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.