Autopsy Poem by Jared Carter

'... my line of approach, my sign-posts, are not your sign-posts.... but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and to get you out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world of overworked emotions and thoughts.'- H. D., Notes on Thought and Vision.

There is something to be said for twilight. For the first nine months of our life we subsist in the twilit world of the womb, as though that long acclimatization were necessary before we might come out into the light of day.

Even as a child I was fascinated by dusk, perhaps because my vision was acute, and I could see more clearly when others were beginning to lose their way. Lions and other large cats are said to be crepuscular. They hunt at dawn, or at dusk, when in the strange half-light their prey are presumed to be disoriented - from a longing to sleep, perhaps, or from having been rudely awakened from dreams.

The mind of the feline predator is difficult to imagine; such a creature's ability to hunt in near darkness is equally hard to fathom. Scientists tell us that if an ordinary housecat were to be lowered beneath the sea to a depth of five thousand feet, its eyes collect light to such an extraordinary degree that it would still be able to function and find its way. It would discover, too, that other creatures flourish at those levels, and move about in that endless crepuscular gloom.

Crepuscular - it is a charming word, one I discovered quite early and carried around with me like a talisman, holding it close to my imagination during the more mundane moments of life in the daylight world. One of those troubling, unmanageable words which few can define or bother to employ, like ultramontane, or prelapsarian, or peregrination. Lovely, odd, strange words, often with sinister meanings.

Take the word autochthonous, for example. Not the sort of word you'd care to meet up with in a dark alley on a rainy night. Or coelacanth. Imagine one swimming your way, rising from the depths, its scabrous fins set at odd angles. I like words of that sort. Techtonic. Metastasize. And autopsy - another word from which the mind recoils. Invariably such words lead toward, and into, rather than away from. Superannuated. One never knows what to expect when setting out with such a word.

Even when quite young, then, when I used to say words like crepuscular and diatomaceous to myself, as though they were a strange and private music. I had already begun to imagine what it would be like to be old - to be in the twilight of one's life, the shadow time, the late October. Some of its eventualities I could imagine, some I could not.

Most surprising, as that long train of days and years finally pulled into the station, was the preoccupation with counterfactuals. What might have happened back then, if things had gone otherwise. 'For of all sad words of tongue or pen, ' another gray-haired poet once wrote, 'the saddest are these: it might have been.'

Twilight, evening, dusk - realm of the might-have-been, of the reconsidered, the brooding possibility. Even the thought that it might have been better never to have been born. Or that one's life might have developed in a different way. 'The moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight, ' a particularly ruminative author, Henry James, wrote of one of his more introspective characters.

Autumn. Or better yet, autumnal - is that not a masterful word, does it not have a haunting ring to it? A bell tolling, a premonition that somewhere, perched over some forgotten doorframe, some awful, near-comatose bird still lurks, about to utter once again its dreadful reprimand.

Twilight remains, if only for a strange, elastic interval, outside of time. Or, rather, it supercedes time, and measurement, and what comes next. That prime observer of classical custom, Herodotus, had a marvelous gift for explaining when something happens - by reminding the reader of its connection with the commonplace and the everyday.

He speaks of a particular part of the morning that is 'about the time of the filling of the market-place.' Not early, then; the fast has been broken, but the animals must be tended to. Only when the chores are done can you turn toward the market-place. And it is only a little later when you and everyone else arrive, and the market begins to fill up. That is the time he means. Just so.

In an earlier passage he describes the traitor, Ephialtes, setting off to show the Persians the secret trail by which they will outflank the Spartans at Thermopylae. 'They left camp about the time the lamps are lit, ' Herodotus observes. Exactly. We all know, intuitively, when that would be. We can imagine the lamps being lit, by those who remain behind. We can imagine the line of shadowy figures moving up the hillside toward the hidden pass.

Saul sets off to visit the Witch of Endor at approximately the same time - dusk, evening, that gray interval traditionally held to be the time of disguise and impending treachery and strange premonition.

You may remember the story by Henry James, referred to a moment ago, about the man who returns to his native country after a third of a century abroad, who has inherited a great empty mansion, and who begins to sense the presence of a ghostly 'other' - the self he might have become had he never left home.

It is at twilight that he begins to search the depths of the house for this mysterious Dopplegänger. 'He preferred the lampless hour, ' the narrator observes, 'and only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell.'

It is a spell, then, an incantatory time, in which we find ourselves when twilight falls. It is a time, moreover, of longing - nay, of searching, as a pride of female lions seeks out its prey, sifting through the tall grass - for that which can never be, or never be for long. Herodotus tells the story of Mycerinus, which is a twilight tale, a fable of extended light and approaching darkness.

Mycerinus receives an oracle from Buto to the effect that he is destined to live for only six more years and to die within the seventh. He sends an angry message back to the shrine, reproaching the god with the injustice of allowing a man so pious as himself to die so soon, when his father and uncle, who had closed the temples, forgotten the gods, and afflicted their fellow men, had lived to a good old age.

Let us pause to remember who these three men were. They were not ordinary mortals. They were, in fact, the pharaohs Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus, of the Fourth Dynasty of ancient Egypt. Among them they built the three great pyramids at Giza; their reigns helped to define an entire culture for the next three thousand years.

In answer to Mycerinus' complaint, the oracle declares that his life is being shortened precisely because he has not done what he ought to have done: for it was fated that Egypt should suffer for a hundred and fifty years - an outcome which his two dissolute predecessors, unlike himself, had understood very well. Herodotus continues:

'Mycerinus, convinced by this that his doom was sealed, had innumerable lamps made, by the light of which he set himself every evening to drink and be merry, and never ceased day or night from the pursuit of pleasure, traveling about from place to place amongst the pools and woodlands, wherever he heard of a particularly delightful spot. His object in this was by turning night into day to extend the six remaining years of his life to twelve... '

Once again, the lamp as concomitant of twilight. The procession of paper lanterns heading into the gloom. Who has not seen it, on a midsummer's eve, and not felt a tremor of apprehension, wondering what its ultimate destination might be?

At dusk in a city in a country far to the south, one may observe solitary women kneeling at intervals along the beach of a great ocean. Near where the water laps the shore each woman scoops out small pockets of sand. In some she places lighted candles, in others, yellow roses. These are offerings to the gods. When you walk along that beach you notice the sheltering pockets up ahead, glimmering in the twilight. As night comes on, the waves gradually accept these offerings, and take them away, and carry them off, far to the east, to the land of morning.

You have seen such things before, if only in dreams, and you have heard sentences of this cadence, and listened to such meanderings, and you have shrugged it off, and paid no attention. The time was not right. You were still young, and there were many years of life ahead of you. No oracle countermanded your hopes and aspirations. Why pause to listen to some old seafaring yarn - 'He stoppeth one of three' - or stay up late, by lamplight, looking through old books, following their crooked lines, puzzling out their odd stories and forgotten tales?

Why, indeed? In the hope of achieving eventual success? Power and fame? The admiration of others? These are marvelous things when they come of their own accord, like unbidden spirits risen from the deep. But they are scaly and reptilian when they descend on others, when they never seem to come your way but are showered on the simpletons and madmen all around you.

There are better things in life, but they do not reveal themselves in the full light of day. Or during the gleam of early morning, in lilac time, when you are convinced that you will live forever. They are - what other word could I have selected here? - crepuscular. They come out in the evening, like bats or hedgehogs, or like that rarest of creatures, the cecropia moth, its wings laden with eyes so intense they seem to have escaped from a wall of crumbling mosaic figures.

And if no twilight is available in your life? Then get yourself to a hedge - to a marginal place, a boundary line, a briar patch. Avoid being out in the open, where you make an easy target. For most of my life I have been a dweller of hedges and a treader of rustic mazes. I have been drawn to the dance of cranes, and to the patterns laid out on the floors of cathedrals. 'Don't go near the hedge! Don't go crawling about under the hedge, you'll get all dirty! ' Precisely.

Throughout my childhood if there was a place more mysterious than being under the front porch or halfway up the stairs, it was the hedge of spirea that lined one side of my grandmother's garden. There, where the canes drooped over to form a vortex of leaves, was a haven of neither light nor dark, but something in between. There I would prowl, down on all fours, gazing out like some half-wild beast at the everyday world of wicker baskets, flowerpots, and watering cans.

Hedge - a blunt word I cannot remember learning, like so many others, and thus an elemental notion, one that has been with me from the beginning. When I was slightly older, poring over the drawings and prints in my grandparents' old books, which were kept in an enormous oak cupboard in the room where I slept, I began to understand that in countries where hedges were common, and far more vast than any I had encountered - Normandy for one, rural England for another - there was an entire genus of creatures prefixed by this mysterious word.

There was an animal, no bigger than one's hand, covered with prickles, lurking in the underbrush. I studied the drawings in an old dictionary, and dreamed of hedgehogs moiling about beneath my bed. And there was John Ball, the hedge priest, who along with other renegades and rabble-rousers, had almost toppled a kingdom, back in a time I could barely imagine. Not least, there was George Borrow - wanderer, hedge-smith, who at an early age had gone to live with gypsies and learn the tinker's trade.

Most remarkably, there were accounts of a hedge school, tucked deep within the brambles, taught by wild-eyed men who had no truck with classrooms or blackboards or fancy learning from town. They taught the fundamentals: ciphering and letters. The essentials for getting by. A hedge, then, became the kind of place - neither in nor out, upstairs nor down - where I most wanted to be. In a birthday storybook, when I encountered stories about Br'er Fox and Br'er Rabbit, I knew what happened next. I had already been there. 'Oh no, don't throw me in the briar patch! Do whatever you like with me, but please don't throw me in that briar patch! '

Hedge, briar patch, tangle of thorns, stand of thistles towering over one's head - noli me tangere, the national flower of my ancestors, the Scots - hedge was where I wanted to be. My vocation was clear: wanderer, word-smith, mender and fixer - and priest? Yes, hierophant of the hedgeapple, hardened fruit of the heartland, riddle of the prairie frontier, ice-age survivor, arc of the bow. I would be the stuff of legends and tales, fashioner of tinker's dams, improviser, cobbler of odd bits and pieces.

To hedge. Let others explicate the meaning of the verb - the race to get ahead, to have the edge. I know the noun - green-spangled sanctuary, remote from public glare and empty chatter. Let me follow down your endless corridors, your elusive turnings where nothing is resolved, and much is still to come.

Admit me now, you mazy world - dim thicket, boundary-marker, place of perennial twilight. Within your precincts the blue bird hides its nest, ‘possum and raccoon trundle along your crooked paths, the newly emerged moth dries its dusky wings and zeroes into the dark. 'Oh, but you'll get dirty! '

Oh, but even if I get dirty, I will learn. I will absorb. I will find order where others perceive only disorder; I will not make the mistake of assuming disorder to be our natural condition. A gnarled and solitary witness of our time, Primo Levi, has made the difference clear:

'It is not true that disorder is required in order to describe disorder; it is not true that chaos on the written page is the best symbol of the extreme chaos to which we are fated: I hold this to be a characteristic error of our insecure century.'

Order within disorder. Among hedges, beneath the drooping fronds of the spirea or the forsythia, or somewhere within the prickles of osage orange or multiflora rose, even while the sun holds everything in its grasp, there is twilight, there is perennial shade. Look for me there. I will be puzzling over things that others do not see, or take no time to notice. I will be watching. Learning. Listening.

And in this circuitous way we come back to words, and to that final, odd, and strangely unsettling word, autopsy. It has meanings we do not wish to contemplate, and yet we are prejudiced in this regard. The vulgar think of an autopsy as a mystifying ritual - something done to the body, away from public scrutiny, like a modern execution. Something carried out behind closed doors.

In fact, it is a pure example of the rationalist undertaking. Men were persecuted during the Renaissance for seeking to discover what the dissection of cadavers might add to our understanding. The word means, literally, 'the act of seeing with one's own eyes.'

Study and apply thyself, then. Sharpen your vision; strive to hear. You have at least five senses. Use them. Do not loaf and admire, but examine, look closely. Learn to see in the half-light, out of the glare. Consider. The time grows nigh: the time of night, when seeing is no longer believing, and the latter becomes the stronger of the two.

Remember Agassiz's fish, recall that astute son who understood that while Tarquinius Superbus made no reply concerning what should be done with the hostages, he took a stick and, according to the messenger, 'walked up and down his garden, striking off the heads of the tallest poppies.'

Observe the snail's progress, the ant's peregrinations, the bee's dance through realms of polarized light. Balance in your palm the dry husk of the cicada. Bend close and listen, as though it were a shell from some fabulous sea washed up in your path. Try to imagine its journey and its visions - where it has come from, where it is going, why its avatars call out so insistently during the long summer evenings.


First published in jaredcarter.com.