A Few Words on Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

I finally got around to reading Moby-Dick last fall. Getting to the end of it, I felt a sense of accomplishment at having completed the struggle, since the author seems to have done his best to lose his less hardy readers before delivering his best stuff. That feeling of accomplishment, combined with the excitement and obliteration of the climax and ending, left me with a euphoric thrill; but there was much that was dry or irritating on the way. Melville presents a thrilling sea-adventure, with lots of action, interesting characters and colourful detail about life on 19th-century whaling ship; and, connected to and symbolised by the story, a philosophical treatise full of ideas that are still exciting now, and must have been shattering at the time it was published. Grafted on to this duality is a an exhaustive description of whales, whaling, and all things whale-related. This description is packed among the already weighty cargo of the adventure and the treatise, and I found myself frustrated that the pacing was frustratingly broken. Melville spends a lot of time elaborating on his symbols, discussing all their possibilities, their antecedents, their mythical and religious importance, and so on until sea-sickness sets in. I’m a child of a different age, and I don’t admire his explicit dwelling on his own symbols. I prefer, as writer and reader, that an author lets things stand on their own rights, and leaves the reader to decide on their symbolic values. In other words, I think the book might be just as good if it were simply the tale of Ahab’s hunt for the white whale, and we were left to deduce the nature of the symbolic rudder steering the story. Melville, however, had definite ideas he wanted to impart, and he couldn’t just say them aloud, due to the repressive culture (Calvinist upper-class America) that was his audience. I can see why he would choose this treatise-within-an-adventure structure: the desire to get through the suspense of the plot forces one to continue on through the drier tracts, where he imparts the ideas his readers might not have wanted to hear. The taught keel of the adventure cuts through the stormy waters of his ideas. (I apologize for my watery puns. After reading this book, one can’t resist them, just as one can’t help greeting friends with ‘Ahoy!’) But when further burdened by an abundance of dry, factual information, modern, attention-reduced readers may be forgiven a sense of impatience.
I loved the beginning, consisting of some 10 pages of citations regarding whales, though others have said they found this to be a cruel introduction. It appealed to the encyclopaedia-reader in me, and in its lack of thematic organization, seemed to open up a world of possibilities. By the time I got to his chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale”, less than a third of the way through, discussing all the meanings and occurrences of whiteness was starting to seem like more of an obfuscation than the presentation of an argument. Later, after learning more than I perhaps cared to know about the physiology of whales, starting with the erroneous declaration that they are fish, and constantly referring to them as murderous monsters (I’ll sit proudly on my seat of historical perspective, here), he antagonized me further with such chapters as “Measurement of the Whales Skeleton”, “The Fossil Whale”, and “Does the Whale Diminish?”, and I began to suspect him of deliberate cruelty. It is true that his readers were unfamiliar with whales, and he needed to both fully describe them and support his descriptions as much as possible with facts. But the story might have functioned just as well if the creature in question had been imaginary. Why not? If one of his ideas is that the pursuit of God is destructive, and makes us mad and even evil (especially when God does not want to be found), why not have God symbolized by a creature of the imagination?
It is interesting to me that many consider Moby-Dick to be the quintessential American Novel, and that I consider Moby-Dick and certain other examples of the American cultural gift to the world to be too explicit. That being said, Melville does not narrow the reader’s choices, does not force them to accept a single, happy outcome or meaning; rather, he explains all the potential meanings until the hapless reader (me) feels he is drowning in a tepid sea of meaning. This, as with most criticisms, comes down to a matter of taste. I have no doubt that Melville accomplished what he set out to do with this great novel; and therefore, it can only be called a success. My tastes, however, are for the implicit, the unspoken, and the inferred. It is the hidden nature of his true argument that intrigue me.
Let there be no doubt that I consider Melville to be a great writer. I may dislike his pacing, but I love his prose. It is powerful, and this force, combined with his meter and rhythm, are Shakespearean in effect. There are lines and passages that made me want to leap up and shake my fist at the sky. It is a rare gift to be able to express the true passions of the tortured human soul in mere words, and Melville shows his mastery again and again, unleashing storms of prose to express the madness of his demented Captain Ahab as he bends both man and the gods to his obsessive ends.
I may not be a great scholar with a hyphenated last name, and I have dedicated no more effort to the study of this great novel than to read it once through, but I present my reactions as humble reader of books. I’ve flipped through a few short commentaries on Moby-Dick, most of which were dead boring (D.H. Lawrence’s being the readable exception), and Edward F. Edinger’s “Melville’s Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia”, whose title I don’t even understand, has been sitting on my bedside stack for some time. I’m sure there’s more to be gleaned from further study. Some Great-And-Weighty Novels inspire further pursuit of the author’s work (War and Peace, for example,) but despite my sense of awe when finishing the book, I’m not inclined to read more Melville. Not yet.

Note to Self (A Prayer)

You think it's obvious... a child must crawl, then it must take little steps, and then finally it can walk, and run, and jump.

You say "Why belabour it.? It's clear!" and, casting it out of your mind, you expect that you will be a saint tomorrow, a rich man tomorrow, and all your dreams will come true ... tomorrow.

You believe that you will jump before you crawl - some do. But everyone falls a few times before they get the hang of it. Would you put a baby on a bicycle and expect it to ride? So why curse yourself for not making your dreams come true in a day? They can and will come true when you're ready for them, but you have spent your life getting unprepared for them.

You have been told, and you have told yourself, that you are not worthy of having dreams, let alone fulfilling them. You have been told that it is wise to protect yourself, that hope leads to disappointment, that cynicism is equal to intelligence.

Now you must ask yourself why you exist, and why your dreams exist, and why you exist together, if not to create each other. Yes, your dreams will create you, and you will create your dreams.

Nothing is wasted! Put the will of nature to work for you. Quit denying it! You were made for love, for glory, for riches, for truth, for beauty, for goodness, for light. You owe nothing and require nothing. You need only stop yourself from saying 'no' when the gifts of the gods are presented to you. Accept them with gratitude and grace and you shall know heaven!

Creativity: infinite illusion... etc.

Another notebook ramble from a couple of years ago...

Creativity is an illusion. Everything exists, everything grows from Source. Source contains - or rather is - everything that is, that will be, including the thoughts of what might be possible. "There's nothing you can do that can't be done," said the poet. Everything you can think of, everything you believe you are creating already exists as part of the Source which contains all forms, including you and your feeling of creativity. To say 'already' is even misleading because Source is greater than time - contains time, and exists before and after the idea of time, and the idea of existence also. One quickly runs out of words to describe That Which is Beyond Thought.

My thoughts about creativity usually focus around writing. I think of the pencil touching the paper. The tip of the pencil tapers into a finer and finer point. Where is the point where it touches, if one takes the old formula of dividing in half the distance between pencil and paper, and then in half again, and again and again? In that way, one will always be halfway there, though the fractions approach the infinite (a useful metaphor for dualistic thinking).

I digress.

Consider it like this: the pencil comes to the fine tip that touches the paper at one end, and at the other it is connected to my hand, my body, my brain, my spirit, my inspiration, up, up, up to the infinite Source of all. Infinite - do we know what that means? The Infinite does not exist in only one direction (Up? Down?). There can only be one Infinite: how could there be a border between one Infinity and another? An infinity divided by two is still infinite: the borders are meaningless. So the pencil comes to a fine point at one end, and expands to infinity on the other. The paper itself exists as part of that infinite; the events that brought it into being, the particles of which it is made are, if not infinite, innumerable. So the pencil is writing on itself, through the medium of consciousness, the human writer. The universe is turned to look on itself through us. We are the narrow part of the continuum that tapers down from the infinitely large 'around' us to the infinitely small 'within' us. Wherever and whatever we are, we are the centre point between two infinities: we are the point where the pencil touches the paper. When we look at each other the All is looking at itself. When you look at another person, you see the representative of the All, the Universe, the Highest Self, God. The Highest Self? Yes - your highest self, looking back at you. That is why, however you treat the Other, whether it's an embrace or knife in the throat, it's the way you treat yourself. There, in the Other, is everything that you are part of, looking back at you.

All eyes are mirrors. All images are reflections. "All in all is all we are."

Communicate or Die!

Yet another bit o' something from a couple of years ago, edited for your reading pleasure...

Part of the need to write comes from the finiteness of existence - words may not be immortal, but they may last longer than this too-fragile flesh. But what if I can't accurately communicate the ideas I want to express?

Putting together my various bits and pieces on my new computer, it felt really important that they not be lost (like the things lost when the previous computer was stolen). Before moving to Paris, I felt like I had made a kind of peace with death: if I die, well, I've lived a charmed life anyway. I've lived well, loved and been loved. And that's true. But when it comes to the loss of my little notes and poems, that Piscean "I'm-sure-I'm-a-genius-if-only-I-could-prove-it" part of me takes over. All these landscapes and ideas in my head - it seems such a waste that they should disappear when I go. Maybe it's just loneliness. And though I know that what goes on in my head is merely a game compared to what goes on outside, it is the game that is being played in this life.

Maybe all these little bits and pieces are my real work: little poems, fragments, ideas. They say what they must. Stories and novels are merely accepted forms in the culture, and in the publishing industry. They are the outside forms I bring into my world in the hope that I can make a living in the outside world by expressing my inner world.

It seems that communication is so difficult in this life that you almost can't allow yourself to worry about it. So if I try to relate my dreams and ideas, and people see something else than I wanted them to, I can't let it bother me. Still, it's sad. Why make the attempt? Well, because I'm obsessive and driven, and I'll do it even if it's the wrong thing. And also, somewhere between the expression and the reception, some third thing exists independantly - and in its independance it is beautiful.

Energy as a Metaphor (from an old notebook)

Thoughts for the day, Aug 4, 2002

I read a lot about energy lately: energy work, healing energy, life energy; the human energy field, the universal energy field. "Spiritual" types constantly use energy as their analogy for what they experience and what they seek. Comparisons are made between electricity and other, 'higher' forms of energy, and science teaches us that all of the material universe is made of energy at the most basic level we now know. Matter, it's said, is merely energy at a lower vibration, or longer wavelength (the Celestine Prophecy contains a nice description of the continuum of energy vibration as it pertains to our participation in the material world). From this, it can be extrapolated that all the universe, including ourselves, exists as a continuum of energy. Seperation and contradiction (matter/energy, light/dark, etc) exist only in our minds, in our perception of the All.

This is very helpful in understanding ourselves and how we function in relation to the rest of the All, and I could talk about the implications of it all day. But the point I want to make here is that energy, as we now understand it, is a word, a metaphor, and as such it is limited. Energy is our highest understanding at the moment, at least the highest understanding that the combined technologies of material science and spiritual experience can agree on, but the fact that we have not yet imagined the next step does not mean that there isn't one.

Not so long ago, certainly within the last thousand years, (I'd have to check on the dates), scientist-philosophers posited an invisible, universal fluid that existed within and between all objects and which regulated the interactions and effects that objects have on each other. This was based on their highest knowledge at the time, which didn't include much about gasses and nothing about energy. Later thinkers hypothesized about a gas that filled the universe, again invisible and unmeasureable. These ideas, which seem somewhat silly now, were based on what they could observe around them. If you have two objects floating in water, the movement of one creates a ripple that affects the other: simple - and why would the movement of planets not be regulated by a similar effect? Likewise for the gas theory. At each stage, the unpredictable, mysterious universe is explained in terms of another mysterious substance for which we have discovered some predictable behaviours. Since the discovery of electricity and other forms of energy, our ideas about the world have been strongly influenced by what we can observe about the interactions of subatomic particles. We see the universe as a mass of energy, reacting within itself, causing the phenomena we observe, and even our consciousness. Field theory, relativity and quantum physics have taken those concepts a long way, and have strongly influenced and reinforced the way that 'spritual thinkers' have described the universe (see Gary Zukav's "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", for example. I should add that those who are strictly materialist, including most of the scientific establishment, do not see the connections between the spiritual and scientific truths.). Life itself is sometimes described as a kind of energy, and the power of God is seen variously as the manifesting or causative energy of the universe, or as the sum total of all energy. I read an acupuncture text from the 1970's that refers to Qi as the body's 'electromagnetic energy'; but acupuncturists or Qi Gong practitioners today would not use the same metaphor. Are we really much beyond the kind of thinking that came up with the 'universal fluid' theory?

Electricity has been studied in depth, and most children have a basic understanding of it by the time they leave highschool. We all know that atoms are surrounded by electrons that exist in a fine balance; if you add an electron to an atom, another must leave. If you add an electron to one end of a row of atoms, one will leave the other end. The more you add, the more are pushed out the other side. That's a gross simplification (I never did pay very close attention in high school), but that's the essence of it. Is that the same thing as the energy that passes when two people touch, the healing energy of Reiki or the flow of Qi? We know that it is not.

A more recent energy analogy is that of light (As in Barbara Brennan's "Hands of Light", a textbook for hands-on healing). Quantum physics tells us that light functions as both a particle and a waveform (that in itself tells us that there's a dialectical form that we have not yet discovered). It is governed by certain laws (such as it's constant velocity) and is affected by gravity and other forces. There is invisible light - waves at rates of vibration that we cannot percieve. It is a definite, measurable phenomenon, much researched by modern science. The light/body energy analogy probably springs from the fact that healers and sensitives 'see' energy, or light, around and within people and objects, and flowing between them. Research supports the theory that what the healers experience is energy moving in very high cycles of vibration (up to 2000 Hz, per Dr. Valorie, UCLA, 1988). But to think that the phenomena they see actually is light would be incorrect. Likewise, the use of the word energy. These experiments and the terminology they engender give us tools to analyse, describe, and discuss our experience. They can never fully describe the experience, however. Observation and words keep us constantly at a distance from experience (and I should know - look how many words I just put between myself and a momentary insight that occured two hours ago).

Lao Tzu said "That which can be called the Tao is not the Tao." This is the essence of my point. All our analogies, whether of fluids or light or energy, are ways to help us think about things that we do not fully understand, or things we do not experience moment to moment and wish to signify in words. Their benefit is that they push us to think beyond our current confines, to seek beyond our past experience for our deepest truth. They are like the Buddhist metaphor of the finger pointing at the moon: "If one raises a finger to point at the moon, only a fool looks at the finger." The danger (at least me) lies in thinking that we've got it figured out. Energy is a good analogy, it pushes our minds toward the deeper truth, the more profound experience. But as our collective experience deepens, the analogy will be discarded, and a better one will replace it. Eventually, there will be no need for analogies to describe self-apparent truths. Our thinking and our experience move from the fragmentary and limited toward the complete and the infinite, toward the Source, the nameless, limitless essence of what we are.