Genoa by Paul Metcalf

Author:Paul Metcalf [Metcalf, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781566894081
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2015-06-21T18:30:00+00:00

FOUR

I have been holding my head still for some moments, and I experience something like a headache, but not quite the same . . . a wall seems to run through the middle of my head, from front to back, and all of me, the total “I,” is cramped into one side, the right . . .

Melville, describing Ahab: “Threading its way out from among his gray hairs, and continuing right down his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.”

And elsewhere: “Seems to me some sort of equator cuts yon old man . . .”

And PIERRE: “. . . his body contorted, and one side drooping, as though that moment halfway down-stricken with a paralysis, and yet unconscious of the stroke.”

The vision in my left eye dims, all but disappears. I remain still, effectively blind in the left eye. Then, as suddenly as it vanished, the vision returns, starting from a central point and opening over the normal field. There remains something strange about it, however, not as before. I reach for the cigar, which I had placed on the edge of the desk, and am surprised when my hand goes beyond it. Reaching again, my hand this time falls short. There is emptiness in my stomach, and I realize what has happened: I have lost binocular vision—am unable to judge distances. It is only with the utmost care and concentration, now, that I am able to pick up the cigar.

Leaning back in the chair, smoking, I experiment with vision, let it do what it will . . . but there is no change . . . still the strange, two-dimensional sensation. I recall a time when Carl, late in life, experienced something similar, only apparently much worse. For a time he lost three-dimensional vision altogether, the world appearing to him as a flat plane.

MOBY-DICK: “Now, from this peculiar sideways position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears . . . you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?”

Not only this,

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