I contemplated not honoring all four birthdays of the Great Run of BLCKDGRD Holy Days that I have every year (minus a forgetful oops or two) for more than two decades here and the prior iterations of this current shitty blog and then decided to for more than just the sake of Fuck It, which sake I'll keep mum. I may read the copy of Melville's *Redburn* I found in a Michigan used books store last month sometime in the next year though reading the first ten pages the night after I found the copy did not inspire me. I can't imagine summoning the determined concentration necessary to reread Gass' *The Tunnel* (though rereading it as the clusterfuck worsens and assholes and assholedom are celebrated as heroes and morality of the clusterfuck is probably a good idea) but I might do *Omensetter's Luck* in the next year, and I didn't binge on Kate Bush or the Grateful Dead for Jerry because I can hear any song in my head by both any time I want. I have been Hüsker Dübingeing of late
A fine metaphors abounding work email chain today:
Dear Jeff,
I
hope you are doing well! I am writing with a question and I realize you
might not be the right person - or maybe there is no right person - but
is it possible to have a course packet made up, for purchase by
students? I am assigning several texts (short stories) in PDF format and
I don't want students staring at a computer in class, so I'd like to
make a hard-copy course packet. Is this something I would talk to you
about, or someone at the bookstore? I would provide the PDFs. Thank you
very much,
Sincerely,
Susanna
Hi Susanna, the
Library hasn't done course packets for well over 25 years because of
copyright (and the department that did them doesn't exist anymore). I
don't think even FedEx will do them any longer. I'd be surprised if the
bookstore will, though it doesn't hurt to ask.
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
OK, now I feel like an absolute dinosaur. No seriously, thank you for the response. I will figure out something else!
"The threat of fascism whips the electorate into line behind austerian liberals, while the resulting social misery and anomie provides the emotional mulch for rising fascism. Both prefer it if the left is excluded from the picture"
"Ralph Shortey, the freshman Republican who introduced the legislation, acknowledges he is not aware of any company in Oklahoma or elsewhere that is attempting to sell food that contains fetuses, but he said, "There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors."
I did finish Henry James' *The Ambassadors* but only because I felt morally obligated to keep my promise to Leona and Dennis and I'll NOT be reading another James, the fucker does muddle for motherfucking muddle's sake
*Punching the Clown*, the new Lambchop album, drops in seventeen days, of the three songs released so far this one slays me most, slays me, yes I already posted it before the BLCKDGRD Holy Day posts, the album won't save me soul but it will salve is a little
Tom Clark
THE COLOR OF STEPPED ON GUM
is the color of our times. The light of our times is the light in the 14th St. subway at 2 A.M. The air of our times is the air of the Greyhound depot, Market & 6th. It is prime time. A passed out sailor sits pitched forward like a sack of laundry in a plastic bucket seat his forehead resting on the movie of the week. The Long Goodbye
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as
the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all
colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of
atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of
the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or
lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young
girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in
substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but
the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that
the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and
if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even
tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the
palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?
(Added 2015: read that outloud. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.)
"Poor Hoffman — I
remember the shock I had when I first saw the mention of his madness. — But he
was just the man to go mad — imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor,
unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors, unmarried, —
without a port of haven in the universe to make. . . . This going mad of a
friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in
him, — which but few men do. For in all
of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what
madness is has but a mouthful of brains." (Correspondence)
"[I]t is often to be
observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy
rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in
one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first
brought to light. Happy would it be, if
the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort:
but . . . [n]o common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by
essentially emptying one's self of it into a book; for once trapped in a book,
then the book can be put into the fire, and all will be well." (Pierre)
"I forgot to mention,
that last night about 9 1/2 P.M. Adler & Taylor came into my room,
& it was proposed to have whiskey punches, which we did have,
accordingly. Adler drank about three
table spoons full — Taylor 4 or five tumblers &c. We had an extraordinary time & did not
break up till after two in the morning.
We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c.
were discussed under the influence of the whiskey." (Correspondence)
"We incline to think
that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little
information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He
us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke
ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from
your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out
of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street." (Correspondence)
""Dolt
& ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few
days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William
[Shakespeare]." (Correspondence)
From: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
"I am pleased to believe that beauty is at bottom incompatible with ill,
and therefore am so eccentric as to have confidence in the latent
benignity of that beautiful creature, the rattle-snake, whose lithe neck
and burnished maze of tawny gold, as he sleekly curls aloft in the sun,
who on the prairie can behold without wonder?" As he breathed these words, he seemed so to enter into their spirit — as
some earnest descriptive speakers will — as unconsciously to wreathe
his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the
creature described. Meantime, the stranger regarded him with little
surprise, apparently, though with much contemplativeness of a mystical
sort, and presently said: "When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did
it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it
was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a
touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In
short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from
knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the care-free,
joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible
creature?
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this
whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and
more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once
the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
things the most appalling to mankind.
From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has on power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; -- nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.
ibid:
But is life, indeed, a thing for all infidel levities, and we, its
misdeemed beneficiaries, so utterly fools and infatuate, that what we
take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of
the minutest event—the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or
the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small
characters by a sharpened feather? Are we so entirely insecure, that
that casket, wherein we have placed our holiest and most final joy, and
which we have secured by a lock of infinite deftness; can that casket be
picked and desecrated at the merest stranger's touch, when we think that
we alone hold the only and chosen key?
From Moby Dick:
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a
sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down
every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers
over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with
carving-knives all gilded and tassled, the sharks, also, with the jewel-hilted
mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and
though, were you to turn the whole affair upside-down, it would still be pretty
much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for
all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of slave ships
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a
parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and
though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set
terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do socially congregate, and most
hilariously feast; yet there is no conceivable time or occasion when you will
find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than
around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea. If you have
never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of
devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
From Moby Dick (and for Savid Dampselle and that other guy who was in Dampselle's Gaithersburg High School English class up on D-Wing above the Auto-Shop classroom/garage):
“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly
squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as
much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish
any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come;
let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
sperm of kindness.”
Oh, you read Melville's traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day post this far? Thank you! 2019: I wrote earlier this year I can't imagine reading Moby Dick again because of whaling, I can imagine reading again, maybe, but not soon.
Reading, and mourning, *Moby Dick* on the cusp of climate catastrophe: Melville’s 200th birthday coincides with the human-made sixth
extinction, as well as with the emptying, warming, and clogging up of
the world’s oceans via overfishing and the dumping of plastics. Such
facts imbue his novel with renewed and melancholy relevance. Reading his
book about a sentient, majestic, and desperate-to-live marine mammal in
a period when the planet’s whales — and all other creatures — are under
such threat grants the work a grim ecological cast.
And then there is Chapter 77, *The Great Heidelburgh Tun,* on decapitating the slaughtered whale to extract profit, what my copy opened to when I picked it up just now, and...
2020: Read Benito Cereno in March, and, re: Moby Dick, I am in negotiations with myself whether if I skip the slaughters is it reading the novel
2021: I read the torturing, murdering, and rendering of whales and I will never do it again
2022: Laugh, I was going to below the fold this post but my goddamn free blogging platform seems to have eliminated that option! I have very vague intentions to reread *Confidence Man* before Melville's 205th birthday
2024: Hey, the Brad who provided content above just had his independent bookstore in Oakland destroyed by fire, please go throw the coins in your pocket and between your sofa cushions at him to help him rebuild the business(and then buy your books there). Also too, a reread of *Pierre* is being contemplated though not yet committed to. 2026:I found a 1940 edition of *Redburn* at a used book store in Northport Michigan on our Leelanau trip a month ago, it is number 14 on current reading list, I should get to it sometime after this year's Melville birthday post
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as
the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all
colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of
atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of
the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or
lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young
girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in
substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but
the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that
the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and
if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even
tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the
palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?
(Added 2015: read that outloud. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.)
"Poor Hoffman — I
remember the shock I had when I first saw the mention of his madness. — But he
was just the man to go mad — imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor,
unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors, unmarried, —
without a port of haven in the universe to make. . . . This going mad of a
friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in
him, — which but few men do. For in all
of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what
madness is has but a mouthful of brains." (Correspondence)
"[I]t is often to be
observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy
rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in
one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first
brought to light. Happy would it be, if
the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort:
but . . . [n]o common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by
essentially emptying one's self of it into a book; for once trapped in a book,
then the book can be put into the fire, and all will be well." (Pierre)
"I forgot to mention,
that last night about 9 1/2 P.M. Adler & Taylor came into my room,
& it was proposed to have whiskey punches, which we did have,
accordingly. Adler drank about three
table spoons full — Taylor 4 or five tumblers &c. We had an extraordinary time & did not
break up till after two in the morning.
We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c.
were discussed under the influence of the whiskey." (Correspondence)
"We incline to think
that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little
information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He
us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke
ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from
your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out
of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street." (Correspondence)
""Dolt
& ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few
days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William
[Shakespeare]." (Correspondence)
From: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
"I am pleased to believe that beauty is at bottom incompatible with ill,
and therefore am so eccentric as to have confidence in the latent
benignity of that beautiful creature, the rattle-snake, whose lithe neck
and burnished maze of tawny gold, as he sleekly curls aloft in the sun,
who on the prairie can behold without wonder?" As he breathed these words, he seemed so to enter into their spirit — as
some earnest descriptive speakers will — as unconsciously to wreathe
his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the
creature described. Meantime, the stranger regarded him with little
surprise, apparently, though with much contemplativeness of a mystical
sort, and presently said: "When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did
it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it
was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a
touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In
short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from
knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the care-free,
joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible
creature?
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this
whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and
more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once
the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
things the most appalling to mankind.
From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has on power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; -- nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.
ibid:
But is life, indeed, a thing for all infidel levities, and we, its
misdeemed beneficiaries, so utterly fools and infatuate, that what we
take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of
the minutest event—the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or
the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small
characters by a sharpened feather? Are we so entirely insecure, that
that casket, wherein we have placed our holiest and most final joy, and
which we have secured by a lock of infinite deftness; can that casket be
picked and desecrated at the merest stranger's touch, when we think that
we alone hold the only and chosen key?
From Moby Dick:
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a
sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down
every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers
over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with
carving-knives all gilded and tassled, the sharks, also, with the jewel-hilted
mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and
though, were you to turn the whole affair upside-down, it would still be pretty
much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for
all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of slave ships
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a
parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and
though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set
terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do socially congregate, and most
hilariously feast; yet there is no conceivable time or occasion when you will
find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than
around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea. If you have
never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of
devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
From Moby Dick (and for Savid Dampselle and that other guy who was in Dampselle's Gaithersburg High School English class up on D-Wing above the Auto-Shop classroom/garage):
“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly
squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as
much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish
any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come;
let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
sperm of kindness.”
Oh, you read Melville's traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day post this far? Thank you! 2019: I wrote earlier this year I can't imagine reading Moby Dick again because of whaling, I can imagine reading again, maybe, but not soon.
Reading, and mourning, *Moby Dick* on the cusp of climate catastrophe: Melville’s 200th birthday coincides with the human-made sixth
extinction, as well as with the emptying, warming, and clogging up of
the world’s oceans via overfishing and the dumping of plastics. Such
facts imbue his novel with renewed and melancholy relevance. Reading his
book about a sentient, majestic, and desperate-to-live marine mammal in
a period when the planet’s whales — and all other creatures — are under
such threat grants the work a grim ecological cast.
And then there is Chapter 77, *The Great Heidelburgh Tun,* on decapitating the slaughtered whale to extract profit, what my copy opened to when I picked it up just now, and...
2020: Read Benito Cereno in March, and, re: Moby Dick, I am in negotiations with myself whether if I skip the slaughters is it reading the novel
2021: I read the torturing, murdering, and rendering of whales and I will never do it again
2022: Laugh, I was going to below the fold this post but my goddamn free blogging platform seems to have eliminated that option! I have very vague intentions to reread *Confidence Man* before Melville's 205th birthday
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as
the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all
colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of
atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of
the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or
lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young
girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in
substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but
the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that
the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and
if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even
tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the
palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?
(Added 2015: read that outloud. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.)
"Poor Hoffman — I
remember the shock I had when I first saw the mention of his madness. — But he
was just the man to go mad — imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor,
unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors, unmarried, —
without a port of haven in the universe to make. . . . This going mad of a
friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in
him, — which but few men do. For in all
of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what
madness is has but a mouthful of brains." (Correspondence)
"[I]t is often to be
observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy
rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in
one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first
brought to light. Happy would it be, if
the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort:
but . . . [n]o common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by
essentially emptying one's self of it into a book; for once trapped in a book,
then the book can be put into the fire, and all will be well." (Pierre)
"I forgot to mention,
that last night about 9 1/2 P.M. Adler & Taylor came into my room,
& it was proposed to have whiskey punches, which we did have,
accordingly. Adler drank about three
table spoons full — Taylor 4 or five tumblers &c. We had an extraordinary time & did not
break up till after two in the morning.
We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c.
were discussed under the influence of the whiskey." (Correspondence)
"We incline to think
that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little
information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He
us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke
ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from
your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out
of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street." (Correspondence)
""Dolt
& ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few
days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William
[Shakespeare]." (Correspondence)
From: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
"I am pleased to believe that beauty is at bottom incompatible with ill,
and therefore am so eccentric as to have confidence in the latent
benignity of that beautiful creature, the rattle-snake, whose lithe neck
and burnished maze of tawny gold, as he sleekly curls aloft in the sun,
who on the prairie can behold without wonder?" As he breathed these words, he seemed so to enter into their spirit — as
some earnest descriptive speakers will — as unconsciously to wreathe
his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the
creature described. Meantime, the stranger regarded him with little
surprise, apparently, though with much contemplativeness of a mystical
sort, and presently said: "When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did
it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it
was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a
touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In
short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from
knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the care-free,
joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible
creature?
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this
whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and
more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once
the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
things the most appalling to mankind.
From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has on power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; -- nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.
ibid:
But is life, indeed, a thing for all infidel levities, and we, its
misdeemed beneficiaries, so utterly fools and infatuate, that what we
take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of
the minutest event—the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or
the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small
characters by a sharpened feather? Are we so entirely insecure, that
that casket, wherein we have placed our holiest and most final joy, and
which we have secured by a lock of infinite deftness; can that casket be
picked and desecrated at the merest stranger's touch, when we think that
we alone hold the only and chosen key?
From Moby Dick:
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a
sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down
every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers
over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with
carving-knives all gilded and tassled, the sharks, also, with the jewel-hilted
mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and
though, were you to turn the whole affair upside-down, it would still be pretty
much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for
all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of slave ships
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a
parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and
though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set
terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do socially congregate, and most
hilariously feast; yet there is no conceivable time or occasion when you will
find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than
around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea. If you have
never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of
devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
From Moby Dick (and for Savid Dampselle and that other guy who was in Dampselle's Gaithersburg High School English class up on D-Wing above the Auto-Shop classroom/garage):
“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly
squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as
much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish
any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come;
let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
sperm of kindness.”
Oh, you read Melville's traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day post this far? Thank you! 2019: I wrote earlier this year I can't imagine reading Moby Dick again because of whaling, I can imagine reading again, maybe, but not soon.
Reading, and mourning, *Moby Dick* on the cusp of climate catastrophe: Melville’s 200th birthday coincides with the human-made sixth
extinction, as well as with the emptying, warming, and clogging up of
the world’s oceans via overfishing and the dumping of plastics. Such
facts imbue his novel with renewed and melancholy relevance. Reading his
book about a sentient, majestic, and desperate-to-live marine mammal in
a period when the planet’s whales — and all other creatures — are under
such threat grants the work a grim ecological cast.
And then there is Chapter 77, *The Great Heidelburgh Tun,* on decapitating the slaughtered whale to extract profit, what my copy opened to when I picked it up just now, and...
2020: Read Benito Cereno in March, and, re: Moby Dick, I am in negotiations with myself whether if I skip the slaughters is it reading the novel
2021: I read the torturing, murdering, and rendering of whales and I will never do it again
2022: Laugh, I was going to below the fold this post but my goddamn free blogging platform seems to have eliminated that option! I have very vague intentions to reread *Confidence Man* before Melville's 205th birthday
