Herman Melville's Clarel

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 7 of 13

Melville’s Clarel
Epic Poem of a Journey to the Holy Land
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 15, 1985

Transcript:
[inaudible] is about 2300 feet above sea level. And the Dead Sea is 1300 feet below sea level. So that there’s a differential of about 3,500 feet.
In Jerusalem in the part of Jerusalem which contained the Garden of Gethsemane. Then the beginning of a cliff there’s a spring, a well, which made Gethsemane a garden. And this water that runs out of Gethsemane used to carve a string called the Kidron down to the Dead Sea. And the Kidron is a very mysterious name. It has connotations of mysterious water. After the destruction of Jerusalem well in Gethsemane didn’t work properly. Except that once or twice a year it would have certain [inaudible] and a thin stream of brownish water would come out and would come down to the Dead Sea there at one time carved a very deep gorge. And in this region just before it plunges down to the Dead Sea the gorge almost like an abyss. And a trail, there is a trail that comes up to the Bethlehem from the Dead Sea and it goes along inside the [inaudible]. And right at the steepest point where there’s the most danger of falling over they built the most sacred monastery in Christendom, which was called Mar Saba.

If you’d go the other way out of Jerusalem, the only other way down into the lowlands is into the wilderness. The wasteland. The wilderness of Zen. And down there in the wilderness there’s other oasis, which was Jericho. And some 10,000 years ago, Jericho was truly a beautiful place because this whole Jordan River valley was lush and fertile. And Jericho when it was civilized about 7,000 B.C., 8,000 B.C. was exquisite but it, as long since dried up.
Melville’s journey took him in 10 days from Jerusalem to Jericho down to the Jordan, to the Dead Sea, back up along the Mar Saba and then up to Bethlehem and back into Jerusalem. And that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. And you can see that no one is interested in it. No one was interested in it. When the book came out, it is a high watermark of American spirituality of the 19th century.

We have been looking at in this series the way in which the American experience was fundamentally different from the European experience. The European experience was based upon history and the American experience is based upon the individual. The labyrinth of the individual was the background against which the American character was built. The American character however was amplified in an unconscious way. Projected against the landscape so that it was the American landscape that became the natural complement, the underside of the American personality.

When the United States reached its apex of polarity in the late 1850’s, when the American character was schizophrenia to an extreme Melville came very close to having a nervous breakdown. And in order to find himself all of his relatives and all of his friends took up a collection to send Melville abroad. And he went to England, and he looked up his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was an American consulate in Liverpool. Hawthorne’s comment was that Melville looked like death warmed over. And said to him, what is bothering cannot be talked away. It has to be experienced and felt.

Now Hawthorne was uncanny and anyone who has read Hawthorne knows that he had an exquisite psychological insight into the American character. He is the one who wrote the short story called The Great Stone Face of that Mount Rushmore like face mystically in the mountain side. And everyone trying to figure out who this was. And the storyteller towards the end discovers that is he, it is his face after all these years.

Hawthorne told Melville that the only landscape in the world that could help him was the Holy Land. And so, Melville took steamship without a stop and went to Constantinople. And then made his way down to Jerusalem. And this was in January of 1857. While he was in Jerusalem he fell in with a group of pilgrims who were going to make a 10-day pilgrimage. On completing the pilgrimage Melville had an epiphany, which is the Greek term for your religious vision. It was an epiphany of tragic dimensions. And when he came back to the United States, he was unable to write in prose. And almost to the end of his life he never wrote in prose again, except to make notes. He instead had understood that art is not a decoration, but that art is a psychological penetration of the mysteries. It is the realm of expressive form that takes the welling up from feeling and the plunging down of thought and ties a bow if it can between these two.

So, Melville realized that the art of language was poetry. And for the rest of his life, he read Shakespeare, The Bible and Homer. And a little bit of Schiller. And he tutored himself to try to discover how language could be raised in his time, over the crisis of consciousness, which had appeared in his time. And for about 10 years, Melville struggled with this until his oldest son committed suicide in 1867. And it was that event that catapulted Melville into an intense nine-year inner pilgrimage to recreate his journey to the Holy Land in an epic poem.

And the next nine years, increasingly, Melville who was stable by being a customs inspector, number 75 in New York City on the wharfs. He had a wife who stayed with him, Elizabeth Shaw Melville. And he had the challenge of his art. And between these three stability positions, Melville went again on this pilgrimage only in his artistic being. It was not an imaginative journey. It was a spiritual journey, which is different. The imagination like memory is a psychic phenomenon, but this journey was a spiritual phenomenon. Or rather we should say a spiritual numina.

And Clarel, and it’s pronounced Claire-Al. Al as in the Hebrew word for divine, God. So, it means literally clear God. The protagonist of the epic is looking for clear God. He would like a plain Job like experience of what is real, and he will settle for nothing else. He was looking for nothing else. Melville.

In fact, in his writing of Clarel wrote about art in this way.
In placid hours well-pleased we dream of many of brave unbodied scheme but form to lend pulsed life create what unliked things must meet and mate. A flame to melt a wind to freeze. Sad patience. Joyous energies. Humility yet tried and scorn. Instinct and study. Love and hate. Audacity. Reverence. These must mate and fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart to wrestle with the angel art.

This was a sizable task. The theme is not anything prosaic like a travelogue. It is the recreation. It is in fact, the creation of a focus for a spiritual crisis, which fell upon the American psyche. And when it was published in 1876 it was greeted like all great productions of wholesomeness. It was ignored. Because productions of wholesomeness include the unconscious. And the contemporaries almost by definition, cannot understand what has been said. A typical reviewer said it is 27,000 lines and I didn’t understand a single word. These are the extremes, which show that some great harmonious chords stretching from consciousness into the depths has been sounded. And that with such an integral network of connections that only someone who could have experienced that wholesomeness could have responded to it.

We still are unable to respond to Clarel. We cannot respond to it because the crisis of consciousness has never been resolved. This country is still schizophrenic in its basic structure. Unable to love. Unable to develop. The individual because the sham cosmetic selves which were encouraged to adjust to will not do. The landscape is too large. The epic proportions are too real. Only something cosmic can take its place here.

In Clarel we have an interesting situation. If we are to experience this coming off the streets of Los Angeles, coming off our jobs or television sets, it’s almost impossible for us to have any experience of this through a secondary medium, like a critical presentation. It wouldn’t mean anything at all. The best way to start as in, if I can indulge you for just a little while, is to give you a sample of the way in which Melville slowly works into the whirlpool of the issues. The poem is in four parts. It’s a great quaternary. And the first part is called Jerusalem. And the second part is called The Wilderness. And the third part is called Mar Saba. And the fourth part is called Bethlehem.

Jerusalem is the basic context. It is the context, the focus, the naval let the entire Old Testament. Jerusalem in the 1850’s was just beginning to experience the Zionist movement. There were just the beginnings of individuals going to the Holy Land to try and start a new life. To refurbish the Holy Land. And Melville was there at the origins of that whole movement.

The wilderness is always the testing ground. It is always the place where we must go. And the wilderness is always that area, which is flatted out in our experiences. And it’s always a waste. It has no sustenance for us. And it is the only backdrop then that could re reveal to us the fact that the nourishment must come from an invisible within and cannot be supported from without. This is a particularly grueling experience for personalities that are arranged so that they’re feeling compliment is in terms of landscape. Very few people in the history of the world have the relationship with the landscape that the Americans have. The Chinese have it. And with the Chinese, the Gobi Desert is very much like this. And with the Americans, the great West was very much like this.

The Wilderness in Clarel is a preparation for what is able to be revealed at Mar Saba. And that Mar Saba Melville brings is pilgrims. There are nine of them. Only four of them are able to make the journey. All the rest of them die on the journey. Several of the major characters die of what can only be called psychic exhaustion. They are not sick of diseases, but they are sick of themselves. And the strenuousness saps their strength. And it’s not as strenuousness of physicality, but it is the strenuousness of being wrung out psychically. Because Jerusalem and The Wilderness and Mar Saba, progressively squeeze and twist and turn all of the individuals until all of their psychic capacities have been squeezed out. Squeezed dry. They no longer have any of the imaginative or mnemonic or projective techniques or talents that they thought that they were basing themselves on. All that they have left are there are emaciated bodies and the purity of their spirits. And there’s only then that they may come to Bethlehem.
In all of this journey Melville begins it by having in the very first beginning of the poem Jerusalem, the arrival of the basic Pilgrim Clarel into a hostel in Jerusalem. A hotel arrangement where you would get meals and so forth. Any he paints this picture of the Pilgrim whom he styles a student sitting at his desk. And as he is sitting at his desk, we see that his bags are unpacked. And we see that the bags are covered with dust and the same dust of the road covers the student. And he is sitting thinking. And he’s trying to experience for himself that he has finally come to the navel of the divine. He has come to Jerusalem. And there’s no reaction. But he do you realize is that he has come on the feast of epiphany, and he looks out of his window, and he sees no divine vision. And this begins to unsettled him.
In chamber low and scored by time. Masonry old late washed with lime much like a tomb new cut in stone. Elbow on knee and brow sustained. All motionless on side long hand, a student sets and broods alone. The small deep casement sheds array, which tells you Holy town it is the passing of the day, the vigil of epiphany. Beside him in the narrow cell, his luggage line packed there on the dusk lies. And then him as well, the dust of travel. But again, face he lifts features fine yet pale and all but feminine but for the eye and serious brow. Then rising pacing to and fro pauses saying, other cheer than that anticipated here by me, the learner how I find theology aren’t thou so blind. What means this naturalistic [inaudible]. In lieu of Shiloh’s oracle.

So instead of finding anything oracular in Jerusalem he finds a vacuousness. And this vacuousness is a very peculiar kind of vacuousness. It is almost sensual. And Melville later on will isolate this for us and tell us what it is in terms of the landscape that he was recognizes that has been happening to him. And obviously has always been happening here in the Holy Land. And that this must be why this is the Holy Land. And he encapsulates it in these words about the desert. Because he begins to realize that Jerusalem is everywhere surrounded by desert. That’s a very peculiar surrounding.
For he finds it was yellow waste without as within, the student mused. The desert see, it parts not here, but silently even like a leopard by our side it seems to enter in with us. At home a mid-men’s homes with glide. We bring this vacuousness with us for we are in reality the only figures who registered this. The desert is itself. It has its being. It is to itself not vacuous at all. The wide-open spaces. The infinitude of the universe are not at home with themselves. He is the only us with our dreams, with our memories, with our imaginations thwarted that realize that it’s the desert.

And this is a parable. If you like not an allegory in the parable of the human condition. The fact that a man in the middle of the 19th century would be conscious of this existential dilemma is almost unheard of. This is 20 years before Nietzsche. This is a long time before Dostoevsky. This is Melville who is the first to recognize that some momentous cycle has been completed by man. That his consciousness has come back round now just some basic starting point. And at that starting point is in an infinite waste, an infinite desert, that will cling to us unless we find some way to be there. If we cannot be there then it’s clinging to us will slowly squeeze us to death. And we will suffocate in its vacuousness. This is the problem.

He begins the epic with this. And he takes this quandary with him through this quaternary, through this four-part cycle. And he’s in no rush to find the answer because he’s half afraid of what he will find. And so, he uses the technique that he used in Moby Dick. He constantly brings in other elements, little diversions. Data from travel books. Observations on what’s going on. The interest in characters. And for a while he’ll go off and literary parallels. But all of this is like the faints of an actor who is trying to convince himself that the role he is playing is not himself. But Clarel relentlessly comes back to the issue relentlessly refocuses, so that what is happening is indeed quite real. And all of the digressions are but increasing foolish embellishments. Failings of the sense of the ridiculous, which Melville with great seamanship and artistry shows us this is what we do all the time. We are always distracting ourselves. We are always bringing in new information, new entertainments. Concerning ourselves with other people. Trying to make involvements out of friendships and so forth. Always anything except to attend to ourselves. And this is the pattern of Clarel. This is indeed the journey that’s going on and goes on all the time. Relentlessly.


He writes here. We’re still in the first part Jerusalem. The third section called The Sepulcher. And The Sepulcher is the tune, and he comes to it, and he says, “In Crete they claimed the tomb of Jove in glen over which his eagles soar, but here through a people town you rove to Christ low urn.” He goes to the sepulcher where Christ was interred. And going there he finds this urn near the door.

So much the more the contrast stamps the human God who dwelt among us, made abode with us and was of woman born. Partook our bread and thought no scorn to share the humblest homeliest hearth. Shared all man except the sin and mirth. Such thronging thoughts made [inaudible] in Pilgrim pressing through the lane that dusty winds the Reverend Fein seat of the Holy sepulcher occur and naturally named there from. What alters old in cluster rare and grotto shrines engirt the tomb, caves in the crack and more is there. And halls monastic joined their gloom. To some incomprehensive bounds the passion’s drama with its grounds immense. The temple winds and strays finding each storied precinct out. Absorbs the sites all round about omnivorous and a world of mains.
He finds that there is no clear geometric distinct place there. That the place that is there is in fact, a labyrinth of mazes, of hallways, of tunnels, of arches. And he begins to realize that Jerusalem is like this. Jerusalem is like a beehive. It’s the, it’s the honeycomb which is completely arranged according to an architecture of wholeness. And man discovers increasingly that the life he lives individually is indeed profane because he is lost in that labyrinth. If he were whole, he would be at home here. He is an alien here. The very core of the roots of his own religion are anathema to him. And this he begins to discover.

And he writes,
Where now through influence of years and spells many a legend lent a sort of nature reappears. Somber or sad and much in tone. Perhaps with that, which here was known of yore. When from this Salem height then Sylvan in primal plight down came to Chavez dale with wine and bread after the four Kings check the Druid priest, Melchizedek, Abraham to bless with rights divine. What rustlings here from shadowy spaces.
He’s talking about all the ancient thousands of years of tradition that were here.
What rustlings here from shadowy spaces. Deep vistas where the votary paces will strangely intermittingly creep like steps in an Indian forest deep. How bird like steals the singers note down from some rail or arch remote while glimmering where kneelers be. Small lamps dispersed with glow worm light mellow the vast knaves as your night and make a haze of mystery. The blur is spread a thousand years. And cavalry is seen as through one’s tears.

And so, he talks about how whenever he comes to whenever he comes into focus, he realizes that a sense of overwhelming mystery is there presenting itself to him in its mysteriousness. And he cannot relate to it. And this is the dilemma of modern world. He cannot be at home in wholesomeness for it’s very mysteriousness puts him off because it has no definition. It seems ambiguous to him. It seems as if one was completely bankrupt of background in order to appreciate this. There is no way to appreciate it. And so, he recoils and looks for something else.

He finds…I’m going to have to skip over this. He finds in a character named Nathan, who was an American. Who married a Jewess. Who then came to Jerusalem to try to settle down. And his name is Nathan. And he has all the American characteristics of a vigorous entrepreneur and so forth. And he tried to apply this to Israel. And he found increasing like that it didn’t work. It didn’t take. That the land was not fruitful for the American way. It was fruitful only in this comprehensive, mysterious way. That’s the only fruit that grows there. The fruit called God grows in the Holy Land. Not profit. Not crops. Not a new empire. It doesn’t grow there.

And so, he writes it Nathan. He says in here,
The blunt waiting for monthly grist at mill and settlement some miles away it chanced upon the window sill a dusty book, he’s spied. His coat like the scotch Miller’s powdered twill the mealy owner might denote. Called off from reading unaware of the Miller had left it there. A book all but forsaken now for more advanced one, not so Frank nor less in vogue and talking rank. Yet it never shall outgrow that infamy at first incurred though viewed in light, which modern snow. Capricious infamy observed.

He finds this book and he asked to borrow it. And he starts reading in it.
Reclined that night by candle dim he read then slept and woke afraid. The white hills slide, the Indian skull, but this wore off. And then to him came acquiescence, which though dull was hardly peace and altered Earth. Solemn he chilled in Adam’s frame when thought thrust from Eden out to death and blessed no more and wise and shame.

He finds that whenever he comes into contact with real experience in the Holy Land. That contact no matter what it is evokes out of him a cacophony of images and memories. And it is all of the elements of his life, which were meaningful to him. The slide was a landslide that happened in New Hampshire, which a lot of his family were lost. And he finds that the Holy Land evokes out of us all of the memories, which we would like to suppress. Which we would like to forget. Because it is exactly this emotional counterpart to our mental lives that is lacking and is exactly this, that the Holy Land evokes.

And Melville’s protagonist Clarel begins to see that this is indeed happening to everyone who was there. And because it is so intolerable to any individual to have himself revealed in all this vacuousness, they began to interest themselves in other people’s plights. They become very curious of who is this now? What are they doing? What is their life story? Who are they involved with? And who are those people that they’re involved with? And so, the social projection comes out. The social complication is part of the cloud of unknowing. Which this vain curiosity spurred because it is the fear of one self of finding out of one self, comes into play. And Melville portrays explicitly how this is a glacial process. That realization is glacial in its comprehension. That the power that is there is not visible right away. We thought that nothing was happening or that one could shirk it. Or that you could talk about something else and it would go away. But it’s an incredible power that carves out rocks into valleys. And it carves out of the human psyche in the feeling tones, those configurations, those inner landscapes which one finds in the Holy Land, the landscapes that are out there. And increasingly Melville portrays this incredible sense of mystery that the Holy Land is a projection out onto the geology of the inner landscape of the tortured psyche of collective man. And he finds that he is walking this on a pilgrimage, and he feels more and more that he is caught up in some immense drama, which he can’t get out of. And he realizes that the compulsive energy of this has grabbed him and grabbed everyone else. And increasingly all that one can do is go along with it and hope to catch a little fresh breeze occasionally.

He writes at the beginning of The Wilderness part two, he says, I’m not writing like Chaucer, not from brave Chaucer’s Tabard Inn where the Chaucer Canterbury pilgrims left from. Not that. They’re very picturesque see. He’s not writing about that. He says I’m not writing about picturesqueness. They’re interested in winning fair Kent of Canterbury. I’m not concerned with that. I’m not concerned even with getting to Bethlehem. I’m concerned about taking the next step. I’m concerned about living one more minute with this overwhelming conscientiousness, which is forcing itself upon me to disclose my complete inner nature. He says, “I’m not talking about Franklins or squires. I’m not writing about Morris dances of whipped and story. Another age, other men. Here life is an unfulfilled romance, which has tragic dimensions overall.”

So, in The Wilderness, as they’re going along and some of the characters array themselves, Clarel realizes that he is true in an allegorical mentality. That he has difficulty staying present to himself because he is constantly seeing things in literary terms. In travelogue terms. Because he can’t help himself because he has this compulsion towards habitual ossification. He can’t help himself. He’s always been used to obscuring reality from himself. And his mind is very good at this. It is a literary mind. It is a well-traveled. It is a cultivated mind. And so, every time he looks, he finds himself going back into this addicted habit of seeing things just so. And so, as the traveling along all of a sudden, the allegory of Canterbury’s pilgrims comes back, and he begins writing this way.
He Clarel with the earnest face, which fitful took a hectic die kept near the saint with equal pace. Then came Ralph in saddle pummeled high. Yet even behind that peaked redoubt sat Indian like and pliant way as if he were an Osage scout or Gaucho of Paraguay. Lagging in rear of all the terrain as hardly he pertained there too. Or his right place therein [inaudible] rode one who frequently turned again to pour behind. He seemed to be in reminiscence folded ever. Or in some deep moral fantasy. At while in face of dusk and shiver as if in heart he heard amazed the sign of Ravenna’s Wood.
That’s an illusion to Dante. “Of pines and saw the phantom night at [inaudible] with a dagger raised, still hunt the lady and her flight from solitude to solitude. No less for daydream still. The reign he held with lurking will.”

And so, he is writing here of individuals who are all becoming haunted with the sense that the desert, the wilderness, is drawing out of them, squeezing out of them, the validity, the meaningfulness of the very basis for personality, which they have had. Their associations. Their mental learning. Their memories of their life. All their sense of self has been based on these things, and they are more and more becoming permeable and letting in the desert. Letting in the sanctity of the Holy Land. And when it comes in, it carries only with it, this leopard like relentlessness to be real. And is exactly this that the Victorian model of the mid 19th century could not stand. They couldn’t stand vacant spaces because that was the perfect abyss. That’s the perfect screen against which one projects out only the demonic phantoms that haunt oneself from the unknown. What was it that Goya’s great print was? The Sleep of Reason Produces Demons [The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters]. This is not just the aestheticization of reason, but the [inaudible] of reason until it evaporates. And what is left is only the real self-moving without wind or image. And it was this, they couldn’t face.

And Melville in his reluctance to face this squarely for himself or for his readers, keep skirting around it, until they come to Mar Saba. And when they come to Mar Saba, he realizes that the energy that he’s improved by going from Jerusalem down through Jericho and the Dead Sea and back up to Mar Saba along the Kudrin, that he’s accrued a tremendous energy. He’s become charged. And that it is his turn. It is Clarel’s turn. And there’s no way that he can look back or around. And he paints Mar Saba on the edge of this abysmal precipice that goes down to the Dead Sea in this old ancient monastery. Mar Saba is the place where about 20 years ago, it was discovered the page of The Secret Gospel of Mark. Mar Saba is the great Hermetic monastery where the last of the Greek alchemists held themselves out when the Arabs came in and the Islamic armies overwhelmed the Holy Land. That was the home of Marianus the last great, great alchemists to pass on alchemy to the Arabs, to [inaudible]. Mar Saba is the mystical place. It’s the mystical core. It is the place that’s not included in the church agenda. It’s not a part of the Orthodox or the Catholic church tradition. It is that mysterious place that needs to be there but one does not really want to go there because Mar Saba has a mystery in it. Buried, which Melville relentlessly takes us to.

Clarel comes in. But first he sets the scene like a great artist. Mar Saba. First part is called In the Mountain, “What reveries be in yonder heaven. Whether if yet faith [inaudible] it so.” In other words, what kind of dreams are there in heaven? “The tried and ransomed nature’s flow. If there are peace after strife be given shell hearts remember yet and know. By vista Lord of havens dear may that in such an transmit find. That never starts a winding tare which wanders”. So that everything begins to come undone. “Do Seraphim shed [inaudible] at last. On all of earnest mind unworldly [inaudible]. Nor the palm awarded Saint Teresa. Beyond the thunder…”

The machines can’t stand us I think. It’s part of the problem of our time.

Let’s take a break.

END OF SIDE ONE

To a situation like this from the workaday world that most of you have to endure. For six years I’ve presented the major tradition of the West by a simple ploy I got away from ideational structuring because each lecture was on a person. So that the lecture is moved person to person and not in terms of ideas. Not in terms of ages. Not in terms of military battles. Not in terms of politics. Not in terms of any theologies or anything at all. Just simply person to person. And we found in those six years that almost every major figure has been misunderstood. That if you draw a ledger and we’re going to list on that ledger all the major individuals, what did we do? We did some 400 individuals at least. More than 390 of these individuals would be misunderstood and misinterpreted. So that part of the problem that we have in our time is that we have a scrambled schmear we do not have a civilization. We do not even have a culture, which would be a local phenomenon. But what we have is an inexorable pressure to develop ourselves into self-realization. So that we do not have the background in order to do this. We just don’t have the ingredients. It’s like being told that you must produce a beautiful cake, and you’re given a little bit of raw grain, and you’re not given anything to put with it. You can’t make a cake out of it. There is no way. And so, we have to develop. We have to develop this context.

And if one were to look for a title for all of these lectures, I would call it The Yoga of Civilization. We have had yogas for individuals for thousands of years. There’s no problem with that. Those traditions are accurate. They work. A person can organize their body, their individual mind, their individual self, to a tee mathematically. But what has not been done, what has never been done, is that we cannot do it in terms of the civilization in which we live. There’s never been a yoga of civilization. And so, we needed one. So, this is an effort towards doing that.

Along the way we have discovered again and again that almost all of these major figures face the problem of themselves, which means face the problem of what we call today colloquially, the unconscious. The subconscious. And that it’s not some mysterious ambiguous nowhere, but in fact, the images that come to us can be located. They actually exist. Carl Jung called the unconscious the objective psyche. The personal consciousness is a subjective psyche, but the collective unconsciousness is an object of psyche. It actually exists like the world of physics exists. And it has a mathematical patterning and arrangements. It’s very exact. But it is energized. And if we in our slovenly blurred way come into contact with it, we electrocute ourselves. Because we’re not ready to handle a flow. And so, we instinctively fear self-development for that very reason. And we make up the famous favorite image that that must be an after-death state. Where is Heaven? Heaven is after death. Or Heaven is beyond. It is simply not true. It does not hold water logically. It does not hold water in a spiritual experiential way. It just simply is not there.

In the 19th century, in this country, Herman Melville came face to face with the fact that the tradition that we had been given, that he had been given, which was all founded eventually upon The Bible religion. In the 19th century it was more Old Testament than new. Did not deliver when one went there. It did not deliver in the expected way. It wasn’t a kind of a tourist site where you could go to, and you could identify. It worked in the most uncanny, comprehensive way that he was unprepared for. That they were all unprepared for. That the experience of the divine only been a comfortable midway way sentimental appreciation that one would read other of great family Bibles in Victorian living rooms embellished with things. And these were nice little comfortable parallels that you would read before you retired for the night. And Melville found that divinity is not sentimental at all but is real and penetrates. And when it penetrates it vanquishes and vanishes all of the phony structures that we have made to protect ourselves, to insulate ourselves.

And so that’s, what’s going on here in the poem. Is that this great tapestry, this great Victorian epic, is showing progressively that none of the decorations hold. They’re all chipping off and falling off. And the brick underneath it is chipping off and falling off. And he’s now in Mar Saba faced with the fact that he’s getting down to structure. And that there is structure there. And before the machine cut us off.

This is In The Mountain, third section, Mar Samba. 279 pages into the epic.
They turn and enter now the past wherein all redeem, all unredeemed by weeds, trees, moss, the winding [inaudible] leads. For road along the calcinated mass of aged mountain. Slow they urge side long their way betwixt the wall and flanked abyss. They hark the fall of stones. Hoof loosened down the cracks. The crumblings note they of the verge. In rear one strange steed timid lags on foot. And Arab goes before and coaxes him just steepy shore of scooped out gulfs would halt him there. Back shrinks the foal with snort and glare. Then downward from the giddy brim they peep. But hardly may they tell if the black gulf afrightened him or lingering scent he caught in the air from relics and mid lodgment placed now first perceived within the dell. Two human skeletons interlaced in grapple as alive they fell or so disposed and overthrow. As to suggest encounter self a ticklish rim, an imminent pass for quarrel and blood feud. Last, the Arab keeps and where or when Cane meeting Abel closes then. That deserts age, the gorge may prove. Piercing profound the mountain bear yet hardly churned out in the grove by a perennial wear and tear of floods. Nay dry it shows within, but twice a year the waters flow. Not in tide, but in dribbling thin.
And then up above looking from these two skeletons interlocked he sees Mar Saba perched on the top.

And the section called The High Desert,
The twofold testaments become transmitters of Chaldaic thought by implication. If no more those Gnostic heretics prevail, which shook the East from shore to shore. They’re strife forgotten now and pale. Yet with the sects that old revolt now reappears as if in assault less frank, none say Jehovah’s evil. None gain say that he bears the rod. Scarce that. But there’s dismission civil and Jesus is the indulgent God. This change, this dusking change, that slips like a penumbra over the sun. Over the faith transmitted down. Foreshadows its complete eclipse. Science and faith can these unite? Or is that priestly instinct, right? Right as regards conserving still the church’s reign. Whose strenuous will make Galileo [inaudible] recite the penitential psalms invest of sack cloths. Which today would light those potent solvents light expressed and the laboratories of the West. But in her Protestant repose snores faith towards her mortal clothes. Nay like a Sachin petrified.
A Sachin was an American Indian priest of the Iroquois nation.

“Nay, like a Sachin petrified in caved found in the mountain side. Perfect in feature. True in limb life’s full similitude in him yet all mere stone. Is faith dead? No. A petrifaction.” Because he’s looking out in all that he sees is the stony desert. And the stoniness of the desert has come into him like the desert air.

Granted so. Then what’s in store? What shapeless birth reveal the doom reserved for Earth? How far many seas retiring go? But to redeem us shall we say that faith undying does but range casting the skin, the creed. In change dead always does some creed delay. Dead, not interred. The heart upon internments brink. But now our age so infidel in equipage. Still carrying the Christian name for all its self-asserted claim. How fair is it? Tell. Can they age its own conclusions? Isn’t a King awed by his conquests, which in ring with menaces his diadem. Bright visions of the times to be. Must these recoil? Erelong be [inaudible] before the march and league about [inaudible] and democracy. In one result where two we tend shell science disappoint the hope. Yay to confound us in the end. New doors to superstition open. As years, as years in animals grow an action and reaction by. And never men attain but know how waves on waves forever die does all more in [inaudible] show so they. And in the vain appeal persisted yet as ever still blown back in sleep that blinds the eyes. Not less the fervor geysers rise. Clarel meantime ungladdened, bent regard [inaudible] in the more intent for silence held. At whiles, his eye led upon the drus, Muslim reclined half prone. The long pipe resting on the stone and reis a vapor floating by. The man and pipe in peace as one. How clear their profile. In peace as one clear and true. And he so tawny busty view antique and alabaster Brown might show like that. They’re all aside. How passionless he took for [inaudible] the calm. The calm, but not the dearth. The dearth or a waste. Nor would he fall and waste of words. That waste of all.

And he sees that someone who is at home in the Holy Land is unconcerned. And he is on the verge of a breakdown. And all that he has welling up into him is words. And the words come out and all of these vacuous curlicues of association. And he realizes that he’s having trouble. That he can’t stem this tide. He can’t stop this avalanche of putridness, which is coming out of him. And as he enters into Mar Saba, he begins to have these images, which blink into his consciousness. And he writes them down almost like automatic writing. And here’s some of the imagery that Melville, stretches and reaches some of the greatest poetry of the 19th century.
The Lake ink black amid slopes of snow. The dead house for the frozen bard. And the stone hospice chill. They show monastic in thy pass Saint Bernard, apostle of the [inaudible] storm riven. How loan did you build so near to Heaven. But Saba retreat of retreats where heart longing for more than downey rest. Fit place you’d find from world apart. Saba abides the loneliest. Saba that with an eagle’s theft seized in dwells in the cleft. Aloof the monks keep their eerie watch. Down from their hanging cells they peep like sapphire gatherers over the bay. Faint hearing there the hammerings deep of surf that smites the ledges gray. But up and down from grotto to shrine along the gorge hard by the brink file the gowned monks in even line and never shrink. With litany or dirge, they went where nature as in travail dwells. And the warren caves and pensive dells in whale for whale responses end. Echoes and plaintiff’s syllables with mystic silvery breed divine Saint Basil’s banner of our Lord. In lieu of crucifix adored by Greeks, which images decline. Stained with the five small wounds and read down through the darkling gulf is led. By night oftentimes. White tapers glow small in the depths as stars might show reflected far in a profound well. For 1500 years they have wound since cenobite first harbored here. The bones of men deemed martyrs crowned to fossils turn in the mountain near. Nor less well now lone scribe might, even now, in living dead of night. In Saba’s lamps the flames aspire. The votaries tend the far transmitted fire.

And he says that the vision of God comes like this Holy wind flame the roof and purifies everything by burning out all of the illusion. And that this now brings him to the vault in grotto, which is at the basement of Mar Saba. Cut deep, deep into the rock. And he’s taken there by an old monk. And the old monk is both just taking him there because this is what the monks do. They go through this ritual, this rote. And they make almost no comment. And yet at the same time Clarel realizes that he is being raised now up on tiptoe to look into the well of the mysteries.
Regarding him as he went by tossed in his trouble twas a glance Clarel did many a time recall. Though it’s unmanned significance that was the last thing learned of all. But passing on ways that whined a place he gained secluded there. In ledge a cenobite inclined busy at [inaudible] and floor of rock. Like Smith who may repair a bolt of [inaudible] vault. The door or stony slab lay pushed aside deeming that here are the monks might store in times of menace, which they bide their alter plate. Clarel drew near but faltered at the Friar’s sad tone. [inaudible] he looked like one whose life is but a patient’s mirror. Or worse a fretting doubt of cheer beyond. He toiled as an imply. Imposed a bondsman far from joy. No answer made he to salute though death might be. And now while mute the student lingered. Lo slipped down through cleft of craigs the sun did when aloft and [inaudible] citadel fiery shaft into that crypt. Like a well pole slant in a farmhouse well. And lighted it and he looked in on stony benches head by head in court where no recorders be, preserved by nature’s chemistry set the dim conclave of the dead. Encircled where the shadow rules. Sloping theater of skulls. He rose retreated by the line or cliff but paused at tones, which sent so pale. But paused the ends nor eminent not far. Standoff, the counter sign.
The monk tells him now make the counter sign. He doesn’t know what the countersign is.

“It came from over Kudrin’s rent.” He’s over the abyss itself now he realizes. That this amphitheater of all the skulls of all the dead monks of Mar Saba are arranged in this amphitheater are going down so that it ends in this abyss, this cliff. And when he looks down there he sees a ledge. And the monk tells him make the counter sign. Cause they’re used to pilgrims you see. Who were in a spiritual pilgrimage. Who know their way in the spiritual world and Clarel doesn’t know not to say.

“The countersign? Reply say something. Yay. Say death prompted the monk erewhile so mute. Clarel obeyed and in a breath. Advance, the shroud cried turning foot and so retired there into gloom within and all again was dumb.” He looks and he sees a sheeted apparition waiting. Like Lazarus at the Charnel gate in Bethany. And this apparition then turns and walks away. And he turns to the monk, “And who that man or ghost? Siro tis long since he craved over against to dwell enclaved. In youth he was a soldier. Go. But Clarel might not end it. So, I pray the friend, what grief was zeal could so unhinge him?” That he would spend his whole life under a sheet on the edge of this abyss in this amphitheater of skulls. What got to him that would condemn a man living to this? And the monk says, “Go ask your world. And grimed toiled on fitting his clamp as if alone dismissed him austerely thus.” So, Clarel is really in very bad way.

And in the poem, all of the characters begin to talk to each other in such a way that they realized that all of the communication that they had had with each other now is unraveling. That none of the life sustaining processes or thoughts that they had started the pilgrimage with any longer hold. And the only thing that holds with them is the fact that they’re continuing together. That it is the going together that holds. And they have all been shook in their various ways.

And Clarel keeps having this vision of this sheeted man down near the abyss and finally it gets to him. It’s like that seeing that physically was like a bud. And when the bud was taken into himself, it opened up. And when it opened up, he realized that he was being prepared to be taken into that and being another skull. And becomes fearful for that. And he rejects the ascetical perch over oblivion. And the way that he counters it floating up from his deepest psyche are the eyes of a woman that he fell in love with named Ruth. And it’s her eyes, her loving look, that saves him. And that just floats up from him. And he says,
But Ruth still Ruth yet strange involved with every mystery unresolved in time and fate. In cloud thus caught her image labored like a star. Fitful revealed in midnight Heaven when inland from the sea coast far the storm rack and dark scud are driven. Words scarce might tell his frame. And soothed was Ruth and oh much more than Ruth. That flank of Kedron still he held, which has built up in passing on. Well now sweet peel of chimings swelled from Belfry old. Withdrawn in zone. Away through cloisters deep he walked in winding vaults that slope to height. And heard a voice. A spied a light in twinkling through far passage dim and aimed for it. A friendly gleam. And so came out upon the tree.

And so, he finds his way out from this little abysmal cliff. And it comes out from this gleam of light, and he finds himself on a tree overhanging this.
Mid poised in ledge-built balcony. Inrailed and one who leaning over beneath the palm from shore to shore of Kudrin’s overwhelming walls and up and down her gap and grave. A golden cry sent such as calls to creatures which the summons know. And launching from craig tower and cave beautified in flight they go Saint Saba’s doves in Saba bread.
And he has this epiphany because the doves which have been clustered in this tree as soon as he comes out and realizes that he’s on this tree posed the doves of peace spread out and fly around. And they encircled him.

Not Fortune’s darling was seen here but heavens elect. The robe of blue so sorted with the doves in hue prevailing and clear sky serene without a cloud. So pure he showed of stature tall and aspect bright. He looked like an [inaudible] of God. Dispenser of the bread of light. Twas not the intellectual air. Not solely that though. That’d be fair. Another order more rare. As high above the mind of Plato as this above the man in kind. In beauty of this port unsealed. To Clarel part he stood revealed at first encounter. But the sweet small pecking bills and hopping feet at previous one the host or being in courtesy that could no feign beauty welcome yielding and a seat. It charmed away half Clarel’s care and charmed the picture that he saw. To think how like the turtle pear which married to fulfill the law from Bethlehem to temple brought for offering these Saba doves seemed natives. Not a Venus court voluptuous with wanton [inaudible] but colonnades where Enoch rose. Or walks with God as scripture say.

And so, they wind their way from Mar Saba up to Bethlehem. And they find that only four of the pilgrims have made it. Only four of the pilgrims together. Clarel out one of them. And as he goes through Bethlehem, he realizes that the saving grace for him has been this affinity with Ruth. And in the fourth part, in Bethlehem, towards the end, when they come back into Jerusalem, he finds that Ruth has died of a broken heart while he’s been on this pilgrimage. And that she died about the time that he was in Mar Saba. And she had given him the gift of her spirit, but that she was physically not there. And Melville comes face to face with the realization the 19th century didn’t want to face. That in that nothingness is the purest of all love. And they didn’t want to see it. And they tried not it for a hundred years that [inaudible] have the side, but it won’t go away.

About the time that Melville was writing this and working on this, the American character was maturing to a level that had not been seen for about 1700 years on the planet. And next week, we’re going to take a look at one of those great spirit guides who came out of this era. His name was William James. And was he and not Freud that made the science of psychology. Because he came out with this. We’ll see that next week.

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