Lowerings, Blood, Sharks & Whales

Yes, I am still slowly reading Moby-Dick and waiting for winter to salvage its lackluster performance.

In recent chapters, I was clearly in territory that Cormac McCarthy finds entertaining. Anyone who's read Blood Meridian will recognize a kinship with the gorey imagery from Chapter 61 "Stubb Kills a Whale":

     The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman [Stubb]....
     And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his 'flurry,' the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, over-wrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperiled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
     And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
     'He's dead, Mr. Stubb,' said Tashtego.
     'Yes; both pipes smoked out!' and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made."

This brings to mind the heinous scenes of Apaches murdering and raping the cavalry and the very subtitle of Blood Meridian: The Evening Redness of the West. It's really one of Cormac's more infamous passages. Watch out here it comes:

"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braid spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one who horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone landing of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant."

That central phrase, "death hilarious," owes to my mind a debt of inspiration to Melville, who some pages later when, with the dead sperm whale secured to the Pequod, writes, "...sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea."

Wherefore all this bloodshed and the celebratory, even orgiastic language to detail it? Is it simply some gratuitous male defect? Some savagery or primitive shadow on the soul? No. I suspect both a stark reminder of the more sinister forces at work in the world and an unbridled love of language, run amok. The illusion of order that we live upon rests on a foundation of others' blood and misery.

The first slaughtered whale (the corpse made by Stubb) hangs alongside the Pequod, meat-hooked in economical pieces for some 20 chapters before its spermacetti oil is collected and the unusable parts are dropped to the briny dark. The second sperm whale they kill appears in Ch. 81 when all three mates give chase to an old and maimed bull:

As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

Just as the whales of Melville's era had to die to provide the goods he outlines (both literally and sarcastically), our hands are no cleaner in attaining the easy life of first world comforts most of us enjoy. Of course we know that. But learning about where the metals needed to make the chips in our cell phones and smart devices originate or the stories of the slave children assembling our MacBooks overseas deserve more than the occasional buried news item or wringing of hands by a guilt-stricken First Worlder. They need to be stated loudly, perhaps even in exaggerated tones, set to music, given a close-up. Specificity and witness....

...I feel like I've lost my thread. Well, while I am not necessarily laughing along to Death Hilarious in Cormac and Melville, I am entertained by the fireworks of the language. I find it rare and powerful and even beautiful. And it's a convincing argument--at least while caught in the boiling waters of the sentences themselves--against Romanticism. I wonder who will write as forcefully about the horrors we continue to render on ourselves and on the rest of the world today.

The Mast-Head

I am reading Moby-Dick again (third full voyage, though it's been nearly five years since the last). This morning, I came across this gem in "The Mast-Head" chapter, where Ishmael explains the dreamy mindset one gets in the lofty heights above both ship and sea. A harpooneer scoffs that whales "are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here."  Ishmael's response follows:

Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; 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; takes the mystic ocean as his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.  In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wickliff's sprinkled Pantheist ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

First of all, that's some marvelous praise of indolence! And it's a fantastic couple of sentences, as mesmerizing in their imagery and language as the scene they seek to render. This passage reminds me of the ideas in John Haines' essay "The Creative Spirit in Art and Literature," which I have also recently re-read. In the essay (which appears in his collection Fables and Distances), Haines claims that in nature lie all our original artistic and literary forms. He also states that time spent in close observation of the natural world can translate into rich imaginative metaphor, creative leaps.

That's what Ishmael (Melville) is doing here, allowing the sea to become the externalized world of thought within the speaker, with actual whales that are swimming in the dark water transformed as metaphorized thoughts scuddling through the subconscious. At the same time, we can't overlook what is so obvious--namely that it is the powerful, wide, encompassing ocean itself that transports the idle watchman into his state of reverie in the first place. Nature here is both inspiration and form (in this case, extended metaphor). This isn't exactly earth-shattering stuff, but I find it a useful reminder. And I think the passage from Moby-Dick, like so much of the novel, is beautifully written.

(Side note fantasy: I've just concluded my fourth run through the HBO series Deadwood, which to my mind remains the greatest artistic achievement in television, and I see that David Milch's next project, Luck (directed by Michael Mann), premieres tomorrow night. Imagine what Milch could do with Moby-Dick, especially if he enlisted Ian McShane as "moody stricken Ahab...with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.")

Of course, paying attention to the actual world is always a good idea. Out skiing through the woods behind my house today, I had no such revelation as Ishmael finds in the crow's nest, but I was pleased to find a number of tracks in the fresh snow--human (previous skiers, a snowmobile, bootprints), deer, raccoon, mouse or vole, something I couldn't identify, and a few birds. Though I never encountered one of these creatures, the records of their presence were scribbled all over the landscape. Similar to the "half-seen...uprising fin" in Melville's passage, these strings of tracks and little mouse-burrowed chutes remind me of the flitting paths my own mind followed as I skied, shifting attention from the physical realities of my heart beat and breath to the sounds of birds to thoughts of a poem I am writing to wondering about lunch and how badass it might be if David Milch ever were to adapt Moby-Dick into an HBO series.