Rachel Kushner - The Strange Case of Rachel K

I dont care that the earths shadow eclipses the moon, said the Admiral. I have seen terrific irregularity with mine own eyes, and have been forced to the sensible conclusion that this earth is not round as some wrongly insist, but the shape of a pear, or violin.

A thousand years before the Admiral made his daring proclamation and charted his course on this violin-shaped earth, people thought it was flat like a discus. Until the Greek Cartographer spoke out, claiming it was round like an orange. Hed drawn standard aesthetic divisions on his planisphere, a flattened version of his round earth. The first set of lines he called latitude. And the second set, trickier than the first, longitude. But his finest moment, his greatest act of self-control, had been to leave parts of his map blank. The Cartographer was later forgotten, his maps lost like dreams that are lost upon waking, lingering only as faint unglimpsable residues. Seafarers, with no reliable guide by which to brave the open Ocean, paddled and were wind-scooted along in landlocked, salted waters. For navigation, they dead reckoned and used wind rosesradiating lines of sixteen focal points, ornate foliations that indicated air currents but varied according to the size and dimensions of the map, so that no two maps, even of one place, were ever alike. The Cartographer was eventually remembered, but by then the forgetting had been sustained so long that no one could read Greek. The epoch after the Cartographers planisphere reigned and before it reigned againforgotten and then discovered but unreadablewas known as the Great Interruption. It lasted one thousand years.

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Exploring is an undertaking of the brain. The pioneering Portuguese Navigator was one lonely man, thinking. His name was Henry. He wore a hair shirt. He died a virgin. The Portuguese, not waylaid like the rest of Europe by bloody wars, by the Hundred Years one and the other called Roses, were free to daydream. Their country faced the ocean, not the Sea-in-the-Midst-of-the-Land. This orientation gave them a taste for the formless and unfathomable, and Portuguese sailors went south toward Africa, the massive continent with friendly and also unfriendly inhabitants. But their polestar sank as they went, and so they rigged up a kind of crude latitude. They wagered on uncharted courses, and flung themselves into the Watery Unknown.

With Henrys sacrifices and his intuition there were advances. With each advance, the locating and charting of Places, the Pure Unknown was molested, and the mental bravery in revering Nothingness leaked away. Charting courses in the mind came before charting courses in the sea. The Great Exception (shortly after the Great Interruption) was the finding of the Americas, which happened on the earth before it happened in mens minds.

When the Admiral went to Her Highness to explain his astounding insight that the earth was shaped like a pear or violin, and to request the gold for his expedition, he was accidentally drunk from too much wine, and drunk as well on the heady vapors of hubris and conviction. Flushed and inspired, he got on his knee and spirited the story with more zing. He impromptu scrapped the violin thing and told Her Highness that the earth was the shape of a womans breast. He said the Breast had a protrusion at the Orient, where he wanted to sail, where the water grew warm and tumultuous. The nipple, he said, locking his onyx eyes to her green ones, tracing a breast in the air with his slim-fingered, Portuguese hands. Slim fingers he couldnt resist adorning with the ring the Cardinal had given him for luck, with a cross so large and yellow diamonds so sharply cut, that hed scratched himself with it more than once.

Pious excess would be one way to classify the jewels the Cardinal preferred, to wear and to give to explorers before they set sail. It might have been that the Cardinal had hoped the Admiral would think of him, as he wore the enormous and pointy ring. But the Admiral had thought only of the Queen, or more specifically, the Queens breast, which hed all but touched, tracing its curve and pretending to trace the earths curve. But that had only been a moment. An instrumental moment. The Admiral did not think in the manner that either the Queen or the Cardinal or most people did, of bodies and of desire. He was driven by entirely different impulses, which is why he was an explorer.