“The Gilder” begins with a subtle yet jarring change of voice, as the narration shifts to the third-person “they,” away from the first-person “we” predominant throughout the book. The shift is not without precedent — earlier chapters presented as script for the stage come to mind — but still I wonder, has Ishmael left us again as narrator, or just become momentarily detached from the events at hand?

The chapter describes not only an exceptionally beautiful day at sea, but the reactions such weather inspires in Ahab, Starbuck, and Stubb. Ahab leads with some typical (“the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm”) and atypical reflections. For example, here Ahab’s thoughts center on a cyclical nature of life and growth: “through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If.” This is a different Ahab, an Ahab much more like the manhood he describes than the adolescence in which he has spent most of the book. Is Ahab growing perhaps, or does he merely foreshadow his impending death from the cycle he describes?

Starbuck and Stubb, on the other hand, seem to be in very different stages of the cycle. Starbuck’s religious ruminations conjure “boyhood’s thoughtless faith” here and throughout the book. Stubb appears leaping “fish-like, with sparkling scales” as he thinks, “I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!” Maybe it’s just me and my personal preference, but Stubb’s Budda-esque outlook seems the most appealing of all presented here — in “infancy’s unconscious spell,” we are perhaps closest to nature, and to each moment of which we are aware. May we all find an end in this stage of the cycle, and not in the throes of faith, doubt, or ponderousness.

Chapter 114: The Gilder

Narrator:
On and on,
The great golden sun
Gilds the vales and the hills like the heavens.

And on and on,
The sea rolls anon
How the grass in fields dip and leaven.

Ahab:
But ’round and around and around,
Our fortunes come tumbling down
Then raise to the peak of a crown,
Like the sea.

As cold is decayed from the warm,
The blessings come crossed by a storm
And orphan our floundering forms
In the sea.

Ahab’s men:
Oh, give us a captain of woe
And we’ll row and we’ll row and we’ll row,
And we’ll face a magnificent foe
Such as He!

Starbuck and Stubb:
The sea coaxes me
To always believe
In the meadows
Of my old-fashioned home,
Like the gelding
Stretched in full gallop on.

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 2, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea March 5, 2011

The first question asks of the physiology of whales — are whales smaller now than they used to be? Some of Ishmael’s answer points to fossil records — an approach not unlike modern scientific method — but some of his answer also tends towards the abstract philosophy of early science — if we know other species of mammal, including humans, have gotten bigger through the ages, than why would the whale be any different?

Ishmael’s second question asks more of ecology, and points to a far less informed or developed field of thinking — hunting as we now do, will we eventually exterminate whales? From a contemporary perspective, I think most of us assume that back then no one cared about whale extinction as long as they were making money at it. That may have been true, but Ishmael also provides a logical (though naive) argument to the contrary: “Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whale for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish.” How could humans possibly exterminate vast oceans of whales at such a rate?

Of course, Ishmael does not account for economics in his reasoning, the fact that more and more ships will be launched to the hunt as long as there are whales to kill, which is exactly what happened. For me, Ishmael’s arguments also illuminate the politics of current debates on regulations of fisheries, and otherwise. Fishermen feel they know best, being involved daily in the industry, and it’s hard to have your expertise questioned by someone outside your field. At the same time, standing on the deck of one boat makes it hard to see the bigger picture, ecological, economical, or otherwise.

Chapter 105: Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? — We He Perish?

How now, Pliny, you imply diminishment
In fanciful data of yore.
The whale at present has grown with significance,
You misjudged greatly before.

Relentlessly,
Across the sea,
We hunt the whale for eternity,
But as reviled
For guts and guile,
The whale will never disappear.

How now, landsman, you argue extensively –
The whale will perish in full,
Just like bison, that man did exterminate
Down to the very last bull.

Relentlessly,
Across the sea,
We hunt the whale for eternity,
But as reviled
For guts and guile,
The whale will never disappear.

We are whalemen, and as such infallible
In all cetacious regards,
And nothing truer bespoke we with amity:
Extinction’s not in the cards!

Extinction’s not in the cards!

(c) and (p) 2010 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea July 31, 2010
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea February 27, 2011

There are two major differences between the chapter and the sitcom. First, there is no glued-together table lamp to break at the last second and give the whole thing away. In fact, there is no secrecy involved at all — the men are doing a job, which is hard and dirty and dangerous, and destroys both the ship and their bodies in the process. The men need to clean themselves and their ship up after their labor to become men again, and to not remain perpetual beasts of burden. They need to sing, they need to promenade, and they need to drink tea in the moonlight. The labor of whaling strips men of the refinements we often associate with being human, and it’s important for them to reclaim their rightful humanity when the work is over.

Second, the sitcom party at least is fun, and you get the sense that in their cleaning the kids are merely paying up for their good time. On the other hand, whaling work is brutal, as Ishmael reminds us with images of “enormous masses of the whale’s head” which are “profanely piled” on the quarter deck, or chunks of the whales back that stick to the deck, or the soot from the try-works that soils up the bulwarks and riggings. At the end of all this, the men get to “cleanse” themselves of the “defilements” of labor, and emerge once again as refined human beings.

In one last terrible twist, Ishmael reminds us that the work can start anew at a moment’s notice, that sometimes just as the men are “buttoning the necks of their clean frocks,” a new whale is cried, and they have to jump to their tasks anew, without a moment of rest. As Ishmael aptly exclaims: “Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life.”

Chapter 98: Stowing Down and Clearing Up

We walk in twos and threes:
How we promenade the well-trod boards,
As dainty Lords, immaculate.
Though oft maligned, we’re oft refined
By the guts and grime we scrub away.

Bring us midnight tea:
And the forecastle will be transformed
By highest born nobility.
We work and slave, and earn our days
To dab with napkins, so effete!

Sing-out, mast-head, sing!:
Aristocracy in truest form
Is never worn in apathy.
In weary pacts, we break our backs,
Then birth, as phoenix, from the lye.

We walk in twos and threes:
How we promenade the well-trod boards,
As dainty Lords, immaculate.
Though oft maligned, we’re oft refined
By the guts and grime we scrub away.

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 24, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea September 18, 2010

Stubb’s decision here comes on the heels of a recent coming-to-terms with his first unsettling experience with Ahab. Some days prior, Ahab kicked Stubb in response to Stubb’s polite (albeit insensitive) request that Ahab pad his ivory leg when walking the deck at night. Through an outlandish interpretation of an outlandish dream (partly involving a merman telling Stubb that he is wise to understand the great honor in a kick from a great man with an exotic prosthetic), Stubb decides that all is well and good with his station aboard the Pequod, and he can proceed business as usual. Both decisions suggest a Stubb unwilling to be changed by circumstance, and unwilling to be broken by that over which he has no control.

In “The First Night-Watch,” Stubb sings the first cheerful verse of a song, seen below as the first verse of this week’s song. I added a few more verses as per Stubb’s thoughts (as well as his lingering discomfort) in the chapter. This week’s song also features my first attempts at foley arts!*

*I cheated, however, and used a prerecorded thunder clap.

Chapter 39: First Night-Watch

We’ll drink tonight with hearts as light,
To loves as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.

The captain’s spite did fill the night
With terrors yet revealed.
Unfortunate gaffe, so let’s have a laugh,
And hope that his head is healed.

I never foresaw such a good guffaw
From something so unnerving,
But destiny wins what our fate begins,
And life goes on, unswerving.

He gave the first mate an appropriate,
Unsettled sort of feeling,
Just as I felt when the man did pelt
Me, sending me a-reeling!

I’m perfectly sane, but a merman came,
Bestowed me of a title.
A laugh, now, to dub the wisest Stubb
And save him from reprisal.

Never my wife, in her lonely life,
To cry and count my earnings.
She’s having some beers with the harpooneers,
And comforting their yearnings.

Every man shored to a higher lord,
Beholden to his bidding,
“Curses and balls!” Aye, it’s Starbuck calls,
I must see what he’s giving.

We’ll drink tonight with hearts as light,
To loves as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 13, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea August 20, 2010

In “The Chase — First Day,” the crew (and we as readers) finally get to see Moby Dick, who before this point has existed to them (and to us) as no more than a symbol — Ahab’s arbitrary (inasmuch as the letter “a” is arbitrary) physical carrier of some attached meaning. One can imagine a good deal of shift in the crew when given the chance to form their own impressions of the whale, to see it for themselves and attach their own meanings to the object now in direct observation. One can also imagine, as with the letter “a,” no shift at all, but rather a cementing of an already learned and agreed upon significance.

Of course, we only get Ishmael’s experience here, which falls into the former category while also illuminating the latter. Ishmael sees Moby Dick as a gentle giant, a god of grace and love, more magnificent than Jove himself “with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns.” Ishmael’s vision of Moby Dick is certainly influenced in part by his vision of white ocean birds circling Moby Dick as he glides through the water. When Moby Dick dives, the birds “longingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.” Ishmael’s personification of the birds turns the entire image into something of a pastoral, an idyllic and joyous harmony viewed from the outside. Ahab and crew seem alien to a landscape painted thus.

Ahab himself echoes this sentiment in his later frustration with Stubb’s and Starbuck’s reactions to Moby DIck’s destruction of Ahab’s boat: “ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!” Interestingly, all this serves to invest Moby Dick with a grandiosity that surpasses even Ahab’s own investment. People understand people; people understand gods — not only are they fundamental aspects of our beings, they are aspects we tend to keep closest to the human experience. But what of nature itself, perhaps the most fundamental aspect of humanity, but often the most denied? Have we alienated ourselves from nature to the point that harmony stands apart from us as the biggest mystery of all? Perhaps herein lies the everything and the nothing of Moby DIck.

Chapter 133: The Chase — First Day

(There she blows!) In every noble heart, an island,
(There she blows!) Dense with every woe a lesser man could feel,
And his island has breeched in the heart of the sea
With the heavens above and a mystery beneath –
Birds aloft in joyous contemplation.

(There she blows!) A gentle Jupiter, admired,
(There she blows!) A pinion of serenity
Set to work on the heart of a merciless hand
That is raised, nonetheless, in the folly of man,
Peace becomes a just and natural torrent.

And he raised our boat in rows of ivory teeth,
Then he made a safe retreat.

(There she blows!) If gods would speak, it won’t be omen
(There she blows!) That they choose, in all omnipotence, to bear
Any deafening will that a god could command
From the power of all to the weakness of man –
Sails aloft, I speak but from an island;
Sails aloft, I speak in open sea.

(c) and (p) 2009 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 9, 2009
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea July 3, 2010

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

In contrast, my wife and I went to a four-star French restaurant to celebrate her thirtieth birthday a few months ago. Foie gras aside, the meat we ate in no way resembled the animal from which it came, instead appearing as neatly ordered shapes complimenting similar shapes of vegetable. We ate with fork and knife, reserved and hands-free. Don’t get me wrong, it was one of the most amazing meals of my life, but it was a very different kind of eating experience, matched to a very different kind of delicious food, and a very different kind of pleasure.

“The Cabin-Table” explores similar ideas of food and pleasure, contrasting the restrained and formal eating experience of the mates, under Ahab’s “social czarship,” with the “frantic democracy” with which the harpooneers eat. In this contrast we see a pretty clear line drawn between the subdued pleasures (and displeasures) of hierarchy and social form, and the raucous freedom to express enjoyment afforded to both the underling harpooneers, who “dined like lords,” and to the very lords with whom Ishmael compares them. We see a freedom at the extremes, a no-one to impress, a nothing to lose — an ability, perhaps, to viscerally enjoy life in both the absence and fulfillment of ambition.

We see the full effects of ambition in poor Flask, the Pequod’s Third Mate, just over the bridge from crew to officer. Since becoming an officer, he notes, “peace and satisfaction . . . have for ever departed from my stomach.” Reaping the least of his rank, and losing the most of his freedom, Flask longs to “fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle,” to break out of his required facade of good form, and be once again a free man. Such are the spoils of ambition!

Chapter 34: The Cabin-Table

Dinner, Mr. Starbuck.
Dinner, Mr. Stubb.
Dinner, Mr. Flask.
Yeah!

Gather ’round the table,
One and then the next –
Children at the altar,
Blessed!

We must be polite
To the lord of our dinner time –
A social emperor in his throne!

He sets the tone –
We’re everyday guests in Ahab’s home.
Alas, I’ll always be a butterless man!

Three bites of salt beef,
Stubb begins to stir,
Time for me to leave now,
Still hungry.

Farewell Flask,
Farewell Stubb,
Farewell Starbuck.
Doughboy set it up for our harpooneers.

Doughboy! Doughboy! Beef, Doughboy!

There once was a Doughboy, fat and tender.
He made a grave mistake!
He didn’t feed his cannibals
And his cannibals . . . ate him.

We must be polite
To the lord of our dinner time!
A social emperor in his throne.

He sets the tone.
We’re everyday guests in Ahab’s home.
Alas, I’ll always be a butterless man!

Time for me to leave now,
Still hungry!

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 31, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea June 14, 2009

“Dusk” takes us into Starbuck’s mind, revealing a man utterly bound to a world view of rank and class. Starbuck sees Ahab’s challenging God as mutiny, and half-curses himself for being unable to disobey a disobeying Ahab. I find Starbuck’s unwavering loyalty annoying at times, but it ultimately leads to an interesting complexity of character. Starbuck is bound to righteousness, and his concept of righteousness rests on a base of duty to rank. Such a character might come off as flat in many situations, but with Ahab for his superior, the trait makes Starbuck compelling, especially in the final buildup of the chase. Poor Starbuck! You’re too good for the rest of us!

Chapter 38: Dusk

Starbuck:
He’s a democrat to all above,
Taking power for everyone,
But in the end he’s a tyrant to his brothers,
Hand in hand.

He hypnotized my reasoning,
Stripped me as a human being,
As if I was taken by a demon,
Faltering.

Chorus:
We are the crew of Captain Ahab!
We’re going to rule the sea!
We are the crew of Captain Ahab,
We are free!

Starbuck:
We’re going to
Hell! See the revelry!
Hell! Dragging us to sea!
Hell! And the darkness left of life.

His torment strangely did compel
An oath be taken to rebel.
Throw off your chains for yet another
Kind of yoke!

Chorus:
We are the crew of Captain Ahab!
Nursed among the sharks!
We are the crew of Captain Ahab,
Men apart!

Starbuck and [Chorus]:
We’re going to
Hell! [We are the crew! We are the crew!]
Hell! [We are the crew! We are the crew!]
Hell! [We are the crew! We are the crew!]
[We are free!]

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea August 12, 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by Patrick Shea February 21, 2009