Authors: Paul Metcalf
and there was the woman in the mental hospital, brought onto the platform in the lecture hall to demonstrate for the medical students, of which I was one:—she suffered with a compulsion to strip her ragged clothes, and over and over to lash herself . . .
The anger quiets a little, becoming sardonic, and then wrying into a smile. Again, there is Ahab:
“. . . for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.”
And Melville himself, reading of a writer whose work was presumed to be influenced by his illness, makes a marginal comment:
“So is every one influenced—the robust, the weak, all constitutions—by the very fibre of the flesh, & chalk of the bone. We are what we were made.”
Rising, I turn from the desk, and begin to walk, without aim, but confined by the structure of the attic itself. I think again of the infant Melville, held motionless through a brain-caking hiatus, before his delivery; and then of myself, and of the medical data regarding Talipes:
The notion that heredity may not be a factor; that, more likely, clubfoot results from the maintenance of a strained position in the uterus, or entanglement with the cord, or interlocking of the feet . . .
And further:
“Equinus—
The heel cord and the posterior structures of the leg are contracted, holding the foot in plantarflection. The arch of the foot is abnormally elevated into cavus and weight is borne on the ball of the foot. In infancy, correction may be accomplished by successive plasters gradually
forcing the foot into dorsiflexion.
It is extremely important that the cavus, or high arch, be corrected before the cord is lengthened. It may be necessary to sever the contracted structures on the sole of the foot. These consist principally of the plantar fascia and short toe flexors. These structures may be divided subcutaneously. After the cavus deformity has been completely corrected, the
heel cord
may be
lengthened
by tenotomy or successive plaster
.”
“Valgus—
In early infancy, the foot should be manipulated daily by the mother, twisting it into a position of adduction and inversion. A light aluminum
splint
should be
worn day and night
to maintain correction. . . . After care consists in the wearing of a
Thomas heel
and special exercises to develop the anticus, posticus and toe flexors.
”
I have observed these operations and manipulations, performed on others; but in my own case, things being as they were, none of this was done.
The westward end of the attic, farthest removed from the chimney, is cold, and I hear the rain against the side of the house. I turn, and amble back to the desk.
“I was struck with the singular position he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.”
But my foot finds no auger holes, and if bare, would roll like a globe on the old planks.
Reaching the desk, I sit down, body straight out as before, head tilted back . . .
“But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jawbone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my
fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, in spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass.”
My eyes suddenly grow dim. I am, in effect, under water, my vision snuffing out like candle flames. I am rigid, but alive, aware.
There is a sense of motion, barely perceptible, yet abrupt; motion neither within nor around me, but something of both . . .
like the cadaverous man in the mental hospital, haggard with sleeplessness, who fixed a rigid grip on his bedposts every night, “to keep from slipping away” . . .
Or Melville in O
MOO
, feet in the stocks, waking with the notion of being dragged . . .
Or perhaps like an old sea captain, comfortably resting in his home ashore, startled by the thought of the house pitching . . .
“It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and
weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another . . .”
I am covered from head to foot, unable to move, a small boy, standing upright; I taste dirt on my lips. There is a moment of amnesia, and, separate from this, the knowledge that the bottoms of my feet hurt, and the lower spine and back of the head have been jolted. Then, the recognition, the discovery: I have fallen, with arms pinned to my body, into the empty post-hole, around the edges of which I had a moment before been playing.
With this recognition comes the experience: I had wandered from Carl, discovered the freshly dug holes along the edge of the field, had inspected them one after another, skipping over them, leaning into them, dropping pebbles in, and finally, reaching the last and loneliest, farthest from the house, had slipped on the clubfoot, and, as in burial of a sailor died at sea, had slid beneath the surface and out of sight.
The modified sensations linger in my body, still rigid in the chair, as more of the emotion comes back: the desolation and helplessness, the abandonment; the stopping of time, and, in its place, a circular expansion of sensation, a vortex in reverse, limitless in proportion to my physical confinement. Almost dizzy, I am not at first aware of the shadow that moves over my head, or even of my father’s hands slipping under my arms to lift me out. It is only the merest chance that he decided to survey his day’s digging, and heard my cries.
Worse than the accident itself were the cold pity I received, the assumption, without asking, that the “bad foot” was to blame, and my own knowledge that this and only this saved me from punishment. . . . There was, too, the nature of the accident, the ignominy of it; especially as it came soon after Carl’s more dramatic tumble out of the haymow, twelve feet to the concrete floor of the barn . . .
(We had been playing in the hay, and when I ducked suddenly, he lunged past me and over the edge. I looked up and watched him fall: he landed flat on his back, his rump, shoulder blades and back of his head taking the blow; he appeared to bounce, the act of rising being continuous with that of falling, so that he was for a moment off the floor again, landing the second time on his feet, and emitting two single words,
“
JESUS CHRIST
!”
that my father claimed to have heard at the far end of the cornfield, half a mile away.
(He staggered for a moment, and shook himself—the motion originating in his buttocks, and rising loosely through his torso, until finally his great head rocked and shivered; then he glanced at me, and, for an instant, there was a queer smile, at once large-hearted and derisive, and a look in his eye that understood and conveyed more than he could speak. Then he raced for the ladder, and a moment later we were playing again in the hay, the accident ignored.
My body relaxes a little, releases itself, unwilling to participate further in the work of the mind. Other images, however, come flashing in . . .
I see Carl, age twelve, the time he found a bottle of gin, and got himself fabulously drunk. No longer able to stand, he suddenly discovered that he could roll the pupils of his eyes in little circles, and could control the motion: rolling them first one way then the other, clockwise and counterclockwise; then rolling one eye at a time, while the other was still; rolling both at once, each in a different direction; then reversing the directions. This gave him an idiotic satisfaction, and he
continued until he passed out, going to sleep without ever lowering his eyelids, so that when he was snoring, I could still see the naked eyes, free of design and volition, meandering . . .
Now I see him swimming, going under the surface to take in a mouthful of water, then coming up, floating on his back, his body all belly and head in profile, while he spouts a great long stream of water, so that it seems he must have the whole lake in his head.
“But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton . . .”
Melville, speaking of the sperm whale; and
“It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale!”
and
“If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them . . .”
Now it is Carl coming at me, in mock fierceness, when we are roughhousing. He imitates a professional wrestler, ape-like, all arms and shoulders, with the illusion not only of having no neck, but of his head actually being sunk in his body—a round, weather-smooth rock wedged in a cleft between boulders.
“If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung
necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone . . .
“Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As it passes through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course, this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance—the spinal cord—as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain’s cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map out the whale’s spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the wonderful smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord.”
Melville, and the leviathanic unconscious . . .
Carl the wrestler fades, and his huge head approaches, blocking the sun. There is a moment of terror before the image finds its frame . . . Carl is leaving for the summer, to work on an uncle’s farm, and we are standing on the front steps, late afternoon. Mother is standing over us, insisting that, as brothers, we should kiss, full on the lips, before parting. She places a firm hand on the back of each neck. Carl acquiesces somberly, and his head approaches, a great purple
shadow without features, a giant eggplant. I shrink from the contact, narrowing my mouth to an incision—and his kiss descends on me, a wet plum.