maintain the contact, and therefore any hope of identity. My skull, where the tension becomes greatest, is a fragile vault, in which I swim, helpless, as in an ocean.
I am aware of the clubfoot, of the five toes, and the flesh fusing them . . .
(the medical book:
(“
Syndactylism:
. . . a common cause is adhesions of the fetus to the amnion.”
There is an explosion, detonating somewhere in my head, and spreading with force and violence. The pressure collapses, and all sense of balance is gone, leaving me dizzy and ill. It is like shipwreck in a storm, the ship broken and scattered, the timbers—timbers of my skull—crashing against one another in gigantic waves. The structure—the partition between left and right sides in my head—is shattered, so that there is no longer an origin of direction, of motion, and I drift randomly, without form or shape . . .
(
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“. . . the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.”
and
C
OSMOLOGY
:
“For then . . . we see that . . . all the nebulae were packed into a small region . . . years ago and moved away as though an explosion had taken place there, each with its own individual velocity . . .”
“. . .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.”
At the zero point of creation, when all is infinite mass and zero size . . . from this point—to one second—the distribution of elements occurs . . .
Gaseous Nebulae, coalescing into small suns, the suns clustering into galaxies,
The galaxies swirling, with angular momentum, in vortices,
(like a hand swirled in water,
(or like dust motes in an ever-expanding balloon . . .
particles in vortices,
subparticles in vortices,
planets . . .
My body, huddled before a makeshift desk—an old door lain flat on crates—is relinquished, abandoned . . .
floating above it, above the ancient house and attic, above Indiana and the broad continent, I am no longer Michael, but have become everyone . . . no longer compact with pain, fear, anger and contentment, I am only aware . . .
aware of explosion and outflow, of letting go and spreading apart, of vaporizing into widening space . . .
(
C
OSMOLOGY
:
“In many ways we consider radiative energy to be ‘lost’ energy, picturing somehow space as an infinite receptacle, an almost perfect sink.”
No longer Michael, I am without borders . . . I glance down and see the city, the suburban row houses, hanging by television aerials from the atmosphere . . .
Turning from these, I drift, further and further from the land . . .
(Melville, in
P
IERRE
:
“Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself!”
Once again, I lose depth perception; the world beneath me, and the stars, are flat, without dimension. Further, I am unable to see through the center of the eye, the images reaching me only peripherally . . . I see only through the white. I am floating in space, without center or distance . . .
(K
INEMATIC
R
ELATIVITY
:
“Here it is sufficient to recall that ‘space’ is not a physical attribute of the universe, but is a mode of description of phenomena which is at the disposal of the observer . . .”
Everything comes to me in gray, a perfect gray, perfect in its neatness: tiny dots, as though created by a pointillist, ranging from black through various grays to white. I might be peering at a movie or television screen, or, perhaps, through Mike Jr.’s space helmet . . . or the gray gauze of a churchman’s eyes:
a membrane, imperfectly transparent, filtering and veiling all reality . . .
I find my hands, clenched like a baby’s, rubbing clumsily at my cheeks, eyes, forehead . . .
(the root of the word
caul
is the same as that for
hell
and
cellar:
a matter of hiding . . .
All at once, my fists hang away from my face. The gray, peripheral images vanish, and are replaced by an unvarying white . . .
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“. . . there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.”
“This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb bloating of their aspect.”
“What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness that invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?”
“Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there . . .”
Melville’s bedroom, described by his granddaughter: “The great mahogany desk, heavily bearing up four shelves of dull gilt and leather books; the high dim book-case; . . . the small black iron bed, covered with dark cretonne; the narrow iron grate . . .”
and Lizzie’s: “That was a very different place—sunny, comfortable and familiar, with a sewing machine and a white bed like other people’s.”
Olson, describing Melville: “He made a white marriage.”
(but before that, before Lizzie, before the white, there was Fayaway, dark, on a green island . . .
I recall the many hospitals I have visited, studied, and worked in: the floors, walls, and furniture in pastels, the colors, the force of color, bleached out of them; the apparatus of laboratory, surgery, and kitchen in chrome and steel; and everything else, whether intimately or remotely pertaining to healing—the uniforms of nurse, intern, attendant, and doctor, the sheets covering the sick and the ceilings over the beds, the curtains, screens, towels, and bandages—all drained and blanched, sterile and antiseptic—all white.
and there was Melville, possessed—like Ahab—by that “dark Hindoo half of nature”—and to all who surrounded him—to Lizzie, to his sons and daughters, to the Gansevoorts and Melvilles—a poison, potent and to be feared . . .
a sepsis.
White and vague, I am drifting, without space or time . . .
(C
OSMOLOGY
:
“. . . since the age of the universe (especially if its origin was catastrophic) cannot be less than the age of any part of it, however small.”
. . . disincarnate . . .
(Melville: “While there is life hereafter, there is despair. . .”
Once again, the tiny dots of gray appear, shaping images of Indiana, like the first image of the afternoon projected on a movie screen. I see the row houses, the factories and stores of Indianapolis, all neatly arranged and harmonized, a uniform gray . . .
. . . a vision of reality, filtered and orderly . . .
as an old sailor, retired ashore, makes a ship inside a bottle . . .
or a man makes a philosophy: life viewed through a caul.
I remember, in the psychiatric courses I took, studying the life of Freud, and discovering that the Viennese, father of modern psychology—the first to introduce modern man to the pear-shaped world from which he sprang—Freud was born with a caul . . .
Fusing with the amnion, becoming the amnion, turning all to gray and white, I am no longer Michael, but everyone—a particle in an explosion—all time and space—and therefore, nothing . . .
(Columbus: “The pilots . . . do not know the way to return thither; . . . they would be obliged to go on a voyage of discovery as much as if they had never been there before. There is a mode of reckoning derived from astronomy which is sure and safe, and a sufficient guide to any one who understands it. This resembles a prophetic vision.”
I look down at Michael, fixed in the chair—as the attic is fixed upon the house and the old house rooted in the soil—and the images suddenly vanish, whirling into one another. There is a different sensation—as though I had become sensitive to the spinning of the globe. I am aware again of my body, and feel myself sucked down, drawn into it. Within my skull all is gray chaos, whirling and dizzy, with no origin of direction or motion. The desk, the attic, the world are pitching and rolling, and I am ill . . .