Authors: Paul Metcalf
. . . drawn into the body, I am drawn down with it: compacted and chaotic, beyond control, I begin strangely to move . . . I seem drowning, drawn to unknown bottoms . . . there is a monstrous, choking fear . . .
The medical book: “The amnion in the human develops probably by degeneration of the central portion of a lenticular enlargement of the cell mass . . .”
“. . . but this has not yet been determined, even though of great significance in the production of monsters.”
Melville,
B
ENITO
C
ERENO
:
“. . . when at sunrise, the deponent coming on deck, the negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been substituted for the ship’s proper figure-head . . .”
. . . the proper and original figurehead having been that of the discoverer, Christopher Columbus.
Thus Melville, after M
OBY
-D
ICK
, after the sinking of the Pequod—sucked into the whirlpool, at the very bottom—yields the overwater discoverer . . . and
“Seguid vuestro jefe”
. . . the leader, in this case, a skeleton . . .
My left leg—lying straight from the edge of the chair to the floor beneath the desk—seems to enlarge, the flesh prickly and fat . . . then it goes numb: all sensation vanishes . . .
and it occurs to me that, whereas in M
OBY
-D
ICK
Melville fought his way upstream, like the Pacific salmon, to the original sources—in P
IERRE
, there was no need to return, no stream to ascend . . . the fight gone out of him, he remained still, and the past overwhelmed him . . . sinking, drowning, he pulled the world, his family, in over himself . . .
. . . the amniotic waters, closing over the eye of the vortex, over Melville’s wreck . . .
Although in M
OBY
-D
ICK
Melville reached deep into “the invisible spheres . . . formed in fright,” he yet maintained freeboard, working from above the surface—if safe by only the few perilous inches of a whaleboat . . . but in P
IERRE
, the author, the story, the people of whom he wrote, all are one—gelatinous, subaquatic—the verbs become blobs of sound . . .
The absence of sensation in my left leg has become something positive, and yet I can’t put words to it . . . the leg having passed into a condition remote from the rest of my body, untranslatable . . . I am aware only of its motionlessness, of its arrest not only in space but in time . . . being stopped itself, the leg stops the rest of me: my body stiffens, tenses, for or against what, I cannot tell
. . . a thought floats in, however, that I am struggling, by physical force, to prevent Melville from writing P
IERRE
. . .
“For while still dreading your doom, you foreknow it. Yet how foreknow and dread in one breath . . . ?”
Thus,
P
IERRE
.
And Melville—as Ahab, barely before the sinking of the Pequod—foreknew his doom: “. . . from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life . . . !”
I remember Carl, in St. Louis, after the war, after he had come back from nineteen months in a Japanese Prisoner-Of-War Camp: we were afraid of what had happened to his mind, and, for want of a better answer, I was trying to get him to a psychiatrist, to help him go over his experiences, untangle something of what he was, what had happened to him . . . I recall the look on his face when I made the suggestion: the features withdrawing, not from me, but from one another, shifting their arrangement, becoming without form; and the smile, part of his mouth spreading, as he said, “I ain’t drowning, Mike boy . . .”
My leg is now dead, passed into a condition from which there is no recall. I become aware of the hip joint, the part that is still me. I cherish the separation, the feeling of identity going no further than the hip . . .
Ahab: “. . . it was Moby-Dick that dismasted me . . .
Moby-Dick . . . a great white monster, with “a hump like a snow-hill . . .”
not Leucothea, not a white and winged goddess, protectress, who gave Ulysses an enchanted veil . . .
but moving out from this, from the closed and friendly Mediterranean, from the near ocean shores,
moving out, as Columbus, across the Atlantic, and, through Melville, into the Pacific:
the white gull become a white whale, cast in monstrous, malignant revenge . . .
Melville, in the Pacific—the western extreme of American force—untethered, fatherless, the paternity blasted—turning—as Ahab—with vengeance and malice to match the monster’s: turning and thrusting back to his own beginnings: to
Moby-Dick, the white monster: to Maria Gansevoort Melville . . .
(Lizzie’s account of Herman: “A severe attack of what he called crick in the back laid him up at his Mothers in Gansevoort in March 1858
—
and he never regained his former vigor & strength.”
The snow-hill hump, rumbling in the interior caverns of the sea book, bursts forth as the ultimate image in the book of the drowned—all of P
IERRE
perhaps being written as an excuse to expose it:
“‘. . . in thy breasts, life for infants lodgeth not, but death-milk for thee and me!—The drug!’ and tearing her bosom loose, he seized the secret vial nestling there.”
Carl, some years ago, on one of his rare and random splurges of reading—invading the library, chewing his way through stacks of books—came up with a volume of Indian legends: there was one about a woman with a toothed vagina, who had killed many men by having intercourse with them—but the hero inserted sticks too hard for her to masticate, and thus knocked out the teeth . . . and there was another about the first woman in the world, whose vagina contained a carnivorous fish . . .
(Columbus, in the Boca de la Sierpe—mouth of the serpent—observed that the tides were much greater than anywhere else in the Indies, the current roaring like surf . . .
Dead-legged, helpless and unwilling, I feel my body dragged down . . .
Melville, blubbering from beneath the ocean, announces
P
IERRE
to a Hawthorne—not Nathaniel, but Sophia: “My Dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk.”
From a contemporary review of
P
IERRE
:
“The sooner this author is put in a ward the better.”
The interior of my head is an ocean, vast and unvarying, the watery horizon curving as with the curve of the globe. There is no island, no source of direction, or action. Floating, centerless, in this expanse, I am ready to drown . . .
But there is a sudden change: my left leg—or that which had been my left leg—comes back to me: I feel blood and warmth entering again, sweeping in waves from the hip, and with this, the rest of me, all of my body becomes charged with sensation . . .
There is also a difference: sinking in one ocean, I have risen to the surface of another—in a different hemisphere, or on the other side of the equator. The heart beats, the blood flows, the lungs inhale and discharge air—but all are radically altered. Reaching for the butt of the cigar resting in the ashtray, I am surprised to discover the gesture originating, not in my right hand, but in my left. My arm and shoulder, my whole left side, ache and feel uncomfortable—but this is not so strange as when I try to countermand the order, originate the gesture as I would normally, from the right. Plunging once more into the ocean, I attempt to force myself back, to force the gesture, and all gestures, to emerge and spring from the right: my body becomes rigid, all the machinery, all the moving parts, jammed . . .
P
IERRE
:
“. . . a sudden, unwonted, and all-pervading sensation seized him. He knew not where he was; he did not have any ordinary life-feeling at all. He could not see; though instinctively putting his hand to his eyes, he seemed to feel that the lids were open. Then he was sensible of a combined blindness, and vertigo, and staggering; before his eyes a million green meteors danced; he felt his foot tottering on the curb, he put out his hands, and knew no more for the time. When he came to himself he found that he was lying crosswise in the gutter, dabbled with mud and slime. He raised himself to try if he could stand; but the fit was entirely gone.”
and Murray, commenting on this: “Although there is no record of Melville’s having suffered an attack of syncope, there is verisimilitude in his description of Pierre’s fainting. Furthermore, the time relation of Pierre’s attack . . . would indicate that Melville himself had experienced syncope.”
(From the medical book: “. . . characterized by an abrupt onset, with uneasiness, weakness, restlessness, vague abdominal discomfort associated with moderate nausea, lightheadedness, blurring of vision, inability to walk, cold perspiration, collapse, unconsciousness, and sometimes a flaccid paralysis and mild convulsions . . .”
Melville, standing on a Pacific island—T
YPEE
—floating up to effervescent M
ARDI
—charging, then, full force, back to the origin and beginning of things—the center of the whale-herd, east of the Straits of Sunda—and turning, to plunge . . .
(from a letter, written before M
OBY
-D
ICK
: “I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more . . .”
. . . plunge to the depths and bottom of the ocean, to drown, as P
IERRE
. . .
rising, then, struggling to disgorge the ocean from his lungs (and his head), to find another island, another origin of action,
through syncope: fainting—a small and imitation death—perhaps a drowning . . . in effect, saying to bimself—and to any who would listen:
“I have to change centers, and I have to drown to do it.”
Failed as an author—and as a Pittsfield farmer—failing now in health, to the extent that the family had him examined by Dr. Holmes in regard to his sanity—Melville set about in his own way to recenter: he took to writing verse . . .
“For poetry is not a thing of ink and rhyme, but of thought and act. . .” (Melville)
The joints, the motion-sources of my body, remain rigid, the bones and muscles forcing against one another. My tongue and eyelids are heavy, and
I recall a time when Carl came home for a visit—it was just before the war, and I was away in medical school: he was experiencing mysterious convulsions, and the doctors for some time withheld a diagnosis, uncertain of what term to use—although I knew they suspected a recurrence of hydrocephalus. Mother and I were subjected to the electroencephalograph, in search of genetic dysrhythmia—but the findings were negative. Carl experienced all the typical preconvulsive phenomena—unexplained faints, attacks of giddiness, sleepiness, myoclonic jerks—and finally the diagnosis was made: acquired epilepsy . . .
(the word meaning to “seize upon”: as a drowning man would seize upon an island . . .
Perhaps because I was studying medicine—and was, as well, his brother—Carl sent me reports on his seizures . . . fragmentary letters, notes jotted on old pieces of wrapping paper, or the backs of prescriptions:
“A touch of fear . . . great thickness and heaviness, moving to my tongue . . . last stage before the attack.
“This time the aura was black, and the closing-in type . . .
“It is always flashover, definite—like the stepping out of a warm room into the cold . . .
“Have discovered I can induce the aura: driving the car, I put myself as someone in one of the other cars, then someone in another car, then another, and so forth—an overwhelmed-by-numbers bizzniss turns up, and right under (or after) that: the aura . . .
“. . . a breeze . . . gateway to a fabulous world, everything maneuverable . . . like an explosion, reaching, spreading into widening space, all white . . .
“As for question of the head and interpenetration . . . the effect is gradual . . . as for shape, configuration, the same, but as for size, I don’t know . . .
“While I write this, I feel the approach of the aura. Realize that I have walked past where it is stored . . . go back and contact it . . . now it has me, full force . . . as long as I keep my eyes closed, it’s there . . . Feeling: it’s all in my head, and I’m in and occupy very little of it . . . all the world in there (or here) since my head is the limit of the world . . . I am a little bigger than the rest of the universe . . . the feeling now persists even with eyes open: I make desperate efforts to get away from it . . .