Herman Melville's South Seas

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 4 of 13

Herman Melville’s South Seas
Return to the Primitive Paradise
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 25, 1985

Transcript:
The date is July 25th, 1985. This is the fourth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on transformational America. Tonight’s lecture is on Melville’s South Seas return to the primitive paradise.

This is the fourth lecture in this series on transformational America. And all these series that we’ve done for the last six years fit together. And they constitute in their pattern what was called about 500 years ago by the venerable Abbott Trithemius, the Chronologica Mystica and that is different from history. History has an interpretive ideational structure, but the Chronologica Mystica is the person to person contact by which truth and compassion flow together unbroken In history, there was such a thing as a tradition, and it’s rather like lighting one candle from another. And the individual flames of any given time or period are identical, but they’re separate. But the Chronologica Mystica is like a waterfall. There’s no differentiation whatsoever. It is the same spirit, not an identical manifestation. And so, it’s different. It is to use an overworked term esoteric as compared to exoteric.

This country happens to be a very important bridge in making the Chronologica Mystica contact available for everyone, not just for an elite, not just for an initiated inner circle, but the commitment is to make it available. This is of course very difficult because the tendency is to water it down. To make it available to everyone on a common denominator. But in fact, the only common denominator in the Chronologica Mystica is the mystical oneness, the Unitas of the universe. And so, it is up to us as individuals to understand that the common denominator is not a mental interpretation, which we have individually, but is in fact, the universal understanding, which we all participate in as a universal community. And on that basis, we have felt free to leave out all of the interpretive junctures, all the interpreted bridges, all of the ideational connections that usually one would expect at working at this level in depth. This level in appreciation.

In this series, which is called Transformational America, our country went through a period which ended just quite recently of understanding in a reformulation, the basic commitment to making this Unitas available to all and the requirements commensurate with that mission. It had originally been understood in the character of Benjamin Franklin, and he had passed it on to Thomas Jefferson in a very conscientious way. If we were able to appreciate and understand that teaching relationship between Franklin and Jefferson, it is every bit of the universal quality is that between Socrates and Plato. And the relationship is very akin to that of Socrates and Plato. The one was a man who was able to live that life, and the other was a man who was able to amplify the living of that life into an expressive form. For Plato, he created philosophy. For Jefferson, he created the United States. We like to think that the United States is founded on the constitution, but the constitution is not the structure of the United States. It is a legal skeleton for a certain level of organization. But the reality of the United States is made by Jefferson. And very patiently.

And this making of the reality of what we might even call mystical America, except that it’s everyday America was left open. That is to say it was not made a poignant doctrine or an object, which was consciously then passed on, but was opened up so that the possibilities were totally freed. And we have seen throughout the year, what a tremendous struggle it was that after the 1820’s the United States seemed to falter. It seemed to almost wreck itself upon its potential and not understanding the nature of its potential.

The United States became a money grabbing industrial teenager in the 1830’s. And by the end of the 1850’s, the country had fallen into what probably could be called a schizophrenia psychosis. And the Civil War was a spiritual travail and almost unbelievably in a very mystical drama of universal scope, a leading actor came onto the stage exactly at the right moment and help attention together, held the unity together. And that was Lincoln. And through the experience of holding that together, he rediscovered in a very real way, in a way in which he tried to express through his personality. He rediscovered that there was a real United States that the unity of the country was consciously palpable. That it was understandable. But that it did not organize itself in terms of some doctrine, which somebody could understand, but it organized itself mystically in the life of the people. And this is why Lincoln at the Gettysburg address said that this is a government of the people for the people by the people. It has nothing to do really with doctrine or even with laws. It has nothing to do with theologies. It has nothing to do with the kind of complexities that the mind makes up. But it has everything to do with the mystical unity of universal life that would like to be born now in a people.

And the man who saw that vision and understood that was Walt Whitman. And he said, it is an unbelievable challenge to make an esoteric community out of 70 or 80 million people instead of out of 10 prize students. He said the scale of this undertaking will boggle the historical imagination. It’s one thing to have a group of fine individuals gathered at the house of para clays in Athens and having Aspasia serve beautiful salon material and having people like Socrates and Xenophon and Horatius show up. It’s quite another thing to have a completely free form for now 235 million people. It seems almost impossible. And in terms of the mind, it is impossible. The only thing that makes it possible is that it is true. That there really is a universal spirit, a Unitas as Ficino used to call it in the Renaissance. The one as Plotinus called it in The Aeneids. And that this exists in the most certain way, provable way that we have. Any of us can rediscover it in our own terms site on scene with no complications, with no interpretation. And it was this freedom that was called liberty by Jefferson and Lafayette and those individuals who tried to lay the structures and foundations for it.

Central to that realization throughout the Western history has been Christianity. And for those who are coming to the Tuesday night series on archetypical Alexandria, you realize now what a tremendous change in human consciousness was affected 2000 years ago. That painstakingly reviewing the traditions, all of the religious and mystery traditions, the philosophic traditions in the B.C. centuries. We see as we come down to the 1st century B.C., that there are tremendous attempts to take these individual traditions and braid them together. That the pattern of synthesis in the B.C. centuries was a braiding together. Stoicism was one such kind of braiding. Hellenistic Judaism was, was one such type of braiding. And all of a sudden in the 1st century A.D. there are no more braidings. There is a fabric of inner penetration that doctrines come together and form universal vistas. And this is a molecular change in structure of consciousness. It is a totally different order.

And it was this that was passed on through the Western tradition. That consciousness must have a pattern, a fabric of reality, with which to express its realization potential. The largest fabric that was devised in the Western tradition for this was the United States as an entity. As an operating dynamic unity.

The decades before the Civil War were akin to a nervous breakdown of the attempt of the American people to realize this. And it was almost unconscious. And the issue that came up again and again, that seemed somehow exteriorly to focus this tension was slavery. And slavery is the perfect metaphor for the kind of habitual slavery, which man inherits from his organized past, from his unorganized life. A slavery, which is trying to work with the dead elements and arrange them in agglomerations trying to braid them together into meaningfulness. Trying to stick them together with political power, with theological arguments, with magical manipulation. And this agglomerating never works. It holds as long as there are people of power forcing it to. But they go. They disappear. And so, institutions replace people. And as long as the institutions are strong and hold these together, the agglomerations hold together. But they also surprisingly tire, fray.

But the archetypal structure of consciousness that has been about 2000 years now in the West is not to braid traditions. Not to glue them together no matter what kind of force there is, but to bring it together into a unity. To weave a fabric of reality, which is conscious. Which is religious instead of theological. Which is artistic instead of political. Which is magical instead of legal and which yields a cosmic vision instead of a metaphysical system. This is very difficult to understand. It’s very difficult to appreciate.

One of the most central figures in this struggle is Herman Melville. And we’re going to spend a month with Melville. Melville is protean. He’s like one of those sculptures of Michelangelo towards the end of his life that isn’t quite finished and is struggling to get out of the rock. And what has gotten out of the rock into the sculptors’ realm, into the artistic realm, is beautiful beyond compare. But the overwhelming realization and problem with someone like Melville is that he’s still half or a third stock into the rock of dilemma.

And the rock of dilemma for Melville was the question of evil. He never got over the realization that evil was real. That this world with all of its cosmic potential has evil in it. And as this occurred to young Melville, more and more began to dominate his vision. He couldn’t get rid of it because he was weaving a pattern of consciousness. And the issue of demonic evil, the power of darkness, began to affect Melville’s temperament and attitude. And finally, when he was at the pinnacle of his fame, which was very high. He was one of the best bread authors of the 1850’s. He tried to bring out in his work in a novel called Pierre and the Ambiguities [Pierre; or, The Ambiguities], the fact that cosmic vision and absolute demonic evil both exist in this universe together. And for Herman Melville, this was an ambiguity, which was unacceptable. It was an ultimate tension in reality, which could not be. It was incommensurate and yet was there.

And Melville struggled again, trying to bring some resolution as a great artist. And he wrote a book called The Confidence-Man in which he personified Satan as a Mississippi riverboat gambler. The white shoes and the white suit and the cigar. And his object was not to win at gambling, but to get everybody on the riverboat in consternation against everyone else, by suspecting everyone else’s motives on everything. And when the confidence man steps off in New Orleans, he’s very happy. No one trusts anyone on any level. There’s no possibility of human community. There’s no possibility of a United States because the only thing they can trust are the documents, the doctrines, the institutions, and they’re not going to work. The only thing they can trust is power politics and back-room selection. It’s never going to work. Only the isms and none of those isms are ever going to work. They are made like short fuse time box. They have their own destructive seeds within them. The very essence of revolution he has to carry within it the counter revolution at the very same time. You can’t get away from the structure. It’s almost mathematically pure. It wasn’t only until our time with Gandhi that someone finally experienced and thought through the whole nature and saw that the only solution is not confrontation on any level whatsoever, but for one person in any of the parties to find the truth and hold it. And continue to hold it until everyone could see that that was in fact the truth. And gotten to call that Satyagraha. Truth grasping. If Melville had had any intuition at all about that, he would have had a glorious life. He had no intuition at all. He struggled against it, all of his life.

And the origins of it are what we’re going to talk about tonight. The origins happen in the only Earthly paradise that there ever really was, the 19th century South Seas. The South Pacific in the 19th century, early 19th century, was as close as you can come to the perfect Earthly paradise. Because in a very real way, you know, the word paradise comes from the old Persian. It means a refined nature. It means a garden. It means that someone has taken all of the cream of natural entities and put them together in a planned place. And this is a paradise. That it’s man taking nature and alchemically transforming it into perfection. The first paradises where the pleasure gardens of Persian Royalty. That’s where the word comes from.

The 19th century by the 1840’s was recognizing that the Western tradition was turning ugly. The first railroads were being built in England in the 1830’s. And with the power of the railroads came the tremendous power of steel engineering. Some of those fantastic early steel bridges that were built in England are harbingers of tremendous power. One could spend distances that would dwarf cathedrals. One could begin to make the kinds of structures like the Eiffel tower in 1889, a thousand feet high that would dwarf anything man had ever made. And these were expressions of this tremendous capacity.

And already in the 1840’s, the differential between the South Seas and the industrial Northeast of the United States and the industrial centers of England and the industrial centers of Germany was about as great a polarity as you could find. And Melville was the very first Western individual to go fleeing from the industrial Frankenstein that was just beginning to be seen. To go fleeing for the paradisical man. He wanted you to experience paradisical man, not so much to go and see the natives men or women, but to experience it in himself, which was more precarious. He wanted to expose himself in such a way that he became a man who had returned to paradise. He wanted desperately, and we have to underline that word. He wanted desperately to know that man could return to wholeness when he’d been injured.

And the young Melville had been injured in a way which didn’t become apparent for about 10 or 15 years. He had been injured in the most primordial way. He had seen evil and could not explain it.

He says in Moby Dick, that his solution instead of killing himself was to sign on a whaling voyage. Instead of taking a pistol, he took a pen, and he said it was the same thing. And there was something about committing yourself to the deep. You don’t know what’s going to happen. These voyages were often for a year, two years without ever touching a port. You were on the face of the ocean for two years sometimes without ever seeing a port. 32 men in a small vessel, which would hardly be a pleasure yet today. Not to go exploring, but to get away. To find something else.

Melville in his work wrote two great Polynesian adventure travel stories, which are really the quest for this wholesomeness. The first one was called Typee [Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life] and its sequel was called Omoo. Typee is the name of a valley in the Marquesas Islands named for French Marquis from Peru, Mendoza. And Omoo is a Polynesian word, which means wanderer, rover. What we would call today a beach comber, but a cosmic beach comber. Someone who runs from island-to-island to island, who has no home.

And the central theme of Melville all the way through these early works is that when man becomes fully conscious he realizes that he is an orphan. He is alone in this universe. And that he is orphaned because evil has killed his parental confidence in God. And that a man may be moral in himself and have an ethical wholesomeness in himself. And that makes it all the more worse. Because again, and again, the question keeps coming up, how can I be ethical? And how can God be harboring evil? What a contrast. And so, self-realization for such a person as a quandary, the more it happens, the more tragical it becomes.

One of the great studies in Melville is called Melville’s Quarrel with God. Melville, a new kind of a Job. Not saying I just would like to know, but how can you do this.

In Typee near the end there’s an interesting section. He’s been living with the cannibals in the Typee Valley, and he’s walking with his friend, one of the natives, Kory-Kory, and they come across a carved pagan God in the jungle. And Melville gives us a very interesting insight into primordial man’s relationship with God. And he writes it this way,
In how little relevant reverence these unfortunate deities were held by the natives was on one occasion most convincingly proved to me. Walking with Kory-Kory through the deepest recesses of the groves I perceived a curious looking image about six feet in height, which originally had been placed upright against a low [inaudible] surrounded by a ruinous bamboo temple. But having become fatigued and weak in the knees was now carelessly leaning against it. The idol was partially concealed by the foliage of a tree which stood near. And whose leafy bows drooped over the pile of stones as if to protect the rude feign from the decay to which it was rapidly hastening. The image itself was nothing more than a grotesquely shaped log carved in the likeness of a portly naked man with arms clasped over his head jaw thrown wide apart. And its thick shapeless legs bowed to an arch. It was much decayed. The lower part was overgrown with a bright silky moss. Thin spears of grass about it from the distended mouth. And fringe the outline of the head and arms. His Godship had literally attained a green old age. All its prominent points were bruised and battered or entirely rotted away.
You can see this is the perfect image of Melville’s quandary. [inaudible] There are bruised and battered and damaged and rotten areas of the Godhead. How can this be?

“The nose had taken its departure. And from the general appearance of the head, it might have been supposed that the wooden divinity in despair at the neglect of its worshipers had been trying to tear its own brains out against the surrounding trees.” He wrote this in 1846. People thought it was entertainment. They read it to children in their homes.

I drew near to inspect more closely the strange object of idolatry but halted reverently at a distance of two or three paces out of regard to the religious prejudices of my ballot. As soon, however, as Kory-Kory perceived that I was in one of my inquiring scientific modes to my astonishment, he ran to the side of the idle. And pushing it away from the stones against which it had rested endeavored to make it stand upon its legs, but the divinity had lost the use of them altogether. And while Kory-Kory was trying to prop it up by placing a stick between it and the [inaudible] the monster fell clumsily to the ground and would infallibly have broken its neck had not Kory-Kory providentially broken its fall by receiving its whole weight on his own half crushed back. I never saw the honest fellow in such a rage before. He leaped furiously to his feet and seizing his stick began being the poor image every moment or two pausing and talking to it in the most violent manner as if [inaudible] it for an accident. When his indignation had subsided a little, he whirled the idle about most profoundly so as to give me an opportunity of examining it on all sides. I’m quite sure I should never have presumed to have taken such liberties with the God myself. And I was not a little shocked at Kory-Kory’s impiety.

This would be deepen in Melvin and deepen and deepen. And 30 years after he wrote Typee it would finally get to him in the way an old rusty knife not taken out of the body finally works its way into the heart. And Melville would take himself to the only place in the world that could resolve his problem. And that was the Holy land, Jerusalem. In our last lecture in Melville will be about his Epic poem, Clarel: A Journey to Jerusalem [Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land] to try to find out what was it like at the beginning, at the origins? What is it like now? And Melville will be absolutely shattered by the Jerusalem of 1876. 1876, the hundredth year of the American union. Because Melville in a very real way was an American Sage. A seer trying to understand what is happening to us. What is going on with us?

The early Melville, the Melville that we’re looking at now, was extremely popular. Whitman wrote reviews of his books. Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, you name it. Everyone loved Melville because they thought he was entertaining. He was family entertainment. He was the American on the broad seas. He was the man who had lived with cannibals and had come back to tell the tales. But for Melville again and again, when you read his works with understanding there’s something in here, which verges upon the awesome.

We’re going to take a break in just a moment, but here it was the end of Omoo,
An hour or two after midnight everything was noiseless. But when the first streak of dawn showed itself over the mountains a sharp voice hailed the four council in order to ship unmoored. The anchors came up cheerily. The sails were soon set. And what the early breath the tropical morning, fresh and fragrant from the hillsides. We slowly glided down the bay and we’re swept through the opening in the reef. Presently we hoped to, and the canoes came alongside to take off the Islanders who had accompanied does thus far. As he stepped over the side I shook the doctor long and hardly by the hand. And I have never heard or seen of him since. Crowding all sail, we braced the yard square, and the breeze freshened. Bowled straight away from the land. Once more, the sailors cradle rocked under me. And I found myself rolling in my gait. By noon the Island paradise had gone down on the horizon. What was before us was the wide Pacific.
That’s great writing.

Let’s take a little break. If I leave. I’m just down here hawking cassettes.

Melville lived the last years of his life, almost the last 35 years of his life in total obscurity. He was a customs collector for port of New York City. And he lived in a little tiny apartment. And no one visited him. No one talked to him for the last 35 years of his life. And when he died, it was about 30 years before anybody paid any attention to Melville at all.

And the first book on Herman Melville was written after the first World War, which is symbolic in itself. It was called Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic by Raymond Weaver. And Weaver was the one who was contacted by Eleanor Melville Metcalf daughter [granddaughter] of Herman Melville, who had found a handwritten manuscript in her father’s [grandfather’s] papers, and it was the manuscript of Billy Budd, which he hadn’t even sent to a publisher. Towards the end he accepted the anonymity with great courage.

The, the point I think in here, which is echoed in the literary histories, cultural histories, of Van Wyck Brooks. He wrote five volumes that go together and the center of it is the times of Melville and Whitman. And Weaver and Brooks say something very similar about Melville and it has to do with Christianity and primordial man. And in order to put this into some sort of perspective, we have to understand that if you transform a human being they are no longer what they were. That a transformed person is structurally different from a reformed person. If you reform someone, you change what they do, but if you transform someone, you change what they are. And this was always a dilemma in Christianity. Paul always talked about reforming Judaism into Christianity and Mark and John always talked about transforming human nature. So, it’s different.

Brooks writes,
Melville, however, was never seriously drawn into this primitive state of Felicity. Charmed as he was for a while by the savage life and far from adopting its ways himself. He alluded attempts made to tattoo him and escaped by a desperate rouse from the embrace of the Typees. But he never did attack civilization as such. He saw how civilization ruined the Polynesian life precisely by destroying the integrity of that life with all of its taboos. How when the temples were torn down and the people were nominally Christian disease, vise, premature death appeared at once.

And this was a shock to European man. When Captain Cook went to Tahiti, his estimate of the population of Tahiti was 200,000 people. When Melville went to Tahiti, 50 years later, there were only 9,000 people left alive in Tahini. It was absolutely catastrophic. The 9,000 were not only Christian. What happened to the other hundreds of thousands of people? It was a shock to them that the Christianity that they were [inaudible] was diseased. These people were living in paradise. There was nothing wrong with them. There was nothing wrong with the land. There was nothing wrong with the whole ecosystem. They had lived from time immemorial. And within one lifetime of exposure, just to a few Europeans, it was totally corrupt and degenerate. And the obvious thing was that we’re carrying some illness. And the illness that we’re carrying is in Christianity, as we understand it. And we were poisoning not only this paradise, but obviously ourselves.

And it was this which was the origin of the source of evil in the cosmos from Melville. And he could never talk about it straight up because it was too deep. It was too part of him. How can you say that your most precious beliefs are the very corrosive agent? Except that you can see it again and again. There it is island after island after island. Population after population. All kinds of different conditions. The Melanesians, the Polynesians, regardless of who has contacted, it was like a disease. And the same thing was happening to the American Indian. The same thing was happening in China. The same thing was happening in India. And at the middle of the 19th century, it was increasingly obvious that the disease, the corruption, the evil, was in the belief structure of Christianity itself. That somehow that structure was impure. How can that be? How can that be?

The myth of the noble savage began to arise. The myth of the noble savage. Rousseau had talked about natural man. He had talked about how there is a possibility even in civilized man to have moments maybe not very long or not very many. Or maybe just one. But a civilized person can have a moment of deep equanimity with nature and oneness with nature. For Rousseau it was in his boat, caught on the lake. And he said he never forgot the harmony of that moment. And that there was somehow buried underneath everything, natural man who was at home in this world. In fact, at home in this universe. And Mellville experienced that himself again and again, because he went native, as the British, just to say. He went native in the pristine way that when we’re introduced to him in Omoo, he comes off Nuka Hiva, one of the Marchese’s islands and he comes onto the ship and they’re rescuing him. And when he comes onto the ship, all of the sailors are lined up looking at him because Melville comes out wearing the Tapia cloth and the turban and a long beard and uncut hair and cheerful and fulsome. And he’s being rescued. He’s going back to civilization, back to home. And he sees this row of diseased faces, and he can see that they’re all ill. He says the, the skin becomes a kind of muddled bronze. And up to the eye of the native, which he had achieved they were all ill. They were demonic. They were physically ill. They were mentally ill. The whole thing. Everything. But he was an explorer. He’s an orphan. He couldn’t, he couldn’t go back. He couldn’t stay a native because this was home. This was reality. And yet he could see that his reality was the nightmare. This is very hard thing. Very, very, very difficult.

So, Melville did the only thing that the mind can do in this way and that is to wrap it all with fantasy. Wrap it all with…

Turn your cassette over now and it will convince playing again on the other side, after a brief pause.

That well, hell after all, it’s just an adventure, isn’t it? isn’t it just an adventure? But he could never believe his own hype. He could never believe that it was all just an adventure. Somehow it was just utterly too astoundingly real.

You know, Melville tried to lecture in the late 1850’s. He tried his best to be an author who was well-read who lectures. And one of the few lectures he was able to give before, he just couldn’t do it anymore was on the South Seas. And he talks glowingly about the South Seas. And he even gives us a little bit of history of how Balboa who named the Pacific the South Sea, because the curve of the [inaudible] of Darien is in such a way that when you climb up from the Caribbean coast and go over the mountain and look to the Pacific, you’re actually looking due South. That the [inaudible] curves that way. That’s why it was called the South Sea. And he says that it conjures up all the romance of the Orient and a cinnamon and bananas and all of these wonderful things. And isn’t it just an adventure. Isn’t life, just an adventure.

END OF SIDE ONE

In this way, and that is to wrap it all with fantasy. To wrap it all with romance. To spin a cocoon. To make up a mythology. That well, hell after all, it’s just an adventure, isn’t it? Isn’t it just an adventure? But he could never believe his own hype. He could never believe that it was all just an adventure. Somehow it was just utterly too astoundingly real.

You know, Melville tried to lecture in the late 1850’s. He tried his best to be an author who was well-read who lectures. And one of the few lectures he was able to give before, he just couldn’t do it anymore was on the South Seas. And he talks glowingly about the South Seas. And he even gives us a little bit of history of how Balboa who named the Pacific the South Sea, because the curve of the [inaudible] of Darien is in such a way that when you climb up from the Caribbean coast and go over the mountain and look to the Pacific, you’re actually looking due South. That the [inaudible] curves that way. And that’s why it was called the South Sea. And he says that it conjures up all the romance of the Orient and cinnamon and bananas and all of these wonderful things. And isn’t it just an adventure. Isn’t life, just an adventure.

And he says, it’s curious about Balboa naming us the South Sea because as soon as he saw it, he marched down to the shore and solidly claimed the entire Pacific Ocean, half the planet, for his King just because he saw it. He says, this is amazing thing. What is European man doing? What kind of a mind is this? You see it and you own it. The world in a glance. He says a large, minded gentlemen of great latitude of sentiment was Vasquez Núñez de Balboa [Vasco Núñez de Balboa] commander of that post of Darien.

He says, this is a very curious thing that the South Seas then becomes the romantic cocoon out of which the tremendous development of European colonial serenity developed. It was the whole reason for this development, this whole stem. The Pacific Ocean, the South Seas, is the very matrix of the tremendous dynamic madness that led to the industrial revolution. It was the vision of being able to own paradise that drove man to his greedy madness of wanting to subdivide it. And this is what got to him. And got to him very, very quickly.

He says in Omoo, he writes, “The day was now drawing to a close and as the land faded from my sight, I was all alive to the change in my condition.” And Melville was constantly alert to the fact that he’s not only transforming once, but once he got the knack of it, he could put himself into various consciousnesses and he would notice that everything changes. Everything changes. There was a spot in Moby Dick where he’s up in the masthead and he’s keeping lookout and watch and the motion of the masthead he notices is because the ship has the same motion. He says, that’s because the whole ocean has the same motion. He says, it must be because the planet has this motion. And he says, he realized that the inscrutable tides of God must have this motion. And he said, he realized that they were shouting at him. He had been up there for hours, and he thought he had just now thought a few thoughts and he’d been up there all day.

Transformation. One is different. One is not reformed. There’s no agglomeration. The whole pattern of reality is different.

He says,
The sun is going down. He’s on the ship. Now he’s aware, alive, to the change in my condition. How far short of our expectations is oftentimes the fulfillment of the most ardent folks. Safe aboard a ship. So long my earnest prayer with home and friends once more in prospect, I nevertheless felt weighed down by a melancholy that could not be shaken off. It was the thought of nevermore seeing those who notwithstanding their desire to retain me a captive had upon the whole treated me so kindly. I was leaving them forever.
Not so much that he was leaving them forever, but he was leaving that naive appreciation of that transformation forever. Things were now changing again. Life is strange. It is utterly magical. We are now not only in a different condition; we are a different being. Where is the continuity?
And Melville is always concerned with this. He goes down to his bunk and he says,
So unforeseen and sudden had been my escape. So excited had I been through it all. And so great the contrast between the luxurious repose of the valley and the wild noise and motion of a ship at sea, that at times my recent adventures had all the strangeness of a dream. And I could scarcely believe that the same sun now setting over a waste of water had that very morning, risen above the mountains and peer down on me as I lay on my mat in Typee. Was it a dream? Is this a dream? Was that real and is this a dream? Is any of it a dream? Is any of it real?
And it’s all within the context of nature, the same sun, the same, see the same islands and this kind of mental counting. This kind of fingering reality becomes incessant in Melville. An in Omoo it’s almost relentless. Almost relentless.

And of course, the Dae Numa is that the only thing a man can do with this kind of quandary is to head for open water. That’s all you can do. Because there is no way on the basis of that kind of experiential transformativeness, without some central confidence in integration, there’s no way that you can come to a resolution. The only thing you can do is look for wider contexts and wider ever context, more and more. And yet it’s those wider and wider contexts that are really fearful because they really are the unknown. And there’s such a thing as spiritual fear, as well as spiritual courage. And we’ve seen it in our own time. We have seen a graphic worldwide presentation of spiritual courage and spiritual fear.

Why is it that only Americans have gone to the moon? Why have the Russians not gone to the moon? Why is that? There’s such a thing as being afraid to step free from the Earth. That silence out there penetrates.

For Melville he had reached the final ultimate context opening up. He was willing to be alone on the Pacific. Alone on the world ocean. Melville and Moby Dick says the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean here, but arms of the Pacific. It’s a one ocean, but the continents are islands in the ocean. That the reality of the Earth is the ocean and that the continents are just islands. And we’re all Omoo. We’re all Beachcombers wandering from island to island. But it’s in the context of the sea of the world ocean that we can commit ourselves to this openness, if we will, if we will.

I had outlined Omoo for you to try and give you complete look, but I have to skip over because of the time. Again, and again his descriptions of nature are so beautiful. And as he’s describing them this deja vu about whether it is a dream or not comes into play. And increasingly he feels that somehow he had actually walked in the garden of Eden and actually had been thrown out of the garden Eden all over again. And that somehow all of this Old Testament biblical imagery had become charged and energized and was alive in him. And it was a process that he could not stop. That he had committed himself to experiencing life in such a realistic way that now it was like popcorn popping. There was no way to stop it. And he was becoming fearful because he wasn’t sure just what kind of range of imagery was going to energize and open up for a man. And the thing that made him fearful was that he was still somehow committed, still have committed to trying to keep a shape on it. To keep it from getting out of hand. And the only context that he had to keep the shape of all these archetypal energies together was Christianity. And he couldn’t trust it anymore.

And he opened himself up in Omoo and he said, “If I can’t trust Christianity, at least I can trust God.” And as soon as he said that he realized that that was the real problem that he couldn’t do that. And so, he became afraid of his own freedom of his own expanding capacity to be real, without any trust that there was a shape to it at all. And he saw the complete degradation of Polynesia in the South Seas an indication that this is what was happening.

And he gave a little vignettes. One was called Mosquitoes, and he talks about how one Island in the South Pacific had mosquitoes. And that was very peculiar, and he searched around and found out how this island got mosquitoes. So, he says his friend and almost called Long Ghost symbolically enough.
The night following the hunting trip Long Ghost and myself after a valiant defense had to fly the house on account of the mosquitoes. And here I cannot avoid relating a story, rife among the natives concerning the manner in which these insects were introduced upon the island. Some years previous, a whaling captain touching at an adjoining bay, got into difficulty with its inhabitants, usually over women. And at last carried his complaint before one of the native tribunals. But receiving no satisfaction and deeming himself aggrieved he resolved upon taking signal revenge. So, one night he towed a rotten old water cask shore and left it in a neglected taro patch where the ground was warm and moist, hence the mosquitoes. I tried my best to learn the name of this man and hereby do what I can to hand it down to posterity. It was Coleman, Nathan Coleman. The ship belonging to Nantucket. When tormented by the mosquitoes, I found much relief in coupling the word Coleman with another of one syllable and pronouncing them together energetically.
That’s how Mosquitoes begins the chapter.

And this is how it ends. They are going through the jungle, and they see a ruin.
And the ruin was partly sheltered. A Relic of time’s gone by. Which a few days after we examined with curiosity. It was an old war canoe crumbling to dust. Being supported by the same rude blocks upon which apparently it had years before been hollowed out. In all probability it had never been a float. Outside it seemed originally stained of a green color.
Remember the idol that we began to lecture with. This is a functional idol. A long God canoe.

Stained green color, which here and there now changed into a dingy purple. The prow terminated in a high blood beak. Both sides were covered with carving and upon the stern was something which long [inaudible] maintain to be the arms of the Royal house of Pōmare.
Pōmare was the queen, the [inaudible] queen lineage of Tahiti.

The device had a [inaudible] look certainly being two sharks with the talons of Hawks clawing a knot left projecting from the wood. The canoe was at least 40 feet long, about two feet wide and about four feet deep. The upper part consisting of narrow planks laced together with cords of [inaudible] had in many places fallen off and laid decaying upon the ground. Still, there were ample accommodations left for sleeping, and in we sprang the doctor and the bow and I, and the stern.
It’s an archetype image. This is like the boat of the sun before the great period…pyramid of Cheops. This is the voyage of the polarity of man crossing over.

He, the doctor Long Ghost in the bow and I in the stern. I soon fell asleep, but waking suddenly cramped and every joint from my constrained posture, I thought for an instant that I must have been prematurely screwed down into my coffin. Presenting my compliments to Long Ghost I asked how it fared with him.
Coffin. Long Ghost.
Bad enough, he replied as he tossed about in the outlandish rubbish lying in the bottom of our couch. Ah, how are these old mats smell? And as he continued talking and this excited strain for some time, I at last made no reply having resumed certain mathematical reveries to induce repose. But finding the multiplication table of no avail,
What does he multiply? What is the nature of the real? Why is God evil? Why am I pure and he can be evil? That the mathematics that he’s talking about.

I summoned up a grayish image of chaos in a sort of sliding fluidity. And was just falling into a nap on the strength of it when I heard a solitary and distinct buzz. The hour of my calamity was at hand. One blended hum, the creature darted into the canoe like a small swordfish and I out of it. Upon getting into the open air to my surprise there was Long Ghost fanning himself wildly with an old paddle.
This is very arcane. This is the Polynesian way of bidding goodbye forever just to wave a paddle. Long Ghost is bidding goodbye to the realm of natural paradise where a man once had a God canoe that he could sail into the unknown. It’s now filled with the mosquitoes of civilization in revenge.
He had just made a noiseless escape from the swarm, which had attacked his own end of the canoe. It was now proposed to try the water. So, a small fishing canoe hauled up nearby was quickly launched and paddling a good distance off we dropped overboard the native contrivance for an anchor, a heavy stone attached to a cable of braided bark. And this part of the island, the circling reef was very close to the shore, leaving the water within smooth and extremely shallow. Ah what a blessed thought we knew nothing till the sunrise when the motion of our aquatic cot awakened us. I looked up and beheld [inaudible] wading toward the shore towing us after him by a bark cable. Pointing to the reef he told us we’d had a narrow escape. And it was true enough. The water sprites had rolled up our stone out of its noose and we had floated away almost out to sea with no paddle.

So, we’ll move has all this kinds of imagery. And it was read as household entertainment because in the America of the 1840’s, it wasn’t yet conscious. There were feeling tones that something was not right, but it wasn’t conscious yet.

Next week we’ll talk about The Confidence-Man, where Melville becomes very conscious of what it is that’s bothering him and why. And being an artist the only thing that he can do with it is to turn it into literature. Lawrence Darell once said in the Alexandria Quartet, when faced with reality all a man can do is love it or forget it or turn it into literature. And he has to make a choice.

Well I hope some of you are you going to make it next week and we’ll get into that.

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