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, but Carl’s eyes—set wide apart in his head—seemed to focus and move independent of one another, to receive separate images, imperfectly blended.
“Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him.”
He was expert in dissembling, in making his way among others without arousing suspicion. Only a few of us who knew him well, who knew what he was experiencing, could see him falter and waver, manipulate others into doing things for him that he was afraid he might fumble . . .
“It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.”
The condition of my own vision remains unchanged. Smoking quietly, musing over it, I think that in flattening the world,
as Columbus, at first, saw India for America,
(and as others, much later, while living off the fat, still see only India
one loses the look of the land . . .
And it occurs that when the world comes in upon a man, it whirls in at the eyes: two vortices, gouging the outlook . . .
Melville in Cairo: “. . . multitudes of blind men—worst city in the world for them. Flies on the eyes at noon. Nature feeding on man.”
And Columbus, fourth voyage, engaged with the natives at Belén:
Captain Diego Tristan went upstream to get fresh water, just before the caravels were to depart—his boat was attacked by Indians, and he was killed by a spear that went through his eye. Only one man of his company escaped. All the corpses floated downstream, covered with wounds, and with carrion crows circling over them, for Columbus and his men—their ships trapped by low water inside the bar—to see.
Melville and Columbus, men of vision:
“. . . my eyes, which are tender as young sparrows.”
“. . . on my former voyage, when I discovered terra firma, I passed thirty-three days without natural rest, and was all that time deprived of sight . . .”
“. . . like an owl I steal about by twilight, owing to the twilight of my eyes.”
“There the eyes of the Admiral became very bad from not sleeping . . . he says that he found himself more fatigued here than when he discovered the island of Cuba . . . because his eyes were bloodshot . . .”
“. . . my recovery from an acute attack of neuralgia in the eyes . . .”
“. . . nor did they burst and bleed as they have done now.”
“. . . and I felt a queer feeling in my left eye, which, as sometimes is the case with people, was the weaker one; probably from being on the same side with the heart.”
And there was the country fellow, a relative of Mother’s (she tried to deny him because he was thought to be not right in his head—lived by himself in a little shack, did odd jobs, studied strange books at night although it was thought he couldn’t read, had difficulty forming thoughts in his head and passing them as words under his hare lip—but there was the name, Stonecipher, and the relationship, some sort of cousin): I remember him trying to explain to me (he used to get up early in the morning and observe the wild animals, gather herbs in the woods to sell to the neighbor women for medicines) what it is about a baby’s eyesight, how it takes days or weeks after birth for the infant’s eyes to focus, and gain depth perception.
“He can’t . . .”
(his great crude hand raised, the fingers spread, coming toward me, as though he were the infant, I the object to be seen, and his hand the agent of vision
“. . . he can’t MAKE THE OBJECT!”
(the fingers suddenly clutched, grasping air before my nose . . . revelation and delight in his face
and early one Sunday morning, when Carl and I were small boys, we went into Father’s room, tried to get him to play with us. He was, or pretended to be asleep . . . we called, pulled, shoved, and jounced, with no effect. We were sitting on him, out of breath, when Carl cautiously approached his face, lifted one eyelid between thumb and forefinger, and peered in. Then he turned to me, the eyelid held open as evidence:
“He’s still in there.”