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Pearls, Rain, Eggs by Barbara Lefcowitz
1.
When I heard that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, my five year old
mind pictured a harbor filled with luminous pearls in place of sand, the
pearls rising and falling like dunes, some heaped with pearls that had a
faintly blue sheen, others with pearls the color of the roses on a birthday
cake. All day and all night the pearls shone. Why the Japanese would want to
destroy them was beyond me: perhaps they merely wanted to gather them so they
could arrange them on strings that would resemble the pearl necklace my
grandmother wore when she got dressed up for luncheons or card games, but the
newly designed necklace of my imagination would sparkle and have lots of
colors.
Many years later, I hold my grandmother's necklace to the light, study its
large white pearls, all perfectly matched and, I assume, genuine. It has been
passed down to me via my mother who, as far as I can recall, rarely wore it
except to funerals. A family heirloom, nonetheless. And nonetheless, I
must confess that I plan to sell it. I don't like pearls, especially big
white ones that resemble teeth, and know I would never wear them even though
when I was a student at Smith College in the 1950s, wearing a single strand of
pearls with a cashmere sweater was de rigeur and I actually bought a strand
of fake lavender pearls to conform.
Yes, I'm aware that natural pearls from the South Pacific can be an intense
yellow and that black pearls from Tahiti, some with peacock-green overtones,
are most highly prized. Still I prefer more colorful gems like amethyst and
perigord; I could even get used to rubies.
Perhaps, too, I feel sorry for the poor oyster? Years ago I heard that
the secretion of a pearl around a grain of sand or parasite caught inside its
body causes the oyster considerable pain -- though I have no idea how one
validates that claim. Once released from the oyster, however, pearls can be
dissolved, liquefied into such exotic-sounding concoctions as milk of pearl:
a lot more alluring than a string of shiny "teeth". . .
***
I love to lie in bed and listen to rain as it falls rhythmically upon a
roof. In another life, perhaps I was a rain god with square eyes like Tlaloc,
the Aztec god of rain. The heavier the rain, the louder and more vibrant the
music. Especially when the rain falls in almost perfectly vertical strings,
comparable to a comb . . . or to long flowing hair itself. Because it originates
in the sky, rain has been linked in numerous mythological systems with the
rays of the sun and light itself.
All sky gods are simultaneously fertility gods, "impregnating" the earth so
plants might grow. And, as anyone will attest after a thunderstorm on a
sultry day, rain also has the capacity to purify the air, at least
temporarily. The final sentence of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain refers to the
"rain-washed air" as part of its qualified expression of hope.
***
There have been reports of pearls the size of doves' eggs, even goose eggs.
In a sense, an egg is a pearl, given its locus inside a shell and its
associations with the hidden or occult. Of course, eggs eventually get
fertilized and hatch into chickens or newts or human beings, so the comparison
is limited. Yet there was a tradition in Borneo of placing every ninth pearl
in a bottle with two grains of rice so the pearl might eventually breed. For
some odd reason, the finger of a dead man served as the bottle stopper. Alchemists
believed that eggs could not only bloom to a variety of colorful
flowers, but viewed the egg itself as a shell, a sealed enclosure within which
great works of wisdom (pearls?) create themselves.
But even ordinary eggs are considerably more colorful than pearls . . . There's
the blue egg of the thrush; the black egg of the emu; the pale green egg of
the bantam and swan and the orange falcon's egg, plus the brown quail's egg
speckled with purple. Beyond the more familiar realm of birds' eggs (always
oval) there's the bright yellow butterfly egg and the frog's egg encircled by
a black jelly; some eggs of other species are spherical or even tubular.
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2.
The practice of liquefying or pulverizing pearls for medicinal purposes goes
back centuries. The prozac of its day, a tonic prepared from powdered pearls
and distilled water was thought to cure mental illness -- though apparently it
did not have a salutary effect on King Charles VI of France, its best known
recipient. Liquefied pearl or "milk of pearl" was especially popular in
northern Europe, so much so that some pharmacists adulterated the tonic with
powder made from inferior pearls, sometimes mere bits and pieces. Hence a
stern warning to use only whole pearls, despite the added expense.
Numerous love charms have contained dissolved essence of pearls, particularly
in the East. Likewise, to this day, one can find throughout Asia cosmetic
products made from powdered or liquefied pearls, allegedly potent remedies for
wrinkles and other catastrophes of aging skin.
A caveat from Hindu mythology: since pearls were thought to derive from
teardrops, possession of same would likely make the owner cry; in other words,
pearls could bring on misfortune because they are essentially liquid,
symbolizing the destructive potential of water, despite their temporary
disguise as objects so solid and hard that medieval physicians prescribed them
for heart disease because they presumably matched the heart's natural texture. Probably
the pearls were simply swallowed as if they were pills: which reminds
me of a story by Yukio Mishima wherein a very proper lady accidentally
swallows a pearl and must endure the acute embarrassment of having it
retrieved from her bowels.
***
The Indo-European root of the word rain, pleu, means to flow; derivatives
include not only the Latin pluere, to rain, but the Greek ploutos, wealth or
riches: one possible result of overflowing. More distant cousins include Old
English fleogan, to float or swim, and fleugan, to fly; also the word
pluvious, another derivative of pluere, is linked in turn with the plover, a
shore bird that is easiest to catch when it rains. (Cf. the German word
regenpfeifer, literally rain-piper.)
Imagine a city constructed from rain, a totally liquefied city, its shapes
defined according to the laws of water. Falling in long strings, rain would
root itself in a trench or bed of sand, string and after string interlacing to
make whole walls of rain. In winter the walls might stiffen to ice and sheets
of ice would also support the families who have escaped a life-threatening
drought, floating here on whatever liquid they could find, a thread of a
stream, spilled water or wine, sap, whatever juice they might be able to
extract from the secret wells of stones.
Rather than complain, the citizens of such a city would rejoice in the
abundance of liquids and amuse themselves with water sports, watching the rain
form and unform thin bracelets in the city's many puddles. And rather than
yearn for cessation of the rain, at the slightest threat of drought, the
people would flow in search of a new riverbed so they could watch the rain
create yet another liquefied city.
***
If the human egg could swim, it would be a sperm. Right? Wrong. Instead of
opening its walls to the fastest swimming sperm cell, it could choose the most
desirable sperm, whose talents might have no connection whatsoever with its
swimming ability -- or rather, with its ability to swim fast, since it might
very likely prefer to swim gracefully, to swim like a figure-skater rather
than a speed skater.
Of course, the usual problems of choice might present themselves. With so
many talented sperm, on what should the Queen Egg base her decision? Should
she favor artistic ability over mathematical ability; mechanical skills over
political skills; a physically stunted genius or an average mind in a body
whose beauty would rival the finest Greek sculpture? Of course, I speak here
of potentialities. And the egg would also have to take into account the
potential of a particular sperm to survive the long journey from conception to
birth.
Nonetheless, I think all eggs should be taught to swim at the earliest
possible age. For the sake of free will at the very least. But never should
an egg itself become liquid, for there are only two uses of liquefied eggs: downing
them raw as a cure for a hangover and beating them to a froth, which
then can be folded into potential cakes and puddings.
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3.
Given my earlier lament about pearls' lack of color, I am surprised to learn
that one meaning of the word pearl is the color yellowish white. When I came
across the word margaric, a pretentious adjective for "pearly" derived from
the Greek word for pearl, margaron, I had a hunch there was a link with
margarine. Yellow margarine: a lustrous pearl-yellow substitute for butter . . .
And lo! my dictionary tells me that the word margarine indeed derives from
margaric acid, a pearly acid obtained from lichens, in turn the result of a
union between a fungus and algae which is often a greenish yellow.
Perhaps another fancy synonym for pearly, the word nacreous, a derivative of
nacre, offers a less convoluted family tree? Alas, no. Nacre, which literally
refers to mother-of-pearl, is rooted in the Old Italian naccara and Arabic
naqqarah: drum or drum-like. Is the reference to drums of a dazzling silver
resembling "mother-of-pearl clouds," composites of tiny ice crystals
occasionally visible after a storm?
***
Yellow rain, which falls from time to time in Southeast Asia, contains the
powdery excrement of wild honeybees contaminated by a fungal toxin. Rain
also takes on other colors: the oxidation of iron can result in pink or red
rain as well as snow, metaphorically suggestive of violence. A friend once
told me that the rain still falls a bloody red over a mound near her village
in Lithuania, a mound containing the bones of hundreds of Jews gunned down by
the Nazis in the course of an afternoon. Black rain was observed after the
nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . Though acid rain has no color
it has been referred to as a nitric rainbow. On a more benign note, rainbows
themselves are a form of colored rain, their arcs of prismatic colors a
result of refraction of the sun's rays on raindrops.
***
The yolk of an egg contains nutrients stored for the embryo, the amount
varying in different species, depending on the length of time it takes the embryo to
acquire enough self-sufficiency to obtain nourishment on its own. In some
traditions the yellow yolk is associated with the sun; in ancient Egypt, the
sun itself was assumed to have sprung from a "Mother Egg," the latter a
variant of the worldwide myth of the Cosmic Egg, source of the earth, of man,
of all natural manifestations.
Hindu mythology associates the yolk with gold, which, along with
silver, comprises one of the world's two hemispheres; Brahma sprang from the
golden yolk. In Shintoism, the cosmic egg split in two, the white becoming
heaven and the heavier yolk becoming earth, parallel with the traditional
Chinese identification of the cosmos with the upper part of the shell and
earth with the yolk floating in the albumen's primeval sea.
The Philosopher's Egg, an alchemical invention, was apparently all yolk, a
source of gold comparable with a mysterious, presumably soft stone called a
"brain stone."
And the word yolk itself derives from the Old English, geolu, yellow, plus
the suffix ca. Just why is the yolk yellow? Because it is rich in
carotinoids, the yellow pigment containing Vitamin A and commonly found in
fruits and vegetables like peaches and yams.
_______________________
4.
Seed pearls, measuring under two millimeters, are used sometimes in jewelry
settings. Some may be no larger than a grain of salt.
Rain that falls lightly, composed mainly of small droplets, we call drizzle
or -- if we live in California--mist. In painting, it is best represented by
the pointillist technique: dabs as opposed to lines or tonal areas.
And what is caviar but the roe (a mass of eggs within the ovarian membrane)
of sturgeon, especially the beluga? Usually the very small eggs are black,
though sometimes green, even yellow.
______________
5.
"Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes." (Shakespeare, The Tempest)
"Fain would I kiss my Julia's dainty leg,
Which is as white and hairless as an egg." (Robert Herrick, "Her Legs")
"Hath the rain a father?" (The Book of Job)
"For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God
hath sent me to the sea for pearls." (Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno)
"A sad thing is a wolf in a field, rain on ripe corn, wind in the
trees. . ."
(Virgil, Eclogues
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