More Thoughts While Reading Moby Dick…

Is Ahab a tragic character or an ironic one?  Best to be neither, I think.

Oh, how the stubbornness of bad ideas wear me down. Living with too much faith in reason only means you are more likely to be burdened by what fails it.  Nothing quite as noble as chaos, I don’t mean that; but dirty, tortured fragments of broken experience that cannot be made to fit together.  Some parts never become a part of a whole because they didn’t come from a whole to begin with.

But, to quote Cicero – or is it Terence? – Where there is life, there is hope, and I believe both life and hope exist in eternity, from whence it begins unknown, to where it will forever plunge forward beyond nothingness.  There is no beginning, middle, and end, so why plan as such?

Perhaps the best way to get from A to B is to abandon both altogether.  What would happen if you just started each day with only a little nudge, a gentle shove toward some direction…you would end up somewhere, right?

Maybe the best way to be heard is to say nothing at all.  That strikes me as a Way of the Path.  And suppose the Zen masters do have it right.  I can imagine it.  Let the world whorl around you and see what gathers in its wake.  Is that what it is?

In short, the best way to deal with absurdity is to shrug.  Trust that the broken pieces settle into a pattern, if not a whole, and speak fairly.  Think and live freely and answers will open themselves.  Am  I right or am I wrong?

As I ponder this, I am going back to Moby Dick.  A story of well-reasoned madness and the nasty outcomes of chasing one’s dangerous obsessions.  But it also is a story of wholeness, one in which the pieces do come together and complete a story, speaking plainly and fairly.  What a great story it is!

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Reading Moby Dick

Title page of the first edition of Moby-Dick, 1851. 

Moby Dick is keeping me up at night, and, as I’ll explain soon, I think it kept me up once long ago with fear for what it is doing now with pleasure.  Moby Dick is great fun to read and this short post is all about my first direct experience with the book.

As I am reading this book, I recall a very distant and yet very distinct memory of Moby Dick.  It is so visceral and real that it might even be part of a childhood dream, actually a childhood nightmare.

I remember a story of a ship repeatedly being attacked by a whale.  The whale surfaces frequently and each time raises with it a dread that only a very young boy could experience.  I believe this is an old film — maybe even a cartoon — that has stuck with me, but I have searched the internet for something that might fit my memory and I cannot find it.  One characteristic of this memory is seeing the ship from the perspective of the whale.  The whale appears and we ride with him as he builds speed to ram the ship…this is the image that left its mark and taunts me now.   What was it?

I don’t know how my first memories of this whale story ends.  Probably didn’t end well.  Pirates, whales, and crocodiles freaked me out when I was a boy.  Too much Disney, I think.  Whatever it was, it left me looking for more comfort than I could get from my flannel pajamas.  And now, many years later, I am still spooked.

But back to today and Moby Dick.

Earlier this summer I wrote about The Bedford Incident, for example, and it occurs to me now that The Bedford Incident in many ways is a Cold War era retelling of the Moby Dick story.  I’ll have to go back and look at what I said about The Bedford Incident again.

I was surprised when a friend saw my copy of Moby Dick and asked me to read to her.  I am only aware of one book this person has read — V. C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic — so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  But she insisted that I read on, even stopping me and asking me to re-read passages she found especially interesting.  So I read and read, annotating when I thought I should, and found the experience an unexpected treat.  Until now I don’t think I would have thought Moby Dick the best place to start if one were looking to pique the literary interests of a young woman from Iowa.  Who knew?

And for myself, I love the overlapping themes and the almost progressively modern tone of the novel.  I like this historical vignettes, too.  A guy can learn something about sea life, but one should be cautious about putting too much stock in the story’s cetological authority.  At times Moby Dick is poetic and lyrical, other times directly modernist, a true predecessor of later great American novels.  This is fun to experience.  And I have that almost uncanny experience of being frightened again by a memory I cannot pin down, too.

So of course I am up at night.  I am reading…I am reading Moby Dick!  And I am pausing now only to praise Moby Dick and maybe brag some.  (I feel a bit smug about reading it.)  I thought I would share a little now and share more later.

Related articles

• The Bedford Incident (1965) (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)
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I Am Going to Write a Book

Simon Newcomb

I am going to write a book.  Of course a few details are a bit obscure.  Fiction?  Non-Fiction?  Shall I write about whales?  What about a man and a whale?  Perhaps I will write about my exciting career.  Yes, maybe.  I could call it “Death of a Salesman,” but that seems to pessimistic and familiar.  Hasn’t it been done?

And I don’t know how long my book will be, but I suppose that’s the way most good books begin, especially books written by first-timers.  So I’ll just set a deadline.  It is an election year so let’s say I have a working draft complete by election day, five months from now.  We will see what we have then.  Perhaps my “book” will be a mere 15 pages long.  We’ll see.

Today feels like a good day to start a book anyway…or to at least start planning to start a book.  Today marks the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.  If I don’t start my book, it is very difficult to find any other cosmic significance in that event.  Rare solar-planetary events deserve some sort of significant context.  Seeing none with Venus today, I shall grant it some significance.

(It is important to note, however, that the transit of Venus is the event that first gave astronomers an opportunity to measure the real distance between the Earth and the Sun.  I’m not sure how they did it, but I think Edmund Halley, of Halley’s Comet fame, got the first accurate calculations down.  Don’t quote me on that.  I might be wrong, however I don’t have time to look up no silly facts right now.)

Other than giving the Transit of Venus some significance, the only other certainty is my patron.  I shall need a patron.  There should be nothing arbitrary about this, nothing whatsoever.  We have five months.  A nice even number.  I think an equally even $500,000 should sufficiently match my blossoming talent.  Being that this might be a somewhat quixotic literary crusade, I’ll knock off 10% and find a way to make $450,000 work.

So let’s get to work!  What shall I do next?

(NB:  It looks like my recollection of astronomy lessons is a bit flawed.  Some character named Simon Newcomb – I will be sure to find him space on my dedication page – first calculated the distance between the Earth and the Sun using the Transit of Venus to verify his data.  God, not even five minutes into my venture and I am already stumbling over mistakes.  Best stay to fiction.  Perhaps a drama.  When was the last time you read a good tragedy?)

Related articles

• Evening Star’s rare path across the sun (newscientist.com)
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Late Night in Linden Hills

Windy Night

Just a quick post before signing off and going to sleep.  It is a perfectly restful night even if the wind is still strong and busy.  The wind rushing through the trees at night is beautiful and calming, and behind it I hear sounds from the lake coming up  in the darkness, both waves washing ashore and the clinking of sailboat rigging.  Here inside all the windows are open and a cool summertime breeze blows through my rooms.

I absently read an old book about a small south Pacific Island and this fits the night perfectly.  It is so quiet and comfortable that I easily get distracted and catch myself daydreaming.  When I look around my room, lit only by my reading light and several small lamps in another room, one could easily imagine he were sitting alone 20 years ago, 40 years ago, or even more distant in time.  I like that.  Even the sounds of the city are lost in on this breezy night.

I have a soft wool throw draped over my lap and a few firm pillows against my back.  I could turn off the light here and now and let myself nap and not be happier.

I like nights like this.