Late morning. You completed your forty minutes of exercises as you did
one day earlier this last weekend. You have a pleasant Spring sky this last day
of March. – Amorella
1103 hours. I remember a fair day in April when the great white whale
rises and all but one are pulled down into the sea.
Ishmael. You remember such as fiction as
though it were real. Why is that, boy? – Amorella
1109 hours. It was real as a showing classroom drama can be – projecting
an intimate learning situation, like reading in depth, so to speak. With
Ishmael doing the learning. Then like the ancient mariner he must tell his
story; but it is really Melville showing a reflection of his own story through
the characters and setting. – I found this wonderful letter from Melville to
Hawthorne – ever full of the dark wit I so much enjoy.
Drop it is and post by all means, boy. –
Amorella
** **
LETTER TO NATHANIEL
HAWTHORNE, JUNE [1?] 1851
My Dear Hawthorne, -- I
should have been rumbling down to you in my pine-board chariot a long time ago,
were it not that for some weeks past I have been more busy than you can well
imagine, -- out of doors, -- building and patching and tinkering away in all
directions. Besides, I had my crops to get in, -- corn and potatoes (I hope to
show you some famous ones by and by), -- and many other things to attend to,
all accumulating upon this one particular season. I work myself; and at night
my bodily sensations are akin to those I have so often felt before, when a
hired man, doing my day's work from sun to sun. But I mean to continue visiting
you until you tell me that my visits are both supererogatory and superfluous.
With no son of man do I stand upon any etiquette or ceremony, except the
Christian ones of charity and honesty. I am told, my fellow-man, that there is
an aristocracy of the brain. Some men have boldly advocated and asserted it.
Schiller seems to have done so, though I don't know much about him. At any
rate, it is true that there have been those who, while earnest in behalf of
political equality, will accept the intellectual estates. And I can well
perceive, I think, how a man of superior mind can, by its intense cultivation,
bring himself, as it were, into a certain spontaneous aristocracy of feeling,
-- exceedingly nice and fastidious, -- similar to that which, in an English
Howard, conveys a torpedo-fish thrill at the slightest contact with a social
plebian. So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you
may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but
nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable
a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the
silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth -- and go to the
Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its
very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his
own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed
upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers
almost universally laughingstocks? Why so? Truth is ridiculous to men. Thus
easily in my room here do I, conceited and garrulous, reverse the test of my
Lord Shaftesbury.
It seems an inconsistency
to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike to
all mankind -- in the mass. But not so. -- But it's an endless sermon, -- no
more of it. I began by saying that the reason I have not been to Lenox is this,
-- in the evening I feel completely done up, as the phrase is, and incapable of
the long jolting to get to your house and back. In a week or so, I go to New
York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my
"Whale" while it is driving through the press. That is the
only way I can finish it now, -- I am so pulled hither and thither by
circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a
man ought always to compose, -- that, I fear, can seldom be mine.
Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me,
holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me, -- I shall at last
be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the
constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to
write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. I'm
rather sore, perhaps, in this letter, but see my hand! -- four blisters on this
palm, made by hoes and hammers within the last few days. It is a rainy morning;
so I am indoors, and all work suspended. I feel cheerfully disposed, and
therefore I write a little bluely. Would the Gin were here! If ever, my dear
Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in
Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any
means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won't believe in a
Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the
celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads
together, till both musically ring in concert, -- then, O my dear
fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold
which now so distress us, -- when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence,
yea, its final dissolution an antiquity. Then shall songs be composed as when
wars are over; humorous, comic songs, -- "Oh, when I lived in that queer
little hole called the world," or, "Oh, when I toiled and sweated
below," or, "Oh, when I knocked and was knocked in the fight" --
yes, let us look forward to such things. Let us swear that, though now we
sweat, yet it is because of the dry heat which is indispensable to the nourishment
of the vine which is to bear the grapes that are to give us the champagne
hereafter.
But I was talking about
the "Whale." As the fishermen say, "he's in his flurry"
when I left him some three weeks ago. I'm going to take him by his jaw,
however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other. What's the
use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern
book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.
-- I talk all about myself, and this is selfishness and egotism. Granted. But
how help it? I am writing to you; I know little about you, but something about
myself so I write about myself, -- at least, to you. Don't trouble yourself,
though, about writing; and don't trouble yourself about visiting; and when you do
visit, don't trouble yourself about talking. I will do all the writing and
visiting and talking myself -- By the way, in the last "Dollar
Magazine" I read "The Unpardonable Sin." He was a sad fellow,
that Ethan Brand. I have no doubt you are by this time responsible for many a
shake and tremor of the tribe of "general readers." It is a frightful
poetical creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart. But it's
my prose opinion that in most cases, in those men who have fine brains
and work them well, the heart extends down to hams. And though you smoke them
with the fire of tribulation, yet, like veritable hams, the head only gives the
richer and the better flavor. I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head!
I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The
reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because
they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You
perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity;
don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?) Another
thing. I was in New York for four-and-twenty hours the other day, and saw a
portrait of N.H. And I have seen and heard many flattering (in a publisher's
point of view) allusions to the "Seven Gables." And I have seen
"Tales," and "A New Volume" announced, by N.H. So upon the
whole, I say to myself, this N.H. is in the ascendant. My dear Sir, they begin
to patronize. All Fame is patronage. Let me be infamous: there is no patronage
in that. What "reputation" H.M. has is horrible. Think of it !
To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a "man
who lived among the cannibals"! When I speak of posterity, in reference to
myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment
immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of
them, in all likelihood. Typee will be given to them, perhaps, with
their gingerbread. I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent
of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and every time see deeper and
deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as
I do now. My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of
those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three
thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it
developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was
twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my
life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that
I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost
leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. It seems
to be now that Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet that he a
little managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism; or else
there have been many corruptions and interpolations of the text. -- In reading
some of Goethe's sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, "Live
in the all." That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched
one, -- good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to
yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that
are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense!
Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. "My dear boy," Goethe says
to him, "you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in
the all, and then you will be happy!" As with all great genius, there
is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact
with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.
H. Melville.
P.S. "Amen!"
saith Hawthorne.
N.B. This "all"
feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on
the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the
earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all
feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist
upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
P.S. You must not fail to admire my discretion in
paying the postage on this letter.
From -- http://www.melvilleDOTorg/letter3.htm
** **
Later, afternoon. You had a late lunch at Panera on Mason-Montgomery
Road. Stopped at Lowe’s for Drano for the shower, which is running slow.
Beautiful though windy. You are sitting in the public parking behind the fields
at the high school looking east at the south end of Pine Hill Lakes Park, this
area is sometimes called Nixon park for one of Warren County’s representatives,
at least that is the way you remember it. – Amorella
1609 hours. The whole park was Pine Hill Lakes but as this is a
Republican county by a wide margin (John ‘Boner’ our Speaker of the House is
from just west of here in Butler County). Anyway, we still call the whole park
by its original name.
Is there a dark political cloud soaking up
your mind, boy? – Amorella
1616 hours. I’m still thinking about Melville’s letter: “. . . what
plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal
application of a temporary feeling or opinion.” It is a problem with majority
rules and even sometimes with minority rules. And, it seems the only way to
have government run half way efficiently, i.e. have the trains run on time, is
to elect a hopefully benevolent dictator, Plato’s philosopher king. (Wikipedia article below.)
** **
In Book VI of The Republic
Plato defined a
philosopher firstly as its eponymous occupation – wisdom-lover. He then
distinguishes between one who loves true knowledge as opposed to simple sights
or education by saying that the philosopher is the only person who has access
to Forms – the archetypal entities that exist behind all representations of the
form (such as Beauty itself as opposed to any one particular instance of
beauty). It is next and in support of the idea that philosophers are the best
rulers that Plato fashions the ship of state metaphor, one of his most often
cited ideas (along with his allegory of the cave). " A true pilot must of
necessity pay attention to the seasons, the heavens, the stars, the winds, and
everything proper to the craft if he is really to rule a ship" (The
Republic, 6.488d).
Criticism
Karl Popper blamed Plato for the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century, seeing
Plato's philosopher kings, with their dreams of 'social engineering' and
'idealism', as leading directly to Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler (via Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx). In addition, Ayatollah Khomeini is said
to have been inspired by the Platonic vision of the philosopher king while in
Qum in the 1920s when he became interested in Islamic mysticism and Plato’s
Republic. As such, it has been speculated that he was inspired by Plato's
philosopher king, and subsequently based elements of his Islamic Republic on
it.
Selected from – Wikipedia Offline
– philosopher king
1630
hours. I don’t agree wholehearted with the article above because I don’t
remember all the particulars given – though certainly the references to Hegel
and Marx make sense.
You rather like being a philosopher king of
sort while writing your novels. You have control, which you relinquish once in
a while to a character demanding more control over herorhis fictional life. –
Amorella
1637 hours. Fiction demands a limited responsibility but only in my
private time. Besides, I relinquish the basics to you Amorella because I don’t
have the inclination to actually rule even in the fiction. Only a fool would
think she or he could actually rule anyone even her or himself. Other factors
always play a role – friends, setting, time placement, unknowns (Caesar comes
to mind), etc. whether you are class president or president or president for
life.
Carol is on page 72 of Confessions by Grisham. Time to go. - Amorella
Carol is on page 72 of Confessions by Grisham. Time to go. - Amorella
You had leftovers from Olive Garden for
supper, watched NBC News, “Castle”, a “NCIS.LA” and a “Modern Family”. –
Amorella
2118 hours. Earlier we drove to pick up the bedroom lamp now fixed and
Carol looked at other lighting in the store. She actually had a good time, and
she is happy she has her reading lamp back rather than using mine.
Post.
- Amorella
This is true. You have to be open and free
in heartansoulanmind. You have to be as open and free as you would be if you
were physically dead, that’s how you see it, that is how therefore that you
have to imagine the situation to be to write an honest fiction; you hope
as honest a fiction as Melville’s Moby Dick. That is what today’s
thoughts are about. – Post. - Amorella
2154
hours. It has happened again. Today I have a spike of 195 hits. Something has
to be wrong with the blog counter. It shows I have five hits as of 1140 hours
and yesterday I had eleven hits. Both are typical. Five is typical. Yet when I
put it on Stats Overview it shows 195 hits for today – this is from about 1500
to 1700 hours this afternoon. It has to be a glitch. On my Stat Counter it
shows I had 200 hits today but it does not say where they came from. –
2215
hours. According to Stat Counter the hit was from a communication company at 16:36:19
in Korea. Two hundred hits in less than a second is an equipment malfunction
not a glitch. At least it is simply explained. I feel better now.
You really don’t want people reading this
blog do you orndorff? – Amorella
2227 hours. No, I do not. A few hits are fine. I am sacrificing my
privacy in this blog so I am free to write from my subconscious or unconscious
mind, that is how I see it. My mind has to be open so I can communicate with
you, Amorella.
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