“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. .”