lookingland

friday's are always somber as the grave around here, so i'm just going to blither incoherently (not much sound or fury, but plenty of typing nevertheless).

in sarah vowell's book, there's a discursive paragraph in the garfield assassination chapter about herman melville and how he worked at the custom house all his life for 4 dollars a day, six days a week, and never in 24 years got a raise. sometimes i think melville haunts me a little (and not because of the job-thing). melville wrote the first really "great" American novel and yet died poor in obscurity. instead of writing, he dedicated his life to keeping the custom house honest (no small task in that era). vowell lauds his altruism, but laments the loss to literature. it's something to think about: the choices we make with our lives.

anyway, i'm not a "fan" per se of Moby Dick, though used it a great deal in my teaching. and i seem to run into it often in random places. this, coupled with my terror of the ocean all make for an interesting gooey hilosophical conglomerate.

today, for example, i did a silly book meme and got Moby Dick as my "great book".

like all memes, it's chockful of "insightful" personality analysis based on characteristic traits drawn from the text. but i thought i would eviscerate this one in particular because it poked me into an interesting place.

Among the greatest adventure books ever penned, you charter the development of both deeply sophisticated characters and a genuinely artistic plot. Dynamic, thrilling and gripping, you are Moby Dick - the tale of the white whale.

isn't that dramatic?

This book, amongst other things, explores the ideas of hidden depths. Both the ways of Moby Dick, and the ocean he lives in, are secret. You are similar, in as far as you are both deep and secretive. Nobody could ever know every inch of you, you are too big a personality.

weill i can't argue with occasionally feeling like i stand outside of the ballpark now and then, but the honest truth is i wish it weren't so.

You are also destructive, prone to terrible acts of disregard for the carefully constructed personas of others. Just as the ocean often sweeps indifferently across whole coastlines of urban sprawl, so you effortlessly crush the smaller people around you.

this is sadly true. not in a tempest in a teapot sort of way, but i do think i tend to smush people who get under my feet (or fins?)

You are, however, capable of great compassion. As the ocean harbours life, carrying more gentleness in its murky depths than anywhere else, so you have a deeply kind and caring nature bubbling beneath your surface.

yes, perhaps, but very few people know this, much as i try to share it.

As Ishmael tries, in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, to offer a simple collection of literary excerpts mentioning whales, he discovers that, throughout history, the whale has taken on an incredible multiplicity of meanings. Over the course of the novel, he makes use of nearly every discipline known to man in his attempts to understand the essential nature of the whale. Each of these systems of knowledge, however, including art, taxonomy, and phrenology, fails to give an adequate account.

The multiplicity of approaches that Ishmael takes, coupled with his compulsive need to assert his authority as a narrator and the frequent references to the limits of observation (men cannot see the depths of the ocean, for example), suggest that human knowledge is always limited and insufficient. When it comes to Moby Dick, the great white whale, himself, this limitation takes on allegorical significance. The ways of Moby Dick, like those of the Christian God, are unknowable to man, and thus trying to interpret them, as Ahab does, is inevitably futile and often fatal.

yikes. and what (if we are to take it seriously) precisely, does that mean?

whereas scully once calls mulder Captain Ahab chasing the great white whale, apparently i am the whale itself (i hope that's not a comment on my weight). as i have always felt a disconnect with Ahab (all the while wanting to understand him ~ and no, it's not just about the peg leg), this revelation of possibly being the whale (i.e. the object of pursuit itself) is a very compelling thought to amuse oneself with on a too-busy friday when the work is whirling tornadic about my desktop ~ perhaps morse so because it's something i had never considered before (who knew memes could actually be so provocative!).