Genoa (8 page)

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 M
ARDI
, with Jarl the Viking, stole a whaleboat and escaped the A
RCTURIAN
— “. . . 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
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“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
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“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
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“. . . 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 odor 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 . . .

my breath comes rapidly, I am restless . . . flashing the pages before me, I stop at

the picture of the uterus and tubes—like the head of a longhorn steer, the ends of the horns exfoliating with fimbriae,

and the ovum, bursting from the follicle, to become momentarily free in the abdomen, out of all direct contact . . . communicating its condition, perhaps, by means of hormones, but nonetheless adrift, as in an open ocean . . .

          
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air . . .”

          
And Columbus, reported by Fernando: “On the same Saturday, in the night, was seen St. Elmo, with seven lighted tapers, at the topmast. There was much rain and thunder. I mean to say that those lights were seen, which mariners affirm to be the body of St. Elmo, in beholding which they chaunted many litanies and orisons . . .”

The corpusants.

I am still for some moments, as though waiting for lightning—but there is none; only the steady hum of wind and rain, the muffled voices of children, vague sounds of the city in the distance—and the creaking of the television aerial, in the wind, straining the chimney brackets.

In Lisbon,—rank with bodega, wine in the wood, salt fish, tar, tallow, musk, and cinnamon—the sailors talk

of monsters in the western ocean, of gorgons and demons, succubi and succubae, maleficent spirits and unclean devils, unspeakable things that command the ocean currents—of cuttlefish and sea serpents, of lobsters the tips of whose claws are fathoms asunder, of sirens and bishop-fish, the Margyzr and Marmennil of the north, goblins who visit the ship at night, singe hair, tie knots in ropes, tear sails to shreds—of witches who raise tempests and gigantic waterspouts that suck ships into the sky—of dragon, crocodile, griffin, hippogrif, Cerberus, and Ammit

or Melville:

                                
“Megalosaurus, iguanodon,

                                
Palaeotherium glypthaecon,

                                      
A Barnum-show raree;

                                      
The vomit of slimy and sludgey sea:

                                
Purposeless creatures, odd inchoate things

                                
Which splashed thro’ morasses on fleshly wings;

                                
The cubs of Chaos, with eyes askance,

                                
Preposterous griffins that squint at Chance . . .”

And the medical book:

          
“At one time the human sperm cells were regarded as parasites, and under this misapprehension the name spermatozoa, or ‘semen animals,’ was given to them.”

Melville again:

          
“You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in; especially when it seems to hare an aspect of newness, as America did in 1492, though it was then just as old, and perhaps older than Asia, only those sagacious philosophers, the common sailors, had never seen it before, swearing it was all water and moonshine there.”