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.