On top of all this, Ahab hires his own crew and harpooneer at his own private expense, stowing them secretly on board until the first chase. Of course, despite the multi-ethnic crew of the Pequod these men seem extraordinarily foreign, shrouded in mystery and set apart as they are from the crew at large. Add to that an association with Ahab, mysteriously compelled in a suicidal mission, ranting and raving about overthrowing God and such, and these men seem outright devilish to the rest of the crew, perhaps even being the controlling spiritual agents of Ahab’s mad quest. At the head of Ahab’ private crew stands Fedallah, for whom Ishmael evokes images of Genesis, when angels and devils interbred with mankind, and in so doing further implies Ahab as a man caught in a war between the earthly agents of heaven and hell.

Chapter 50: Ahab’s Boat and Crew — Fedallah

Stand in the boat with a new leg.
Knee in the cleat, it’s a new day.
Lift up the lance, make it bloody,
All on one, not two legs.

And all men with two legs are but a hobbling wight
When thrown deep into the tangle of a dangerous fight.

Cover the deck with a new sheath.
Walking erect, would you believe?
He points at the whale as a brute thief
But never asks no relief.

And nobody’s gonna give this Captain Ahab a boat
So he finances the crew that’s gonna keep him afloat.

Wouldn’t you know, heading the crew
Is the devil’s due?
Wouldn’t you know, dim as the dusk,
He’s the devil’s tusk?
Wouldn’t you know, fevered in dreams
See we phantom things?
Wouldn’t you know?
Wouldn’t you know?

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 8, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea May 11, 2011

Aunt Charity, Captain Bildad’s sister, packs the Pequod similarly. She has better reason than I, though, since a whaling voyage lasts three years at least, and many comforts to which the crew are accustomed would not be available in foreign ports at that pre-globalized period in time. Clearly I missed my true calling by 150 years or so.

Chapter 20: All Astir

Think of the things a housekeeper brings to have, oh yeah!
Each item needed, nothing conceded, yeah?, oh yeah!

Think of the patience
To careful creations
Of pantries that never fail.

Aunt Charity!
Aunt Charity, oh yeah!

Think of the volume of stores used in three years’ time, oh yeah!
Bother and beans, a housekeeper seems a bore, no more!

Think and be thankful
Of each sturdy ankle
That make wishes never want.

Aunt Charity!
Aunt Charity, oh yeah!

Charity’s bounty
Could cover the county –
Everything far and wide!

Aunt Charity!
Aunt Charity, oh yeah!

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 6, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea March 26, 2011

“The Honor and Glory of Whaling” largely addresses the body of myth underlying all modern stories. As Ishmael discusses stories of Perseus and St. George, he subverts various details to better fit his purpose. Some such revisions are subtle, but some are outright ridiculous, such as the image of St. George riding a seal to spear a beached whale. In the process, Ishmael suggests that the original details of myth are a disorderly mash of fantasy and reality, carefully pulled together by storytellers to embody common underlying themes.

These themes become especially apparent as Ishmael incorporates Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Jonah, and Vishnoo into the same scheme as Perseus and St. George. By doing so, Ishmael creates an image of whalemen that goes far beyond the role of slayer. Whalemen instead become tamers of nature, prophets, and creators of worlds in story. Like Vishnoo, Ishmael dives to the ocean depths for stories from “before the beginning of creation . . . which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects,” and resurfaces with a modern embodiment of worlds long since dissolved, but never entirely forgotten.

Chapter 82: The Honor and Glory of Whaling

We’re a fraternity,
And the last common-beautiful in a long line
Who trace paternity
To the regal and dutiful, both alike

In their dominance
Over nature’s providence!

Now take the Greeks –
They had offered Andromeda to appease
A great leviathan,
But then Perseus did slay it to save her life,

And they sang, “All ye virgins of the Mediterranean Sea,
Raise your bosoms to the future you’ll get to be!”

We’re a fraternity,
Even Jonah and Hercules do comprise
We captains of decease,
Though their victory was endurance, it’s still a fight.

And Vishnoo; god of all creation, social elite;
Heads our roster with a fluke in place of his feet!

And we sing, “Na na na na na na na, na na na na na,
Na na na na na na na, na na na na na!”

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea June 30, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea November 20, 2010

My memory of that reading might be responsible for my seeing this chapter as one of the funniest things in print. The carpenter clearly wants to be left to his work in peace, and Ahab can’t seem to muster the social aptitude to clue in past the carpenter’s manners (and deference to his captain). Ahab peppers the poor carpenter with his quasi-deep thoughts, catching him constantly off guard and struggling for an appropriate response. The chapter is comic relief worthy of Shakespeare — funny and somewhat morbid all at once.

As with Shakespeare’s comic relief, which often also doubles as commentary on the writer’s life, I wonder if Melville sees something of himself in the carpenter — happy to write, finding a song in the tools at hand (whether they are bracing life or preparing for death), and wanting to be left alone to follow his work, without buffoons like Ahab harping on him about significance and metaphor.

Chapter 127: The Deck

Carpenter:
Sha na na na na!
No need to sing, the tools are ringing in song!
Sha na na na na!
But digging a grave, you bring the ditty along . . .
Still, indifferently, I cradle death, undone.

Sha na na na na!
I do as I do, you say to do it, it’s done!
Sha na na na na!
There on the way, I needs be having some fun!
And in courting laughter, bathe in tempers won.

Ahab:
A sounding board in the house of the dead –
Echoes untoward!
Hold now, opine — every vector a straight line
Paired with this force!

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 31, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea October 16, 2010

As the chapter begins, Tashtego mounts the head of a whale to extract the sperm from its casing. He cuts a hole in the head, and rams a bucket into the hole — filling it with sperm — then gives the signal for men on deck to pull the bucket out with the aid of a tackle hung from the rigging. All goes well until the task is almost finished, when Tashtego slips and falls into the twenty-foot hole that is, at this point, the whale’s head. To make matters worse, at this moment the cables that tether the whale to the ship snap, and the whale starts to sink with Tashtego still inside. It all seems entirely hopeless, “when a naked figure with a boarding sword in its hand” –Queequeg, in other words — springs to a death-defying underwater rescue, described mostly in birthing metaphors.

Two things stand out for me in “Cistern and Buckets.” First, no one knows what to do when Tashtego falls into the whale. One would think that after some number of years of standing over gaping holes that someone would have planned for the worst. But like a greedy land developer circumventing safety regulations by hiring non-union labor, no one has thought forward for the sake of Tashtego’s safety. In fact, Tashtego himself seems awfully unconcerned throughout the chapter as well, walking erect across the rigging and standing on the whale without holding on to the cables.

Second, Ishmael tells of the greatest perils with the greatest humor. At first, his humor seems shockingly nonchalant. But thinking deeper into that exact realization brings the gravity of the situation into sharp relief. Only when tragedy becomes common do people tend to make light of narrow escapes, and people only talk about some deaths as being sweet when they see the possibilities for themselves as being much less so.

Chapter 78: Cistern and Buckets

How the tragedy came to pass, don’t ask me, now.
A heave of the sea, or the slippery, hypnotic prow,
Once a living device, now eighty buckets of paradise,
Sent him fully within the cavern of fibrous skin.

And then fallen away,
The head buckled and swayed,
As old ocean eloped
With young death on a rope –
Alarum now awoke!

No umbilical, turned the womb into a precious tomb,
And so buried twice, once in a fragrant room,
Then, in the infinite ocean of epithet –
Savage sunk in a savage beast, under savage moon.

And then, out for the save,
The midwife of the waves,
With caesarian drowned,
Birthed the man by the crown,
And broke the burial mound.

Wherein the mystique?
A death, bittersweet,
Claims curious life
In sweet essences rife
With unbroken form!

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 22, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea September 25, 2010

As Ishmael goes on to discuss the fossil remains of related species of whale from prehistory forward, I think it’s safe to draw another metaphor. Like whales, human themes reach back through time in slightly varied forms. In other words, every good story has been told many times over with a different set of details.

The whale, then, is not the point for Ishmael, but the human themes that the whale allowed him to explore. Like the whale, these themes look a little bit different now than they did in generations past, but as with all “large and liberal” themes, we find we find them important because in thinking about them, “we expand to their bulk.”

Chapter 104: The Fossil Whale

Big as it is, the whale is a fertile theme,
Varied and antediluvian,
The sea held a brand of Leviathan
Before time carried the Earth.

Born on the depths of a primal mist,
Nursed with the reptiles-furious,
Ruled under ice caps and equatorial freeze –
Hard to believe!

And what I’m trying to say, now,
There’s a subtle line
Between the scale of the subject
And the thoughts brought to the mind.

Reach, yet, the distance of ancient lands,
Prior to Moses in Pharaoh’s hands.
Touch ye the blood of Cetacean prehistory,
With Ahab and me!

And what I’m trying to say, now,
There’s a subtle line
Between the scale of the subject
And the thoughts brought to the mind.

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 26, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea September 11, 2010

Strangely (or perhaps just uncomfortably), Ishmael tells this aspect of his story through ideas of power and race. In “The Cabin,” both Pips’s and Ahab’s insanity seem of a piece with their power. Ahab’s power of title has allowed him to indulge the worst of his nature, with no checks and balances to keep him accountable to his fellow man. Pip’s insanity has empowered him as a black worker in a different way altogether. Unable to work, Pip becomes powerful in his uselessness, freed somewhat from subjugation.

When Pip begs Ahab to “use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more,” Ahab asserts that Pip “grows so sane again.” At first glance, we should worry that Ahab implies in these words that the only sane black person is a subservient black person, if not for the next, quite touching and lucid, exchange between the two. When Pip declares that “I will never desert thee, sir,” Ahab replies, “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him.” The sanity that Pip offers Ahab is not subservience, but human devotion, and Ahab knows that that kind of sanity could never coexist with his quest to kill Moby Dick, or with his power (being the root of his quest), or perhaps even with his race (being the root of his power). He leaves Pip in the cabin, in a throne of sorts at the center of the ship, enacting delusions of power, again quite insane.

Chapter 129: The Cabin

Ahab:
Turn your trembling eyes,
Oh!, sacred tiller, wise
With empty paradise!
Let me force the way.

My illness will suffice,
Torn from the echoes,
To guide this grand device.

Pip:
Fully centered, so here I stay,
The coronation of king-for-a-day,
As I make believe a history to abnegate.

Ahab:
The hour is coming nigh –
Spun off the axis.
Oh, empty paradise!
Let me force the way.

No caprice or guile
Brought yet to sully
A dutiful demise.

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 6, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea July 1, 2010

And then: “. . . the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

Ishmael, of course, survives to float in the vacuum where his world once existed, gone as quickly and ultimately as the close of a book. But then again, all it takes is this one survivor to birth the world anew in a multitude of private universes of reader/listener experience. All the survivor needs to do is speak. It all reminds me of The Neverending Story, minus the dog-faced dragon.

Chapter 135: The Chase — Third Day

You’ll always be the suffering,

Come as a revival of our pride;
Chimneys, volcanic, break our lives
Back to the building blocks, inspired
By the mechanics of each grief.

You’ll always be the suffering,

Come think of the beauty in her eyes;
Think on reflections in your child.
Make for the evening, come what may! –
We’re better in bitter struggling.

You’ll always be the suffering,

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 3, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea March 13, 2010

White presents a problem. On one hand, white is the sum total of all colors in the spectrum — white is every color at once. On the other hand, we most commonly think of white as the absence of color — white is no color at all. How terrifying to think, existentially speaking, of everything adding up to nothing. Annie Hall-esque neurosis ensues:

1) In death, a body turns white. Does an entire life sum to nothing? Worse, perhaps, is death, a body empty of spirit, the fullest state of being?

2) White is the color of empire. Such dread lies in the prospect that all cultures sum to a blank homogeneity.

3) In a polar bear, we see the purity of “celestial innocence and love” (everything) equal to the ferocious indifference of nature (nothing). Ishmael later refers to the latter as “demonism” in the world, which does makes sense as the opposite of God, but which in turn becomes a far more dreadful spiritual equivalency.

4) etc.

In his telling of the chapter, Ishmael provides us with a great example of this specter of whiteness. The more examples that Ishmael layers into the chapter, the more the chapter becomes a wash of information — the sheer volume of it negating any greater significance. By giving such a complete and inconclusive study of white, Ishmael makes a greater statement about perspective and storytelling and the human experience — we need to filter, we need to select the significant and disregard the rest — we need to color our world, or lose out in the quest to have it all.

Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale

A study in white
Surrounds every taker.
Imperial blight,
Terrifically pure.
Desolate glaciers found at great heights,
Cold and unloving in the next life.

With every color
Layered in turn,
The sum of creation
Is empty in full.
Pure in its essence, but a nothing.
Are we perspectives on a nothing?

In death, the body’s pallid –
As the spirit drains away
The vessel is overflowing.

A color to mask
Each kind of decay.
The specter of white
Implies every corruption.
Purity’s nothing but an absence.
Cleansed of the human, now an absence.

In death, the body’s pallid –
As the spirit drains away
The vessel is overflowing.

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea October 26, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea January 31, 2010

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