Queequeg's Coffin

Very warm and humid this morning, a pall of thick stillness, idle, prescient, like calm waters before the whale breeches ... it’s August, into the teeth of a hurricane season that has hardly flashed the first flukes -- a high-pressure swirl in the southeast Atlantic dissipating anything that swells this way -- Remember back in our wildest year, ‘04, a similar dome barreled the ‘canes all our way with terrifying similitude -- Francis and Jeanne mounted the southeast coast within 20 miles of each other, Charley and Ivan had the same approach from the Gulf ... But nothing yet this year. Every homeowner to receive a soaring premium increase (just about everyone in the Southeast) feels the teeth of the season out of the wallet into the ass, and anyone in the wake of Katrina’s devastation bears something harder and menacing. A regional zeitgeist, an added foment to the age ... everything hot and humid and still and waiting.

Still, in a sense. The world boils. Rockets falling helterskelter over Lebanon and Israel, the murder count soaring here in Central Florida (with the shooting death of a man in the parking lot of the Florida Sports Grill in Olando last night, 37 people have been murdered this year in the vicinity, beating the record set back in 1982 -- and four months yet to go ...). Prices going up up up, oil at another high after domestic production got held up over a corroded pipe in Alaska. The death toll of American soldiers in Iraq heads toward 3,000 in the three-year war and nearly 6,000 Iraqis have been killed by violence in the past two months.

So the calm fronts a vortex too painful to watch ...

***


When one has written of the sea’s wildest whale, what next? Melville thought that Moby Dick cleared the way for greater things. In a letter to Hawthorne in Nov. 1851, he writes, “Lord when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; -- I have heard of Krakens.”

But as it turns out, he had already stepped his depths. Perhaps it was because he thought he possessed those depths, rather than found a way to ride them. Shakespeare is the real whale of that great tale, a voice so rich and deep and true that Melville’s encounter with it (he read the whole of Shakespeare as he was writing Moby Dick fundamentally changed his story, upwelling into it the sort of primal energy which Shakespeare seemed to font to effortlessly. F.O. Matthiessen writes in American Renaissance, “Without the the precipitant of Shakespeare, Moby Dick might have been a superior White-Jacket. With it, Melville entered into another realm, of different properties and and proportions.”

For one book, Melville figured out the trick of riding Shakespeare without drowning in him. To do this, he took The Bard to sea, welling that primordial voice into a contemporary enterprise with blue and black roots, the American whaling industry. His knowledge and accounting of that trade keeps the book from wilding too far into unknowable regions; at the same time, the Shakespearean ragas that infect and inflict the Pequod’s voyage provide rudder and sail for a greater sea than it could have otherwise found.

Weird and precarious balance, one which Melville could only sustain for one book. Nothing I’ve read in his oeuvre comes close to the black opera he magistrates in Moby Dick. Writing it buoyed him into an eternity only Hawthorne could see and the rest of his days were shadowed by the curse of not being able to write fully and adequately of it again. “It takes plenty of sea-roads to tell the Truth in,” he wrote in that book, but finding the greatest ones on a trackless path meant never quite finding them again, no matter how he set pen to paper.

***

There is much to learn from Melville’s bittersweet example. He harnessed the power of Shakespeare in the rudest employ of the everyday; he orchestrated his drama so that inner and outer facts were bound together in a tense harmony; he so penetrated to ordinary as to render it extraordinary, while at the same time conjure up the deepest feared shadows of the human heart into the intimate congress of wage slaves, facing the immensity trying to earn a day’s buck. There is no sex on any of its surfaces yet libido upwells from its oldest regions, like big Moby Dick with jaws open wide:

Suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity rising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.

***

The sex isn’t anywhere and it is suddenly breeching and smashing and spouting and destroying, a sex is too big even for Ahab, who mounts it and plungest his bad barbs into its black heart, getting mortally tangled there and dragged to our doom.

Oh tensed coil of infininte and temporal, sublime and corporeal: what a writhe! I read in Carl Kerenyi’s The Gods of the Greeks of how Rhea when forbid Zeus to marry and he turned with lust on his mother. Seeking to hide from him, Rhea turned herself into a serpent, but Zeus did likewise, entwining the two into an indissoluble knot, daring what only gods adduce with impunity. “The commemorative emblem,” Kerenyi writes, “-- in our language, symbolon -- of this union is the staff of Hermes, around which two serpents coil and cling together.”

Caduceus of the magus and doctor, creative libido harnessing an abomination: such regnant power and tension coils my hand as I hold this pen, though I hardly know it, though I can rarely adequately say it.





QUEEQUEG’S COFFIN

August 6

Ahab’s gone now, bound to the
white whale by the very lines
he willed his fate to doom.
His ship was dragged to hell
by that swooning pair, leaving only
me to flail the sucking surge,
sure to drown with all. But then
a few yards off a shape suddenly
sounds and breeches, a glistening
box of wood the length and girth
of a man embarking on his final
berth. It’s Queequeg’s coffin,
flourished with cannibal carvings
like a poem from rude isles
farthest from white men’s minds.
Well, that savage friend is gone;
his fellow pagan Tashtego was
the last man I saw, perched
on the Pequod’s high mainmast,
hammering a red flag to the mount
just as an albatross -- or phoenix?
-- settled there. All gone now
with a final squawk to the receipt
which spreads so thick below,
the devil’s dark blue undertow.
Perhaps I was sent me this as
my friend’s bequest, keel enough
to ferry back to shore the wildest
tale to survive onto the page.
Perhaps my boon’s his curse,
a brailled to rough for verse.
Whatever the case, I’ll write my
own damned book here, upon
this anti-pulpit, copying a tome
from lost worlds writ in bone.
I’ll tell the truth of men in the
angry maw of god in both chapter
and verse, its sea-wrack hurled
with an ink-horn’s splash.
Upon this mount I’ll ride
a church too wild for shores,
too deep for mortal men: Both
horse and hearse, bereft of corpse
and course except as that fraught
God so wills, this tiny voice the sail
which hauls that ship’s remains
upon a box the savage sea so deigns.


from -- Moby-Dick, Chapter 135, Epilogue:


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 ethereal 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.

***

EPILOGUE


"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job.

The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?- Because one did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

FINIS