Herman Melville

When I designed this series I tried to give it some balance. And with Melville tonight and next week with Whitman we come to the center. The balancing point of this presentation of our own tradition. And it's about the most invisible tradition in the world today. So it's very difficult to I think understand and appreciate Melville and Whitman unless one had some kind of a large form like I'm seeking to generate here. The beginnings of course were with the Native American Indians and with the. Sort of magnetizing experience that we had initially shaping us until the 1670s when a sudden severe. Indian War changed and warped the imagery that we had of the Native American people. Not all. There were groups for instance like. A man named Eliot translated the Bible into an Indian. Language phonetically. We have a page from Eliot's Bible on display downstairs in the library. And there were clusters of Christianized Indians who lived outside the towns. In fact if you remember. In Emerson that outside of Concord there was at one time in the early history of Concord one of these groups of Christian Indian villages. So not all but the major damage had been done. The major twist and the relational psyche as a large archetypal structure had occurred. Then we moved to Benjamin Franklin and saw how an individual born just one generation after that profound experience became a masterful figure and showed that the United States even at the mid 18th century was already at the cream of world history in terms of the talent of individuals and their participation in the alarm of the Human race we found with Thomas Jefferson a worthy successor to Benjamin Franklin and again bringing back the theme of trying to make some kind of relational peace with the continent with the Red man and eventually enlarging that to making some sort of relational peace with man's history. And the Great Revolution of 1800 when Jefferson came into office was really a restructuring of what had become a stagnant Federalist situation. And Jefferson really carved out what we know as the United States today gave us that tremendous impetus. And the basic spiritual core of that vision Was that the American people should be pioneers of developing man's capacities that they were the leading visionary edge of history in a very real exotic way. Then with Cooper we saw the beginnings of the expression of this in terms of a national literature in terms of the development of profound images like the Glimmerglass Lake within which the reflection of Deerslayer the archetypal American explorer pioneer who is a blood brother to the red man who learns how to read the wilderness as good as any native and thereby himself becoming a native. Not just to the country but to all of nature and to his own inner nature. And we found with Emerson the development of this in large scope. Universal master coming to see that there were in fact several. Broad currents of development that not only were we pioneering in the physical world but we were pioneering in the metaphysical world as well. And that almost in this hourglass shape of developing the American spirit these two currents seem to go out almost in opposite directions requiring enormous efforts on the parts of visionary people to keep them intact to keep them from polarizing as they so often did for mundane minds who mistook the sensations of vibrancy in the United States for authority and power instead of seeing them as the complementary currents of a universal flowering to produce a new echelon of creation within the human spirit. And so by the 1850s it became increasingly difficult for individuals to span this enormous polarized dichotomy that was promoted on the surface and to see in it this complementary unity of titanic historical and individual energy. So it was that Emerson seeking to find some way to put his hand on the issue and hold it before what had become a worldwide audience. He wrote the book Representative Men showing that there are often individuals and not just men women also but there are individuals whose vision is superior. Not that they dream up or speculate about something but that they see things as they are and their completeness. That is they see structurally and that their vision goes down to the roots of the world and to the wings of the future and so that they are able to see the unity and the unity in notion so that their understanding of the dynamic unfolding actually is a superior vision. But in the 1850sdespite the fact as we will see that there were half a dozen American works of absolute genius written all within a 4 or 5 year span. None of them were able to stop the incredible landslide into the Civil War which on the surface expressed the drive for polarized power and authority to come into a loggerhead clash. And the Civil War of course is the most tragic of all wars. It's almost a dead ringer for the tragedy of the Peloponnesian War where the Greeks fought among themselves the Athenians and the Spartans and of course the tremendous grinding of spiritual energy the tremendous chaotic mangling of vibrations in the Civil War set up a smokescreen that almost obliterated most of the practicing American visionaries at the time. We regard Lincoln with very high regard and honors because he never once under the strain broke. He carried through the vision of unity as best he could which was very very high. And if you are able to see into some of the observations that are presented through here will do Lincoln later on this year. But Emerson noticing that Lincoln even in the depths of the war things were going tremendously bad still had a kind of open humorous regard outside of the White House. Able to joke actually with people still in this tremendous cacophony of the Civil War. Herman Melville was one of those gifted visionary Americans who was unable after the Civil War to put back together his vision again. Though he tried valiantly in 1866 when he was 47 years old he published a volume of poems on the Civil War called Battle-pieces and it was his attempt to try and express in some cultural form the tremendous fraying edges of experience that had wrangled the American people into exhaustion. And I'll read just one poem from Battle-pieces and then we'll go on because he's so prolific we just can touch here and there. But you can look up there are collected poems of Melville and Battle-pieces is about 107 pages. This one is called Shiloh. One of the most bloody battles of the Civil War. Shiloh. Written in April 1862 the day after the battle. Its subtitle is A Requiem. It's not very long. It doesn't really need to be. The first thing we see is an image of birds swallows unable to land skimming lightly wheeling still. The swallows fly low over the field in clouded days. The forest field of Shiloh. Over the field where April rain solaced the parched ones stretched in pain through the pores of night. That followed the Sunday fight around the church of Shiloh. The church so lone the log built one that echoed to many a parting groan and natural prayer of dying. Foemen mingled their foeman at morn.But friends at eve. Fame or country their least care. What like a bullet can undersea but now they lie low. While over them the swallows skim. And all is hushed at Shiloh. And so struggling with this tremendous debacle. Melville sought to try to get out of the country to get a perspective. He applied to try and become the American consulate in Italy and was unable to secure the position. He tried a couple of other consular posts. They didn't turn out and so he sold his farm in the Berkshire Mountains where he'd lived for 12 or 13 years in Massachusetts and moved to New York City and spent the last 25 years of his life anonymous as a customs inspector in the Port of New York. And of course after he died when he died of course there were many people wondering who was Herman Melville. What had he done and one small three line obituary appeared that Melville had written some books that children read these days and had been famous before the Civil War. And of course some 20 years after his death they found among his papers the manuscript that was published then in the 1920s Billy Budd one of the really great novels in all that 25 years of obscurity and anonymity. Melville struggled to try to find what he had had before which was as I said starting tonight was a visionary stance from which presence he could see in balance the total thrust of the American character in the world and in terms of world history. He was looking for that place on the shaft of meaning where a man's mental hand might rest and in its feel conceive of a either a beginning or at least a fulcrum place from which one can design the meaning of life. He even went to the extent of traveling to the Holy Land to Jerusalem notebooks he filled. He wrote a great epic poem about 600 pages long called Clarel about an American in the Holy Land. It was published I think in just a few hundred copies in 1876 almost unknown to anyone. And in it he failed. But he failed in the terms that great men fail because he was unable to find that balance point. But in Clarel and it's written in Octosyllabic epic verse just a few lines on Cliff and moonlight roaming out. So Clarel thrilled by deep descent revulsion from injected doubt and many a strange presentiment but came ere long profound relapse. The rhyme recurred made void or gaps in dear relations. While anew from chambers of his mind's review emerged the saint who with the poem shared heaven on earth and gracious calm even as his robe partook. The hue and needs from that high mentor part is strength too strong to teach the weak. And so on. Struggling. Unable to do it. And as Faulkner once said at the end of his writing career there comes a point where the writer breaks his pencil says I've done my best. I can't do it. But before the Civil War. Before the decades of anonymity Melville had been an American genius of the highest order. He had been born in 1819 in New York to New York City. He had been the son of a fairly ambitious wealthy businessman who unfortunately failed in business went bankrupt. He had moved his family up to Albany New York to try and get a new start but was unable to and committed suicide in just a couple of years after his bankruptcy. Raving and somewhat mad. And of course it affected the Melville family quite a bit. A footnote to that is that 45 years after that on the death of the widow of his business partner she left the Melville some $28,000 out of guilt. We now suppose for what her husband had done to Melville's father. But this tremendous bouncing from the expectations of the upper middle class in the early part of the 19th century in New York City to this tremendous family crisis and tragedy this pulling of the plug out of all the expectations which he was encouraged as a young man to have and now we're unable to be fulfilled at least temporarily. Finally led Melville as a young man to seek employment. Other than the sort of odd jobs that he had had as a teacher here or there a clerk in a bank. He set off to sea signed on board some ships and spent 5 or 6 years traveling the entire world and involved in more adventures than you could possibly cram into a lifetime. He was involved in a mutiny. He was involved in running away from a ship and living among savage cannibal natives for a while. He participated in a cruise which became quite famous on the US United States frigate a ship which the captain was finally court martialed and reprimanded for cruelty to the men and when he came back at the age of 25 from all of these cruises he began to write and his first book was called Typekit Peep at Polynesian Life and Typee was an immediate success and it was promoted to be true. It was not a fiction. It was included in fact in a travel series. John Murray Publishers in England were quite concerned that this be a true account so that they could include it in their travel series. And Melville's friend Toby who had been with the natives and Nuku-hiva with him wrote a letter to the London Times saying that yes indeed we have done all these things. This is true. And Melville publicly clasped his old friend Toby. And so the portrait of the American wandering individual able to live in savage society and coming back and writing about it placed Melville immediately on the literary map. So he wrote a sequel Omoo which also sold very well and he was off and running. He wrote a couple of books about his early days in sailing Redburn and Marty. Then he wrote a book called White Jacket which was about the experience of the United States frigate. And White Jacket of course was a cause celebre. It was debated in the United States Congress and Melville suddenly found himself to be one of the most talked about and famous authors in New York. And with all this came of course wealth. He bought a farm outside of Pittsfield Massachusetts in the Berkshire Mountains. And as the success of his stories and novels went on he found himself as he says in his own words beginning to unfold like a rose. And his great confidant was Nathaniel Hawthorne who was a neighbor of his in the Berkshire Mountains. And in a letter to Hawthorne he says I date my birth from my 25th year that before that I had no idea of what it meant to be a human being. And now scarcely an hour goes by in my life that I don't unfold more and I feel myself rushing pell mell to some great rendezvous with destiny. And as the themes of what he was writing about began to penetrate him and occur to him that he was struggling trying to give birth to something quite enormous a perspective that deepened as well as spread out. He found himself engaged finally in the writing of one of the real great works of the human spirit Moby Dick. And he began writing on Moby Dick in 1850 and the almost cavalier jollity that he has in his letters of that time seemed to indicate that he was trying to surround himself with as much manly rapport and regard as he could because in his private moments that are not there in his letters he was as he says in Moby Dick trying to feel underneath the ocean underneath the primordial ooze for the structures of reality itself. And having grabbed hold of something he could not let go but had to pull it up and see it face to face. And Moby Dick of course is one of the great expressions of the human spirit. Realizing what monumental terrors await. One who pulls the dragon's tail. And yet having that tremendous ineffability of character not so much consciousness but of character to proceed and the ingenuity to penetrate through to find out. In Moby Dick. And when it was published it was published in three volumes. I have a three volume edition here. When it was published he began to of course consider himself graduated in terms of not only a writer but as a human being. And his very next work. And I will get back to Moby Dick. But his very next work is one of the most mysterious books ever written which is called Pierre or the Ambiguities. And in it we have really the first really tremendous archetypal psychological novel. Pierre becomes absolutely the focus of an existential anxiety which in its formless apprehensiveness seems to exude and color all the lives around him. And somehow the reflective center of this anxiety is the mysterious free floating face of a woman who he cannot quite place but to whom he knows. He has some basic primal relationality hidden long long since before he was born. And of course Pierre or the Ambiguities did not sell well. It did not read well. No one in the 1850s would have been able to read Pierre and come away with anything. It's really a novel that actually outdoes Kafka in many many ways. Following up here because Melville felt that he had earned the right to take his coat off he wrote a second novel which was also not very well received and which sort of put the capper on his professional career as a popular author. The novel was called The Confidence Man and Thomas Mann later on wrote of course Felix Krull the Confidence Man. There are some interesting interplays between the two works. In The Confidence Man Melville sets the character of Satan as a con man on a steamship on the Mississippi River and his whole regard for man is to involve man in increasing unceasing bickering and jealousies until everything is confused until the shell game with what is what is completely confused and there is no way to find out what is the truth of any situation whatsoever. And that of course is what Melville posits as true hell in Moby Dick. Melville reached one of those apotheosis moments when a writer does finally find and a visionary does finally experience that present sense from which one could start a beginning or from which one could balance any amount of information any structure of meaning whatsoever a universal achievement. But in order to express this Melville chose to pace the unfolding of it so that just little dabs of the true thrust of the story would come out from time to time and to interspace it with intervals of actual fact in terms of a context which would float the doubts of realization. And he chose a whaling voyage and all of the individuals and accoutrements that would go with this. And he chose one metaphysical creature a fabulous unbelievable yet unbelievable white whale to be the central symbol if you will synthesizing all of the directions of purpose that seem to emerge out of the whaling voyage until finally the normal business of the voyage becomes completely directed and focused upon the one controlling incident. And that of course is the place where reality can be not grasped but experienced in total. To begin it Melville brings us in very very very cautiously. In fact he doesn't begin with the story but he begins with a section called etymology just giving us quotations from everywhere. About the whale. What is a whale in terms of history in terms of man's experience and of course trying to keep a sense of manly humor foremost because he doesn't want us to flinch from the moment of seeing. And the best way to keep us in great regard is either through humor or through aesthetic artistry. One can either use a tremendous imagery as Shakespeare or Dante did or one can use tremendous élan as Goethe or Melville. So he begins it reads etymology supplied by a late consumptive usher to a grammar school. The pale usher threadbare and coat heart body and brain. I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars with a queer handkerchief mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars. It somehow mildly mildly reminded him of his mortality. And so begins Moby Dick. And then the etymologies give us the word whale in all the major languages. And then he quotes Hakluyt who was a great chronicler of voyages saying that principally the word whale must include a heavy aspirate the h ha because there's a sense of untold wonder in the creature. Then follows a whole series of extracts and these Melville puts in parentheses are supplied by a Sub-Sub librarian. He writes It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grubworm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Yaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not in every case at least take the higgledy piggledy whale statements however authentic in these extracts for veritable gospel cetology study of whales. Cetology. And in this Melville is funny with the whole series of criticisms and appreciations that have come out from him from Typee that all this was veritable truth all these were experiences which were actual. And Melville now is saying let's write about what is really actual. Let's get down below the travel guides. Let's get down to the very bedrocks of experience. If you would like to know something that is what we would call today cinema verite. Very well. I will tell you the metaphysical truth exactly as it is and color just a little so that you have enough taste to carry on. And let's hope you can stand to see what is really there. You want truth I'll give you truth. This is what he is saying but he's playing with it. He's giving us a chance to come in as with a sense of camaraderie and set aside our critical view set aside our doubtful views to become not just a reader but a co-participant in the spinning of this yarn and in the delving of the method to the visions. And so he says wrote. So fare thee well poor devil of a Sub-Sub whose commentary I am. Thou belongs to that hopeless sallow tribe of which no wine of this world will ever warm and for whom even pale sherry would be too rosy strong but with whom one sometimes loves to sit and feel poor devilish too and grow convivial. Upon tears and to say to them bluntly with full eyes and empty glasses and in not altogether unpleasant sadness. Give it up. Sub-subs for by how much The more pains you take to please the world. By so much the more shall ye forever go. Thankless. And he goes on and ends this wonderful opening cavalcade of impressions. By saying. But gulped down your tears. And high aloft to the royal mast with your hearts. For your friends who have gone before. Are clearing out the seven storied heavens and making refugees of long pampered Gabriel Michael and Raphael against your coming here ye strike but splintered hearts together. There ye shall strike. Unsplittable glasses and so mixed in with the conviviality the camaraderie the humor the irony are also the beginning threads of as someone expressed it define hammered steel of tragedy. As he breaks from the introduction the etymology and the extracts Melville then positions us to see what a young person roaming in the United States which had no longer really a wilderness. By the 1840s it had already become as Jefferson's vision a constant development. But instead of the young intelligence seeking the wilderness that had been in the land it now turns toward The oceans of the world a true vast planetary wilderness one which just 100 years before had barely been explored sufficiently to even appear accurately on maps. Captain Cook in fact did many of his explorations in the late 1760s so only one long lifetime between that and Melville. But he is anxious to bring out the fact that those individuals who just travel from place to place across the Atlantic Ocean or travel on the Mediterranean Ocean are not really there in the wilderness of the oceans. They're simply passing through. They're unconscious about the wilderness nature of the world. But those individuals who go off on whaling ships who are out of sight of land for six months to a year at a time who are off on these voyages from three to 4 to 5 years without a break. They actually are what we would call today astronauts or cosmonauts. They are the people who are really exploring not just the wilderness of the oceans in terms of their vast planetary extent but the inner response from the individual. And in fact in one moment tellingly in Moby Dick when the little cabin boy Pip falls overboard from one of the ships and is left bobbing in the sea for a couple of hours before they can get back to pick him up he is forever after considered mad. And Melville says that little Pip out there was not drowned physically but metaphysically that the pressure of having his perspective his smallness come in to just the size of his little head bobbing on the infinite waves of the ocean gave him to see the foot of God on the treadle of creation. And the sight of such enormity took away the mind of little Pip. And little Pip ever after is just shaking his tambourine and becomes sort of a gadfly on the Pequod the ship he goes to great lengths to say that water is magical. It is the phenomenon of context on this planet. And the vast oceans were the province of the American spirit and the American mind to go out and explore and use them more so than any other people And in fact he in the very beginning in Loomings which begins with the famous phrase call me Ishmael he talks about how if you go out in New York City on any Sunday and walk down to the piers you will find thousands and thousands of people gazing out to the oceans. If you take an individual and set him going in any part of the United States sooner or later they will gravitate towards water. And that almost by this magic reality of the transformational capacity of water and that mounted up into the infinite capacities of the oceans. To do this man is wed to water through his own physical being and through his metaphysical apprehension. And he writes he wrote I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Hot ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be sociable with it — would they let me — since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. In other words the universe is enormously vast complicated and man must be at home in it all by reason of these things. Then the whaling voyage was welcomed. The great floodgates of the wonderworld swung open and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose. Two and two there floated into my inmost soul endless processions of the whale and midmost of them all one grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air. And with this the first chapter ends and we find Ishmael going down to New Bedford Massachusetts to sign up and he goes on about New Bedford in much the way that I've been expressing it that even though it was small one could find more nationalities than in New York City. And not only that the ships from New Bedford had struck out until they had mastered the entire world of whaling and that even though the crews were so international that you found a persons from every race every nationality every situation they all seem to be under the thinking aegis of American minds that the officers of the whaling ships were Americans. The plans that went into the whaling voyage were Americans because there was something in the American mind that was at home in this vast wilderness of the oceans of the world and at home in this incredible infinite experience of adventure which was required and were able to keep themselves shaped as it were in the midst of all this infinity. And in fact Ishmael when he finds himself in New Bedford and he's thinking about universals and infinites and he begins musing to himself which is his nature that all the things he is doing do they not add up to patterns And do these patterns not reverberate into meaning which eventually is in fact colossally large and in fact universal And if he could only understand himself and what it is that he is now doing and involved in could he not understand it all And of course this is purely the visionary stance of Emerson. And if you read Emerson and Representative Men on Plato he says the great genius of Plato was that he was able to through education raise the spirit of the individual to new horizons of perspective wherein all the ideas that they had had heretofore were like small things clustered below and were encased in new levels of understanding and so on and so on up the Jacob's ladder of meaning until man had a true heavenly perspective about himself. And this is what Ishmael is trying to generate within himself when he finds that he is in New Bedford on a Saturday on the ship that goes out to Nantucket Island. Doesn't go until Monday and he has a couple of nights to spend in New Bedford and he searches in his pocket and he's got a few spare coins. So he finds the Spouter Inn and he is told by the owner whose name is Peter Coffin. And he begins thinking Spouter Inn Peter Coffin. And he's told that there is one half of a big double bed in a room that's available. Everything else is booked up the place is full and that this individual is out selling some shrunken heads around town. And so Ishmael wonders what kind of strange people. But since he has opened himself up to experiencing the infinite that he might as well take the situation that has been placed before him. And sure enough he falls asleep and somebody comes in in the middle of the night and lights a little fire in front of an idol. And Ishmael cannot quite see but it looks like the skin is purplish yellow and this huge beaver hat comes off and it's bald except for a huge top knot and the individual turns. And there are these huge tattoos and it looks like a mask of the devil himself. And of course it is Queequeg. And they have a great meeting. And later on when he signs his name on the register he makes this sign when they sign him for the Pequod that his name is infinity. But in the initial confrontation Melville has Ishmael as an individual who is having to work from scratch and create a relationship to the unknown through building up not just from the structures of accepted experience which he already has but through the ability to exfoliate. On the present new experience new structures which he never had and to make a whole new realization literally out of nothing. And Ishmael's initial meeting with Queequeg. And I'll read you some of it later just to give you some of the flavor of it. But the import is that it is in small. The theme of what Melville was saying that the American mind was capable of that we were no longer tethered to traditions that would hamstring us from experiencing situations that had never been experienced before that we were no longer tied down to ideas whose histories and origins and developments came from situations that have very little to do with situations that are now obtained and developing and many other ways that this could be expressed. And it's not so much that the American mind was free except to say that the American mind was free to see things as they are. And of course we have to recall now that Moby Dick is contemporaneous with Emerson's Representative Men. It's contemporaneous with Thoreau's Walden with Whitman's Leaves of Grass with Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables. They all written within a few years of each other. It was a moment when the insight of the American spiritual genius put their finger not on the place where the bow of meaning is tied but in the general vicinity where experience would allow one to create bows that don't even need to be tied. They come into presence through unified instantaneous experiential visionary procedures which are familiar to most of the metaphysicians that are here. This was the capacity that Melville was displaying at first in small with the tandem meeting of Ishmael and Queequeg and then throughout the rest of Moby Dick and through Moby Dick for the capacity of the American experience at that time. Well how does this how does this get some flavor He said he wrote. Meanwhile he continued the business of undressing and at last showed his chest and arms as I live. These covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face. His back too was all over the same dark squares. He seemed to have been in a 30 years war and just escaped from it with a sticking plaster shirt. It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard a whaleman in the South Seas and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too. Perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine. Heavens look at that tomahawk And of course the tomahawk is his pipe. The counterpart. But there was no time for shuddering. For now. The savage went about something that completely fascinated my attention and convinced me he must be indeed a heathen. And of course this is when Queequeg pulls out his little idol and he burns a sacrifice to it and so forth. And this looks for all the world like devil worship to him. And it's all these images come to him that this is it. This has got to be it. This is the devil. And he's worshiping a devil. And he's going through all of this and wondering. He says I could not help it now. And giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me. He crawls into bed feels that there's someone there. Stammering out something I knew not what. I rolled away from him against the wall and then conjured him whoever whatever he or it might be to keep quiet and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning. Who He devil you he said at last you know. Speak damn me I kill you And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing. About me in the dark. Landlord for God's sake Mr. Coffin shouted I. Landlord Coffin Angels Save me Speak E tell me who be. Damn me I kill Again growled the cannibal while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes. Get the hellfire imagery all about me till I thought my linen would get caught on fire. But thank heaven at that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand and leaping from the bed I ran up to him. Don't be afraid now he said grinning again. Queequeg here wouldn't harm a hair on your head. Stop your grinning shouted I. And why didn't you tell me that infernal harpooner was accountable I thought you knew it. Didn't I tell you he was peddling heads around town But turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg. Look here. You savvy me I savvy you. This man's sleepy. You. You savvy me savvy Plenty grunted Queequeg puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed. You Gideon he added motioning to me with his tomahawk and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this. And not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. You see he's caught all all of his prejudices all of his fantasies have come to the fore and none of them were true. And so he's caught there you see. But he's he's Ishmael. He's able. He's able to readjust for all his tattooing. He was on the whole a clean and comely looking cannibal. What What's all this fuss I've been making about Thought I to myself Well the man's a human being just as I am. He has just as much reason to fear me as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. See how Ishmael's mind works. Landlord said I tell him to stash his tomahawk there or whatever you call it. Tell him to stop smoking and I will turn in. So Queequeg puts his pipe down and they go back to sleep. It turns out that Queequeg and Ishmael within half a day become blood brothers. They realize Queequeg is as Melville says at least 20,000 miles away from home. By the way that he would have to get back. He doesn't know anybody. He's spent all of his life either on small little islands or in little port cities with whalers. And Ishmael is the first person that he's ever gotten a chance to talk to in a normal human way. And Ishmael of course who's been provincial all of his life is exactly the complement to Queequeg. He has all of the land grounded. Quote normal background. Queequeg. All the exotic. And the two of them realized that in each other they form a brotherhood. And so Queequeg draws out his purse and he empties all of his money on the counter and he splits it exactly in half and gives half to Ishmael. And Ishmael starts to try to give it back. And then he realizes no that they are in some of the literature on Melville which was almost nonexistent up until I think it was 1919. I forgot to bring it tonight. I have a copy of Raymond Weaver who wrote a book called Herman Melville Mariner and Mystic. And it was the first time that anyone had ever written a book on Melville. It was a big book. It's about 500 pages or so and it alerted everyone to the fact that there were treasures to be explored. And soon after that of course they found Billy Budd published it. Lewis Mumford came out later on in the 20s with his biography of Melville. And slowly Melville's works came back into print. And then in 1930 this set of Moby Dick was published in Chicago all with woodcut Illustrations by Rockwell Kent. I'm sorry I didn't have time or circumstance to put some of these on a slide but this set of books this is a set of Moby Dick in 1930. He has the actual publishing phenomenon that re-established Melville as a world class author. That is to say he ranks with Dante and Shakespeare and not just with some of the other contemporaneous writers that he is around. It takes a couple of readings of Moby Dick to get used to the enormity of it and then once you do of course you can go back to it. I go back to it every other year. There are some things that when you find that you can plumb and find out more about yourself than you go back to them. And so this is like Shakespeare and in fact Shakespeare and Dante were two of the pocket companions that Melville had when he was writing Queequeg. And in it of course. The notion of polarity is constantly in the foreground. And the lesson of the moral if you want is that if we don't resolve polarities they will electrocute us unless we back off into a limbo a sort of a nondescript existence and shmear over any chance that we would have of having meaning. But at any time in our lives in any situation where we seek to know with some clarity about more primordial issues those same polarities that were there before will still be there and the same conundrums will still be there. And so they have to be dealt with. And the crew of the ship in Moby Dick the ships the Pequod had has its polarity. The three mates the first mate Starbuck the second mate Stubb and the third mate Flask. And they have their counterparts. They're all American. New Bedford bred individuals. Flask is from Martha's Vineyard. Stubb is from Cape Cod. Starbuck is from Nantucket Island. But each of the mates has a harpooner. And this is like the knight and the squire only when they get into pursuing the whales these are the knights and these are the squires. Polarity is change and Queequeg of course we know about from the South Seas. Tashtego is an American Indian an enormous American Indian. Daggoo is a huge African about six feet five in his stocking feet so that there are three White Americans and there are three of world individuals from the other races. And the Pequod's crew is based on the fact that these polarities work very well but the commanding polarity which encases all of these others and dooms them even though they work well is that the Captain Ahab has as his polarity his polarizing figure his harpooner who is secretly smuggled on board with four others. In fact they are seen only by Ishmael. He sees in this phantom fog five figures run aboard and he and Queequeg have been talking to this wild eyed old man who says that his name is Elijah and he says you're going to sail on that ship are ye God help ye. And they say what have you got to do with us. You know. And he says pardon me. Pardon me. I didn't mean to say it but I know about the ship. I know where you're going. Maybe you're the kind. Maybe you'll go to. It's the devil's ship. Five phantoms come aboard and Fedallah is sort of a Chinese gangster who has just one tooth and is described as having these black silk clothes that sort of cloud around him and he hisses when he talks and he's hidden until the voyage is half over. He's hidden away and they're only brought out the fact that they have has this shadowy counterpart. When the object of the voyage is disclosed not just to go whaling but to go whaling after one particular whale. Moby Dick a white whale one that has taken off Ahab's leg but not just his leg has insulted him more has brought out in him a polarity that he can no longer handle. And so that he must do away with the intention by killing the other side of it. But he doesn't understand polarized energy at all. And in that structure because of Ahab's increasing control and tyranny always works the same way tyranny and authority. I think we did a lecture on this the difference between aspiration and authority. Last year there was a tape on this always works the same way. And Ahab eventually freezes the situation so that no one is free except for Ishmael and Ishmael has as his counterpart Queequeg at first but later on begins to understand is the only one who does understand about the whale. About the nature of the whale and the nature of the oceans. And Moby Dick and Ishmael. Even though it is not explicitly said except at the end because Ishmael lives he's the only one. He bobs to the surface on the coffin made for Queequeg and he is able to survive. And Moby Dick leaves him alone and lets him live. But they're able to work. The rest of these become increasingly frozen in a structure grid of power. And in order to carry out the authoritarian commands and control of this power everything has to be made static and strong. But brethren. And of course this is the very thing that brings out the incredible capacity for destruction which the world has. These are the very images. In transforming this structure. Ahab goes through a part in Moby Dick where he has the three harpooners take the heads off their harpoons and he has them drink a toast saying that they will pursue the white whale. And then the whole crew has gotten drunk and everybody is in this frenzy of this unholy compact with Ahab holding the three harpoon shafts and the three harpooners lifting up their toast to this. And that was the first transformation. And the second transformation is later on Ahab has a new harpoon made and the harpoon head is tempered not in water but in blood donated by the three harpooners and he consecrates this harpoon. He says not in Latin not in the name of God but in the name of the devil so that Ahab's power control structure goes through phases and transformations and several major points all around the harpooners and around this kind of polarity. But Ishmael is freed from that. He cannot and does not really respond to that. In fact there are moments several moments when Ishmael finally begins to understand about the the nature of the whale. He has in fact two portions in Moby Dick. Instead of reading them I'll just give you one is where he is up in the crow's nest at the top of the mast. And it's a calm day. And the Pacific is a broad blue. And he says it's almost like the depth of the blue of the infinite vastness of the soul and the weaving of the ship. North and south north and south and then east and west east and west lulls him so that he feels himself just a part of the eternal pattern of the flow of this ocean and that the infinite depths of the blue of the sea are in him also. And he lets it be because this to him is totally all right is it not In fact he says the fault of many people who drowned in the honey philosophy of Plato and are unable to free themselves. And he goes on like that. The second time is after they're processing some whales. There are these huge tubs of sperm from the whales which have to be kept in a fluid state and tend to start clotting. So he's assigned with some other crew members to squash these clots. And he writes this. It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree that when with several others I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it I found it strangely concreted into lumps here and there rolling About in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty. No wonder that in olden times the sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer such a sweetener such a softener. Such a delicious mollifier. After having my hands in it for only a few minutes my fingers felt like eels and began as it were to serpentine and spiralize. As I sat there at my ease cross-legged on the deck after the bitter exertion at the windlass under a blue tranquil sky. The ship under indolent sail and gliding so serenely along as I bathed my hands among those soft gentle globules of infiltrated tissues woven almost within the hour as they richly broke to my fingers and discharged all their opulence like fully ripe grapes their wine as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma literally and truly like the smell of spring violets I declare to you that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow I forgot all about our horrible oath. And in that inexpressible spur I washed my hands and my heart of it. I almost began to credit the old paracelsian superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger while bathing in that bath I felt divinely free from all ill will or petulance or malice of any sort whatsoever. Squeeze squeeze squeeze all the morning long. And this of course is a transformational experience. It drops him completely out of the frozen structure of the Pequot. He's the only one. 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-laborers 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. So much to say. Oh my dear fellow beings why should we longer cherish any social disabilities or know the slightest ill humor or envy. Come let us all squeeze hands all around. Nay let us all squeeze ourselves into each other and let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could have kept kept squeezing sperm forever for now since by many prolonged repeated experiences I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower or at least shift his conceit of attainable felicity not placing it anywhere in the intellect or in the fancy but in the wife the heart the bed the table the saddle the fireside the country. Now that I have perceived all this I am ready to squeeze case eternally. And then quietly he says in thoughts of the visions of the night I saw long rows of angels in paradise each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. And so this beneficent grace is bestowed upon Ishmael because of his capacity to open up and not just blend in but to understand. And so he drops out of this magical demonic authoritarian structure and is freed from it. Well of course as they go on I suppose most of you know the story. They approach Moby Dick eventually and Moby Dick turns out to be more than anyone had ever bargained for. He turns out to be sentient. He's not just a whale. He is the great granddaddy of all the creatures of the deep. And he has a military mind about attacking not just being a prey. And his great strategy of course sinks not only all the whale boats that are sent out against him but finally sinks the Pequod herself so that only the coffin of Queequeg is afloat on the ocean and only poor Ishmael clinging to his coffin is left. And the first image of the capacity of Moby Dick as a thinking mastermind comes when he flips himself totally into the air out of the ocean displays his total bulk. Melville says salmon like arched against the sky and not the sea like the natural bridge in Virginia. Remember Jefferson's great vision of that. Then he sounds he dives down and Moby Dick is so huge that he's like an island. And there are clouds of birds always around him. And when he sounds the birds fly up into the air and then Fedallah the man with the single tooth wrapped in black silk the evil hissing one points and he says the Birds the Birds and the Birds come swooping down right over the little ship where the whaling boat that's been sent out where Ahab is in. And the Birds come down right over Ahab's ship and Ahab looks down into the face of the deep and way down below. Coming up is this white smear becoming clearer and clearer. And as Moby Dick comes up he's protected against any harpoons because he's coming straight up and he opens his jaw and he breaches the surface and catches the whaling ship the small boat in his jaw and holds it there and then begins shaking it. Melville says as a cat playing with the mouse. And of course Ahab's head is only about six inches away from the blue inner casing of the whale's jaw. So the very thing that he's been after all this time is right there before him and there's nothing he can do. Moby Dick has him because the power that Moby Dick presents in himself not just symbolically but as a creature of the vast ocean is infinitely greater than Ahab's power. And Ahab who has sought to create a larger structure through which he can he says of his crew he says you are my arms and my legs. With you I am able to attack this whale. But he's completely outclassed even with that authoritarian structure which he has fashioned and transformed and transformed again and has made demonically powerful. Because the demonically powerful actually have no power whatsoever in terms of a natural flow and almost as if Moby Dick understands this. Begins crunching the boat slowly into pieces. Ahab Of course. I'll read the short description of this just to give you the flavor. Through and through. Through every plank and each rib. It thrilled for an instant the whale obliquely lying on his back in the manner of a biting shark slowly and feelingly taking its bow boughs full within his mouth so that the long narrow scrolled lower jaw curled high up in the open air and one of the teeth caught in a row. Lock. The bluish pearl white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's head and reached higher than that. In this attitude the white whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat. Her mouse. With an astonished eyes Fedallah gazed and crossed his arms but the tiger yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads to gain the uttermost stern. And then there's an illustration that has the jaw of the whale snatching the ship. Ahab returns to the ship finally as he's pulled out of the water and he's speechless with rage and Moby Dick swims off so they pursue. In a second time they come upon him and Moby Dick smashes two of the ships the little boats that are sent against him and goes on Melville says at the powerful pace of the casual traveler of the infinite ocean. Moby Dick is in no hurry to leave so a third time and Ahab believes that this is the charm is not three. The number is not three. The number of all this. And doesn't it fit And isn't it just right And isn't he the person And of course he's hypnotized and magnetized by his own visions and power. And this time Moby Dick turns upon the ship itself and rams it and smashes several of the planks at waterline and the Pequod begins to go down. And there's a moment there where there's a parallel Ishmael at one time in a storm when thereafter a whale has the experience of looking down and seeing that the boat that he's in one of these long harpooners boats is completely filled with water and it doesn't sink that all he can see is sort of just the bare outline of the gunwales of this ship. And he has this wonderful beatific experience of just sitting in this transparent boat on the surface of the ocean that he's a part of it. This time though there's no one that has that blessedness that grace. And the Pequod as it sinks in the waves just begin to wash over it and Moby Dick begins circling around the ship and throwing wavelets in on it and the whole ship goes down. And. This is it. For an instant the tranced boat's crew stood still then turned the ship. Great God where is the ship soon through dim bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom as in the gaseous Fata morgana only the uppermost mass out of the water while fixed by infatuation or fidelity or fate to their once lofty perches the pagan Harpooners still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now concentric circles seized the lone boat itself Duluth's crew and each floating oar and every lance pole and spinning animate and inanimate all round and round in one vortex carried the smallest ship of the Pequod out of sight. But as the last warnings intermixed poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the main mast leaving a few inches of the erect spa yet visible together with the long streaming yards of the flag which calmly undulated the American flag calmly undulated with ironical coincidence over the destroying billows they almost touched. At that instant a red arm and a hammer hovered backward uplifted in the open air. In the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A Seahawk that tauntingly had followed the main trunk downward from its natural home among the stars pecked at the flag and accommodating 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 grasp kept his hammer frozen there. And so the bird of heaven worth art. Angelic shrieks and his imperial beak thrust upward and his whole captive form folded in the flag with Ahab went down with his ship which like Satan would not sink till 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 solemn white surf beat against its steep sides then all collapsed and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had rolled for 5000 years. And that's the end. And then as an epilogue because Ishmael is completely outside the form the novel is over the end. You turn the page and a quotation from Job and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. And Ishmael then says on the second day. Finally on the second day a sail drew nearer and nearer and picked me up. At last it was the devious cruising Rachel who had lost a boat against Moby Dick three days before Ahab. It was the devious cruising Rachel that in retracing her search for her missing children only found another orphan. But the thrust of this when it appeared in 1851 in the United States was that a level of consciousness had been attained which was not only sophisticated but ethical. It marked a moment of visionary apex which had rarely been reached in any country at any time and had come to the United States just 75 years after its formal founding. And it's quite interesting to note that for a long time for more than a human lifetime the import of the work itself went unnoticed by and large and it was only rediscovered later on when levels of appreciation and apperception for these meaningful forms and structures had matured to the point and the normal flow of life to begin to receive the message that was there to begin to harmonize with the vibration that had been created. And so it is that quite often those visionary figures in whose sensitivity the balance of the true present is held in an expressive form usually have to wait a generation or two before there is some sort of a quote audience to understand what this amounts to. What this means where one can go with this. It's also interesting that out of the reams and reams of critical material there must be 20,000 books and articles and by now very few of them are really readable in the sense of drawing the whole large issue. They usually center on one aspect or another. There are a few synthetic attempts but very few of them begin to even appreciate and understand. I think one of the few and I'll just draw your attention to it was a book called American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. He has a lot of Melville in this American Renaissance by F. O. Matthiessen is one of the few really excellent works from which one can gain an overview. Unfortunately it's long. Again it's 6 or 700 pages. Well the contemporary figure with Melville was Whitman. It was Whitman who first reviewed Typee Melville's first novel in The Brooklyn Eagle. It was Whitman who also couldn't stand the tremendous crush of the American Civil War. He left his home and went down to the battlefields. He spent a lot of time among the miles and miles of wounded. If you've seen Gone with the Wind you have some idea of just the fields of injured just vast fields. And it was the first time the American Civil War was the first real modern war in terms of its destructive capacity. The armament had reached a level that had rarely been seen. In fact the American Civil War's battle techniques were often studied after by Europeans especially for the knowledge of modern warfare which were contained therein. But oddly enough even though they had been acquainted for over 40 years lived in the same city they never physically met. Melville and Whitman never had a meeting in person. But Whitman is about the only other figure that can be put next to Melville in terms of the far reaching capacity of an individual to envision a matrix for holding the total structure of the universe at any one given present and express it in terms of the imagery which could be understood by a people of that epoch. And the great counterpoint and companion to Moby Dick is of course Leaves of Grass which came out just a few years after it. So next week we'll take a look at Whitman and we'll try to get some idea about this great companion that Melville never met. Well that's all for this evening.