Prodigy of Ponderous Misery

I know we're all busy. The Internet is a hectic, happening place. We don't really have time to ponder extended passages of Moby-Dick. When we're not checking on work email, there's a more entertaining Daily Show monologue or SNL skit or stupid human trick on YouTube. We've got the Journal to read, friends to text, games to play, a Facebook wall to peruse, or that last episode of Lost to watch again. So, let's keep it short today, at less than one sentence from Chapter 9:

after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.

This is from Father Mapple's sermon  - not an especially renown line. That's part of my point. Greatness is made up of an accumulation of the little things as well as the big ones. We talked about the single word "bosky" in a previous blog, so now let's just focus this one line. Don't just read it. Repeat it. Say it aloud. Listen to the poetry in it. Hear each R in the phrase "after sore wrestlings in his berth," and then listen to how they again reverberate in "ponderous misery drags him drowning..."

Good, isn't it? Yet you hardly notice because it's surrounded by so much that's equally good. You quickly become jaded when reading Moby-Dick, as if you've stumbled into a flooded treasure room. "What," you think, "another diamond-studded bracelet? Ho-hum. Let's move on. I think there's a golf-ball sized pearl here somewhere."

Stop and savor that bracelet just a second. Sure, there's plenty of grand drama, satire, symbols and metaphysics in The Whale, but it's the poetry that holds it all together. It's the sheer fucking, fabulous poetry that's so bitterly difficult to capture in cinema, which is why no movie version has come close to capturing the essence of the novel.

Teachers, don't show any movie version in the classroom. Not even the best of them (which is clearly the 1956 version directed by John Houston, starring Gregory Peck and written for the screen by Ray Bradbury) holds a candle to the book. Movies just can't do it in this case, though it's not their fault. No, blame (and celebrate) the music of the language.

The Pulpit Is Its Prow

Let's get this metaphor straight. Here's a look at Father Mapple's pulpit in Chapter 8:

Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed beak.

What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow. 

So, God's action's are the Weather and we are all Crew on the Ship sailing into God's Seas. The pulpit is the Bow, from which we're getting the latest Weather Report on God's "quick wrath." For now, the man standing on the bow is Father Mapple, giving a sermon that is great but, essentially, a warm-up act. Because soon it'll be our Everyman, Ishmael, standing on the pulpit of the Pequod. From that bow, there will be some serious descrying as we get the Weather Report for humanity. In some ways, this is what Moby-Dick is, a sermon for the ages, one we continue to discuss today, trying again and again to discover God's mysterious disposition.

But Faith, Like a Jackal, Feeds Among the Tombs

Sure, Melville is among the greats, but we don't have to worship at his feet, which were as clay as yours or mine. Still, in Moby-Dick, you're often left to wonder if even the perceived mistakes or weaknesses aren't as intentional as a flaw in a Shaker chair. Consider, for example, the following passage:

[H]ow it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

So, I frankly ask you, reader, Do you buy this passage? Cause I'm not sure I do. How does  the author of "faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs" wind up writing, a short paragraph later, "My body is just the lees of my better self"?

Is he saying that the rest of the world is secretly hypocritical about their faith in the soul but he, our everyman Ishmael, is not? Or is all this "methinks-my-body" stuff just the same sense of it's-unthinkable-that-I-could-disappear that so much of the rest of humanity shares?

If this were another author, I'd say something stinks in in the Whaleman's chapel and I'd point to this unsettled and unsettling theological stew of soul and sole. We crave better, purer fare than this, especially once cruise ship Pequod sails.

But this is Melville, after all, so we've got to wonder if this muddled thinking isn't intentional paradox. Does our boy Ishmael also gather faith here amid the tombs - so much faith, in fact, that he boldly states that Jove - or does me mean Jehovah - cannot "stave" his own soul? It rings of more than faith - of an almost Ahab-like hubris. So, what do you think: Is this passage an unwholesome mess, a perfect circular paradox, or a masterful bit of foreshadowing?

An Elegy for the Languishing English Language

With Moby-Dick, it's not just the big things: the grand scope, the multi-layered meanings, the galaxy of symbols. Sometimes it's the small things: the well-turned phrase, the small joke, or even the one word. So, let's allow ourselves a moment to cherish even as we mourn those portions of Melvillean English now fading into disuse. Certainly, "bosky" is a fine example and "bosky beards" a splendid phrase. Note how unselfconsciously it's woven into the narrative below:

The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooners, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.- M.D.

 I invite you to savor it now. Use it appropriately with your friends and acquaintances - though I wonder who outside the Taliban, the Castro family, and the occasional motorcycle gang member actually sports a bosky beard anymore. And, in an age of parking lots and strip malls, how much of our landscape is legitimately bosky anymore? Perhaps we could bring it back in some small way. "Sweetie, the backyard is looking a tad bosky these days. Maybe it's time to break out the hedge trimmer?"

Alas, I fear this is a rearguard action, battling against inevitable attrition. Our language itself  feels less and less bosky, with growing numbers of etymological parking lots where there were once verdant vistas. I, of course, realize there are plenty of new words being created, with corporate speak and techno-babble regularly springing up like weeds through the expanses of modern tar and concrete, but they don't feel like much recompense to me for the losses to our increasingly shorn and unshaggy language.

Unlock His Bridegroom Clasp

For though I tried to move his arm—unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse him—"Queequeg!"—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I.  -  M.D.

So what should we think about this Abbott-and-Costello-like shenanigans in one of the world's great novels? Should we go all post-modern lit crit and dig out the symbols of cultural hegemony or spout at length on the homoeroticism of harpoons and whales and fiery tomahawk pipes hidden under bedsheets? (You think I jest, dear reader? Try typing homoeroticism and "Moby Dick" into Google and just see what your net brings up.)  

Well, not for me, thanks. Yes, there's some fine symbolism and foreshadowing going on here. We can turn it over and over like it's a gemstone and look through a million prism-like facets to see our own thumbs. But, this is mostly just Herman having fun with one of the oldest jokes in human history: the story of the Odd Couple. Sometimes, my friends, a harpoon is just a harpoon.

Vaudeville as a Suburb of Melville

A good 30 years before the comedians moved in , Vaudeville was just a little suburb of Melville, which is, contrary to conventional high-school wisdom, nowhere near Dullsville. The Vaudevillean shrunken head bit, which you'll see below, got its first big break in Melville. Some consider this downtown bit to be Unciville, but those folk fail to recognize the sheer size of Melville, whose boundaries extend past Unciville all the way to Deville, Bedeville and then outward to Eville. It's easy to get lost. Melville is a strange and encompassing metropolis, having originally sprung from within the confines of the ancient University of Hard Knoxville, replete with its idiosyncratic twists and turns. Today, however, one can start in downtown Vaudeville, take the turnpike through  Eville, get off on the exit to the rundown, treacherous coastal resort of Anville-on-the-Head and yet still never leave Melville proper.

From Chapter 3: The Spouter-Inn

(The landlord and Ishmael discuss the missing harpooner bedfollow)

"[I]don't see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."

"Can't sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?" getting into a towering rage. "Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?"

"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't sell it here, the market's overstocked."

"With what?" shouted I.

"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"

"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better stop spinning that yarn to me—I'm not green."

"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin' his head."

"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.

"It's broke a'ready," said he.

"Broke," said I—"BROKE, do you mean?"

"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess." - M.D.

Pursuing The Whale

This project started in the simplest of ways: My family bought me a new Kindle, I downloaded a free edition of Moby-Dick onto it, and I started reading it, making notes to myself using the Kindle's awkward but strangely meditative notes function. It's something to do in the evenings while half-watching the young and talented Tampa Bay Rays take on their much more highly paid elders in the brutal Eastern Division. Then, I thought, if I'm making these notes anyhow, why not just drop them into a blog somewhere? Simple plan, really.

What I didn't count on was two things: one, that Moby-Dick has a way of working under the skin, like one of those corkscrewed harpoons that Moby drags around with him, and, two, that other denizens of the Internet had already been lanced themselves by Melville's work. I already knew about the Melville House Publishing's Moby Lives but had never heard of the likes of Power Moby-Dick, referenced in a previous blog, and certainly not the almost obsessively ambitious projects by artists such at Patrick Shea - who has been writing songs inspired by each chapter of The Whale - or Matt Kish, who has been creating a drawing for every page of Moby Dick. The great novel has long inspired other artists (see my previous allusion to Pollack's work, for example) but it is somehow becoming the foundation of whole great coral reef of Web-based works building on it. Although I've only begun to explore them, they clearly range from profound to playful. I even stumbled onto an eccentric little blog called Whales and Wiener Dogs, which led me to Whales in Space.

I have no idea what this all means. Perhaps nothing, as Ahab admits about Moby (I'll refrain from the quote since we're getting well ahead of ourselves in the narrative.) The Internet is a whole universe of eccentric pursuits and passions, and so now I'm apparently one of its oddly crazed or inspired citizens (depends on your point of view) crouching in the corners, applying the poetry of the manic, brilliant, tragic Melville to my own conventional little life. But I suppose there are worse ways to explore the ineffable mystery of our lives than to focus on that great American work that articulated the mystery better (for my money) than any novel before or since. So sail on, reader, pursue your passion, however quixotic it may seem to others. I say there's greatness in The Whale, whatever that means for you.

Breaking Up the Icebound Stream of Time.

 Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched....

 A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It's a blasted heath.—It's a Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. M.D.

Just imagine Ishmael in the Spouter Inn trying to puzzle out this painting. We of the 21st century have long since grown accustomed to, and often weary of, abstract expressionism. In Melville's day, it was still science fiction, though he anticipates it so well that we can easily imagine him as a 20th century art critic first stumbling across the works of Kandinsky or Pollack, a sudden shudder running up his back - shocked, disturbed, yet somehow exhilarated - recognizing something brand new: the "breaking up of the icebound stream of Time" or "chaos bewitched" indeed. Unlike his colleagues, he wouldn't have thought the artist merely a mad fool, as many critics considered Melville himself. Instead, for better or worse, something inside him would have shifted and new worlds would have emerged from the chaos.

Blue (Moby Dick) 

by Jackson Pollack

On Friendly Terms With All the Inmates

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.- M.D.

I think there are few lines in the early chapters more Melvillean than these. The mix of bravado, humor and genuine curiosity about the "horrors" of the world strikes me as so damned American. He's tongue-in-cheek, of course, parodying others' ideas of what a horror actually is. Ishmael is, after all, literally prepared to sleep with cannibals, as we'll soon see.

But Melville is also in earnest about the horrors of the world, a heritage he has long since passed on to his literary descendants. Faulkner, Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon, DeLillo and McCarthy, to name a few. Where would they be without this freaking, freaky New York genius?

Oh, I know, Those writers owe plenty of other debts, as did Melville himself. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, to name a few. But there are so many things utterly unique about Moby Dick, an artistic ambition that gave other American writers the chutzpah to take on their English betters. In the field of literature, Melville was as much a revolutionary as Washington, Adams, or Madison.

The result helped transform American lit, as many scholars have already proven. But Moby-Dick did more than that. Allow me to make an extraordinary and no doubt absurd-seeming supposition: I contest that Melville makes us all better, braver human beings. I don't just mean writers or Americans. I mean any global citizen with real experience of the planet. He has, through some miracle of literary homeopathy, changed the ocean of humanity with his particle.

We are, as a result, not just less bigoted (though American bigotry retains a faithful following) but better able to meet the actual horrors of the world with a brave face. Take our fellow inmate Death, for example.  I've seen people salute Death on the street during their morning constitutionals. I've even witnessed some joshing with their dark neighbor, as if they were were throwing an arm up over his bony shoulders and pretending to grab his nose. Of course, Death himself has a grim sense of humor. Maybe he asks us to pull his finger and we dare it, knowing full well it could be our extinction.

We need a philosophical mind for such dark shenanigans, overlaying a deeper but not unalloyed belief in human redemption. Melville has played a role in forging the macabre hilarity of the modern mind. It is one of many inheritances from The Whale.

Portentousness of Unconscious Power

I'd like to interrupt our scheduled program on behalf of those seeking more conventional annotations to Moby-Dick. Although I'm sure there are many fine sources of information, I've particularly enjoyed browsing Powering Moby-Dick. It's for the readers who wants to know, for example, where Corlears Hook is located or how far a league really is. These kinds of annotations can be a great help to the reader seeking to make sense of the many references in the novel. No, such notes are not necessary to the enjoyment of the text, in my opinion, but they are lovely in their way, a kind of color-coded poetry intended to help chart the Melvillean seas. 

Atmosphere at Second Hand

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. M.D.

I work as a manager, which many people see as a sucker's job. I can't say they're wrong. As a manager, your life is not your own.You are prey to the vicissitudes of fickle clients, temperamental workers, sociopath executives, bumbling vendors, and cutthroat competitors. Now, call yourself a "leader" (or, better yet, get someone else to call you one), and your pedigree improves by several levels on the instant. Alas, that distinction is mostly a conceit, as are the titles that often come with it (director, VP, SVP, COO, CEO). Whatever the epaulets they bear, leaders must keep in mind they tend to get their "atmosphere at second hand," as Melville says of the Commodore. Yes, sometimes they're the first to learn and decide critical things, but they're also sometimes the last to know, getting wind of them second or third hand (or however many hands you have on deck.)

The word "scuttlebutt" is still used in countless offices throughout the world, but most don't realize the term was invented on sailing ships. That is, potable water was stored in a cask, also called a butt, on deck for the crew. They put a hole in the cask so people could more easily draw water from it. You probably already know that "to scuttle" something means to "cut a hole into," usually for the purpose of sinking a boat or ship. The crew would spend idle moments around the scuttled butt having a drink, chatting, regaling and gossiping about others.  So, even today rumor-mongers spread scuttlebutt around the office. In my experience, these stories are sometimes true, often false, and most often some sort of unholy trinity of truth, error and spiteful or wishful conjecture.

But we digress. The point is that the captain often finds out things well after the sailors on the forecastle know. The wise leader does not "little suspect" this, as Melville says. He or she knows this fact right down to the toes and tries to get the best atmosphere he or she can. An occasional jaunt to the forecastle can't hurt. Let's call this Leadership Lesson 1 from The Whale.

Were Niagara But a Cataract of Sand

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? - MD

 ***

I was born in the city of Niagara Falls, on the U.S. side, and like to think of Melville standing on the unfenced precipice of the great cataract, caught up in the roar of it. He would have seen it back in the pure days before much of the flood was siphoned off by engineers bent on "preserving" the natural wonder and, more to the point, powering one of the great hydroelectric plants in the world. I envy that bastard Melville. Because he was right. The water's the thing.

Though I live 1,200 miles away, that Niagara River of my childhood still pervades my dreams. I dream the river is somehow sweeping me down Center Street toward the precipice of the falls. Or I dream of swan diving from the tops of tall chestnuts growing along the banks into the silver gray waters. Or of swimming under the surface of the river for a long, long way, trying to reach the Canadian shore from the U.S. side unseen, desperately trying to escape those who would spot, capture and imprison me. Though it's been decades since I lived there, I couldn't shake the Niagara if I wanted, anymore than I could drain my veins and expect to live.

I believe this is not a literary convention, symbol or archetype. Or, rather, it's not just those things. It's somehow baked in at a primal, visceral level. We shouldn't forget that. Whatever the scholars think, Melville did not write only on a symbolic, abstract plane. The water was far too real within him.

The Streets Take You Waterward

If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. 

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward...Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. 

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon...What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? - M.D.

Despite my previous posts about ornery exiles who take to ship, Ishmael is more than that. He is also the most medieval of protagonists: Everyman. Typical Melvillean paradox there. And deftly done. We know it with the very first paragraph, though he beautifully plays it out in the second and third.

First, he brings all of Manhattoes into the same family frame, and then pulls in the rest of humanity through our global attraction to water. Sure, water is the symbol of life and birth, and Ishmael is getting a fresh start of sorts, a rebirth on the ocean. But this is more than some cool Jungian archetyping. Water is the universal solvent, melting distinctions between Ishmael and ourselves. The ocean is in all our bloods, rather literally. We're sea creatures on fleshy stilts carrying the living oceans within us. We are drawn not only to that thing we need (a human lives just 3 days without water, it is said) but that thing we are.

So, Ishmael's madness and mysteries are ours as well. To discover his secrets and our own, we all must voyage.

Photo used with permission

Drizzly November In My Soul

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.- MD

You have to love a line like "drizzly November in my soul." Who hasn't felt like this at times? Depressed, hostile, generally pissed off. Melville has fun with it here, but you recognize an authenticity of emotion. Seldom has despondency been so entertainingly, succinctly portrayed.

It made me think of how we're awash in TV ads hawking remedies for depression or anxiety in the shadow of the Great Recession. How many ill-tempered, job-hungry Ishmaels out there even now holding cardboard signs on street corners, or holed up in cheap rentals or sleeping on the cramped, musty couches of family or friends? And then there are those not exiled from the workforce still afraid, stressed, alienated in mostly empty offices, suffering an internalized exile of the soul.

Me, I think of the Badlands of the insomnia, going interminable stretches of getting two to four hours of sleep each night. At times I've taken half a blue pill to cope yet wondered if I wouldn't be better served seeking to ship elsewhere, facing treacherous gray swells instead. 

My world seems so narrow by comparison with Ishmael's that I wonder if it's me or if we have, as a global tribe, lost certain critical competencies in the 21st century. Perhaps whole continents would still lay wild and undiscovered had our ancestors only had Prozac and been succored by screens and tubes.

Illustration from a 19th century book on Physiognomy: on left is "Utter despair" and on right is "Rage mixed with fear" 

And He Will Be a Wild Man

Ever wonder how "Call me Ishmael" got to be the most famous line in American lit? (Sure, there are some other contenders from the likes of Frost or Thoreau, but my money's on ole Herman Melville.)

Perhaps, you say, it's that evocative and fertile Biblical reference. You know, the whole Ishmael-illegitimate-and-exiled-son-of-Abraham-and-Hagar reference from Genesis: "And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren."
But how many Americans really remember who Ishmael was without a footnote? (Of course, there are about a billion and a half Muslims in the world who know perfectly well who Ishmael was, being one of the prophets).

Anyway, my theory is that the Biblical reference plays a minor role in the power of the line. I think people remember that line because they can. It's short, to the point and damn near conversational. And it's also intriguing and mysterious right off the bat.  It isn't someone named Maximillian saying, "Call me Max." This guy is not giving us his nickname so much as he's giving us some meaningful alias. He's acting familiar even as he's holding something back, a secret of some sort. That keeps us interested in this quirky guy. What's he got up his sleeve? Stay tuned.

Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness - Karel Dujardin

By Art Is Created That Great Leviathan

Although the first words of Moby Dick, or, The Whale are among the most famous in all literary history, they aren't actually first words. That is, of course, typical Melvillean paradox. Better get used to it. The novel actually begins with an Etymology ("Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School") and Extracts ("Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian").

Melville is having a bit of fun with us in regard to those subheads (better get used to that as well) but the Extracts are legit and good reading in themselves. Of course, they're not so good that I'm going to excerpt them all here (throughout this blog, you'll be able to link to the Gutenberg.org edition if you want to see the full text of anything). Let's stick to just one Extract that particularly hit home with me:

"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man." —OPENING SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN.  

In college, I had an odd acquaintance, perhaps even a friend of sorts, who would frequently quote Hobbes as saying that life is "nasty, brutish and short." He considered it witty, I think, but no less true for that. He was a haughty little guy, I thought at the time, though now I consider us both to have been just kids looking for toeholds in that vast academic rockface, crumbly in parts, solid in others, littered with liquor, drugs, lust, existential ice and the occasional heavy doses of sheer anarchy. You know, the good ole days. 

Only later did I realize that my comrade had been quoting Hobbes out of context. The old materialist had actually meant that without the Leviathan of governmental power, our lives are "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." That is, the State is a great monster, sure, but one that also protects and even redeems us. And so today, where the Tea Party sees the Leviathan as a Rapacious Blubbery Beast that needs a sharp harpoon to the head, Democrats see a Cetacean of Collectivism, a semi-mystical creature that pools the best of what we are into single redemptive power.

Meanwhile, the rest of us struggle with our ambivalence, both repulsed by and attracted to such Monsters. And it seems to me that's more than okay. Moby Dick was written for the likes of us.

"Destruction of Leviathan"- 1865 engraving by Gustave Doré.