THREE
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 Omoo, 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 finger 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, shoulderblades 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 corn field, 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 counter-clockwise; 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.
“It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves:
and not without reason.
“Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discolored, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb’s boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?
“When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale’s head embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jeweller’s scales.”
There is this about Carl: all the evidence indicates that he was conceived out of wedlock. There was the hasty wedding, and his birth in less than the full time thereafter. Mother’s only comment was that he was a fast baby, but perhaps that’s the way she wished to think of him. The only mystery to me is that she ever consented to conceive and bear another–myself–after the time she must have had in delivering Carl.
There was Tashtego, dipping sperm oil by the bucketful from the whale’s head:
“…but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up–my God! poor Tashtego–like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling,
went clean out of sight!
…
“‘Stand clear of the tackle!’ cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.
“Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging–now over the sailors’ heads and now over the water–Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The next a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every one counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.
“‘Ha! ha!’ cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.
“‘Both! both!–it is both!’–cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.
“Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;–he had thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way–head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected.”
As a boy, Carl went through a period of monumental hay fever marked by no ordinary sneezes, but by explosions, one following another in rapid succession so that they seemed continuous, his eyes, nose and mouth became fountains. I see him now as I came upon him one day, where he had gone to isolate himself during an attack, in an unused room of the house. Glancing at me, through bloodshot, aqueous eyes, he turned, in sequence, to the four points of the compass, saluting each with a shattering blast that doubled him over, scattered spray to the walls, and brought his forehead nearly to his feet. Subsiding a moment, shoulders and head hanging to one side, he turned to me and spoke, the words running together in his wet mouth:
“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 he 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, hand leader,
he had sleep-walked out a
second-story window to he 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 under way, 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
