Mid-morning. You had a relaxing bath, read the Saturday and Sunday papers, and the house is fit for family. Last night on Facebook you mentioned how, in your opinion, Melville’s Captain Ahab is the most interesting character of depth in literature. You didn’t say why, but this is the answer: Melville speaks of Ahab in Chapter Twenty-eight, one of your favorite slices of literature.
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It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered--then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once; "but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em."
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
From: Melville’s Moby Dick, Chapter 28
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What a marvelous description of character!
This is a mirror of what you would like to be, boy, a fantasy. – Amorella
Such passion described, Amorella. To see such passion I have but to dream.
Alas, such is a solid truth, yet with only as much granite as it would take to hold a headstone.
1228 hours. Just finished the new Discover magazine while sitting on the front porch with Carol while she was reading Time. Presently we will be heading to the grocery for a list of items.
Kroger’s on Tylersville. I have a quotation from the “Ways to Leave Your Body,” article and as soon as I read it I realize this is what could have happened in this “metaphysical dance with Amorella” way back in the eighties. It felt mystical, and that is still an honest assessment; however, I have had sensations of out-of-body experiences before. The feelings I had and the intensity of the reality of those feelings could have triggered split consciousness with Amorella taking the ‘out of body’ personality. This is the simplest solution and if it truly wasn’t a mystical experience it was indeed existential enough for me to change my thinking, leaning in favor of transcendentalism. I have no problem accepting either account, mystical or scientific. What ever it was/is it is still real enough. Even if Amorella is nothing more than a part of myself (a more efficient slice of myself) I still could not have written the books without her being where she is even if it is only psychological. Reality is a strange mistress within and surrounding each of us everyday. Life is interesting. Most every day something new pops up from imagination or one source or another. Retirement is good. Below is the quote I am referring to.
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Blanke now thinks out-of-body experiences are related to phantom limbs, the sensation reported by many amputees that a missing limb is still attached. He proposes that the feeling of leaving the body represents a broader misperception of not just one limb but the entire physical self. “What you can get wrong for your hand you can also get wrong for the rest,” Blanke says. “When the brain gets it wrong by trying to reconcile what is seen with what is felt, it generates another reality – and two bodily representations of yourself.”
Sherry Baker, “Ways to Leave Your Body,” Discover. July/August, p. 53.
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So it goes, orndorff. At least you’re compatible with never having this creative mystery about yourself resolved. – Amorella
Like you said, nothing involved with human beings is set in stone. If consciousness can float in one of the smallest of fictional critters I can imagine who’s to say what’s possible and impossible. If it's plausible in imagination, it seems to me that somewhere in the physical universe it may be plausible within circumstances we do not know. In fact, when someone utters, “That’s impossible,” I smile, at least inwardly. What else can an agnostic do? Grandma Schick always said, “if you don’t bend with the wind something’s going to snap”.
You talked to Kim and she said they have not eaten yet after you asked, you told her you haven’t eaten either so it looks like a mid-afternoon meal out or in. All for now. Post when you return home or you’ll probably forget about it. - Amorella
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