Moby's Boogie Board

In chapter ten of the "Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis" [the Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot], St. Brendan and his monks encounter one of the strangest mysteries on the salt roads to paradise, an apparition of Hell sent by God, an island that is not, a circular immensity which doors all shores:

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When they drew nigh to the nearest island, the boat stopped ere they reached a landing--place; and the saint ordered the brethren to get out into the sea, and make the vessel fast, stem and stern, until they came to some harbour; there was no grass on the island, very little wood, and no sand on the shore. While the brethren spent the night in prayer outside the vessel, the saint remained in it, for he knew well what manner of island was this; but he wished not to tell the brethren, lest they might be too much afraid. When morning dawned, he bade the priests to celebrate Mass, and after they had done so, and he himself had said Mass in the boat, the brethren took out some un-cooked meat and fish they had brought from the other island, and put a cauldron on a fire to cook them, After they had placed more fuel on the fire, and the cauldron began to boil, the island moved about like a wave; whereupon they all rushed towards the boat, and implored the protection of their father, who, taking each one by the hand, drew them all into the vessel; then relinquishing what they had removed to the island, they cast their boat loose, to sail away, when the island at once sunk into the ocean.

Afterwards they could see the fire they had kindled still burning more than two miles off, and hen Brendan explained the occurrence: "Brethren, you wonder at what has happened to this island." "Yes, father," said they: "we wondered, and were seized with a great fear." "Fear not, my children," said the saint, "for God has last night revealed to me the mystery of all this; it was not an island you were upon, but the first fish of all that swim in the ocean, which is ever trying to make its head and tail meet, but cannot succeed, because of its great length. Its name is Jasconius."

(transl. Denis O'Donoghue)



This twelfth-century text is one of the classic "immrama" or "rowing-about" tales, where monks cast their fate to God by piously sailing into the unknown, trusting unseen currents to lead them to paradise. ("Eremium in oceano quaerere" was the phrase which frequently appeared in saints' lives to indicate this watery equivalent of the anchorites who headed into the desert and forest to get to the heart of God.) As a youth Brendan burns out of disbelief a book of God's wonders in the creation; his penance is to sail for seven years until he himself has witnessed all of those wonders and then write the book himself.

But who is this circular fish Jasconius, the first and greatest fish of all? Is he from the Devil or does he receives his commands from God? John Patrick Chrichton Stuart Bute in his lecture "Brendan's Famous Voyage" (1893, collected 1911) comments:

"The word "whale" ("cete") is never applied to the animal but always "fish" ("picis" or "monster" ("bellua") or "beast" ("bestia"), and the whole thing, with the notion of its vast size, and the attempt to join the tail to the mouth, which brings it into connection with the emblem of eternity, which is due, I believe, to the Phoenecians, but which we ourselves so often see upon coffins and grave-stones, seems to bring it into connection rather with the idea of the Midgard Worm, the great under-lying world-serpent which figures so largely in the mythic cosmogony of the Scandanvians. I suggest that this is the notion of which the romancer may have heard from Scandanavian sources, and there is even a kind of indication that it was associated in his mind with the idea of paganism, as Brendan is made to speak elsewhere of God having made the most terrible ("immanissimam") of beasts subject under them."

Fascinating to me is that the circular fish is emblematic here of eternity and was used as such on medieval coffins and grave-stones; i'm reminded here of the cuculattus, dolphin-riding puer aeterni who appeared on Roman headstones; also the morphing of Manannan into St. Michael, ferryman of souls aboard a sweeping wave.

In a more current work, Clara Strijbosch's wonderful The Seafaring Saint: Sources and Analouges of the Twelfth-Century Voyage of St. Brendan (Four Courts Press, 2000), another source of the wonder tale of the whale is found in Physiologus, an early Greek Christian text which became known in Europe through Latin translations. Physiologus is a bestiary of sorts, combining descriptions of stones, plants and animals with an allegorical moral -- just the sort of book that Brendan burns in disbelief and then is bid to re-describe in his own book of wonders. Here is a description of the island whale from that text:

"... A certain whale in the sea is called the aspidocelon and is exceedingly large like an island, heavier than sand, and is a figure of the devil. Ignorant sailors tie their ships to the beast as to an island and plant their anchors and stakes in it. They light their cooking fires on the whale, but when he feels the heat, he urinates and plunges into the depths, sinking all the ships. You also, O man, if you fix and bind yourself to the hope of the devil, he will plunge you along with himself into hell-fire."

Whatever the source -- and like every other literary production, we have to allow plenty of sea-room to include them all, formal and folk, ones nursed from the culture and those dreamt out of a hoarier, primeval past -- this Jasconius is a force to be reckoned with, both awful ("immanissimam," whatta phrase) and yet ordained, part of the Creation. In the dream-time of this tale -- who knows how long it may have circulated before it was formally written down -- Brendan voyages in search of an island of the everlasting which is both lost in his past and ahead in what Christendom in its middle infancy was fervently praying to find.

The most awesome of God's creatures, Jasconius becomes one of Brendan's dearest friends on the ocean waste, for he will return every year for seven years to celebrate Easter on the back of the whale. The whole mystery of the Resurrection of the Christ is enacted at an altar set upon the creature of God who rises from the depths of the abyss. That the figure of the tail-eating beast is carved on coffins and headstones confirms the sense that Jasconius is a ferryman of the soul.

Another tale I've retold here is a similar trope on this raising-an-altar-on-the-back-of-fish motif that seems to be about knowing the greatest secrets in the book God cast to the bottom of the ocean. It is about the founding of the abbey on the island of Iona off the Scotland coast by St. Columba in 563 AD, the very dawn of Christendom in the British Isles. Columba digs into the sward trying to establish the abbey's footers disturbs an water-spirit residing there (symbolically, a whale?). Every night a terrible storm blows up out of the sea to destroy the day's work in the footers. Columba vigils one night to see what's at work, and after midnight a creature, half-woman, half-fish, comes up out of the sea with a warning: Columba has enfuriated this deep-sea god and propitiation is required. A man must be buried standing up (so that his head is near the surface, I guess). Lots are cast and Oran's is chosen. He is buried and the day's work remains standing through the night. Three days later Columba wishes to look back on the face of his friend and has the monk's head unburied. Looking into his friend's dead face, the eyes suddenly pop open and the mouth cries, "Everything you know about God and man and heaven and hell is WRONG! In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at ALL!" Columba has the head reinterred at once.

In that story, Columba seems to want to gaze back on his past because he's curious about the land where the dead have travelled. In this second tale, he also wants to redeem that past: Columba is walking beside the river Boyne when a human skull is brought to him that is much bigger than the skulls of the people of that time. His followers say to him, "It is a pity we don't know whose skull this is, or the whereabouts of the soul that was in the body on which it was." Columba answers, "I'm not leaving this place until I find this out from God for you." So he sits there and prays until God hears his requests and bids the skull speak. It reveals itself to be the skull of Cormac mac Airt, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, king of Ireland, and an ancestor of Columba's. It says that although Cormac's faith wasn't perfect (living in pagan times), he still had some due to his honesty and his knowledge that from his descendants would come Columba who would pray for his soul. Columba picks up the skull, washes it, then baptizes, and blesses and buries it, staying at that spot saying 30 masses for the soul of Cormac. At the last of the masses, the angels of God appeared to Colum Cille, taking Cormac's soul with them to enjoy eternal glory.

Backwards and forwards the intent, looking back to save the present from its fear of the grave, looking forward to eternity to save the bones of the past: is that some of the tail-in-mouth circularity of Jasconius?

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Over the centuries it seems that the second impulse has ebbed some in the monstrous face of the first. As we become more conscious, do we fear death more? Does society grow more morbid, fearful, compulsive? When Shakespeare's Hamlet looks upon the big skull of Yorick disenterred ground being dug for the newly-dead bones of his beloved Ophelia (he does not know for whom the grave is being dug), his query of the skull is


Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that. (V.i)

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Whatever wonder there is in a life, it vanishes a sweep of the scythe; and the consolation of the life to come has dimmed here almost to darkness. This thing called life is a wonder island which appears out of nowhere and, having come to appreciate the wonder on which we stand, quakes and dives suddenly, taking ever penitent to doom.

Three centuries later, Melville camped on the whale as he attempted to write its latest and yet oldest book. A true American gnostic, Melville questions whether the whale is indeed the Christian God's truest heart, and a black one at that, symbol not of resurrection but eternal death in the spiralling glooms of the abyss. His whalers war with these beasts on the great ocean desert in defiance of God, pitting their cruel barbs against the animal face of that God, often being pitched to salt doom in the effort of eking a living in an inhospitable world.

Melville read and re-read Shakespeare's plays in the months before and during the writing of Moby Dick, finding in them a voice deep and loud enough for the sort of tale that was leaping from his mouth. He once remarked on the plays that what he found most vitally in them was not purity of drama or a broad understanding of human psychology but "those deep far-way things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality" .... "the things which we feel to be so terrifically true" that no merely good man would ever speak them. It would take a Shakespearean tragic hero to utter those worlds, and Melville's Ahab is that man, the Puritan blasted by his own God, sheared of his vitality by the jaws of God's greatest creation.

One of my favorite passages in Moby Dick is found where the crew of the Pequod have caught their first whale; the head is cut off and tied to the ship, where it will later be mined for the spermacetti trapped in the honeycombs of its skull. After the crew retires below decks, Ahab comes upon on the deck and contemplates the massive head hanging there like a Hamlet holding the huge skull of Yorick:

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It was a black and hooded head, and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet hear and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is within thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. The head upon which now the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world's foundations, where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned. There, in the awful water land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went, hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insensate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed - while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to make an infidel of Abraham, and no syllable is thine!"

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Yikes! A cold and dark abysm indeed is what Ahab sees in the visage of a whale's severed head, one which has been slaughtered by his command. If one God rules the world, and one captain rules a ship, then isn't God's will inextricably wrapped around the captain's, who will end this tale tethered to the flanks of the forever diving Moby Dick?

It's hard to read in Moby Dick such casual slaughter of animals we have grown to call our kin, but if one is going to look into the truth of men's hearts, how could we not get there without showing how much savagery is still there, despite all our centuries of civilizing? Are we not still confounded and cowed by the terrors of the world in which we live? Doesn't it seem that yesterday a bloody head suddenly lifted out of prehistory at the Israeli-Lebanon border? What is this zeal to kill the agents of one's feared demise but a foolish assault on Death itself, against the ordained bearer's of God's scythe, against God himself?

Will our next immrama be written down by some soldier on patrol out in the oceanic desert which engulfs Iraq? Will he encounter the decapitated head of a hostage or sectarian or fellow grunt and spend a moment there trying to peer deeper into the heart of God through those blank eyes?

Harold Bloom writes, "The ultimate use of Shakespeare is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing." To me, it seems those truths can only be found at sea, aboard the whale whose mouth is pent on its tale. To immrama on the "immanissimam" is to look God square in the eyes.




CETOLOGY

"According to magnitude I divide
the whales into three primary BOOKS
(subdivisible into CHAPTERS) and these
shall comprehend the whale, both
small and large. ... Small erections may be
furnished by their first architects; grand ones,
true ones, ever leave the copestone to
posterity. God keep me from ever
completing anything! This whole book
is but a draught - nay but the draught
of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength,
Cash, and Patience!"

- Melville, Moby Dick

Who's to complain? Our work is
the whale's, his to ordain and
mordent and spume and sire.
This book is inked in his
cathedral depths, its covers
set with pearls the size of
snowballs, harpoon barbs
and two dozen spilt doubloons.
Each page is another fin
from the catalogue which
pilots every sea and depth
God poured in me a thousand
lives ago. So what's a poem
to Leviathan, whose groaning
organum binds surface and keep
to distant shores? Certainly
not Mon Petit Ephiphanies,
those shiny black buttons
on Ahab's coat that tumbled
to abyss when you jawed
the captain's ribs. Not even
the ship survives to ferry
the tale you bid me write:
It's just me on this savage
leaky casket & a sea
sufficient for God's heart
and the silence that you
leave behind having
thrashed and battered
and hauled ass on down
to doom. "You must have
plenty of sea-room to tell
the truth in," your prior
scholar once wrote:
a big fish to write it, too,
between the covers of
all shores. The work goes
on in your salt scriptorium,
my song today the next
bit of scrimshaw to survive.
That's cetology: blue study
where the texts are all
shelved on the mandible
of a diving town,
where poetry leaks from
the wounds and
fire rages where we drown.