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