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81 English 1B. She had gone underground, and Joel could no longer be “the apple of his mom’s eye, abnormally so,” as Gale put it.30 Gale’s familiar expression, the apple of her eye, was made familiar by the King James Bible,31 which uses it in several verses to translate a Hebrew idiom that more literally means “little man of the eye,” the reflection of another person in the pupil. It is a perfect term, birthed by the lady luck of language, for the maternal outlook on the son. Her view is not literal, as the world sees him, an ordinary child; it metaphorizes the boy, transforming him into the fruit of her womb. Joel must have considered what part he, the little man, had played in his mother’s suicide. She died from lack of love, after all, and he doubted his power to love, to relieve her deficiency. But he did not speak of it, and there were no more overt mentions of her after English 1a. She had gone underground, to a distinct realm, and his references were now oblique, as if the line between the quick and the dead were a trick of language, to be traversed by substitution and other symbolic means. Now the boy had to metaphorize the mother, to descry her through our mortal scope of words. 30 Gale, e-mail to me, November 4, 2002. 31 Deut. 32:10 and elsewhere. ...

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