Chapter 128: The Pequod meets the Rachel

Patrick Shea — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:48:12 +0000

“The Pequod meets the Rachel,” always sends me in search of greater significance at the expense of the obvious. Chasing storytelling choices so deliberate that they must be important, I think myself in circles around the simplicity of the story itself. For example, Ishmael repeatedly refers to the Rachel’s captain as “the stranger,” despite noting that he and Ahab have long been acquainted as captains of Nantucket. However, after Ahab refuses the captain’s request of help, Ishmael starts to call the captain by his last name, Gardiner. And then there’s the titular Biblical reference, suggestive of greater mythic significance.

Despite these inclusions and others, the heart of Ishmael’s story is quite simple: Captain Gardiner, of the Rachel, begs Ahab to help search for Gardiner’s twelve-year-old son, whose whale boat disappeared after being dragged off the night previous by Moby Dick himself. Ahab froths at Gardiner’s mention of Moby Dick, and then refuses to join in the search, telling Gardiner that “even now I lose time” in the hunt. The grief-stricken Captain Gardiner stumbles off the Pequod and continues his wandering search for his missing son.

In discussing my thoughts about the chapter with my wife, she told me that I could always talk about the obvious message of the chapter — that Ahab is a jerk. It’s a funny comment, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that’s really the big message here — Ahab is a jerk. A friend begs Ahab to help him find his missing twelve-year-old son, and Ahab goes to hunt a whale instead. Maybe the book should be called Ahab-Dick.

Alas, despite my searching, all my efforts to find deeper meaning in this chapter have led to dead ends. Still, like captain Gardiner, I can be “seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea,” searching for answers in a vast, answer-less expanse.

Download: ch-128-the-pequod-meets-the-rachel.mp3

Chapter 128: The Pequod meets the Rachel

They died last night, they died last night
Certainly.
They died last night, they died last night
Certainly.

A pale unceasing cannonball
Struck from sheltered lee.
Carried by the cannonball;
Buried in the sea.

They died last night, they died last night
Certainly.
They died last night, they died last night
Certainly.

Listen as their spirits scream;
We heard them all last night.
Ghost ship sails for ghost beliefs,
Sweeping tack for any sight.

They died last night, they died last night,
Certainly.
They died last night, they died last night,
Certainly.

Abraham is unmoved,
Stable in the old roots,
Fathering a nation of
Hollow belief, and resolve.

Any circle broken
Makes the center shift and
Every spoke in kind will
Follow its lead, finding home.

Pack our Rachel up again,
Send her on her way.
An arrow loosed, we’ve joined the work
Three weeks from today!

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea September 21, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea August 15, 2009

Chapter 57: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

Patrick Shea — Sun, 10 May 2009 18:18:14 +0000

A recent roommate often left issues of heavy metal magazines in the bathroom. Many of the bands featured in these magazines had hard-to-pronounce, possibly Norwegian names and featured epic cover art involving seven foot tall men wielding twelve foot long swords. The magazines used medieval words like “hewn” in their album reviews. I was never sure how conscious the bands were of their theatrics, but the uncertainty made that brand of metal compelling for me — it existed in a nebulous realm, outside of the earnest/ironic dichotomy of most people’s perceptions of the world.

Chapter 57, “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars,” finishes a three-chapter discussion of whales in art, the gist of all three being the difficulty of capturing the true likeness of a whale, as “the living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters.” In contrast to the realistic “mechanical outlines” of formal art, the representations that work, Ishmael claims, are those that fall into what we might now label “outsider art”: a placard of a legless ex-whaler on the docks, or the likenesses of whales hewn (there’s that word again) into natural forms (cliffs/shorelines, stars, clouds) by the perceptions of the men who hunt them.

All metal, even the mainstream stuff, achieves this effect to some extent. I tried my hand at a metal song this week, which in many ways came off more like a Misfits song, but then, I can’t tell if Glen Danzig is serious either.

Download: ch-57-of-whales-in-paint-in-teeth-in-wood-in-sheet-iron-in-stone-in-mountains-in-stars.mp3

Chapter 57: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

Crush uncrushable seas beneath a tempest’s tail.
Spur impetuously into the primal.
Right or Wrong, the trained of form will miss you.
God alone can carve you

Into the mountainous,
Celestial countenance,
Into the stones and bones
And token homes of sailors’ souls.

Fight the kraken where the bastion overflows,
And no striation could subsume the war machine.
Weak or Strong, a man could never tame you.
May God impress your savage form

Into the mountainous,
Celestial countenance,
Into the stones and bones
And token homes of sailors’ souls.

[instrumental]

Weak or Strong, a man could never tame you.
May God impress your savage form

Into the mountainous,
Celestial countenance,
Into the stones and bones
And token homes of sailors’ souls.

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 16, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea March 22, 2009

Call Me Ishmael » Metal

Chapter 128: The Pequod meets the Rachel

Chapter 57: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars