Anti-Apocastastastasis; or, The Flag of Ahab

In Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote.

-- Melville, “Hawthonrne and His Mosses”

We who are born into the world’s artificial system can never adequately know how little in our present state and circumstances is natural, and how much is merely the interpolation of the perveted mind and heart of man. Art has become a second and stronger nature; she is a stepmother, whose crafty tenderness has taught us to despire the bountiful and wholesome ministrations of our true parent. It is only through the medium of the imagination that we can lessen those iron fetters which we call truth and reality, and make ourselves even partially sensible to what prisoners we are.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The New Adam and Eve,” in Mosses at An Old Manse

ETHEREALIZING

Robert Frost

A theory if you hold it hard enough
And long enough gets rated as a creed:Such as that flesh is something we must slough
So that the mind can be entirely freed.
And when the arms and legs have atrophied,
And brain is all that’s left of mortal stuff,
We can lie on the beach with the seaweed
And take our daily tide baths smooth and rough.
There once we lay as blobs of jellyfish
At evolution’s opposite extreme.
But now as blobs of brain we lie and dream,
With only one vestigial creature wish:
Oh may th etide be soon enough at high
To keep our abstract verse from being dry.

***

(The church father Origen wrote,)

Since, as we have often pointed out, the soul is eternal and immortal, it is possible that, in vast and immeasurable spaces, throughout long and various ages, it ((the Devil)) can descend from the higest good to the lowest eveil, or it can be restored from utlimate evil to the greatest good.


Alice K. Turner comments, “Eventually, Origen proposed everyone would choose to repent, even the Devil. If Chirst died for us all, that would include the angels: the Devil was once an angel. If God is infinite, everything will naturally return at the end of time to be part of him -- the Devil’s negative aspects would be destroyed in the refining fire to leave only his essential angelic self. This theory of universal redemption is called apocatastastasis.

-- The History of Hell, 77



APOCATASTASTASIS

Jan 18, 2006

As Origen’s theory goes,
what goes around flows
underground in riptides
of immortal main, arteries
of red plush cycling back
to the pale white heart of things
through a harrowed vein,
my spleen for vengeance on
the wave embracing he who
folds and smashes me
on the final forgiving shore,
remitted in the pale at last.
In this view all who spiral
up and out through will
and pluck come home at
last on coils of His vast love,
what made us seem so
separate and wild reversing
poles at their extreme
and coursing back from self-
exile in the pure dream
of golden days where
citrus and mint
rise like perfume in
the cleavage of the long-lost,
now-welcoming Beloved.
Even the Devil obeys this
law, yearning from his
rude black chair to
redirect the black
waterfall which tumults
down from grace, dreaming
of stars halted in their
entropic tracks, confronted
by the Counterforce.
What dreadful sum or
nadir is in that pause
which gives birth to
reversing gears, slowly
wheeling the universe
the other way, yearning for
old unities which compress
infinity into a tight ball
smaller than a hair
on the ass of an iota?
Do we circulate from fire
to cold extremities, there to
warm black regions with
a kiss which belies the curse,
like red satin in a vampire’s
cape; and do we there, spent
and sated of angelic mission,
thus fold our wings and fall
backwards into the limb
and harrows of chthonic fire,
the poems of lost ecstasy
come home to roost in
that blissful crypt (a bed,
a beach, a writing chair)
which hurled ‘em? As business
models go it’s pure revenue,
every wasted dollar stacked
neatly in the shitpile which
loams the billion bullion apples
of the Hesperides. For quantum
physics, too, it’s neat ‘n’ reet,
and gloriously mad, the delusion
of cold fusion frigging God
from His depths on homewarding
sails of icy galactic fire.
But as songs, well, sorry Origen,
you’re pure disaster,
‘cause what’s the point
of singing if you know the
who’se listening? Why stand
at that shore if you’re so sure
that water is the oar for rowing
salty blues no cup or pap can pour?
If God is inexorable as
taxes, fat and death, then why
ride this warring pen knowing
that it will—it must—roll on
to its appointed end at the
last line of the poem where
the silence and whiteness
are destined to take over
and write the other way,
erasing every infernal spout
and spume with the smile of
dead serenity, slaking each
line’s lack and slum till I and Thou
are jammed back in the
womblike narrows of the one.
If these yawps of chaos must
exchange their extreme zoots
at song’s end & suit up
homewarding hymns,
then what’s the point of flinging?
Every god deserves a rant
and plunge no wave redeems
in any blue enough way.
As much as I love tides
I brook no centrifuge to them
but praise their pagan
gallops slipshod on every shore,
no end final enough to end
the reach for next wild doors
where wilder songs more
wildly soar. In such faith I’m poor
and verbal in all the useless ways,
keeping watch on the Pequod’s
mainmast roost ten thousand
leagues below, still hunting
for that feral whiteness with
barbs no silence knows
how to end, much less return.

***

This from the last chapter of Moby-Dick, which refuses to end even as it does. The White Whale has just smashed his brow into the Pequod, erupting a fatal wound in the ship’s breast:

***

Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.

"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,- death- glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;- ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;- at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.