In a routine pumping of the hold, Starbuck discovers a good amount of oil mixed in with the pumped sea water, implying a significant leak in the casks. Unfortunately, Ahab is nearing the fishing grounds around Japan, and so nearing his fated encounter with Moby Dick, which leads him to refuse a pause in the voyage to repair the casks and save the oil.

Starbuck, of course, objects, and in the ensuing argument we see yet another recognition by Ahab of his own failing mental health. After Starbuck takes his leave of the cabin, Ahab paces awhile, then changes his mind in the matter, ascending to the deck to give orders for the crew to tend the leaky casks. Ahab’s motives remain a mystery as the chapter ends, but Ishmael offers two possibilities. For one, simply, “It may have been a flash of honesty in him.” Perhaps more likely, though, Ahab doesn’t want to seem crazy or otherwise unfit for duty, because that might lead to a justified mutiny, and so end his quest. In other words, Ahab is sane enough to foster his insanity in secrecy.

Chapter 109: Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin

Leaky casks
In the Autumn of my voyage,
Never checked.
Leaky casks
In the hold of leaky vessel,
On and on.

Leaky casks
Lose in double-time what’s gathered
Tooth and nail,
And the ordinary thoughts we carry sink
In the sea.

When the sea fills the vacuum left behind,
Then the mind begins to weigh
And the spirit loses buoyancy.

Leaky casks,
Never thought I’d stop to fix them,
By and by,
But convincing me, my enemies are kind
Yet to me.

When the sea fills the vacuum left behind,
Then the mind begins to weigh
And the spirit loses buoyancy.

Leaky casks
In the Autumn of my voyage,
Never checked.
And the ordinary thoughts we carry sink
In the sea.

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 17, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea July 21, 2011

Says Ishmael, the whale’s skull composes the barest fraction of the mass of its head, implying a deficient intelligence in the phrenological view. Furthermore, depressions at the top of the skull would imply a lack of self-esteem and veneration. We know the whale to be opposite from these conclusions, though. Some sailors hold that the seat of intelligence in the whale lies in the sperm magazine rather than the brain, coming much closer to describing the whale’s character by lending a mystic quality to the whale’s sentience.

However, the best answer for Ishmael lies in the backbone — what better metaphor for the whale’s character than the firm and indomitable spine it is known to possess? Furthermore the magnitude of each vertebrae, especially nearer the skull itself, summatively compensates in mass for the diminutive skull itself. Therefore, according to Ishmael, the field of phrenology must expand its examinations of character to account for the spine as well as the skull, or it will continue to prove an inadequate science.

Chapter 80: The Nut

The phrenologist says, “You’re gonna have to wait for a while –
The skull of this whale is buried twenty feet from its smile.”

And I say, “Woe to the sailor; cheers to a stunning conceit –
So human is the notion that the head is the spiritual seat.”

And you say, “Maybe in a monster renowned more for power than guile
The ghost in the machine lives in the high Roman forehead with style.”

And I say, “With every minute, the character that’s in it must rest
Upon a mighty flagpole — the backbone’s the answer to test.”

Its vertebrae, close to the spigot
Equal the source in size, to the digit –
There resides a will, inflexible by its very design.

The phrenologist says, “You’re gonna have to wait for a while –
The skull of this whale is buried twenty feet from its smile.”

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 13, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea July 12, 2011

The whole he can endure; at the parts he balks.

The moment the Pequod enters the fishing grounds wherein Ahab expects to find Moby Dick, all events turn toward death. First, strange ghostly cries of seals haunt the men as if “the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.” Then, a man in the mast-head falls to his death, the life-buoy thrown to him hopefully by the crew sinking after him like a second corpse. Finally, as if our attentions could not be directed more bluntly to death, Ahab orders the carpenter to turn Queequeg’s unused coffin into a new life-buoy.

However, these events don’t affect the crew as they might otherwise, “for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as a fulfillment of an evil already presaged.” We too, as readers, are getting used to this feeling, because it presents itself as much in the beginning of the tale as in the middle or end. Everyone, in fact can accept these events as necessarily tragic components of a greater narrative, except Starbuck and the carpenter.

Starbuck, in all his ceremony, cannot stomach the symbolism of turning a coffin into a life-buoy. The carpenter mocks him for his silliness, painfully unpacking the uncomfortable symbolism for the mate in detailed questions about how he should perform the task. The carpenter cannot stomach the insult of Ahab asking a craftsman to “cobble” one creation into another. As a craftsman, the carpenter instead prefers “something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end.”

With these words one can’t help but think of Moby-Dick — with its end at the beginning and its beginning at the end and such — and of the writer as craftsman. The carpenter’s remarks seem silly to our modern taste both for material reuse and for fractured narrative, but were perhaps the dominant perspective of the nineteenth century. I wonder if in these somewhat pompous statements lays a preemptive criticism of the criticism Melville expected of his book from the mainstream, or perhaps a self-deprecating acknowledgment of the intricate density of his creation, not to mention its morbid aspects. Either way, the degree to which this self-consciousness is unnecessary for present day readers provides yet another reminder that Moby-Dick was so aggressively ahead of its time.

Chapter 126: The Life-Buoy

Now off we sail to the cursed hunting grounds
Accompanied by the most unearthly sounds,
Baby seals, lost and found,
And their mothers searching ’round.

The first event in the dark preceding dawn,
A sudden death to the first advancing pawn.
Sunken men tell no tale,
And the life-buoy did fail.

And oh!, hide your look;
The day-to-day often took your breath
But no shudder shook
From abstractions of this book.

He tells the mate to replace the buoy lost
And though the mate knows that death is never crossed
And survived, never-mind,
Make that coffin float in kind.

And oh!, hide your look;
The day-to-day often took your breath
But no shudder shook
From abstractions of this book.

The carpenter is a forward-facing man;
He sees the task as a step-by-step demand.
Starbuck balks, the details bore,
And he ponders God once more.

And oh!, hide your look;
The day-to-day often took your breath
But no shudder shook
From abstractions of this book.

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 5, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea March 19, 2011

However, Ishmael does not argue against the truth of these stories. In fact, in “The Sermon,” Father Mapple gives a beautiful reading of the same story, steeped with truths of the human condition. By contrast, in “Jonah Historically Regarded,” Ishmael draws a clear distinction between factual truth and literary truth, criticizing only those who confuse the two.

Chapter 83: Jonah Historically Regarded

Everybody knows Jonah,
The whale, and its use,
As they used to know Hercules,
And the trials sent by Zeus.

But do we have to believe it?
It speaks to the soul
With impossible fantasy;
The facts aren’t the goal.

(Don’t confuse the two!)
History and story,
One tells no lies
And the other is written not to be boring,
To shock and surprise, oh!

History and story,
Both tell a tale
To communicate truths of life to our quarry,
To lift mystery’s vail.

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 29, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea February 20, 2011

Though I recognize the choice may be incidental, I couldn’t help but to ask myself: if only a matter of race, why did the mates send Tashtego up the mast and not Queequeg or Daggoo? Do we as readers see in this choice a stereotype of the Native American as elemental? Perhaps, but we should also remember Stubb’s words one chapter prior: “What’s the mighty difference between holding a mast’s lightning-rod in a storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn’t got any lightning rod at all in a storm?” Maybe our race-attuned modern minds should recognize “Midnight Aloft” as a racially problematic presentation of Native Americans, but also look deeper into what might be Ishmael’s intention in including such a strange chapter — offering a vivid illustration of how Ahab’s supposedly great act of defiance is regularly performed as an unpleasant but routine and endured assignment in the life of a sailor.

Chapter 122: Midnight Aloft — Thunder and Lightning

Um, um, um.
Um, um, um.
Every snowflake in the winter,
Every lightning bolt in spring,
Every gift the Earth is given,
Is given unto me. (Given unto me!)

Um, um, um.
Um, um, um.
At the bottom of the order,
Every dangerous task in need
Is given unto me. (Given unto me!)

The sky, undone,
Overthrown,
Daggers flashing off and on.

And I sway,
Dearly clung
To the lightning rod.

Um, um, um.
Um, um, um.
When the white man touched the metal,
That would bring the lightning nigh,
Well, you thought the man defiant
And crazy, by and by. (Crazy, by and by!)

But you sent me to the rigging,
Climbing to the sky! (Climbing to the sky!)

Um, um, um.
Um, um, um.

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 30, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea June 19, 2010

I thought of this chapter in the book as I talked to my mom one night. I told her that my co-teacher and I were showing our class President Obama’s first-day of school address, and she asked me if we had to send home permission slips. I laughed, but she wasn’t kidding. Apparently, in the school district that reared me and my sister, teachers had to allow for parents to opt their children out of watching the President of the United States tell their children to do their homework.

As I sat Monday morning, watching my students — white, black, hispanic, arab, asian — watch their president speak to them (directly to them!) about the importance of education in their lives, I couldn’t help but think about the relativity of cultural norms. My students idolize President Obama. They relate to his story in a way they can’t relate to to the stories of most, if any, politicians on the national stage, and for many of my students, President Obama’s success signals the first possibility of their own success. I’m not sure my students could even imagine the far away city-on-a-hill where parents keep their children from listening to President Obama’s encouragement and advice, just as I’m not sure those children of white, upper-middle class conservatives could imagine a place where anyone would care to listen at all. And that’s precisely the problem. These worlds don’t meet in America, and so we never blunder through each other’s bizarre ritual, working towards understanding with experience. Rather, we choose to live beyond even the auspices of empathy, so alien are we to each each other’s stories.

Chapter 13: Wheelbarrow

Packing my bags with my best friend.
Walk down the street with my best friend.
People will stare at us always,
Sharing the load!

Don’t be embarrassed,
Because we cherish
Mutuality.

Stare at the sea with my best friend.
Happy to be with my best friend.
Closing the gap there between us,
Building the road!

Don’t be embarrassed.
Platonic marriage.
The world’s a joint-stock company!
We help each other be.

People may laugh at my best friend,
Stab at the back of my best friend,
He never holds it against them;
He’ll always help his fellows!

Don’t be embarrassed.
Platonic marriage.
The world’s a joint-stock company!
We help each other be!

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea September 25, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea August 29, 2009