Stubb and Flask are soaking wet, adding lashings to the anchors in the bulwarks during a storm. Moments earlier, Ahab, frenzied, grabbed the lightning rod during a rant to the crew and dared the lightning to strike. Flask is shaken. Stubb is not.

Stubb (sensibly) explains to Flask about probabilities: “Don’t you see, you timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first struck?” Furthermore, Stubb notes that most ships don’t run with lightning rods at all, so Ahab was in no more danger than any other man at sea in a storm — grabbing the rods was actually a fairly safe affect, in the end.

How has Stubb remained so sensible through all this tumult? In speaking to Flask, Stubb draws a parallel between remaining sensible in trying situations and staying dry in a storm. So how does Stubb stay dry in a storm? With coat-tails and cocked hats, of course. These items of outerwear channel the storm down and away from oneself. Perhaps in drawing this parallel, Stubb implies that a certain degree of manners or gentility go a long way in sheltering (or distancing) a person from the world’s roughness. Or perhaps Stubb is Stubb, and that’s all it takes to keep himself dry.

Chapter 121: Midnight — The Forecastle Bulwarks

I take a turn on the floor
To lash the anchors once more.
I don a gentleman’s hat
And the coattails to match
‘Cause they channel the storm.

And so I keep myself dry
But when the lightning comes by
It don’t give me no pause
‘Cause I’ve counted those odds
Like a sensible man.

And my flesh ain’t the same as yesterday,
My mind’s the same,
It never stays in the place I started from.

I’m a sensible man.
I’m a sensible man.
I see the cards in my hand,
And play them out as I can.

I’m a sensible man.
I’m a sensible man.
Don’t waste my time with a plan,
But see the truth as it stands.

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 3, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea March 12, 2011

In “The Prairie,” Ishmael explores the ways in which man has denied spirituality in the pursuit of science. Early in the chapter, Ishmael’s reference to two psuedo-sciences — Phrenology (the study of shapes in the skull as indicative of underlying characteristics of the mind), and Physiognomy (the study of the face as indicative of underlying character or personality) — recall the pseudo-science of an earlier chapter. In “Cetology,” Ishmael uses the common opinions of men to override reason and influence his classifications of whales as fish. By contrast in “The Prairie,” Ishmael uses reason to twist these modern refusals of the spiritual into evidence of the same. Enter the whale’s forehead.

If in man an expansive brow (like Shakespeare’s) suggests genius, then in the whale we must see genius of a magnitude past comprehension, and what points to god more than that which we cannot comprehend? In beholding a whale’s brow “you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than beholding any other object in living nature.” In short, science points us away from god and toward the body, and the body points us right back to god.

Chapter 79: The Prairie

Now read the face,
See everything placed –
Rest assured,
Once inured
No doubt you will meet
Nobility steeped
In each corner, all around.

From prairie there rose
No sign of a nose,
But it’s fine,
We don’t mind.
It’s simple and sleek,
And no one can tweak –
Even kings can’t boast the same.

And oh, take note!
And oh, it’s plain!
And oh, the world bespoke
In his visage just the same.

Now look at the brow,
Could heaven allow
Such a mind
Laid behind?
It’s not that he writes
Or speaks to our plights,
It’s the genius of his life.

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 28, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea February 12, 2011

The titular character of “The Prophet,” has clearly taken Jack’s tutorial. He accosts Ishmael and Queequeg soon after they sign on to the Pequod’s crew. He speaks in “ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk,” about Ahab, and about their souls. Ishmael, a well-read storyteller himself, knows how this sort of thing goes, and notes that “It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.” Even so, Ishmael can’t help but to think about Elijah’s words long after they leave Elijah at the dock. Ishmael says that Elijah’s words “begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod.” It seems Elijah could teach us all a thing or two about authoring novels as well — compelling stories (like Moby-Dick) often do the same, and by using similar methods.

In fact, much of “The Prophet” reads as somewhat meta-. By so obviously invoking literary conventions, and then having Ishmael reject them outright, Melville seems to criticize the laziness of convention while conceding it efficacy as narrative device. For example, physical disfigurement in literature often belies a greater purity of character (the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tiny Tim, Esther in Bleak House, Isaiah, Gerty McDowell in Ulysses), and Melville gives his “prophet” Elijah a face disfigured by smallpox. And what about naming this crazy man on the dock Elijah, a prophet from the reign of King Ahab in Israel, who will return to announce the Messiah? Bible references lend an irresistible mystical quality to any story. More than anything else, “The Prophet” announces the coming of a different kind of book — self aware, and toying with convention.

Chapter 19: The Prophet

Well, you talk about a soul deficiency,
And you wax about a man who’s come undone,
And you speak in opposition, then before our very eyes
Say so long and hallelujah, better him and he than me.

And it’s easy! It’s so easy
To make it seem the secret’s inside of you.

You’re a plot device, you speak in pronouns,
And disfigurement suggests the same within,
Did you strike into the darkness and escape a different man
Or are you just a reference to an older way of writing books?

And it’s easy! It’s so easy
To make it seem the secret’s inside of you.

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 23, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea January 15, 2011

But the Greeks had a word for this, right? It’s hubris, plain and simple, that Ahab not only admits to, but celebrates. And since Ahab doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would never have read a Greek myth, you have to ask yourself where Ahab thinks he’s going with this one. Is the Pequod’s voyage no more than an elaborate suicide, or does Ahab really think he can be the first ever to win this sort of fight?

Chapter 120: The Deck towards the End of the First Night Watch

When the going gets tough,
The tough get going!
You see, the winds are getting rough
With no signs of slowing.
Just like a steeple on a bluff
Feels the worst of the blowing,
So the loftiest truck feels the worst of adversity.

Malady weighs for the rest of my days,
But I know the tempest will push me through.
Lift every sail, the worst we can fail
Is Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 17, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea January 8, 2011

1) Perhaps he’s taking out his hatred of Moby Dick on all whales. Perhaps he knows a thing or two about basic probability, and understands that the fewer the whales in the ocean, the more likely it is that one of them is Moby Dick.

2) Perhaps he wants to distract his mates and crew from thinking about: a) the peculiarity and lawlessness of a captain commandeering a ship for private vendettas, and b) just how scary Moby Dick is supposed to be. Both thoughts would grow wildly over time, were the men not comforted along the way by the familiar and relatively more predictable tasks of whaling.

3) Perhaps he knows that very few things in life trump mankind’s “common, daily appetites.” Even the Crusaders pillaged on the way to attempt what they considered a most holy quest (albeit, the supposedly spiritual aim of the quest was itself to pillage). To take the crew’s hopes of being paid at the end of the voyage would surely mean mutiny.

4) Perhaps he’s trying to prevent mutiny by micromanaging the crew day to day. Whaling is something Ahab can micromanage expertly.

Maybe he wanted to keep the men in good practice for the big day? Maybe his irrationality extends to this decision as well? Maybe all of the above?

Chapter 46: Surmises

Our purpose clear; it has begun,
But for every tool you count beneath the sun,
Only mankind’s opposition,
From his fickle disposition,
Needs a careful kind of maintenance on the way.

We’ll fight lick for lick,
We’ll kill Moby Dick,
But we’re gonna pick old Neptune’s pockets
All along the way!
Our pious delight
Too far from our sight,
So we’ll think about the money for today.

And not the least on Ahab’s mind
Is the joy he reaps from killing Moby’s kind.
Though he has a wife in token,
He is married to the ocean,
And he skips upon the waves of blood he laid.

We’ll fight lick for lick,
We’ll kill Moby Dick,
But we’re gonna pick old Neptune’s pockets
All along the way!
Our pious delight
Too far from our sight,
So we’ll think about the money for today.

Our purpose clear, off in the distance
Swims a holy fish we seek with great insistence,
But that’s many months in coming,
So for now the ship is running
Off the fuel of material desire.

We’ll fight lick for lick,
We’ll kill Moby Dick,
But we’re gonna pick old Neptune’s pockets
All along the way!
Our pious delight
Too far from our sight,
So we’ll think about the money for today.

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 17, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea August 28, 2010

When the Pequod encounters the Jeroboam, the Jeroboam’s captain declines to board, not wanting to infect the Pequod’s crew with the epidemic his ship continues to suffer. The Jeroboam suffers from one of two possible epidemics depending on where you stand. If you look from the angle of a crew member, the epidemic awaits poised at the hand of God by way of (and at the discretion of, apparently) His messenger Gabriel. If you are Captain Mayhew, the epidemic is fanaticism itself, embodied here in the form of the very same Gabriel.

Of course, Ahab boldly declares his immunity to any of either epidemic, having with his own similar strain infected the Pequod. What Ahab does want, as per usual, is intelligence of Moby Dick. In the ensuing story Ishmael relates some key factors in Gabriel’s transformation from sociopath to pastor, an all-too-familiar progression even 150 years later.

Ahab and Gabriel exist clearly as parallels, both garnering power in the invocation of fear among their crews. They draw on fear of the same menace, Moby Dick, although to opposite ends — Ahab to inspire chase, Gabriel to require avoidance. But there’s another key difference between Ahab and Gabriel, that of institutional authority — Ahab has it, Gabriel doesn’t — and I for one am reminded with great terror at how easily title or deed can legitimize and empower delusion and fantasy.

Chapter 71: The Jeroboam’s Story

All heaven would delight,
Heaven would delight,
If the sing-song charlatan a-blowing his horn had never been torn
From permanent night.

Cry “hell!” until you’re right,
You’ll always be right
If you hem and haw wide as Arkansas, you’ll probably draw
Inside of a straight.

Oh, but you’re wrong,
You’ll always be wrong,
You offer damnation,
You offer mistakes.

Give me the law,
Let me be strong,
Give me salvation.

No angel would affright,
The way you affright.
You feed their fear so that you can steer them far and away
From nature’s rights.

Oh, but you’re wrong,
You’ll always be wrong,
You offer damnation,
You offer mistakes.

Give me the law,
Let me be strong,
Give me salvation.

All heaven would delight,
Heaven would delight,
If the sing-song charlatan a-blowing his horn had never been born.

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 23, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea May 15, 2010

I realized that my thoughts about this week’s chapter have been influenced by the book’s iconic status as well, albeit in a totally different way.  After evoking preacher-as-captain imagery in the preceding chapter, Ishmael begins Chapter 9, “The Sermon,” by setting Father Mapple in stark contrast to Ahab, as Mapple sings a hymn about salvation at the hands of a forgiving God. Mapple’s sermon continues with a masochistic message about Jonah displaying true repentance by being “grateful for punishment,” and concludes with a message for all spiritual leaders: “Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!” The sermon seems a ready foil for Ahab and his madness.

But we haven’t met Ahab at this point in the story. In fact, Ishmael hasn’t even reached Nantucket, or heard of the Pequod. Sure, Ishmael is a masterful storyteller, and Moby-Dick an extremely well-planned tale. And sure, every good storyteller builds themes before introducing the main plot arc. But still, like most people (I think), I went into Moby-Dick looking for the secret of Ahab, because that’s what Moby-Dick means as an iconic piece of literature. What I got instead, of course, was the secret of Ishmael — a terrifically entertaining story. It’s nice to remember that, for the most part anyway, the classics are classics for a reason — not because they are painful to read though good for us, but because they’re really good books that have entertained people for centuries.

Chapter 9: The Sermon

Purge your pride, in the belly of
Desire, in the valley of
Required opportunity –
Delight in obedience.

The flame burns true as a compass, there’s
No skew on perspectives you
Want to simply justify –
And so do you slumber.

But, oh!
The hand of God is up above!
And, oh!
You cannot run from boundless love!

Carried down with a tempest of
Renown, to the stillness of
Each round individual sphere –
Peace now is a punishment.

So beg your Lord for the trying reward
Bestowed for the congress of man,
Each lost in his wickedness –
And so, with your pilot!

And, oh!
The hand of God is up above!
And, oh!
You cannot run from boundless love!

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 6, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea March 20, 2010

“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

“The Albatross” uses a well-worn superstition of sailors to explore a similar idea. As most famously explored in Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for a sailor to mess with an albatross (the bird of good omen) means the worst of luck to come. Enter a whaling ship, on return voyage, called “The Goney” (another name for albatross). As the Goney sails past the Pequod, Ahab shouts his customary inquiry about the white whale to the Goney’s captain, whose response is hindered and overwhelmed by several happenings — the captain drops his speaking trumpet into the water, the two boats’ wakes cross with a thunderous clap, the wind picks up — all while a shoal of fish scatters away from the scene.

The crew and Ahab, of course, all interpret the events as omen — the crew horrifically, and Ahab with a “helpless sadness.” We as readers also can’t help but to apply a gravity to the cliched events that we have learned over the years to consider significant. Ishmael, however, does not seem shaken — in recounting the reactions of others, he gives no reaction of his own. Ishmael merely notes that “to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.” In a single stroke, Ishmael points a finger at our Ahab-like tendencies as readers. As Ahab distorts his world with his singularity of purpose, so can we as readers distort a novel. In turning our learned behavior into red-herring, Ishmael asks us to untrain our habits as readers, to read as an observer and a thinker, rather than an interpreter, and escape with him to tell the tale.

Chapter 52: The Albatross (part 1)

A clap of thunder,
A bolt of lightning,
The crash of two wakes as they cross in open sea –
It’s foreshadowing
Death and destruction,
‘Cause the boat we passed was an Albatross by name.

A bird of good omen
Shot by Ahab –
What an arrow be the name of Moby Dick!
The captain faltering,
The Albatross dumbstruck,
Now we’re cursed to be the walking dead for sure.

Hasn’t he read
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
Doesn’t he know
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
Every good sailor knows you let the albatross be!

Somebody read
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Out to the captain
(The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)!
So we’re all on the very same page while we’re in the same boat.

Birds that scatter
As a portent,
Because of their supernatural sense of evil to come.
We had schools of fish
Scatter like birds.
Even Ahab noticed with sadness of our fate.

Hasn’t he read
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
Doesn’t he know
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
Every good sailor know that you let the albatross be!

Somebody read
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Out to the captain
(The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)!
So we’re all on the very same page while we’re in the same boat.

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea September 1, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea June 21, 2009

Starbuck begs this, the million dollar question, pretty early in Moby-Dick. Ahab’s answer is simple and engrossing, but not entirely sane. Ahab sees all earthly objects as physical representations of the objects’ creator. Moby-Dick may not be God, but God made Moby-Dick, and the act of creating a being of “outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it,” betrays the strength and malice of the creator. Ahab can’t attack God directly, but he can attack the results of God’s flaws, which bring pain into the world.

Excepting the mates, the entire crew sides with Ahab enthusiastically, with little clue as to why. In fact, the crew themselves seem surprised at the vigor of their own assent. Ahab calls the men together for an excessively dramatized show of passion and suffering, at one point shouting “with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose.” He makes a cause of his revenge for all mankind, who “give no reasons for the torrid life they feel.” And then Ahab brings his show to a climax with supposedly ancient custom and ritual that could feel very important unless you remember it’s not.

Giving purpose to the pain of his own loss, Ahab gives the crew a similar diversion. Hard-toiled years alone at sea, away from a wife and children, monotonous horizon in all directions — I can understand the need for a story, an adventure, a secret ceremony. It’s a shame Ahab’s was the only offer.

Chapter 36: The Quarter-Deck

All visible things
Are but a sculpted mask
Held before the visage
Of some unspeakable truth,
Nothing known but for our suffering.

I’ll strike at the mask,
Never mind it agent
or principal.

And I’d fight the sun
If it aimed at any pride
In all my Earthly bounty;
Scattering, every ember shared
For eternity.

The knots in my mind
Tighten ’round a critical
Density,
And furrow into my brow
With an irresistible gravity.

Now pass the cup
And we’ll ration out
The victory.

And I’d fight the sun
If it aimed at any pride
In all my Earthly bounty;
Scattering, every ember shared
For eternity.

And I’d fight the sun
If it aimed at any pride
In all my Earthly bounty;
Scattering, every ember shared
For eternity.

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 20, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea May 16, 2009
Fiddle track written and performed by Molly Foresta