Moby Dick is a novel that contains a vast depth that is as often cumbersome as the book itself. It is what the word Tome was made for. It also has the additional benefit of propping up a shortened table-leg, of allowing us to take our dinners on an even plane.
Nevertheless it is studded with passages of great beauty and thundering force. Its characters are archetypes that leap off the page and brandish their war-wounds with guzzling grace. Often the ship itself, the Pequod, stands as a great metaphor, or rather conceit, for the soul. Each of its nooks is granted a chapter unto itself, the narrator waxing poetic about its history and the histories of men that grazed it. Here is a section from a chapter called the Mast-Head, wherein it is Ishmael’s turn to whale-watch. He is talking about a certain type of seafarer that is prone to philosophical reveries.
“Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to the task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera glasses at home.
“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are as scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” 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 at 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 Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
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. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”
The dangers of a well-stocked mind are many. Many a time I have bartered bitterly with the reality around me, offering it the vast and drafty spaces of intellect in return for a little less pain, a little room for heedlessness. The sharp edges of love are dulled in the sludge of theory. The complicated knots of conflict are glazed and glass-walled behind the barricades of symbol. Death is hunted down with a sawn-off, gutted, stuffed and mounted on the mantelpiece of Reason. This is the legacy of Plato. He has offered us a world so much more purer, so filled with the light of Eternal Forms that we eagerly shift our gaze to the heavens, ready to give up the hard contradictions of the world before our feet. What use has the hand for a hammer when it can live in a gifted house? We must nip this thinking at the bud. We must unearth the fish we have buried beneath our dreams, to give those lies their sap. Too often do we shirk our responsibilities with the placating voice of vision. Our divinity is placed beyond our death and so what use is there for earthly renovation? This is the thinking that drives the fundamentalists, the Rainbow Transcendentalists, and all manner of people that talk of higher worlds than these around us. Those worlds do exist, or rather, can exist. They must be made by the sweat of our brow, by the face that does not turn away from a blow. Those higher lives are merely modifications of thought; they are transformation and metamorphosis, but their difference is such that they seem to untrained eyes to be of another reality entirely. Look to sky and earth with equal longing. The world that streams through your pores is the only reality. But initially, it is not yours. It must be made that way. ‘God’ is something far greater than what cannot be grasped. It is the grasp itself and that which is grasped.
Look about you. This is the only life you will live. There is no other. Strain your eyes for those flitting forms and you will know their depths. The great whales of our world can be caught. To live without a safety-net is a difficult thing. Not all manage it. Wear your pain like a badge.
