way northeastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her
keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall, tapering masts
mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And
still, at wide intervals, in the silvery night, that lonely, alluring
jet would be seen.
"But one transparent-blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the
long burnished sunglade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across
them, enjoining secrecy; when all the slippered waves whispered together
as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a
strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the mainmast head.
"In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for
a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and
silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet, is this Moby Dick?
thought Daggoo----"
The boats were lowered and pulled to the scene.
"In the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost
forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the
most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to
mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a
glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms
radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of
anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.
No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either
sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly,
formless, chance-like apparition of life. And with a low sucking it
slowly disappeared again."
The following chapters, with their account of whale-hunts, the killing,
the stripping, the cutting up, are magnificent records of actual
happening. Then comes the queer tale of the meeting of the _Jereboam_, a
whaler met at sea, all of whose men were under the domination of a
religious maniac, one of the ship's hands. There are detailed
descriptions of the actual taking of the sperm oil from a whale's head.
Dilating on the smallness of the brain of a sperm whale, Melville
significantly remarks--"for I believe that much of a man's character
will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine
than your skull, whoever you are--" And of the whale, he adds:
"For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his
brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative
magnitude of his spinal cord."
In among the rush of terrible, awful hunts come touches of pure beauty.
"As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any
sort, nay not so much as a ripple or a thought, came up from its depths;
what landsman would have thought that beneath all that silence and
placidity the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
agony!"
Perhaps the most stupendous chapter is the one called _The Grand
Armada_, at the beginning of Volume III. The _Pequod_ was drawing
through the Sunda Straits towards Java when she came upon a vast host of
sperm whales. "Broad on both bows, at a distance of two or three miles,
and forming a great semi-circle embracing one-half of the level horizon,
a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
noonday air." Chasing this great herd, past the Straits of Sunda,
themselves chased by Javan pirates, the whalers race on. Then the boats
are lowered. At last that curious state of inert irresolution came over
the whalers, when they were, as the seamen say, gallied. Instead of
forging ahead in huge martial array they swam violently hither and
thither, a surging sea of whales, no longer moving on. Starbuck's boat,
made fast to a whale, is towed in amongst this howling Leviathan chaos.
In mad career it cockles through the boiling surge of monsters, till it
is brought into a clear lagoon in the very centre of the vast, mad,
terrified herd. There a sleek, pure calm reigns. There the females swam
in peace, and the young whales came snuffing tamely at the boat, like
dogs. And there the astonished seamen watched the love-making of these
amazing monsters, mammals, now in rut far down in the sea.--"But far
beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger
world met our eyes, as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in these
watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales,
and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.
The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly
transparent; and as human infants while sucking will calmly and fixedly
gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at a time;
and while yet drawing moral nourishment, be still spiritually feasting
upon some unearthly reminiscence, even so did the young of these whales
seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of
gulf-weed in their newborn sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers
also seemed quietly eyeing us.--Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas
seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan
amours in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of
consternation and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the
centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea,
serenely revelled in dalliance and delight----"
There is something really overwhelming in these whale-hunts, almost
superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life, more terrific than human
activity. The same with the chapter on ambergris: it is so curious, so
real, yet so unearthly. And again in the chapter called _The
Cassock_--surely the oldest piece of phallicism in all the world's
literature.
After this comes the amazing account of the Try-works, when the ship is
turned into the sooty, oily factory in mid-ocean, and the oil is
extracted from the blubber. In the night of the red furnace burning on
deck, at sea, Melville has his startling experience of reversion. He is
at the helm, but has turned to watch the fire: when suddenly he feels
the ship rushing backward from him, in mystic reversion.--"Uppermost was
the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so
much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern. A
stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my
hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller
was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! What is the
matter with me, I thought!"
This dream-experience is a real soul-experience. He ends with an
injunction to all men, not to gaze on the red fire when its redness
makes all things look ghastly. It seems to him that his gazing on fire
has evoked this horror of reversion, undoing.
Perhaps it had. He was water-born.
After some unhealthy work on the ship, Queequeg caught a fever and was
like to die.--"How he wasted and wasted in those few, long-lingering
days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and
tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew
sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they
took on a strangeness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you
there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in
him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water,
which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and
rounding, like the circles of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named
would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage----"
But Queequeg did not die--and the _Pequod_ emerges from the Eastern
Straits, into the full Pacific. "To my meditative Magian rover, this
serene Pacific once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption.
It rolls the utmost waters of the world----"
In this Pacific the fights go on.--"It was far down the afternoon; and
when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done; and floating in
the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both died stilly together;
then such a sweetness and such a plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons
curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from
the deep green convent valleys of the Manila isles, the Spanish
land-breeze had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.--Soothed
again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who has steered off from
the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil
boat. For that strange spectacle, observable in all sperm whales
dying--the turning of the head sunwards, and so expiring--that strange
spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed
wondrousness unknown before. 'He turns and turns him to it; how slowly,
but how steadfastly, his home-rendering and invoking brow, with his last
dying motions. He too worships fire;...'"
So Ahab soliloquizes: and so the warm-blooded whale turns for the last
time to the sun, which begot him in the waters.
But as we see in the next chapter, it is the Thunder-fire which Ahab
really worships: that living sundering fire of which he bears the brand,
from head to foot.--It is storm, the electric storm of the _Pequod_,
when the corposants burn in high, tapering flames of supernatural pallor
upon the masthead, and when the compass is reversed. After this all is
fatality. Life itself seems mystically reversed. In these hunters of
Moby Dick there is nothing but madness and possession. The captain,
Ahab, moves hand in hand with the poor imbecile negro boy, Pip, who has
been so cruelly demented, left swimming alone in the vast sea. It is the
imbecile child of the sun hand in hand with the northern monomaniac,
captain and master.
The voyage surges on. They meet one ship, then another. It is all
ordinary day-routine, and yet all is a tension of pure madness and
horror, the approaching horror of the last fight. "Hither and thither,
on high, glided the snow-white wings of small unspecked birds; these
were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the
deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans,
sword-fish and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous
thinkings of the masculine sea--" On this day Ahab confesses his
weariness, the weariness of his burden. "But do I look very old, so
very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, and bowed, and humped, as
though I were Adam staggering beneath the piled centuries since
Paradise--" It is the Gethsemane of Ahab, before the last fight: the
Gethsemane of the human soul seeking the last self-conquest, the last
attainment of extended consciousness--infinite consciousness.
At last they sight the whale. Ahab sees him from his hoisted perch at
the masthead.--"From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so
ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his high, sparkling hump, and
regularly jetting his silent spout into the air."
The boats are lowered, to draw near the white whale. "At length the
breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspectful prey that his
entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if
an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest,
fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast involved wrinkles of the slightly
projecting head, beyond. Before it, far out on the soft, Turkish rugged
waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead,
a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the
blue waters interchangeably flowed over the moving valley of his steady
wake; and on either side bright bubbles arose and danced by his side.
But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl
softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like
to some flagstaff rising from the pointed hull of an argosy, the tall
but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's
back; and at intervals one of the clouds of soft-toed fowls hovering,
and to and fro shimmering like a canopy over the fish, silently perched
and rocked on this pole, the long tail-feathers streaming like pennons.
"A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested
the gliding whale--"
The fight with the whale is too wonderful, and too awful, to be quoted
apart from the book. It lasted three days. The fearful sight, on the
third day, of the torn body of the Parsee harpooner, lost on the
previous day, now seen lashed on to the flanks of the white whale by the
tangle of harpoon lines, has a mystic dream-horror. The awful and
infuriated whale turns upon the ship, symbol of this civilized world of
ours. He smites her with a fearful shock. And a few minutes later, from
the last of the fighting whale boats comes the cry: "'The ship! Great
God, where is the ship?'--Soon they, through the dim, bewildering
mediums, saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata
Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of the water; while fixed by
infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the
pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And
now concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew,
and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and
inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip
of the _Pequod_ out of sight----"
The bird of heaven, the eagle, St. John's bird, the Red Indian bird, the
American, goes down with the ship, nailed by Tastego's hammer, the
hammer of the American Indian. The eagle of the spirit. Sunk!
"Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen
white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and then
the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years
ago."
So ends one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world,
closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the
sea such as no man has equalled; and it is a book of exoteric symbolism
of profound significance, and of considerable tiresomeness.
But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea
ever written. It moves awe in the soul.
The terrible fatality.
Fatality.
Doom.
Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees
of America. Doom!
Doom of what?
Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in
America. The doom of our white day.
Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is
something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign
of the greatness which is more than I am.
Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His
great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The
spirit, doomed.
The reversion. "Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from
all havens astern."
That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all
havens astern.
The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.
What then is Moby Dick?--He is the deepest blood-being of the white
race. He is our deepest blood-nature.
And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white
mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our
will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races
and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and
fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal
hunt which is our doom and our suicide.
The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper
consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our our
will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal
consciousness.
Hot-blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea.
Oh God, oh God, what next, when the _Pequod_ has sunk?
She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam.
Now what next?
Who knows? _Quien sabe? Quien sabe, señor?_
Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.
The _Pequod_ went down. And the _Pequod_ was the ship of the white
American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and Indian and
Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, businesslike Yankees and
Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.
_Boom!_ as Vachel Lindsay would say.
To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.
_Consummatum est!_
But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank
the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what's been happening ever
since?
Post mortem effects, presumably.
Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the
Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus,
Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.
XII. WHITMAN
Post mortem effects?
But what of Walt Whitman?
The "good grey poet."
Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?
The good grey poet.
Post mortem effects. Ghosts.
A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human
parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his
beatitudes.
DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!
ONE IDENTITY!
ONE IDENTITY!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Do you believe me, when I say post mortem effects?
When the _Pequod_ went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat
still fussing in the seas. The _Pequod_ sinks with all her souls, but
their bodies rise again to man innumerable tramp steamers, and
ocean-crossing liners. Corpses.
What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without
souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them
going.
So that you see, the sinking of the _Pequod_ was only a metaphysical
tragedy after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the
_soul_ is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same:
digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
What do you make of that? I AM HE THAT ACHES. First generalization.
First uncomfortable universalization. WITH AMOROUS LOVE! Oh, God! Better
a bellyache. A bellyache is at least specific. But the ACHE OF AMOROUS
LOVE!
Think of having that under your skin. All that!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And
your ache doesn't include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache
you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there's so much more
stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder
about it.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!
CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFF!
Reminds one of a steam-engine. A locomotive. They're the only things
that seem to me to ache with amorous love. All that steam inside them.
Forty million foot-pounds pressure. The ache of AMOROUS LOVE.
Steam-pressure. CHUFF!
An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or the
Ocean, or the Stars, or the Oversoul: if he feels that an ache is in the
fashion.
It takes a steam-engine to ache with AMOROUS LOVE. All of it.
Walt was really too superhuman. The danger of the superman is that he is
mechanical.
They talk of his "splendid animality." Well, he'd got it on the brain,
if that's the place for animality.
"I am he that aches with amorous love:
Does the earth gravitate, does not all matter, aching,
attract all matter?
So the body of me to all I meet or know."
What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is
that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning
right away from _some_ matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of
most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially
selected matter. As for living creatures all helplessly hurtling
together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend
the greater part of their time getting out of the sight, smell or sound
of the rest of living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own
queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering
on one another like a lump of bees.
No, Walt, you give yourself away. Matter _does_ gravitate, helplessly.
But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways.
Matter gravitates because it is helpless and mechanical.
And if you gravitate the same, if the body of you gravitates to all you
meet or know, why, something must have gone seriously wrong with you.
You must have broken your main-spring.
You must have fallen also into mechanization.
Your Moby Dick must be really dead. That lonely phallic monster of the
individual you. Dead mentalized.
I only know that my body doesn't by any means gravitate to all I meet or
know. I find I can shake hands with a few people. But most I wouldn't
touch with a long prop.
Your mainspring is broken, Walt Whitman. The mainspring of your own
individuality. And so you run down with a great whirr, merging with
everything.
You have killed your isolate Moby Dick. You have mentalized your deep
sensual body, and that's the death of it.
I am everything and everything is me and so we're all One in One
Identity, like the Mundane Egg, which has been addled quite a while.
"Whoever you are, to endless announcements----"
"And of these one and all I weave the song of myself."
Do you? Well, then, it just shows you haven't _got_ any self. It's a
mush, not a woven thing. A hotch-potch, not a tissue. Your self.
Oh, Walter, Walter, what have you done with it? What have you done with
yourself? With your own individual self? For it sounds as if it had all
leaked out of you, leaked into the universe.
Post mortem effects. The individuality had leaked out of him.
No, no, don't lay this down to poetry. These are post mortem effects.
And Walt's great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank
graveyard growths.
All that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one
pudding-cloth! No, no!
I don't want all those things inside me, thank you.
"I reject nothing," says Walt.
If that is so, one must be a pipe open at both ends, so everything runs
through.
Post mortem effects.
"I embrace ALL," says Whitman. "I weave all things into myself."
Do you really! There can't be much left of you when you've done. When
you've cooked the awful pudding of One Identity.
"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral
dressed in his own shroud."
Take off your hat then, my funeral procession of one is passing.
This awful Whitman. This post mortem poet. This poet with the private
soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a
sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.
Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the
whole eternity of time. As far as his rather sketchy knowledge of
history will carry him, that is. Because to _be_ a thing he had to know
it. In order to assume the identity of a thing, he had to know that
thing. He was not able to assume one identity with Charlie Chaplin, for
example, because Walt didn't know Charlie. What a pity! He'd have done
poems, pæans and what not. Chants, Songs of Cinematernity.
"Oh, Charlie, my Charlie, another film is done----"
As soon as Walt _knew_ a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he
knew that an Esquimo sat in a kayak, immediately there was Walt being
little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kayak.
Now will you tell me exactly what a kayak is?
Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me _sitting in a
kayak._
I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather
senile, self-conscious sensuosity.
DEMOCRACY. EN MASSE. ONE IDENTITY.
The universe, in short, adds up to ONE.
ONE.
1.
Which is Walt.
His poems. Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, they are long sums in
addition and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably MYSELF.
He reaches the state of ALLNESS.
And what then? It's all empty. Just an empty Allness. An addled egg.