Omphalos

I first saw the Institute at dusk while I was walking down the esplanade across. The Charles river, scarlet and sanguine, glimmered under the sunset mid-fall. The fall wind scraped my eyes teary, but I was finally able to catch sight of the Institute’s enormous silhouette, a flat cylinder radiating three rectangular wings. A dome, round like a mound, pressed down the central corpus-- an unfinished burial. And gradually towards the bloody flow, the giant posed out its embrace with two cement wings of the building, each speckled with narrow glass windows that reflected the falling sun and pierced the Institute’s shadowy figure. I knew that, looking from my perspective, there was a smaller wing behind the central dome-- I’ve heard of the prestigious Institute more than a handful of times before this visit, and I’ve seen happy, cheerful pictures of it, with froshes lawning and sometimes vandalizing the contemporary structural art on display. Yet never, never had I expected such a solemn first encounter.

I sometimes play with philosophical arguments in my mind-- it’s my coping mechanism, I joke you not-- and this argument was the one that hopped out on that morbid day, that all man-made structures need some sort of an anchor, or foundation. The corner of a mansion, the pole of a tent, the foundation stone of the Jerusalem Temple, you-name-it. What, then, is the anchor of this city? The answer was evident: the Institute. Even its name implied its purpose: insto, instare, institi, to stand upon. The mound-like centerpiece was an enormous hive, every citizen a worker, the hustle of the city an eternal drone.

I used to be a Latinist during my years at Ashwater-- a historical New England boarding school in its namesake town nearby. Socially inept as I was, I always enjoyed my lunch breaks alone in the lobby of Peare Hall, our classics department, where two old prints of the Odyssey and the Iliad sat humbly inside a glass case, displaying their red and black lines, printed and annotated in a beautiful order. As a school as old as this country, Ashwater carried down many traditions in education, such as offering classic studies through a hybrid of Latin and Greek. Though I studied Latin, I managed to pick up a Greek word or two: diploma, diplomatos-- something the students desperately need in hand; phallos, phallou-- something, in contrast, we do have in hand at times.

It was about a week before I visited the Institute that Isa noted the word omphalos in my Latin class.

Until this day I am still impressed with Isa’s love for Latin, not inspired by the glory of Rome, but, uncommonly, by her passion for physiology and anatomy. Fully known as Isabel Fu, she was not very close to me at Ashwater, but I used to have a slight crush on her, a crush that began and ended along with each Latin class. Sometimes I would pause my train of thought mid-class, my eyes helplessly fixed on her dark, straight hair put up in a subtle French twist, displaying her pale ears and bony jaw below. I think she definitely knew I was looking at her sometimes, yet she, reserved and tacit, did not respond to me at all, except for some common requests like me borrowing a pen or a piece of paper. To me she felt distant, like the fellow marble Caesar and Cicero in Peare, and thus I did not pay much attention to her.

Yet on that particular day, a memory of mine resurfaced from the bloody Charles. It happened during my most recent Latin class, when we’d often sit along the walnut table and discuss anything classic we encountered during the week-- a spontaneous way of learning by design. It was then that Isa said, “I ran across this word omphalos.” She peeked over her laptop hesitantly, “I think it means the navel?”

Our instructor Dr. Schimdtt closed her eyes and savored the question. After a deliberate pause-- I still find her pauses intriguing-- she grinned, “It’s the navel in Greek, Isa, but also, metaphorically, the center. The source. Sometimes it’s depicted as a hive in sculptural art, but it can also refer to the center of a shield, which we will encounter, later, in the Iliadic half of the Aeneid. Or, it could also be a vault, a tomb. Can a tomb be a source? I don’t know! The ancient Greeks were weird...”

Now I saw it: the Institute is an omphalos. It is a stem that beams out its wings and branches that gradually disperse into the city’s skyline. It’s also a black hole that gravitates the entire city, including me, towards its vaulted, hollow dome. A right turn later and I found myself on a bridge over the Charles, heading right towards the Institute’s entrance.

My eyes ached. Two lines of tears edged down my wind-battered cheeks, as I edged my way towards the Institute. It was not just my eyes that were sensitive-- I often weep before realizing what’s been lost. It’s a subconscious skill: milk gets spilled all the time, so why not cry before it happens, which could be any moment? That’s the only reasonable time of mourning for an absurd world, where all that could be lost will be lost. I compare this sentiment as a shrieking little canary inside me, but on that damned day the canary was more desperate than usual. It flinged itself against my rib cage harder and harder while the brutal-looking Institute loomed larger in my vision. It flinged, until I was gasping, breath-taken, astounded by the enormous Institute in front of me.

From my teary eyes I recognized the entrance of the Institute, two wooden doors that seemed absurdly narrow and small upon the central corpus. In front of the doors pinned a lonely obelisk, dwarfed by the looming dome and engulfed by its shadow. Perhaps the architect put it there so it could act like the needle of a sundial, telling the time by its shadow. Yet it had been rendered useless, as no light could ever touch its shaft now. A phallos, subjugated. Numb, dumfounded, I mechanically paced towards the entrance, with only Isa’s voice, soft yet slightly frictious, ringing in my head-- her rustling breath falling with each footstep I marched. Catullus was she reading:

“But my tongue grows thick, a thin flame

runs down beneath my limbs, with their own sound

my ears ring, my lights eyes

are covered by twin night.”

Perhaps poor Catullus also had his little canary, which bonded him and me upon that moment, across two thousand years of time. But why would I recall Isa again, why would she return to my mind uninvited? More strangely, why would Isa be the one reading Catullus? Repressed and tacit as she was, I surely did not see in her a Catullian romantic, nor was she ever mentioned in any gossip at school. So I was genuinely surprised when, in another Latin class of mine, she volunteered to read her translation of Carmen 51 by Catullus, the most romantic, sensual and explicit poet in the highschool Latin curriculum. I’d say she did a great job: she read it, or, rather, she chanted it with such a desire, joyful, a little desperate, a little longing, and with a little reservedness unique to her—

“your sweet laughing, which rips out all senses

from miserable me: for at the same moment I look upon you,

Lesbia, nothing is left for me

of my voice in my mouth.”

Dr. Schmidtt took that opportunity to introduce Sappho, a poetess six hundred years before Catullus, whom the latter was imitating at all times. She would point out the mysterious bond between the two, a braid that spans across centuries of time and hundreds of miles of space, from the glorious Rome to the secluded Lesbos, from Catullus’ explicit exclamations (Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo!) to Sappho’s whispering words. Yet I was more intrigued in a different bond I sensed: the bond between Isa and Sappho through Catullus. Isa was never lively in class, but when the sapphic meter slipped off her tongue on that day, she was gleaming in light. She was alive.

What bonded Isa and Sappho together at that moment? Or, rather, how are we able to transcend time and space to connect with another human being? The Institute inspired in me an answer to this question. The navel, the omphalos, is a mark of a motherly connection, that implies our instinctual ability to connect. We are born bonded, tied to a womb through the umbilical cord-- the ruin of which results in the navel. We’re born connected to another human being, the mother: only life does us part.

Cicero, whose marble bust still stood on the windowsill of Peare, once said tota mulier in utero: a woman is entirely her womb. And even before Cicero, the Latin language itself already had this prejudice encoded in its etymology: the feminine form of mother “mater” is “matrix”, the womb. To reiterate, in the Latin language, the feminine essence of a mother is her womb. But today’s vision suggests an alternate narrative, which says motherhood is the navel, which all of us carry. It’s an alternative that does not push all womb-bearers into one category, but recognizes the navels on every one of us, that every one of us carries a little extension of a womb, a little tomb of a forgotten past, a little portal to humankind.

Maybe it’s my turn for bonding. Right after Isa’s mesmerizing chant, Dr. Schmidtt asked me to read another of Catullus’ Lesbia-themed poem (Lesbian poem?) for her-- Carmen 5 this time, which I complied. I tried to imitate the liveliness of Isa like how Catullus followed Sappho, but to no avail:

“Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love--

and the rumors of rather stern old men,

let us value them all at just one pence!

Suns are able to set and rise again;

yet for us, when once the brief light has fallen,

an eternal night must be slept.”

And the night, perhaps eternal, was now approaching. The sun was setting every moment, unfurling the Institute’s shadow like a carpet. The Institute. Never have I seen a thing so holy yet so evil, so powerful yet so reserved. Only until then did I realize it is a womb and a tomb, a monument and an omen, but also a navel, a threshold, a liminal space. I turned away from its door and glanced back, only to see its pitch-black entrance. Then the sun fell below the horizon, and everything became pitch-black too, as if they were merged into a far greater entrance.