William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Yes into the sea with an anchor? like the man you told me about? The anchor caught on a tombstone, and the man coming down the rope in the celestial sea to free it, and he drowned? Listen, But Gwyon, fearing the insistent monotone that crept into the boy's voice for the delirium it might forebode, hurried out of the room studying the picture of the subterranean sanctuary discovered beneath the basilica of Saint Clement of Rome, a sudden light in his eyes as though his senses were afloat with vapors from two thousand years before.

Gwyon's entrances were often as precipitous as this escape; and there were times Wyatt pretended to be asleep when he heard his father's approach upon the stairs.

When he could not read, he painted, with an extraordinary deftness which consumed his whole consciousness, and often left him so tense that he passed into delirium. — Listen, I… what was it? Listen.

It was the deliria that Gwyon feared, which left him doubly helpless, trying to conceal his anxiety behind his back in one hand twisting the other, and he hastened to call Janet who was, a good part of the time now, the only moving thing in the house. She remained, gibbering testimony to Aunt May's inquisition.

So far as anyone knew, she never left the house. Her voice had gained the timbre of that of a grown man when she raised it in the full volume of speech. But this was infrequent. She usually spoke in a hoarse whisper, lubricated by a salivary flow which she had difficulty controlling (and caused, though she did not know it, by a medicine compounded of mercury which she'd found in Aunt May's cabinet, renewed and taken reverently in uniform overdose since Aunt May's death). Her shoulders were broad, thighs narrowed, and with squarely muscular hands she plied an emery cloth to remove the fine filaments which darkened her chin.

In any other native household, her regular absences from her work, or those occasions which found her insensibly rigid before an empty window, or prostrate on the kitchen floor, might have been taken for organic disorders; and, like the Venerable Orsola Benincasa, whose sixteenth-century childhood was visited by innumerable misinterpreted ecstasies, she might have been bruised black-and-blue, pricked with needles, and burned with exposed flames to rouse her. But Reverend Gwyon remarked to himself that her derelictions from duty had occurred most notably during Easter week of that year: that about eight o'clock on Thursday evening, in the midst of serving his dinner, she was numbly entranced before the kitchen stove; and the following afternoon at three he almost upset her in the dark passage outside his study door, where she stood limbs immobìlely extended before the cruz-con-espejos.

When modern devices fail, it is our nature to reach back among the cures of our fathers. If those fail, there were fathers before them. We can reach back for centuries. Gwyon appreciated the extended hands of his people less and less as the months passed. The doctors refused him information of any direct nature, guarding the frail secrets of their failing magic as carefully as Zuñi priests planting prayer sticks. And then there was that hallowed tribal agreement among them never to admit one another's mistakes, which they called Ethics.

On the other, the spiritual, hand, the congregation breathed out stale prayers for the boy's recovery. But in the end they always gave their God full leave to do as He wished, to remove the lad if such were His sacred whim, loading the fever-stricken boy with the guilt it had taken them generations to accumulate. They called this Humility.

The sermons thundered at them from the pulpit of their peaceful church increased in violence, and embraced expiatory petitions to the Lord their God less and less frequently. Still the gray faces continued to appear, drawn by duty and (though none but the Town Carpenter might have admitted it) a sort of perilous curiosity. The tension mounted, until the sermon on the evils of vivisection, on the morning of June twenty-fourth, after which the Reverend retired for the rest of the summer.

That Sunday morning, Saint John's, or, as the Reverend reminded them in a deceptively peaceful voice, Midsummer Day, the simple altar was decorated with flowered sprigs of oak trees. The warm light of the sun stretched in long empty patterns from the diamond-shaped panes across the congregation. Someone's liver-and-white hound appeared and tussled briefly with the bellrope, came part way down the aisle, and then sensing something turned and fled.

The sermon, meanwhile, had progressed from vivisection to the Mojave Indians, — among whom it is humbly understood, and I quote from foremost authority, "to be the nature of doctors to kill people in this way just as it is in the nature of hawks to kill little birds for a living." Among the Mojaves, it is believed that everyone dead under the doctor's hand falls under his power in the next life. Superstition? It is what we, gathered here today in the sight of God, call superstition. We call such people as those benighted savages, and send missionaries among them, to enlighten them with the word of Truth we are gathered together to worship here today. For centuries, missionaries have brought back stories to make us blanch with horror, stories of human sacrifice practiced in the interests of religion on the bloodstained altars of the Aztecs. Yet we support in our very midst a highly respected class of men who are Aztecs in their own right. Like ourselves, they may throw up their hands at the thought of murdering a maiden on a stone altar. But it is only that this was done to serve a god different from their own, that shocks them. We may find them wringing their hands in reproach against those who roasted Saint Lawrence on a gridiron: Is it the roasting they regret? Is it the suffering of Saint Catherine on the wheel? The choking cries of Tyndale being strangled? The muffled words of forgiveness on the lips of John Huss at the stake. those of Our Lord on the Cross. O Sancta simplicitas! No! They regret simply that none of these experiments was carried out under the scientific conditions of a medical pathological laboratory. (He had already gone ten minutes beyond the time usually allotted to the sermon, but the gray faces were bound in wonder.) — Tell me, how did Asclepius end? he demanded, reaching his turning point. — Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Why, Zeus slew him with a thunderbolt! But we mortals, what are we allowed? Not even as little as John of Bohemia, who threw his surgeon into the river when he failed to cure the king's blindness. No terms, like the Hungarian king five centuries ago, who could promise full reward to the surgeon who cured his arrow wound, with death if he failed. No, we turn them loose, with money in their pockets, and expressions of deep respect for their failures. The same trust, and confidence, perhaps, that Saint Cyril had for the physician who cut out his liver and ate it… that Pope Innocent VIII had in the physician who prescribed the blood of three small children for His Holiness' nerves… of Cardinal Richelieu, on his deathbed, given horse dung in white wine. Have you noticed, he went on, lowering his voice, leaning toward them over the high pulpit, — the charm that doctors wear? A cross? No. In the very name of Heaven, no! It is a device called the caduceus. Look closely. two serpents coupling round a wand, the scepter of a pagan god, the scepter of Hermes. Hermes, the patron of eloquence and cunning, of trickery and theft, the very wand he carried when he conducted souls to Hell. (The organist, an alert young man, fingered the pages of the next hymn and made sure there was air in the bellows.) And when Reverend Gwyon hit the pulpit with the flat of his hand and raised his voice from the crisp confidence he had just given to commence a new inventory of the achievements of the medical profession, beginning with — Who was it that suggested the use of the guillotine in the French Revolution, but a doctor who died under its own blade!. there was a cheer from the far end of the nave, a moment of unholy silence, and the organ lusted into Rock of Ages as the Town Carpenter left hurriedly from one end of the church (in the direction of the Depot Tavern), and Reverend Gwyon, shaking but steadily, left from the other.