Many thousands of you have visited over the last year and a half, and I appreciate your interest and support. I am releasing these songs for sale mostly for those of you who have expressed a desire to listen away from your computers, or to include tracks on mix CDs, etc. All songs, of course, will remain available on this site for anyone who wants to listen.
If you spend enough time with a book, you start to notice things that you would have no reason to notice on a first, or even second, read. These noticings tend to seem like deliberate inclusions by the storyteller, but also tend to have no clear purpose in the story itself. A professor of mine called these “octogenarian” noticings, presumably because they come with time.
I had an octogenarian noticing as I reread Chapter 27, “Knights and Squires.” The chapter — the second of three chapters introducing the mates, harpooneers, and captain of the Pequod — formally introduces us to the Pequod’s second- and third- mates, Stubb and Flask, respectively. In describing Stubb and his squire/harpooneer, Tashtego, Ishmael frequently refers to air — Stubb’s breezy personality, his lightness of spirt, the smoke from his pipe protecting him from a miasma of ponderous thoughts, not to mention a reference to Tashtego as “Prince of the Powers of the Air.” Flask and Daggoo (particularly Daggoo), appear in references to earth — stout, unmovable, like a lion or giraffe. In the next chapter, Ahab comes across strongly as associated with fire, which fits the later introduction of Fedallah (frequently referred to as devilish and smelling of brimstone) as his harpooneer. Flipping back to Chapter 26, Ishmael describes Starbuck, surely enough, with strong water imagery.
I’m not sure what significance we can assign to this choice in Ishmael’s storytelling, if any at all. Does Ishmael seek to lend an elemental mythos to his tale? Is this another attempt to establish a pre-Christian spirituality in the story? Or does Ishmael want to establish himself and Queequeg, members of Starbuck’s crew, as true spirits of water — ponderous, reverent, and observant? Perhaps Ishmael only wants to further his point about American dominance over the world. All of the above? None of the above?
Chapter 27: Knights and Squires
Bumbling nobility paired with strength
Provides a might without right, Oh!
Led underestimating the majesty,
The gravity facing us.
How could I breathe
A little of each nightmare
Sighed in all dying breaths?
God of the air
Medicated with camphor,
Block miasma of empathy.
Stout, Earthly travesty led with ignorance,
The dirt in its fearlessness.
Never to feel the depths, even
Face to face, all sublimity wasted, Oh!
Nothing to move
The mountain of your violence,
Even battering waves!
Man of the world,
Yet braced against the influx
Of our tremulous days.
Rally the backs,
The strength of every island
Pitched at banners of eloquence.
Only the wretch,
The touch of something deeper,
Will be graceful on high.
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea October 19, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea January 9, 2010
Ishmael is a moody cuss, and though I wouldn’t go so far as to call him misanthropic, he’s definitely an outsider. The Gregory Peck film version of Moby-Dick plays up a maritime fraternity — i.e.; a strong sense of belonging — as attracting Ishmael to whaling, but the book suggests otherwise: Ishmael wants to alienate himself from life on land.
“Nantucket” offers some insight into the nature of belonging. Ishmael describes Nantucketers as belonging to the sea in a way no other group could. Merchants, war-ships, pirates and privateers use the ocean, but they don’t interact with it, and so remain mere extensions of the land, and not creatures of the sea. In contrast, the Nantucketer “alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.” In “seeking to draw a living from the bottomless deep itself, ” Nantucketers become a part of the ecosystem, comparable to a landless sea gull. In other words, belonging runs deeper than habitation, down to the foundational interactions that sustain life itself.
Ishmael also mentions the inverse. A Nantucketer, he says, spends so little time on land that “when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.” In other words, belonging to the sea means alienation from the land. And this makes me wonder if Ishmael — observer and outsider that he is — really expects to be of the sea, or if he’s merely searching for a more distant vantage from which to see the truth on land.
Chapter 14: Nantucket
The thief who thieves from countrymen
Is a vicious criminal.
Heroes cast their empires wide
As a noble blanketing.
Mining yet through surfaces
To extract the best from all.
As oil on water brings a darkness
The heroes’ shadows fall.
An island born from Heaven stealing
The future of the Earth,
Rests its head atop the ocean,
A proxy one for each.
Friends and lovers laugh together,
The rape’s relentless cry,
A barren desert gilded with
A villain’s remedy.
Every surface serves as but
The monster’s wherewithal.
A push defined by that to push
Makes a gift of boundaries.
Life in placid infinite,
Though a paradise in form,
Tortures spirits’ needs to break
Into other peoples’ homes.
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea October 18, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea December 31, 2009
in “The Pulpit,” Ishmael introduces the fantastic, though brief, character of Father Mapple, a reverend via the holy order of whaling. Father Mapple spent his youth as a harpooneer and, to Ishmael’s great transfixion, carries “clerical peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led.” Father Mapple arrives at church through a storm, bedecked in a sailor’s hat and overcoat. He strips the outerwear to reveal his inner identity as spiritual leader, and climbs into his prow-shaped pulpit via rope ladder “with a sailor-like but still reverential dexterity.” Father Mapple then hoists his rope ladder, isolating himself in his pulpit.
Ishmael clearly finds great significance in all these details. In his description and analysis of Father Mapple, Ishmael constructs a definition of sailor as pilgrim that stretches throughout Moby-Dick as a whole. Here, in discussing the significance of Mapple’s prow-inspired pulpit, Ishmael thinks “What could be more full of meaning? — for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.”
I am left to wonder: who stands in this pulpit at sea, in the isolated spiritual search of the whaler? Ahab stands out as an obvious parallel to Mapple — both being captains of sorts, both being old and wizened, both idiosyncratic to say the least — and I would not put this kind of bleak spiritual implication past moody Ishmael, but as we see with Mapple in the following chapter, he doesn’t bear the heavens or the earth with any of Ahab’s malice. In fact, what we see most of Mapple in his sermon is a contemplative and observant storyteller, much more akin to Ishmael, the captain of our narrative, and the Noah of the book’s final flood (there’s hope for us yet!). The thought of an Ishmael at the prow of the world carries many interesting implications, especially in considering that Ishmael is no captain at all. Rather, he is a listener, an observer, a thinker, and an honest teller of his own inner truths. What more could we possibly aspire to as human beings?
Chapter 8: The Pulpit
Climbin’ up the pulpit, as a ship at sea.
Isolate your sermon, lofty like a priest.
At the prow:
Symbolism now!
So we set the stage
From a random page.
Every affect, image, turning of the leaf
Doesn’t carry meaning deeper than the brief
Dropped impression:
Lightness isn’t heaven.
But oft it goes,
The tempest of our woes,
Whether a lost, forgotten captain,
Or rebel to shake the wrath of God.
Through the door, a mass of idiosyncrasies:
With the shell of sailors over suit to preach.
Old and bright,
Fascinating sight,
But a man the same.
Don’t forget his name.
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea October 15, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea December 29, 2009
Conversations about obsession in Moby-Dick often carry with them a touch of the romantic, somehow equating obsession with passionate intensity and emotional profundity. Similarly, in many discussions of artistic obsession, I notice a search for passionate underpinnings, as in “What in the world would inspire someone to do something like that?” But the inspiration always seems so much less relevant and interesting than the follow-through, especially in illuminating the nature of obsession.
Throughout Moby-Dick, Ahab discusses his inspiration in half-coherent, bitter rants of cosmic injustice — passionate, perhaps, but ultimately simple-minded and melodramatic. However, he discusses his follow-through as a metaphysical loss of free will. Take, for example, Ahab’s discussion with Starbuck in “The Symphony,” when he questions, “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?” Ahab clearly wants to stop his chosen course of action, but rather than blaming himself for his choice, he builds an elaborate philosophical framework of having no choice at all.
In “The Chase — Second Day,” Ahab gives us a last window into his obsession. Invoking the age old omen, more or less, that the third time’s a charm, Ahab declares his intentions to lower for Moby Dick one last time. When Stubb declares his bravery to Ahab, Ahab calls him, under his breath, “mechanical,” and then realizes that omen works as a force to drive away fear. By invoking fate and omen, Ahab excuses himself and his crew from the important task of confronting choice and taking responsibility for action.
This is obsession — not a romance of passion, but an imprisonment of will, a feeling of living without choice. Obsession means doing without thinking, doing because you have to, living as a machine, sometimes for the express purpose of ignoring agency. Of course, Captain Ahab is a case of extremes, and as such, speaks to an extreme sort of obsession. All artistic pursuit, as with any job, requires some degree of obsession, a surrender of choice for the sake of the pursuit — seeing friends less, going to the Met less, laying in the park less than one might otherwise choose.
Despite Elvis Costello’s thirty year old rebuff in “Welcome to the Working Week,” people tend not to want to think of artistic pursuits as work, preferring, perhaps, romance over reality. Perhaps Ahab’s biggest fault lies in painting a romance over the the reality of his own pointless, unfulfilling 9 to 5 — and perhaps this is why, to many, Ahab appears heroic.
Chapter 134: The Chase — Second Day
It’s the worst could happen
Every waiting day:
How could darkness pass away?
In the early morning
With a captain’s grace,
Soon foretold to whence we chase.
With the wind an ally
And the sea to speak,
Brought us place, pernicious.
Thundering breach, froth, and majesty
Tore into view.
And he took us head-on,
And we circled free,
And I lost my death in thee.
Every beacon splintered
In a punchbowl sea.
Firstly, cradled; lastly, leaned.
Would I have leaned any oftener!
Would I have leaned!
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea October 13, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea December 6, 2009
Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he swallows.
In the DC comics universe exists a Bizarro World, where everything functions exactly the opposite of the way it functions on Earth. Bizarro society hates beauty, perfection, intelligence, and success, among other Earthly values. Bizarro Superman was punished for doing good, and his sentence involved turning the spherical planet (a perfect shape) into a cube (less perfect). Even the name of the Bizarro World, Htrae, is Earth spelled backwards.
In “Leg and Arm,” Ahab stumbles into his own Bizzaro World, a British ship called the Samuel Enderby. The captain of this ship lost an arm to Moby Dick one year past, not long after Ahab lost his leg. Both captains have ivory prosthetics, objected to by doctors and crafted by ship’s carpenters, but herein the similarities end. The Samuel Enderby is a quite jolly ship, full of humorous banter and ribbing. The Samuel Enderby’s captain, Captain Boomer, has seen Moby Dick twice since the loss of his arm, and wisely (in his own esteem) did not engage. Boomer’s incredulous reaction to Ahab’s chasing of Moby Dick visibly upsets Ahab, who violently storms off the ship’s deck to return to the Pequod.
Perhaps the most striking difference between the worlds of these two ships is the way in which they conceive of Moby Dick. The Enderby’s doctor, Dr. Bunger, swears as scientific fact the inability of the whale to digest human flesh, and assigns, ergo, “that what you take as the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints.” In other words/worlds, a whale is a wild animal, acting as such, and anything more is poetic personification. The Enderby seems to have dealt with its tragedy much more reasonably than the Pequod. Maybe in reality, the Bizarro World came to Captain Boomer.
Chapter 100: Leg and Arm — The Pequod, of Nantucket, meets the Samuel Enderby, of London
You gave a leg and I gave an arm –
Let’s shake bones together!
We thrilled for the Whale; we both came to harm –
In whiteness stained forever.
Both taken by the do-run-run –
Where the lust begun
I can’t begin to say.
Once clinging to a grim resolve,
And so our flesh dissolved;
It melted away!
Our doctor’s a drunk; he left me a stump,
Presenting Dr. Bunger!
“The captain, that man, with hammer for hand,
Clubbed me in a passion!”
(both:)
Oh Bunger, you’re a rascal, man / Oh Boomer, so facetious, man
You didn’t feel my hand / I never drank a dram
No matter what you say! / No matter what you say!
Oh Bunger, nothing like you man!
“And neither you, captain!”
(both:)
We’ll laugh all the day! / We’ll laugh all the day!
You gave a leg and I gave an arm –
Let’s shake bones together!
We thrilled for the Whale; we both came to harm –
Let’s shake bones together!
Let’s shake bones together!
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea November 29, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea November 29, 2009
For obvious reasons, visiting my parents reminds me of my childhood. Our family photo albums include a pretty awesome sequence documenting my first (bowl) haircut at the barber. We were living in Montana at the time, which I remember very little of, but the woman who cut my hair looks wonderfully patient and sympathetic with the steady stream of tears running down my face.
I’ll leave you this week with a song I wrote some time ago, inspired in part by that sequence of photos.
Best wishes for the holidays. See you next week.
Haircut
I’ll still recognize you
After your haircut!
I’ll still call you by name,
And know who you are.
You’ll look different, it’s true,
But that’s okay!
I’ll still like you the same,
In each and every way.
Let’s go walk down the block
And get us a haircut.
Clip, clip, snipity-snip,
You look like a star!
Turned the chair and I look into the mirror,
Rub my eyes so I see a little clearer.
I stick out my tongue, and so does my reflection –
I guess that’s me to perfection.
I still recognize you
After your haircut.
I still call you by name,
I know who you are.
You look different, it’s true,
But that’s okay!
I still like you the same,
In each and every way.
I’ll still recognize you
After your haircut!
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea summer, 2007
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea December 10, 2008
This is farther than I usually care to venture into literary analysis, but I think in Captains Bildad and Peleg, we have something of an Old Testament God and Satan, respectively. In chapters leading up to “Merry Christmas,” Bildad blesses while Peleg curses, Bildad quotes scripture while Peleg challenges the hypocrisy and inconsistency of Bildad, Bildad ruminates as Peleg blusters, and so on. In these two captains, I can’t help but see not a pairing of good and evil, but of faith and practicality, Heaven and Earth.
The contrast carries into our last encounter with the pair, acting as harbor pilots for the Pequod in “Merry Christmas.” Bildad sings lamenting psalms about fruition and plenty, laying in wait beyond the river’s flood. Peleg kicks crew members in the rear as they hoist anchor to a bawdy tune “about the girls in Booble Alley.” Ishmael refers to a balance between “pious Bildad” and the “devil for a pilot” of Peleg, in thinking if his voyage was being launched to “peril” or “salvation.” Even in the imagery of their final goodbyes — Bildad’s simple “God bless ye” versus Peleg’s promised “hot supper smoking” for the mates in Nantucket upon their return — Bildad and Peleg seem as God and Satan.
In “The Ship,” as Peleg writes out Ishmael’s contract before Bildad, I can’t help but think that Ishmael, like Job, is something of a bet about the corruptibility of all humankind. In the midst of the bargaining, Bildad repeatedly wishes for Ishmael to have the seven hundred seventy seventh lay — three sevens, a union of frequently occurring numbers of strength and protection in many mythologies, including the Bible. Is Bildad trying to charm his wager, or is he just a cheapskate?
I also can’t help but wonder why two Quakers would choose a Christmas morning to launch a voyage, and there perhaps lies a significance. In treating Christmas as a day like any other, Bildad and Peleg plant us firmly in Old Testament myth — not of a war for souls, but of faith in the human spirit, challenged repeatedly by an advocate, if only to strengthen and affirm the position held by the faithful. To me, thinking about the whole of Moby-Dick in these terms seems true to its literary merit. By no means do I seek an “answer” to the book in coincidental symbol and allusion, nor do I think these ideas lend themselves to answers as much as they do to questions, the biggest question perhaps being, as in the story of Job, “Who won the bet?”
Chapter 22: Merry Christmas
Based on belief, it wouldn’t be logical
Charging a man to tame the depths of all,
Much less a man so touched when on the battlements.
A bet the devil would make
In Old Testament days
With God, so celebrate
A Merry Christmas.
Sing to the sea, your words of milk and honey,
Warm through my heart to stand against the chill,
Pounding with strength still cresting from the darkest day.
A bet the devil would make
In Old Testament days
With God, so celebrate
A Merry Christmas.
Our pilots disembark,
Return to lee.
Three cheers for open water,
No traffic.
Based on belief, it wouldn’t be logical.
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea September 27, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea September 13, 2009
…And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!
I vividly remember rereading Romeo and Juliet for the first time as an adult: “Where’s the love stuff,” I thought, “and why are those kids so bratty?” I read the play a couple of times in high school and thought, of course, about love and want, and the unfairness of circumstances beyond our control, cosmic or political. I thought those things partly because of my circumstances — an adolescent rushing toward independence and adulthood — but also partly because of cultural expectation — our culture thinks, for some reason, that Romeo and Juliet has something to do with love, and it takes time to think past that expectation.
And so with Moby-Dick. I approached my first reading of Moby-Dick with a common cultural expectation — Ahab is crazy, perhaps, but heroically so, and his mad quest, though reckless, defies God in an admirable way. By the time I got to “The Quadrant,” I had had quite enough of Ahab getting his crazy on, and began to read his rants much more clinically.
This is not to say that Ahab does not rant about interesting things sometimes. Ahab punctuates his tantrum in “The Quadrant” with a rejection of science on two counts: first, that science can only describe circumstance, rather than providing any power over circumstance, and second, that science makes man think he is supernaturally powerful, when he is not. As in “The Quarter Deck,” Ahab fully places himself outside of the supernatural, an earthly being claiming an earthly power to satisfy his defiance.
Is Ahab disillusioned? Has he himself worn out an expectation of heroics? Not by a long shot, as we see in the very next chapter of the book. He has, however, literally trampled his last vestige of reason.
Chapter 118: The Quadrant
Angled reflection,
But to sweep the sky will never tell why,
Only the present
Where the see-er stands alone.
Rational repose –
You can bend and strain with nothing yet gained,
Then the descendance,
In a fiery slide we go.
Astral projection,
Behind all things, the knowledge of scenes
Dealt as invective,
So burn your fires bright.
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea October 12, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea November 21, 2009
And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
We live in an ocean of information. I don’t mean information as in media, advertisements, etc. I mean that even with civilization totally stripped away, we would find ourselves naked in the woods in an ocean of information — the snap of a twig, the coloration of each mushroom, the taste of a breeze — too many details to recognize, let alone integrate into one’s understanding of the world. To cope with this impossible situation, we make a series of decisions, conscious and subconscious, about what to care about and why to care about it. In the process, each individual person writes the story of the world, based on our unique filtered set of significance. In the end, it’s less about perspective, or even interpretation, and more about the act of imposing meaning onto the world — somewhere in the process of reading the world as a text, we find ourselves writing the world as a text.
These ideas are the basics of the modernist principles found in “The Dubloon.” The gist of the chapter involves Ahab — then Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, the Manxman, Queequeg, and Pip — looking at the dubloon that Ahab nailed to the mast in “The Quarter-Deck” and “reading” its markings in widely varying ways. Of course, Ishmael throws in a number of subtle twists along the way. Before Ahab’s reading, Ishmael details the markings on the dubloon as objective fact. We have to remember, though, that Ishmael himself is a viewer, and a re-teller, and has imposed his own story of the dubloon simply in the details he chose to relate.
And then suddenly you may recognize that Ishmael is effectively reading his crew-mates’ readings as he recounts them, and then suddenly he starts reading Stubb’s reading of another character’s reading, which that character reads through the lens of a tattoo or something, and none of it really means anything anymore — to even assume that each man’s reading of the dubloon speaks to his inner self is itself a meaning imposed on events.
Chapter 99: The Dubloon
A thing yet precious in itself,
Stamped with the symbols of a collective memory
And then stamped again, each eyes
Create reflections in the ridges, shaped alike.
And a man can filter text through any text,
And a man himself is text filtering text:
Come along and write the world with me!
You make me precious, and I make you precious.
I look, you look, he looks; we look,
Ye look, they look are crazy as a thing can be.
And we recognize these truths
And yet oblige the process, meaning be the rule.
And a man can filter text through any text,
And a man himself is text filtering text:
Come along and write the world with me!
You make me precious, and I make you precious.
A thing yet precious in itself,
A purpose at the center of our waning lives,
It’s a story that we make –
Unscrew the navel and will everything unwind?
And a man can filter text through any text,
And a man is but a text filtering text:
Come along and write the world with me!
You make me precious, and I make you precious.
(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea October 11, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea November 15, 2009
