Do You Want to Know The World?

 I subscribe to an email newsletter from Lapham’s Quarterly. Usually, it has something to pique my interest. 

I am also interested in Melville and Moby Dick. 

Today, the two interests intertwined with Unspeakable Terrors, Unalterable Threads (Lapham’s Quarterly). 

Particularly relevant was this:

One of the reasons Moby Dick seems so modern in comparison to, say, Hawthorne’s novels is that its unpredictable swerves appear to offer a glimpse of the ever-shifting contradictions inside Melville’s inexorable mind. For a time, perhaps, he saw the Whale purely in symbolic terms, as embodying fate, or power, or evil, or the world’s indifference to hu­manity. But almost instantaneously the thought came to him that the Whale was also meaningful as a living being with certain physical char­acteristics and habits and relationships. Then he realized that the Whale also lit the world’s drawing rooms, and influenced the arts, and spurred adventures. Do you want to understand the world? No single narrative or perspective will ever steer you right. 

This struck me very on point with what I want to do with "Chasing Ashes." So I save it here for remembrance and inspiration. 

That balancing, that interweaving, that aspiration to capture a unified whole, mattered much more to Melville than moving his plot forward. His critics’ attachment to straightforward narrative reflected an assump­tion that their countrymen would continue to march through time confidently, successfully, as pioneers, conquerors, masters. But Humboldtian science could have a critical, political edge, juxtaposing the humility of interconnection with the hubris of colonial advance. “Progress” al­ways doubles back on itself; the future is interwoven with the past.

What a strange idea of narrative prose capturing a unified whole than moving its plot forward!

 And some thoughts for Ahab:

Ahab’s defiance, which drives all the action of the novel, may seem as timeless as the whale’s, but it is also meant to offset one specific malevo­lent act, the central trauma of his own personal past. Moby Dick took his leg; he must take Moby Dick’s life. What forces can offset trauma? Perhaps the old rituals of community—the solidarity of shared risk—a squeeze of the hand all around. Perhaps the embrace of difference—the transcendence of our inclination toward endless subdivision. Perhaps a breath of salt air, bright sun, the rolling of the ocean, the curve of a welcoming bay. Perhaps the recognition that we are all inevitably intertwined, each with the other, all with the world. Perhaps the adjustment of our “conceit of attainable felicity,” so that it’s not about recovery but rather “the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.” Captain Ahab, though, could no longer believe in the concrete joys of human existence. There could be no compensation, for him, but re­venge. “Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?...So far gone am I in the dark side of the earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.”

 

Still, as Lewis Mumford understood, more deeply than many of his contem­poraries, Ahab was not just a tragic figure. His defiance was also heroic, for we are all traumatized to some extent, and not to fight back against “the mystery of evil and the accidental malice of the universe” is to risk becoming the universe’s pawn. “Ahab is the spirit of man,” Mumford wrote, “small and feeble, but purposive, that pits its puniness...and its purpose against the black senselessness of power.” We humans may go humbly about our business—we may seek a simple life—“a happy mar­riage, livelihood, offspring, social companionship, and cheer”—and yet, regardless of our worthiness, we will eventually meet with “illness, ac­cident, treachery, jealousy, vengefulness, dull frustration.” To Mumford, Moby Dick belonged at the heart of the Western canon, because ulti­mately all of Western history, “in mind and action, in the philosophy and art of the Greeks, in the organization and technique of the Romans, in the precise skills and unceasing spiritual quests of the modern man, is a tale of this effort to combat the whale—to ward off his blows, to coun­teract his aimless thrusts, to create a purpose that will offset the empty malice of Moby Dick.” 

We offset meaninglessness through the construction of meaning. Ishmael may have been more skilled at interpretation than Ahab, but Ahab, an accomplished cetologist himself, who knew all there was to know about whales and simultaneously recognized their inscrutability, made a lasting contribution. Even as he lost faith in everything, he kept up his pursuit. “Without the belief in such a purpose,” as Mumford put it, “life is neither bearable nor significant: unless one is polarized by these central human energies and aims, one tends to become absorbed in Moby Dick himself, and becoming part of his being, can only maim, slay, butcher.”

Seems my original ideas were onto something.

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