la baleine

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick

[la-baleine]

I want to feel:

I like the small moments more than the big ones. 

The moment of private grief Ishmael must have had on that ship when he realized that Ahab doesn’t see the sea in the same wondering and loving way he does. I am often grieving over the realization that other people don’t experience the world in the way I do. (Maybe that’s for the best.)

The moment of wild intensity when Ahab is points a musket at Stub after Stub questions his decision to have the crew disregard the leaking oil muskets. I can’t tell which pain I would like to subject myself to more. I know for the moment he pulls away, and gives in, that I would like to be neither: that I would want to witness.

The moment Queequeg decides to copy his entire tattoos on his body onto the chest of the coffin. Tattoos, the etching quality, has become deeply entwined to Ishmael’s life since boarding the Essex. I’d like to be bewildered Ishmael as much as I would like to be manic Queequeg. I’ve been both many times. I think I can understand this distantly. So many things have become painfully relevant to my life since I came to Wells. It is easy to absorb the things people you are fond of love. Blue, bees, the word “buddy”, newspapers, Shakespeare, Nina Simone, Arizona raspberry teas, excessive journaling, whales. So much more. I wonder what my tattoo will be.

The moment Ishmael realizes that the sea attracts people that want to kill themselves but can’t reconcile it. Those thoughts are hard. No one talks about it. Those kinds of thoughts impair the heart, the mind. Those thoughts make it hard to do anything for a little bit. I’ve had many thoughts like that in class, or crying in the rain at Cornell, and I know I can’t really do anything successfully for a few hours.

The moment Ahab is mentally crafting the harpoon he needs to kill the White Whale. The hurried retelling to the blacksmith. I would love to feel what its like to obsessively try to explain a vision he has in his head. I wonder if that is excruciating for other people. The moment he eventally gets the harpoon back, and he has to cope with the fact it is not perfect, it is not exactly what he wants, and it could never be. Coping with the realization that even if he made the harpoon himself, it could never be an exact replica of the one in his mind. (Some things are best left in your head)

[la-baleine]

A ONE SIDED CONVERSATION W/ CHAR: Sunday night, (technically Monday morning, 1:29 am)

Somehow, and I’m not quite sure if I still understand it all or not, there has only ever been one world. But, Charlotte, it just keeps shifting.

In my first semester of college, I “took” a class on Ancient Philosophy. I put the word took in quotations because I never showed up. If I did I was drunk or exhausted, which are essentially the same thing. One is just more fun than the other. It was a 2:30 pm class in a basement. The last time I ever went was on a friend’s 21st birthday. We drank maple bourbon and apple cider in her bedroom, which was drenched in heavenly autumn sunlight.

But in that course Charlotte, I read about the ancient world, and how very rough and different that all was. It was a different world, but somehow it was this world. It blows my mind that this world does not die and be reborn again each time a generation dies, like a phoenix or some animal that must have existed back in those days. Reading this book makes me think about animals, and the topics, that are chosen to be preserved in our words. Can you imagine if no one in human history ever wrote about a whale? What if we lived in 2017 and never even knew that whales had ever existed?

I think that la Belle et le Bête was real. But only in the original French words.

I think beauty is traumatic, Charlotte.

You can call me Ishmael, Charlotte.

Melville writes a lot of wrong shit. It’s the most incredible book, but somehow it seems fitting that the Great American Novel is full of “alternative facts”. When you read something wrong, there are a lot of mixed emotions that follow. With Melville, you laugh. Mainly because you’re reading it alone in your single room at 3:30 am on Monday morning and you have to laugh. But my professor always asks why would Melville write something wrong in a book he tried so hard to get right?

His errors are strange, almost calculated. Hindoo instead of Hindu. Fake whales. Claiming substances possess different properties than they do in all reality. Describing Nantucket not from a loving memory but from an encyclopedia and geography textbook.

He discusses “primal” depictions of whales in a certain cavern in India, I think, I’m not quite sure. The cavern was wrong. He spelled the words wrong. He said it was to be a depiction of a whale, and “the tail was all wrong”. It was supposed to be a fish.

I know we always talk about how no one thinks like us and we don’t think like each other.

I think no one thinks about the person that laid those tiles, the artist that created the image. I always think about the people mentioned only once. What was that like, to be living in the ancient world, carving something on a wall? To try to do so, I got barefoot and drew in marker on the walls in the stairway of my freshman dorm. I drew a whale. Then I drew a man with a fish tail instead of legs. Then I drew Florida. With a heart over the beloved. I’m wondering if it was like Howe Caverns, which I have been to seven times, or a sea cove. I can’t even picture what India looks like.

What do you think it means to really know something? Is it like anything at all?

Melville knew about whales. And about being in love with best friends. And the sea taste of the ocean. And about being a human teardrop. And about standing on a boat and realizing that living is really hard, but that you have no choice to do it. I have no proof but I bet he knew what it was like to almost drown too.

I know about all these things too.

(EDIT: I wrote this in this way because I didn't know what to write and I wanted to talk to my friend Charlotte but she's a swimmer so she was asleep. Maybe it’s weird. It’s weird. I also don't really care. It’s all the things I would say to her on the floor of her dorm at Smith after dark when it’s raining.) 

[ymiprk-deactivated20180313]

Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature: and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (via yumiprk)

[youvegotishmael]

Blue (Moby Dick)), Jackson Pollock, 1943

“Whatever the extent of his actual exposure to the novel at the time he painted Moby Dick, there did seem to be certain almost uncanny analogies between the author of that nineteenth-century novel and Jackson Pollock, in both subject matter and style.

Pollock shared with Melville not only feelings of paranoia, but also a definite preoccupation with moody and tragic violence, and their mutual penchant for uncertain and indefinite imagery is seemingly equivalent. Because of these similarities both, projected in their respective art forms, a particularly “American chiaroscuro.”

The way Pollock organized his forms in this small mixed-media work approximates the rhythms of the roiling ocean depths. Fish and what appear to be lower marine forms toss about on the waves, although no discernible white whale is anywhere in sight.“

–from Jackson-Pollock.org

[195195119511951-deactivated2021]

[youvegotishmael]

Thinking about Moby-Dick as prose poetry.

[hijodeporos]

We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours are not beautiful everywhere in the picture: but the Artist has laid on the appropriate tint to every spot. Or we are censuring a drama because the persons are not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic and some scurrilous clown; yet take away the low characters and the power of the drama is gone; these are part and parcel of it.

Plotinus, “On Providence” (via hijodeporos)

Thinking about theodicy and aesthetics in The Shark Massacre"

(via youvegotishmael)

[studenting]

[sarah-evenson-deactivated201909]

Here is another fact about whales. If you keep following this blog you will know enough about whales to get a degree in cetology by the end of the year. 

[visionsecho]

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things”. This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (via visionsecho)

[whisperthatruns]

But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not really.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (via whisperthatruns)

[fragmentarie]

On my CV it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel ‘in progress’ rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (via fragmentarie)

See Moby-Dick, “Cetology”:

“What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way.”

(via youvegotishmael)

[la-baleine]

english major backpack

[la-baleine]

Critical Response 2

It’s very interesting that this long epic novel about the hunt for the white whale, takes chapter after chapter for the Captain Ahab to even appear on deck of the ship. My mother called me last night to ask me to give one word to describe Moby Dick so far, and I said descriptive. Melville is so skilled with is ability to turn even a very simple scene into a rich, vivid experience. If you lose your excitement, these long passages of description, like in Chapter 23 when Ishmael is describing Bulkington, can start to seem very dull. Long books like Moby Dick, or Ulysses, require a kind of loving dedication and for the reader to have the Inner Resources to make the most long-winded text interesting. I think that Chapter 24 (The Advocate) is extremely important in context of the world outside of the ship. Ishmael advocates for the whaling profession, saying that it’s a “heroic” profession, important economically and has greatly expanded cartography/geographical knowledge. Which, the geographical thing is really true, but mammals harming mammals is really hard for me to support. In his support of whaling, he really taps into a really strong cultural phenomenon of the Islands/Cape Cod life: the family names. What last name you have, and if you’re a “Landsman” (Cape Cod native) or an “Nantucketer” or an “Islander” is really important historically and culturally in this realm of the world. Ishmael rationalizes whaling by basically saying why would these noble families have any involvement in a “bad” industry. Ishmael also discusses the biblical mentions of whales, as well. I think that this chapter did not HAVE to be included in Moby Dick, but the fact that it was included, especially this far into the text, feels very intentional. The importance of the color white is starting to appear in Chapter 28 (Ahab). In Ishmael’s description of Ahab, we learn that he’s been obviously mentally scared by the encounter with the white whale and physically since he lost a leg during said encounter. But Ishmael makes a point to highlight Ahab’s white scar that runs down one side of his face that looks like a lightening strike. The whispers around the ship say that the scar suddenly appeared on Ahab’s face during an “elemental strife at sea.” Something pretty intense for me too is that Ahab’s fake leg is carved from a whale’s jaw- that seems pretty spooky to me.

[la-baleine]

the white scar

(haiku)

The scar is here- white like foam birthed from fear the sea is not yours to roam.

[la-baleine]

Rockaway, with the rocks.

“Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach?”

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

1.

Everyday I wake up at 5 am,

still mostly asleep I sit at my cold wooden desk,

and begin to let myself bleed.

I let my blood cover these bright yellow pages,

the pages I stole out of the supply closet

at my last temp job,

and somehow the words seem to form in the pools of my blood.

(Writing like this is hard.

Being like this is hard.)

2.

But today, someone liked my blood.

I walked down to the post office,

and happened to cut a finger on the metal door.

Fingers dripping, I opened the letter.

$80 from the Smoky Mountains Poetry Collective.

A letter saying something about promise and destruction.

Looking down, my woolen coat,

found in my father’s house eleven years ago,

it seems to have more holes than ever before.

It feels like the holes are growing as I’m standing here,

surrounded by all these tiny metal boxes,

ripping my only coat to shreds.

Hopefully it does not take me with it.

3.

Later, I think of the postcard

I found in a library book three months ago.

“Greetings from Rockaway Beach!”

written in red.

I spent hours in that brown threadbare chair in the mystery section,

memorizing that picture, every single wave

and striped umbrella.

I decided to read about this beach,

this beach that juts out from the grey city.

Rockaway, with the rocks.

Rockaway, with the white sand.  

Rockaway, with the water you can hear from a mile away. 

4.

I have never seen the ocean before. I’ve read that it tastes salty.

Maybe like the sweat that runs off my lip

after working in her rose garden all day. 

 Is it the same sea-taste?

 5. 

 After seeing that wrinkled postcard, 

I dreamt of the ocean,

(and the pretty girl in the small swimsuit)

for nights on end in my cold, small bed.

I wonder what it would be like to taste each. 

[la-baleine]

Chapters I-IV

Moby Dick is half a wild and fierce adventure, full of death, anxiety and mysticism, but it’s also sort of a love letter to those who love the ocean. I believe that those who are familiar with the Atlantic Ocean and/or the greater Cape Cod area understand the kind of hungry passion he has to get to sea. I’ve read Moby Dick once before, two summers ago in Brewster, Cape Cod. I felt as if I had never read anything more descriptive about the area before. Upon learning that he had never actually been to Nantucket, I began re-reading with that lens in mind. It seems silly now, that I thought he had spent any amount of time there. The heavy descriptive language in the longer passages about Nantucket in the second chapter (The Carpet Bag), are almost taken from a combination of an Encyclopedia and a travel magazine. The whole area is smothered in this strange power- you can simply feel it. I think if I was foreign, I feel like I could still pick up that it was fundamental to something.  I find that the energy is strongest in the sand dunes on the way to Providence, in the Ladies Library in Brewster, and in boats covered in brine in the Nantucket Sound. I feel like that is something Melville is missing from the first few landlocked chapters. However, he masterfully captures everything once he is out of sight of land

 In the very first chapter, Melville wrote “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” Such a line may seem simple, but this is the major hook for me to read Moby Dick. All my childhood I wanted to be a classic explorer, like those anthropologists/archeologists/biologists that explored South America and the rest of the world in the 1800/1900’s. The feeling of wanting to find something remote, something untouched by anyone you know, is something I’ve felt my whole life in perspective. Melville does an excellent job of setting up the vibe of the story in the first four chapters. He discusses water, Nantucket, anxiety over cannibalism, general yearning and the process of finding a crew at great length.