PEARLS, RAIN, EGGS
Barbara Lefcowitz

* * * * * * * *

I.
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 rigueur 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.

II.
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 pleure, 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 pleure, 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.

III.
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.

IV.
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.

V.
"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

THE END

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