The Moon In Its Flight (11 page)

Sheew Gweatness

Although his buddies adored him, and candles nightly burned in each window and “makepiece” of every rude shack in Corsica against his victorious return, Berrigan’s adventures, or many of the more famous among them, may well have been optical illusions. One may consider the celebrated opossum story, for instance, as an example. Optical illusions occur when light strikes the subcutaneous fibroid tissues of the eye—actually, the cornea—in such a way as to make certain things look different from the way they look in actual life. This has to do with inverted images, a concept but barely understood in our subject’s day, or, perhaps, “heyday.”

In addition to the opossum story, a good example of the optical illusion is the homely one of the cantaloupe drawings in divers supermarket ads. Such drawings tend to prey on our minds and disturb certain ethical values, especially since the supermarkets that so advertise these melons sell a product that is inestimably larger than represented in the crude sketches. This phenomenon is defiantly an optical illusion, then, manifested both in the advertisement and as encouraged in the produce section of the oft-bustling market, probably. Of course, we cannot determine whether the market has, has had, or will ever have extremely small cantaloupes, such as those shown in the ads, or, on the other hand, if the ad draftsman will ever be moved to draw cantaloupes to that which is sneeringly called “normal” size. Or “standard.” Size. This is the hallmark of all optical illusions.

An adventure of Berrigan’s, undertaken some short time after the hilarious Italian campaign (the legendary “Teleuton fortnight”), had to do with citrus fruit, lemons, to be precise, and seems wholly, perhaps uncannily representative of the optical illusions that so tortured him and his friends and camerados. The adventure may be worth recounting. Brightly burns the hearth!

It has been reported, and there are painstakingly crafted mezzotints accompanying such reports, that Berrigan, or “Tod,” as he was sometimes called by his intimate friends, perhaps while in Egypt, quite comfortably situated himself amid several lemons of an enormous size, lemons so large that the famed acclimatizer found that he could quite easily hide behind or amid them. What a carnival it promptly became. Some of the lemons were whole, and some sliced in half, or “twain,” as “Tod” said, and as he turned from one to the other, first to one, then to the other, turn and turn about, so to speak, crouched in such a way that only his tricorn hat was visible, he trembled with pleasure as he realized that Wellington might never find him! At that moment, Berrigan loved the very paving “blocks” of the local public park, such a fellow had he become.

And yet, this idyll amid the lemons did not quite happen as remembered and reported, first remembered, then reported, like conversation at a table. Luckily we have mezzotints, which seem to prove that the citrus “imagery” depicted is an optical illusion. Nelson’s wanton destruction of French boats of almost every class could well have fallen into the same category as far as “Tod” was concerned.

There is also the bizarre possibility that the lemons of the adventure were of “standard” size, or that size at which they are usually picked and placed in cool, dark “lemon sheds,” or “chillers,” there to ripen slowly into the characteristic fruit of thin-skinned, yellow, and invigorating sour juiciness. If, however, this were the case, it would indicate that the beloved stroller had somehow shrunk to the size of a small creature, e.g., a mouse! In such instance, it seems safe to say that any sighting of “Tod” in such a state, and by unauthorized personnel, would most likely qualify as another optical illusion. The latter, in the innovator’s case, seem to be everywhere. Thus does history, by the legerdemain of apparent candor, hide its secrets.

To get his feet back on the ground, as it were, “Tod” quickly decided to engage the Mamelukes, to whom he read the riot act at the Battle of the Pyramids. Later that night, alone in his tent, and by the small light of a battle lantern, he wrote a detailed critique of the day’s engagement, replete with the witty
mots
and deadpan “cracks” for which he was, even then, becoming notorious, in, of course, a good way. In the act of writing, the restless fabricator began to nod, and, in a few moments, was asleep. Was he bored with entelechy? Was, finally, the morphology of the workshop reduced to the ultimate ennui? These things usually gave rise to verbal expressions of astounding felicity. Failure had no venue in his relaxed vocabulary! Perhaps it was the odd scent of prairie smoke that had caused his snooze. Whatever, he woke to plaudits and florabelles. Something, too, had addressed the reality of his beard. Ha! he said. He was the soul of wit in those happy days.

There were other engagements, between which “Tod” played quietly among his lemons, or what may have been only the “images” of his lemons, if such a word may be used among the furtive lagniappes of the marathon readings in celebration of the sentient beings then abounding. On the other hand, he had a surpassingly tenuous idea of life when at liberty, so to say, and when his chef created chicken Marengo, Berrigan realized, with what he would scoff to term “a start,” that the crawfish were much bigger than he, as were also the
oeufs(?).
But he fell to with a good appetite and finished everything on the platter, despite its or his apparent or real size. This incident was also optically questionable. It, too, must fall under the heading, if you will, of the “phenomenal.”

There is little need or desire to speak of the wanton destruction of the fleet by Nelson, the obsessed mariner and scourge of the waters, whose cry, “Put out my other eye, Hardy, for the to’gallants smell o’ death!,” electrified all of Britain. His spectacular victory brought a ray of hope to citrus-suspicious Europe, which had been in the bleakest of dumps because of the madness and lust of the Jacobins and the publication of Wordsworth’s
The Stamp Distributor.
(“A whiff of the grape!” is probably what Nelson hallooed to his gunnery captain, Hardy, or, variantly, “Put out my other eye, Hardy, and give me a taste of the grape!”)

By this time, “Tod” had lost all sense of stability, so that when news of Nelson’s brave shout was brought to him in his tent and subsequently translated, the reference to “grape” sent him into concealment behind two or three large lemons he’d ordered from home. “Home!” he’d often think. The next morning, of course, the sad retreat from Moscow began, a dispiriting exodus that ended with the bitter tragedy of 18 Brumaire. “Had our restless and well-read
bricoleur
only known,” said many a grizzled veteran of the Big Army. The sunlight blazed and shattered off their medals in a curious manner, reminiscent of Apollinaire, one of the many poets whose work Berrigan had learned by heart.

Lemons

The lemon is not quite the size of the American cantaloupe, yet it is considerably larger than the cantaloupes that exist in supermarket ads. It is rare that one encounters a lemon even half the size of a rather small man. This conundrum only serves further to confuse the fruit-filled dilemmas of Berrigan’s life. Many modern people, anxiously on the go, take the juice of half a lemon in hot water every morning, for the sake of a regular (?), not that it matters, apparently. They will die, even as you and I. “Mostly
bricoleurs,”
they protested, prostrate before the highly-regarded interviewer’s tent. What did they mean to suggest?

Yet there are cancer dangers implicit in lemon use. New laboratory reports come “in” every month, and while the data are raw, rats used in subject-friendly experiments contracted cancers of the liver, kidney, and stomach after the ingestion of nine lemons daily for the space of four months. It should be noted that certain of the rats suffered from visual hallucinatory episodes, i.e., they seemed to see lemons “everywhere.” “Tod” thought long and hard about this, propped, as he was, against a favorite bench.

At Austerlitz, tired at last of Josephine’s (name changed) spending orgies, “Tod” took the juice of half a lemon in cognac upon arising. He’d often joke with young Pierre, his favorite shoes, about the pleasures of tipsy (illegible); and even he had difficulty defining the elusive term. And yet the cantaloupe was unknown to him, even though Moravia was then the melon capital of Europe. One apocryphal story has it that Berrigan, upon seeing a cantaloupe for the first time, thought it a bust of Max Jacob. There was a good deal of levity
that
evening in selected purlieus.

At about this time, the chronicler would often put himself to sleep by imagining himself to be a woman. What was it they said, at least most of the time? How would it feel—that was it—to have a vagina? How would it feel to slip a lemon in there? Or would it be “up” there? And can one actually slip a lemon into such a space? Would it be correct to do so, or would such an act be demeaning? And if so, to whom? Thus did he muse on the politics of his era, complex, certainly, but succinct!

The sea would claw gently at the shore, slowly moving the beach to, say, Spain. In years to come, vacationers would be hard-pressed to lark about
here!
And yet, “Tod” thought, he and his pals took it all for granted. Science was funny that way, although science had invented the lemon and sent, as well, our eager astronauts to their hard-earned deaths. Science!

The lemon is native to India, to the Punjab, to be precise, and has quite extraordinarily lovely, though not showy, purple-edged white blossoms. The skin of the fruit grows slowly yellow and pliable, except, of course, in actual life, that is, when the fruit is permitted to ripen on the tree. Fruit thus ripened is called
mague verde.
The juice of the mature lemon is high in Vitamin c, and is thought, by Lutheran ministers, to be an aphrodisiac, hence the plethora of summer picnics. In hot climates, the lemon is called
l’amour jaune,
perhaps a reference to its amorous properties.

All citrus growers agree that the fruit should be cut from the tree while green and at “standard” or “normal” size, then allowed to ripen in “chill sheds” or “chill shanties” in order to attain its maximum heft and astringent flavor. The problem here suggested, of course, is: What is standard or “normal” size? (See “Cantaloupe, representations of.”)

As Berrigan would make for one “chiller” or another along the line of march through the desolate steppe, his constant refrain was “Etonnez-moi!” He may well have been exhorting his weary followers. On the other hand, he may have been commenting on one of the various optical illusions that the wasteland was noted for, e.g., the williwaw and the fairy morning.

Florida

Florida, to this day, is much like Corsica, even to its genial and plentiful whores. This coincidence was not lost on “Tod,” grown by now into a wonderful person, and an even more omnivorous reader. “Another Corsica, man,” he’d assure admiring guests, with the superb touch of false humility he’d recently cultivated as an adjunct. Josephine’s (q.v.) healthy bosom quickened with a kind of oddly bourgeois pride, and heavily came her breath. It had been worth it, she knew, to give up her legal work in order to become the wife of this extraordinary man, even though a career was becoming extremely important amid the “new plangency,” as the era was being arrogantly called. There were, it should go without saying, optical illusions everywhere.