Who Ain't A Speck?

 Ishmael would understand.

As would Pip and Ahab, though both would resist the obvious lessons.

And, who could blame them?

Mendocino paddling:

JP in the offing.

Fictional Identikit

There's a game going about to identify one's self via three or four literary characters.

Here's my submission from the four quarters of my soul, or some such:

Jim Hawkins, from Stevenson's Treasure Island;
Ishmael, from Melville's Moby Dick;
Frank Bascombe, from Ford's The Sportswriter;
and
Robert Walton, from Shelley's Frankenstein.

A Whale of a Tale

Moby: sculpture mix, unglazed.

Thanks also to the artist of the Penguin Books Deluxe Edition of Melville's Moby Dick, foreword by Nathaniel Philbrick.  Book and book cover used here with respect.

(I can't find any reference to the actual artist of the cover, so I will need to conduct an image search in the near future.)

Queequeg: "As Cool As An Icicle"

But as for Queequeg -- why, Queequeg sat there among them -- at the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle.  To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding.  His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him.  But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.

--Melville's Ishmael on his new friend

from "Chapter 5: Breakfast"
of Moby Dick

Moby, Ubiquitous

Another Moby: 
sculpture mix, unglazed.

Printer's Devil

One of my poems in print.  

Moby Dick!

Sperm Whale: sculpture mix; unglazed.

Hail Herman Melville and your great American epic!

Melville's Queequeg: "George Washington Cannibalistically Developed"

Herman Melville's Moby Dick is a novel full of great lines, sentences and even paragraphs that resonate either wittily, sensibly, or sentimentally (in the best and worst ways) long after the reading is done. Here's a simple sentence that I keep close at hand:

“You cannot hide the soul.”

Here’s the full passage from Chapter 10 -- "A Bosum Friend":

“With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like tow long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”

And from the next page, signaling Ishmael's shift from the opening pages "hypos," those feelings of violence and despair:

“I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.”

"The Carpet-Bag": Sentence #1

"I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific."

--Melville's Ishmael.

Classic chapter opener; such an easy, sweeping sentence.

Melville does this again and again, but in a big book like Moby Dick, you've got to stop and just look, every so often, sentence by sentence, to feel the poise and power.

"The Two Orchard Thieves"

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, --what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man received money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition.

--Melville's Ismael, Moby Dick: Chapter 1 Loomings.

Adam and Eve?

The hair on the figure to the right made that connection for me.

That's my Mateo on the left, waiting for the next round in the kiln.

Melville's "Jacket"

Stage Direction: It's 1850, and the new novel by that Melville fellow is in the bookshop. You know, the fellow that lived with those South Sea cannibals. Let's open it up and see what's on offer. No, read aloud; I want to hear it too.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was not a very white jacket, but white enough, in all conscience, as the sequel will show.

The way I came by it was this.

When our frigate lay in Callao, on the coast of Peru--her last harbour in the Pacific--I found myself without a grego, or sailor's surtout; and as, toward the end of a three years' cruise, no pea-jackets could be had from the purser's steward: and being bound for Cape Horn, some sort of a substitute was indispensable; I employed myself, for several days, in manufacturing an outlandish garment of my own devising, to shelter me from the boisterous weather we were so soon to encounter.

It was nothing more than a white duck frock, or rather shirt: which, laying on deck, I folded double at the bosom, and by then making a continuation of the slit there, opened it lengthwise-- much as you would cut a leaf in the last new novel. The gash being made, a metamorphosis took place, transcending any related by Ovid. For, presto! the shirt was a coat!--a strange-looking coat, to be sure; of a Quakerish amplitude about the skirts; with an infirm, tumble-down collar; and a clumsy fullness about the wristbands; and white, yea, white as a shroud. And my shroud it afterward came very near proving, as he who reads further will find.

But, bless me, my friend, what sort of a summer jacket is this, in which to weather Cape Horn? A very tasty, and beautiful white linen garment it may have seemed; but then, people almost universally sport their linen next to their skin.

Very true; and that thought very early occurred to me; for no idea had I of scudding round Cape Horn in my shirt; for that would have been almost scudding under bare poles, indeed.

So, with many odds and ends of patches--old socks, old trowser- legs, and the like--I bedarnedand bequilted the inside of my jacket, till it became, all over, stiff and padded, as King James'scotton-stuffed and dagger-proof doublet; and no buckram or steel hauberk stood up more stoutly.

So far, very good; but pray, tell me, White-Jacket, how do you propose keeping out the rain and the wet in this quilted grego of yours? You don't call this wad of old patches a Mackintosh, do you?----you don't pretend to say that worsted is water-proof?

No, my dear friend; and that was the deuce of it. Waterproof it was not, no more than a sponge. Indeed, with such recklessness had I bequilted my jacket, that in a rain-storm I became a universal absorber; swabbing bone-dry the very bulwarks I leaned against. Of a damp day, my heartless shipmates even used to stand up against me, so powerful was the capillary attraction between this luckless jacket of mine and all drops of moisture. I dripped like a turkey a’roasting; and long after the rain storms were over, and the sun showed his face, I still stalked a Scotch mist; and when it was fair weather with others, alas! it was foul weather with me.

Me? Ah me! Soaked and heavy, what a burden was that jacket to carry about, especially when I was sent up aloft; dragging myself up step by step, as if I were weighing the anchor. Small time then, to strip, and wring it out in a rain, when no hanging back or delay was permitted. No, no; up you go: fat or lean: Lambert or Edson: never mind how much avoirdupois you might weigh. And thus, in my own proper person, did many showers of rain reascend toward the skies, in accordance with the natural laws.

But here be it known, that I had been terribly disappointed in carrying out my original plan concerning this jacket. It had been my intention to make it thoroughly impervious, by giving it a coating of paint, But bitter fate ever overtakes us unfortunates. So much paint had been stolen by the sailors, in daubing their overhaul trowsers and tarpaulins, that by the time I--an honest man--had completed my quiltings, the paint-pots were banned, and put under strict lock and key.

Said old Brush, the captain of the paint-room-- "Look ye, White-Jacket," said he, "ye can't have any paint."

Such, then, was my jacket: a well-patched, padded, and porous one; and in a dark night, gleaming white as the White Lady of Avenel!

That's "The Jacket," the complete opening chapter to White-Jacket, the novel that Herman Melville published the year before publishing his masterpiece Moby Dick. In this novel, Melville keeps to the nautical themes of his highly popular first two novels, Typee and Omoo, and his less popular third and fourth novels, Mardi and Redburn, but he shifts us from merchant ships to a military vessel, the U.S.S. Neversink, a microcosm as his subtitle indicates: "The World in a Man-of-War."

I love the voice here, White-Jacket telling his tale, describing in practical terms how he ended up a sailor wearing a sponge of a coat, without protection, with its reversal of what such a covering is meant to be and do. I love how the symbolic resides within and transcends the practical and literal. Seamus Heaney, in his poetry, is also a master at creating symbolic resonance within and through a practical framework, a literal and material set of images.

However, while I appreciate and value the symbolic resonances here, the hints and forebodings, what I most appreciate and most value is the voice itself, the humor, the pathos, and the gusto that animates this voice. White-Jacket walks me through his tale of tailorly woe, through the workmanship by which he aimed to solve that problem of protection against the weather, and also through the inadvertent misfortune, the mere and significant bad timing. Gusto: note the relish here. White-Jacket's an Ancient Mariner with a compelling voice and the beginnings of a compelling story. What about that "sequel"? And, how will that untarred jacket be "white enough"? Enough for what? or for whom? and how?

I first read White-Jacket while camping and fishing along the Trinity River in Northern California. My best friend Keith and I would take a few days each summer for three or four years as a sort of retreat or refuge before the new school year would begin. At the time, I was reading my way through all of Melville, striving to work out for myself how he got, as a writer, up and into the narrative voice of Ismael, the heart of Moby Dick. Of course, as I began reading, this narrator, this White-Jacket fellow, pulled me into his story for himself, for itself. Now, almost 30 years after that first encounter, I am opening up this naval novel once again as preparation for teaching that famous whaling novel, yes, but I can already feel myself being pulled in, ready to listen as this particular tale unfolds.

Listen. Read again. Read aloud this time.

There's magic here.

P.S. Some further reflections:

I'm reading (and I've used as illustrations above) the old Signet Classics edition of Melville's novel. The artist of that cover isn't specified, or I'd give full credit indeed. I may have picked up the novel because it was written by The Author of Moby Dick, but that image of the rugged sailor, 70's hair and all, with the ship and sea and sky, all helped me to pick this book to take up to the Trinity to read while lounging about, enjoying the sunshine, fishing, and telling tall-tales.

I recall that weekend as being so so hot. Evenings, we'd forego any ideas about cooking for ourselves, the heat was still that draining, and we'd drive to the town of Big Flat and eat at Big Flat Pizza. We'd start talking about the ice tea with real ice about an hour before we'd hope in the car and go. After we'd cool down, we'd pick up some beer for the campfire session and talk for hours, revisiting past triumphs and disasters, making plans for the future, solving the problems of the world, out-Socratizing Socrates. Fine times, some of the finest I've known.

During the day on the Trinity River that weekend, we'd cram ourselves beneath any shade we could find: under bushes, under giant boulders even; we'd picked a spot without any trees down on the flat beside the river, and we were too exhausted and drained from all that heat to hunt up a better place. The tent was no help in such high temps; I don't think we even slept in it. The best relief was to wait until you were really overcooked, really steaming from the heat, and then plunge into the river, swimming against the current, until the cold waters quenched all fire and chilled you to the bone. Then, you'd pull yourself out on the other bank of the river and stretch out on the rocks, warming yourself until you were overcooked again, and the cycle of plunge-strive-quench-chill-climb out would be repeated over and over again.

In between cycles, I'd read my book and share bits with Keith. I just may have read this first chapter aloud to him; if I did, I'm sure we found plenty to say in return.

Melville's Wrestling Tips

ART

In placid hours well-pleased we dream

Of many a brave unbodied scheme.

But form to lend, pulsed life create,

What unlike things must meet and mate:

A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;

Sad patience--joyous energies;

Humility--yet pride and scorn;

Instinct and study; love and hate;

Audacity--reverence. These must mate,

And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,

To wrestle with the angel--Art.

--Herman Melville

I've always liked this poem, perhaps because conflict and engagement are crucial in my vision of how makers work in this world. I'll forget this poem, forget about this poem, and then be reminded, be pleased to remember--as I am today.

I never forget the sentence Melville had glued inside his writing desk: "Keep true to the dreams of thy youth."

Swimming Lessons

I've decided to teach Melville's Moby Dick next semester with Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's Hamlet. I'm looking forward to helping my students swim with leviathans.

*See also this blog entry from last spring: http://mattduckworthunderwater.blogspot.com/2010/05/postcard-melvilles-practical-tattooing.html

Passages: Melville's Practical Tattooing

Consider these words from Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick:

"The skeleton dimension I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had been tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale."

This passage may be found at the end of Chapter CII: A Bower in the Arsacides, just before Chapter CIII: Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton.

Ishmael's practical tattooing--using his skin as a notebook--is a remarkably broad-minded advance on Typee's trepidation at being marked as a cannibal, savagely disfigured and so unfit to return to civilization, in Melville's first novel. Typee's obvious discomfort prevented the Marquesan islanders from honoring him, as they saw it, with the tribal adornments to Melville's alter ego's immense relief.

Not so many years later--according to conventional chronology, anyway--Melville in Moby-Dick changes the tune; Ismael regards tattooing as means to either a practical or poetic end. In fact, due to the white whale's sinking of the Pequod, Ishmael loses all possessions save Queequeg's life-saving coffin and his own skin, fortuitously marked. (Queequeg's hieroglyphic and profound markings deserve a separate entry.)

I must quote Thomas Farber's wonderful line, his counter to Melville's famous opening: "Call me Queequeg."

Ishmael's poem must be that novel I'm rereading.

Harpoon Shopping

I love titles. I love the specific flavors, the promises, the mysteries. I must drive my friends and students crazy sometimes going over the titles of the pieces we read or listen to. As a boy, I remember trying to figure out the meaning of Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand," a title I found so attractive, so racy, so compelling and evocative of who-knows-what. I knew I wanted to know her, that cowgirl, and have the same desiring-yet-dismissive attitude that I heard in Neil's voice. (That mood seemed so worldly then.) Eventually, listening to the song over and over, I settled on a rich-girl-in-Malibu-caught-playing-games image, and I still hold to that.

I love titles, sometimes more than I love the book, the album, song, whatever, that each belongs to. When I see a book title that triggers my horde of . . . what? synapses? hobgoblins & sprites? . . . up in that cauldron-of-plenty I call my skull, I don't want to open that book at all. I keep the cover closed and let myself just roam through the field of possibilities. I want to consider the story I might write if I had that title to guide me. Eventually, I'll open the dust jacket, read the blurbs, check out the bio, and read a few pages at the beginning and in the middle to see what I'd be getting into, to see if that writer rises to my expectations for that title. Pretty dodgy? What gall, since I've never written a book, and yet I'm expecting the published authors to match or surpass my bare imaginings. I'm a very appreciative and generous reader, but when we're talking about the imagination, I don't respect too many boundaries . . . at least in the privacy of my own head. (I wouldn't stoop to plagiarism, of course, because such theft is obviously wrong and an admission of creative bankruptcy. I may sin creatively as a procrastinator, a would-be perfectionist, and a shameless ham, but I'm no deadbeat cheat-thief.)

Notice: just thinking about titles and their suggestive powers has me pounding the drum, even if the music turns out cacophonic. Rein in the metaphors? I'd rather let the contact high of a good title spur me to produce even bad prose; I can always revise and refine later. Let the floodgates open. Yes, I am mixing my metaphors. I'm no Pablo Neruda, but the best lesson he teaches is to allow--even to court--exuberance and possibly incoherent or puzzling associations and juxtapositions. (Neruda will also teach you to reflect and revise, reflect and revise, but that's the subject of another blog.) In other words, when the Muse nudges, sing as best you can.

"Harpoon Shopping": I haven't even addressed my title for this blog-entry yet.

A friend of mine, a fellow aficionado of Melville and hands-on literary responses, was trying to get me to visit Back East with a special trip to Nantucket. I had to decline, reluctantly, and in the back & forth of our correspondence he lamented that he'd been planning to take me "harpoon shopping," much in the spirit of Ishmael and Queequeg, of Melville and Hawthorne, his muse at the time. The potential homosocial implications are obvious, but so what? We'd quest through Nantucket and New Bedford seeking some old iron implement of destruction, possible corkscrewed by use and abuse, probably fake and overpriced. Still, we'd be able to hold the proper tool to accompany Ahab's pursuit of the white whale, for wouldn't the story come alive just that much more if we could heft such a harpoon in our own hands? When my friend insisted that he'd take his wife instead on that shopping trip, she declined vehemently, and something in that moment, the triangulation of characters and cross-purposes, demands a story from me. Not the actual events, not non-fiction, but something fictional, something made-up to catch some emotional resonance in a net of words. Her tone (which I did overhear while on the phone) and the phrase itself have sparked some sort of story-idea that I haven't yet written or fully realized.

And that's fine. I love having unwritten stories in my head. And yet . . . right? I have written very little of all that I've a mind to, so I really ought to take that title and fish that appropriate story out of that cauldron-of-plenty in my skull. Instead, I'm writing a blog about a story I'll probably never write. I should be harder on myself? I should just laugh at myself, with compassion? Am I squandering my creative resources? Again, who cares? I'm having fun thinking about and yakking about all of the above. Good enough for now. (But not good enough forever.)

"Harpoon Shopping" also reminds me of a rock song I wrote back in my early 20's during the mid-80's: frustrated desire in 4/4 time, painfully obvious unconscious imagery. I mean, "a harpoon in the cellar / Lying underneath a tarp"? What was I thinking I was thinking? Was I describing a murder-mystery or sewing a full-length Freudian slip? I can't even recall the melody now, though I still sing these lyrics to any tune that seems appropriate at the time. Good, bad, and ugly--here's that old, aging, definitely dated chunk of song:

BETTER AT BREAKFAST

I left the harpoon in the cellar

Lying underneath a tarp

You would never be a suspect

Without this pin-up of your heart

Found in the trunk up in the attic

That you never used to lock

If you always ring the bellboy

There's room enough for talk

Things can be seen as simple as that

A round of applause against the crack of a bat

Was this love gone wrong pawned from the start?

Why would you want to leave me with a broken heart?

Why would you want to leave me with a broken heart?

But the friend of a friend once said

I'll bet she's better at breakfast than bed . . . .

[Repeat Everything.]

I'll confess: I'm not even sure what that last line means, really. I do think it's concretely suggestive with the contrast of "breakfast" and "bed," with the bitterness of tone, and so I think there's a focused and fairly limited set of meanings possible. And that's not the same as not having any meaning at all; I wasn't writing nonsense, but I wasn't writing an essay either. Rather, the meaning is a little loose, a little more suggestive than asserted, and so dependent upon the reader or listener to work out the meaning for herself or himself in the context of the whole song, the whole story. That's how any story, any poem, any piece of art--good or bad--works, right? That's how it all works for me.

The three words surfaced one day in my head--"Better at Breakfast"--and the alliteration and suggestiveness held them there, front and center, until I wrote the song to fit them. There were more lyrics, but they've sunk into the morass of memory. I'd written this song and a collection of others without any formal musical training, I'll confess, but with the absolute need to match lyrics to the distinct tunes in my head; I called the whole thing, an album's worth, "B-Side," which says it all. Too many tales of fickle women; too much self-destruction and anger. I was in my early 20's, so go figure. Here are some of the titles from that imagined, unrealized album: B-Side, Better at Breakfast, I Have a Girl, How Can You Tell, Maximum Security, This Must Be the Place, Not Wanted, The Perfect Crime, Permanent Press, Rome Fell, Shotgun Wedding, and Woke Up Knowing. I never did finish the lyrics or tune to these lines that--perhaps too well--stand in for all those lost songs: "Mexicali Rose / By any other name . . . / You mix the drinks / But they taste the same." I never quit my day-job. Give me some credit for that.

Note: I originally posted a version of "Harpoon Shopping" on a myspace page back in September, 2007.