VII. L’Entraînement

VII. L’Entraînement

The eighth day—Raphaël, whose last thoughts were sun-tipped waves
Formed by a black cataract; after mislaid precepts of dying—Of a panther
In a deserted cave—Subtending his reflective ophthalmoscope, Helmholtz
With a candle for a slit lamp, first sees the fundus—Later, retinal columns
Of photopigment, rhodopsin, which span a disk membrane seven times,
Make an entire corpus of it, as Mars in Todi inscribes Etruscan, or a hide

Of misread Sanskrit, a life—Resisting efforts to stretch them, hidebound
States—Their mute cuttlebones, torpedoes, to further congest the waves—

In other texts, Almásy’s burnt eyes rimmed with gentian violet, or the times

M. Martin left his refuge from the Sun; there is nightfall, a gorged panther—

Without Ariadne, without so much as a nerve fiber’s ascending column
To retrace the web catching your hand—His own retinal blind spot, Helmholtz

Found mapping the macular borders—Confirming a neural code Helmholtz
Expanded to three color receptors, after Young’s double-slit waves—Some hidden;
To recombine, their interference patterns projected—Reading agony columns
Penned by a jealous Lucien, the Balzac of Illusions Perdues, a putative wave
Much like Achilles' lance, it salves the wounds that it makes—A measured panther
Inspires fears of his own knife; not unlike the fallen spear and patera of an at times

Neurasthenic, lightning-struck Mars—In battered physiologies, stimulants that time
The process in our own espressos—Unconscious inference of three cone colors Helmholtz

Recognized; a century later, where Newton deduced a prismatic seven—Judging the panther,

There is an amplification of Lucien, for whom they sheathe their claws, or in hidden

Excitations of the disciple of Dionysus (1871)—There is Wilde, in astrakhan, when waves
Show their teeth (1882), feasting with the same (1895)—From the Place Vendôme column

Balzac ascribes knowing; and later, an introversion of libido, to stay the fall—How a column
Of mercury encounters temperature—Amending Herodotus, the patient wants to time
His adhesions, in short, Narcissus wants a graven image of himself—Their reducible waves,
Coefficients—When the lens gradually ages into egg white, a superordinate hide
Of an ass animates the conducting muscles into a rictus—At various intervals, Helmholtz
Measures human nerve velocity at 30 meters per second—L’Étrangère, whom the panther

Predates, bears an Odessa postmark (1833) posted by her daughter’s governess—A panther
Captivated Nietzsche—For him, a syringa whip—Lou Andreas-Salomé’s running columns
Of correspondence, Chapter Seven, “The Freud Experience” and Chapter Eight—Helmholtz
Would find a quantifiable substance—“With Rainer” of her autobiography, such voids of time

Her name dropping exposes—Exupéry's Terre des hommes (1939)—Freud’s face, a hide

Likened to La Peau de Chagrin (1830); the last book he read before an overdose—Waves

Of Gilf Kebir—Morphine oases of Almásy, an enervated thief (1939)—Waves there have a panther
Sheen owing to an impact crater—In Helmholtz’s accommodation theory, lenses over time
Harden as Sahara glass; except for in-column fiber optics, our inverted image converges these subtexts.