A Sublime Uneventfulness, or No Path to the Civilized World

As this comes at the close of "Sounds" in Walden I will offer that I hear this in Melville.

All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in—only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale—a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow—no gate—no front-yard—and no path to the civilized world.

***

...turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun- set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner -- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.

Moby Dick, "The Mast-head"

Nothing Like Us Ever Was

Fragments Of A Lost Gnostic Poem Of The Twelfth Century

Found a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.

Indolence is heaven’s ally here,
And energy the child of hell:
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear
But brims the poisoned well.

-- Herman Melville


Let us allow the past to comment upon the hollowness of a suit and tie speaking to the necessity of mass killing and a triggering humility.


“But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.  That’s what makes America different.  That’s what makes us exceptional.  With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.”  -- Barack Obama, address to the nation on Syria, September 10, 2013

Let us praise the lies of stalking betterment:

"A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind to be raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire's quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” -- Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Let us study a time when atrocities came to pass out of sheer inanity; when only stinking piles of rotting youth could stop the laughter born of gnosis.

Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind (1920)
Carl Sandburg

“The past is a bucket of ashes.”

I

THE WOMAN named To-morrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil      
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.

II

The doors were cedar      
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
  We are the greatest city,
  the greatest nation:      
  nothing like us ever was.

The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
  where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
  We are the greatest city,      
  the greatest nation,
  nothing like us ever was.

III

It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
  a nation together,      
And paid singers to sing and women
  to warble: We are the greatest city,
    the greatest nation,
    nothing like us ever was.

And while the singers sang      
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
  there were rats and lizards who listened
  … and the only listeners left now      
  … are … the rats … and the lizards.

And there are black crows
crying, “Caw, caw,”
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest      
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
  We are the greatest city,      
  the greatest nation:
  nothing like us ever was.

The only singers now are crows crying, “Caw, caw,”
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are … the rats … and the lizards.      

IV

The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood      
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts      
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.      

Except By Magicians

Audio recording of chapter one of Moby Dick, "Loomings".

***

When I began to read it, I did not believe it.  That first chapter was too good to be true.  Books beginning at that elevation cannot be maintained there except by magicians; and how often do we meet writers of that kind?  Moreover, I had come to it late, for I had ridiculed at least one rare and exciting rumor about it.

H. Tomlinson (reprinted in Parker, H., The Recognition of Herman Melville)

***

My peace and my supper are my reward, my dear Hawthorne. So your joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter is not my reward for my ditcher's work with that book, but is the good goddess's bonus over and above what was stipulated -- for for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory -- the world?

Melville to Hawthore

***

(image by Farel Dalrymple)

   Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. 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. There is nothing surprising in this. 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....

One's Own Possibilities

Yet [Walter] Benjamin’s letters are instructive also in the way in which they show how political commitments are something a bourgeoisie makes for itself, for its own good and its psychic well-being. Maimed as well as privileged, it has an interest in lifting the burdens of exploitation it, too, necessarily suffers (and not only, as at the present time, when capitalism devours its own bourgeois children). Benjamin makes the point in his arguments with Scholem. His Communism is not something chosen independently and somehow added onto his writing and intellectual life, capable, as Adorno thought, of deflecting it in wasteful or deplorable directions. The political choice is motivated by the writing itself: ‘a victorious party’ – the German Bolshevist party – ‘might make it possible for me to write differently.’ This is the crucial issue: under what conditions might a truly ‘literary’ life be lived, in what kind of situation might the vocation of the intellectual be most fully realised?


The critique of capitalism is for Benjamin first and foremost a critique of how it affects his own possibilities for writing, the commitment to socialism first and foremost a kind of class interest for the bourgeois intellectual, who suffers under the market and yearns to make fuller use of his intellectual energies. This is why classical right-wing talk about the ressentiment of intellectuals is ignorant and misplaced, and the familiar counter-revolutionary analysis of their role in revolutions and their lust for power an ingenious misconception. True intellectuals want to write, and their deeper political reflections turn on the obstacles a given social system places in the way of that vocation. Hence Benjamin’s allegiance to Brecht, whose ‘essays are the first ... that I champion as a critic without (public) reservation. This is because part of my development in the last few years came about in confrontation with them, and because they, more rigorously than any others, give an insight into the intellectual context in which the work of people like myself is conducted in this country.’


from "An Unfinished Project" by Fredric Jameson, a review essay on the correspondence of Benjamin with Adorno and Scholem.

One of Benjamin's great essays: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936)

***

With no son of man do I stand upon any etiquette or ceremony, except the Christian ones of charity and honesty. I am told, my fellow-man, that there is an aristocracy of the brain. Some men have boldly advocated and asserted it. Schiller seems to have done so, though I don't know much about him. At any rate, it is true that there have been those who, while earnest in behalf of political equality, will accept the intellectual estates. And I can well perceive, I think, how a man of superior mind can, by its intense cultivation, bring himself, as it were, into a certain spontaneous aristocracy of feeling, -- exceedingly nice and fastidious, -- similar to that which, in an English Howard, conveys a torpedo-fish thrill at the slightest contact with a social plebian. So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth -- and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughingstocks? Why so? Truth is ridiculous to men. Thus easily in my room here do I, conceited and garrulous, reverse the test of my Lord Shaftesbury.

It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind -- in the mass. But not so. -- But it's an endless sermon, -- no more of it. I began by saying that the reason I have not been to Lenox is this, -- in the evening I feel completely done up, as the phrase is, and incapable of the long jolting to get to your house and back. In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my "Whale" while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now, -- I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, -- that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me, -- I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

Melville in a well-known and much-cited letter to Hawthorne (Juneteenth, 1851)

***

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur'd Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm'd with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis'd it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. I continu'd this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag'd in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix'd in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire.

from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (written between 1771 and 1790)

***


I HAVE been considering (my Friend!) what your Fancy was, to express such a surprize as you did the other day, when I happen’d to speak to you in commendation of Raillery. Was it possible you shou’d suppose me so grave a Man, as to dislike all Conversation of[60] this kind? Or were you afraid I shou’d not stand the trial, if you put me to it, by making the experiment in my own Case?

I must confess, you had reason enough for your Caution; if you cou’d imagine me at the bottom so true a Zealot, as not to bear the least Raillery on my own Opinions. ’Tis the Case, I know, with many. Whatever they think grave or solemn, they suppose must never be treated out of a grave and solemn way: Tho what Another thinks so, they can be contented to treat otherwise; and are forward to try the Edge of Ridicule against any Opinions besides their own.

The Question is, Whether this be fair or no? and, Whether it be not just and reasonable, to make as free with our own Opinions, as with those of other People? For to be sparing in this case, may be look’d upon as a piece of Selfishness. We may be charg’d perhaps with wilful Ignorance and blind Idolatry, for having taken Opinions upon Trust, and consecrated in our-selves certain Idol-Notions, which we will never suffer to be unveil’d, or seen in open light. They may perhaps be Monsters, and not Divinitys, or Sacred Truths, which are kept thus choicely, in some dark Corner of our Minds: The Specters may impose on us, whilst we re[61]fuse to turn ’em every way, and view their Shapes and Complexions in every light. For that which can be shewn only in a certain Light, is questionable. Truth, ’tis suppos’d, may bear all Lights: and one of those principal Lights or natural Mediums, by which Things are to be view’d, in order to a thorow Recognition, is Ridicule it-self, or that Manner of Proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just Raillery in any Subject. So much, at least, is allow’d by All, who at any time appeal to this Criterion. The gravest Gentlemen, even in the gravest Subjects, are suppos’d to acknowledg this: and can have no Right, ’tis thought, to deny others the Freedom of this Appeal; whilst they are free to censure like other Men, and in their gravest Arguments make no scruple to ask, Is it not Ridiculous?

from Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1737), "An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour," Lord Shaftesbury.

All Hail the Butchers

The history of the earth! doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other? We observe avarice, rapine, and murder, equally prevailing in all parts. History perpetually tells us of millions of people abandoned to the caprice of the maddest princes, and of whole nations devoted to the blind fury of tyrants. Countries destroyed; nations alternately buried in ruins by other nations; some parts of the world beautifully cultivated, returned again to the pristine state; the fruits of ages of industry, the toil of thousands in a short time destroyed by a few! If one corner breathes in peace for a few years, it is, in turn subjected, torn, and levelled; one would almost believe the principles of action in man, considered as the first agent of this planet, to be poisoned in their most essential parts. We certainly are not that class of beings which we vainly think ourselves to be; man an animal of prey, seems to have rapine and the love of bloodshed implanted in his heart; nay, to hold it the most honourable occupation in society: we never speak of a hero of mathematics, a hero of knowledge of humanity; no, this illustrious appellation is reserved for the most successful butchers of the world.

Letters from an American Farmer by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (Letter IX)

***

   Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor.

Moby Dick, "The Advocate"

Close Your Eyes

So, I was thinking, and have been thinking for some time, that the eyes are the true tyrants of our minds and really of our worldly conceptions.

I thought, the blind cannot see color and so there is no difference but that which we discover by other senses.

Are the other senses more liberal?

I thought then of that parable of the blind man and the elephant and realized that blindness is primarily a pejorative figural state. You do not perceive the whole if you only are aware of the parts.

However, this a truth that our mind under the tyranny of our very eyes wishes to subvert. "Seeing is believing" after all.

Greater and greater resources are spent on new ways to see--what is the large Hadron collider but another way to see; or the Hubble telescope; or the mass spectrometer.

We believe ever more desperately that we will FIND the truth in a new vision.

I think this is a deep error.

The elephant is not only a trunk, not only a tail, not only a massive back, not only a "pillared" leg. Melville makes this point of the whale as well...we cut it up, we divide it, we suck out its oil. We make use of it and do not know it; cannot know it.

The "Blind" man and the elephant is NOT a tale about actual blindness but rather about the easy reliance on perceptual frames that limit understanding.

I come more and more to believe that a literal blindness might actually be a kind of salvation.

Close your eyes to truly see.

Ah, Melville--Ye Knowest My Heart

Fragments Of A Lost Gnostic Poem Of The Twelfth Century

Found a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.

Indolence is heaven’s ally here,
And energy the child of hell:
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear
But brims the poisoned well.

Numerous Cabalistical Contrivances

I know my friends Meredith and Dimitri are missing the Melville fix!

From Chapter 118, The Quadrant, Ahab examining a piece of technology:

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:"Foolish toy! babies'plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores,and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; THESE shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

The Fastness of the Idea of Property

I'm going to have to admit that I never really understood the phrase "to play fast and loose". I mean I understood it as a phrase and not in its parts. It means to be deceitful, primarily, or unreliable. But I simply thought one played "fast" in a manner akin to "fast cars and loose..." well, you know (hey, what do you want from a guy who thought ELO sang about "space magic" rather than "strange magic").

Anyway to the point, more from Melville! Chapter 89, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, is a disquisition on the law of property, to wit:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

Seems simple, straight-forward...makes sense even! However,

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

And then Ishmael goes on to comment, not really volumes, be enough to be exemplary of the issue: property as an idea has you fast!

...these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on.

Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish?

***

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

Literature as Assay

Stories are entertainment to us, almost invariably ONLY entertainment. Our books--published in enormous numbers as only America (and England, our mother) can--have little depth and significance...they are, after all, now written by folks who have been raised with television and video games which seems to have predicated the resurgence of the comic book in "long form" (perhaps a separate post is warranted on pictorial art--cave-art story-telling) which seems to this former reader of The Fantastic Four a little bit more about marketing than "art".

I am aware that this is a very general statement, that there are always good, deep, significant works of literature written and published annually. What I'm really getting at is that the business or industry of book publishing has now made the possibility of reading one of those important titles hard come by. We promote, market and sell "sure things" and frequently the really creative and important works are not of this type--and in fact many would say "strangeness" characterizes our deepest works of art.

Yes, there's a lot to argue about here. Classics are "institutional" and so suspect (chicken/egg arguments abound). Classics are patriarchal and promote the ideas of a small group of "power elite"--even the "strangest" titles can be shoe-horned into this category with a specific type of reading.

I'm saying that the field where the seeds of art are sown are NOT conducive to great depth. Our industries have not only literally stripped away our topsoil but have also done so figuratively...we have no fertile ground to induce roots to deep growth.

What prompted this was trying to characterize my own habits of reading. Not to say mine are better than anyone else's but rather to try to find out what attracts my attention and why these things are somewhat "classic" yet marginal at the same time.

In doing this I've also discovered this same "industrial" bias in the use of the very margins of what was once strange. All things have become "means" to aid in the production of predictable ends--and so, no strangeness. "Creativity" is only allowed if in service to the end. Creative film-makers, for example, are such within the boundaries of profit if they want to continue to make movies with a particular kind of distribution. (There's more on this, too--but later, maybe).

Okay, I've been reading (dipping in and out of) the works of Susan Howe and she is very much a poet-scholar-thinker "on the margins" and in the margins. One of her pieces is "Melville's Marginalia" and she speaks of her reason for following Melville's lead through the books he read, "I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trails he follows through the words of others..." I think that this is really the way I like to "follow trails" in reading. Howe, though, not only follows but in the process creates a new work and in that new work there is interpretation of the past in a way that casts light on the human condition...on what it means to read, write, think--to be in language.

Finally, what prompted this note, is that there was a doctoral dissertation (this is what prompted Howe, "a library cormorant"), by Wilson Walker Cowan from 1965 where this young student searched out as many of the books in Melville's library that he could and copied out (by hand, of course) the marginal and inter-textual notes that he determined were in Melville's hand as well as the text that the notes were made on/in. A labor of love in a time when this research was indeed LABOR and was indeed born of love or kinship.

And today, after spending some time yesterday searching for extant copies of this dissertation outside of libraries, I discovered an industrial academic project based on Cowan's work. Melville's Marginalia is now a product. It's editor (project manager) describes being a graduate student under noted Melville scholar (production manager) Hershel Parker:

“Hershel sent me far and wide to fulfill research tasks on Melville—the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Harvard University, the Boston Public Library. Along with giving me specific tasks to perform for his biographical research, he would also suggest leads that I could pursue for publication…. It was not long before I started making significant discoveries of my own and began publishing the results under his guidance. His scholarly curiosity and enthusiasm were contagious, and I was quickly sucked into the Melville vortex,” he says.

[Note: the interview with this project manager is published via the office of communications and marketing at the U of Delaware.]

And so Melville's mind, his marginalia, are mined for the production line of industrial academia...not for love or kinship...but for the means of "making discoveries" in the service of "publishing results" in the manner of reporting on chemical assays.

The Monkey-Rope, or the Human Condition

The Pequod has killed a whale and is setting about the business of taking strips of blubber from around the carcass (something akin to peeling around an orange). Qeequeg is the harpooneer to whom Ishmael is referring:

But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole tensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him...

Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale's back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship's steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist.

It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering- while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him- still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.

Are You a Believer in Ghosts, My Friend?

There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vulturism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.

Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabout: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!

Thus, while in the life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?

Chapter 69, The Funeral

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The world is wrapped up tight within us. And yet towards externalities are we driven--do we drive ourselves. Imagination sets us moving; ambition paves the way; we set our sites and embark.

Imagination is thinking is seeing. Seeing is believing (though Thomas, wisely, doubts). Doubting is seeing something else.

If so, what is the imagined self?

Melville's Ishmael, in the chapter Nightgown: "Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part."

Vision is light.
Light is vision.

Congenial to our dust and less our essence.

Ishmael, elsewhere, in The Mast-Head (look-out): ..."There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you..."

"...but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;"

"There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror."

Breathe that in; close your enslaving eyes and be more attuned while less attentive.