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Melville’s Vanity
May 1, 2020 by imothyt


Apologies that I haven’t written for several days; I don’t know why but I sleep later than normal these days. I’ve always been an early riser, 4am, but these last few years that has been creeping to 5am, and lately I’ve been switching off my 5am alarm and going back to sleep until 6, 6:30, 7, or even later. My theory is that the phone is bothering me/waking me and I might try sleeping with the phone off for a few weeks and see if that helps. I’ll report back.

If you’re wondering how my low-salt/low-fat diet is working.. it’s OK. I have managed to keep off the 7 pounds I lost when I went virtually no-salt but pretty much as soon as the virus hit I stopped tracking all of my meals in a database like I had been doing before. I also sort-of went back to eating moderate amounts of salt in my foods (I quit measuring my seasoning salt). I have enough stress right now teaching my child, working from home, and staying sober, I decided to work on the low-salt thing more later. If there is going to be a later! HA HA AH.. I’ll be eating nothing but spam slices and potatoes when the apocalypse hits because I can’t grow anything except potatoes.

Since my last post I have read 4 chapters of Moby Dick: 94-97 – A Squeeze of the Hand, the Cassock, the Try-Works, and the Lamp and supplemented those readings with the Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, and some of Proverbs from the Bible.

This segment of Moby Dick begins with Ishmael tasked to squeeze the crystals which form in the spermacetti. Sperm (not semen) is actually a wax and crystals form when the temperature changes. In the 1850s people would squeeze these crystals to keep the wax in a liquid form – or alternately let them grow so that they could make things like candles from the wax.

While squeezing the sperm Ishmael is overcome with

“a strange sort of insanity, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborer’s hands in it… Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, –OH! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”

If Melville is my 19th century version of a blogger, he’s blogging here about people on Twitter! and the “social acerbities.. ill humor (and) envy” that are not new to our time but rather seem to be constants among humans. Melville’s point is well taken but I’m beyond tempted to laugh at the goofy way he makes it. He seems to be channeling Uncle Walt but in a far less subtle and poetic manner. I suppose I should heed his words, squeeze the sperm, and basen my own acerbities.

But it’s hard to be serious reading these two chapters because after he describes the process of chopping up the whale fat for rendering he spends an entire chapter describing how the mincer (the guy who chops the fat) will skin the whale’s penis, hang the foreskin to dry, and wear that as a “cassock” or priests robe. Then the mincer stands “invested in the full canonicals of his calling.”

These are intentionally comical chapters. Melville is toying with us, playing with the transcendentalists, and his humor sprinkled throughout and brought to a head when he ends the chapter thus:

“Arrayed in decent black [the whale’s cured foreskin – 7’s note]; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!”

But the humor is a distraction, and what I have found throughout Moby Dick is that Melville enjoys a slight of hand in his works: throwing the reader off the scent of his true arguments.

I can be accused of the same; at times muddying my writing about Arsenal by intentionally leaving things vague, omitting my true feelings, or obfuscating and weasel-wording (for a moment of honesty; please sell Xhaka so that I can find some peace), so that I can avoid being minced in the blubber room of social media. And in chapter 96, the Try-Works, Melville deploys many of the same tricks to distract us from one of, what could be, the main arguments of the entire book.

I will admit that I was one of those annoying atheists who pretended that he had read the Bible whenever I was questioned about it, “every chapter” I would say before Googling which verse I needed to back up my argument. And along with that I often thought of the Bible (sorry that this is a weird segue but it will make sense in a second) as a bludgeon for people in power to use to beat others into line.

In my defense, that is how the Bible is often presented in mainstream media, how it is used politically, how many people spoke to me about it, and how most of the evangelical preachers I listened to (I was in Young Life when I was a teen) used it. If I had, actually, you know, read the darned thing (other than the Beatitudes – I loved using Jesus’ words against the Bible thumpers) I would have possibly had a different opinion.

What Melville has excelled at more than any other author is to get me to open the Bible and read parts I would never have read before. It started a few chapters back when he mentioned how the heads of the whales hung like Holoferenes from Judith’s belt. That got me to read the Book of Judith, where I was introduced for the first time to basic biblical storytelling.

You could easily make a film from the book of Judith, it has everything: war, spies, hubris, deception, decapitation, and the underdog winning in the end (sorry for the spoiler). There’s some stuff about believing in God to deliver you from oppression and never straying from the path but even if you just take it as a woman who went out and did what was needed to save her people it’s just a well constructed short story.

And then there’s this chapter, the Try-Works. In what I’ve learned is typical Melvillian style, he starts the chapter describing a part of the whale ship and then quickly switches into a fugue-like state before he descends into a frenzied sermon on his actual argument.

We have seen this before with the chapter The Mast Head; in that chapter Ishmael sits in the crows nest and “zones out”. As he enters his dream he describes the sea as “a deep, blue, bottomless soul” and connects all matter, all beings, even the Pantheist Wickliffe’s ashes “form at least part of every shore around the globe.”

Yet, he obfuscates and intentionally confuses, ending the chapter with a warning that while you ponder the infinity of being you hang above “Cartesian vortices” which you could quickly drop into and perish. “Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”

In the Try-Works he follows the same pattern. He describes the Try-Works in some detail, telling us how a massive brick furnace is “firmly secured to the surface (of the deck) by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides”. Saying the try-works is on its knees seems intentional because what goes on below deck is hellish indeed.

There are two massive, polished iron try-pots, which are kept meticulously clean by the sailors. Once a whale is harvested, they strip off “blankets” of flesh, and the mincer stands above the pots slicing off bible leaves (thin strips) of flesh and blubber for rendering. They start the flame with a little bit of wood but quickly switch to the rendered scraps (basically whale cracklings) and the whale figuratively consumes itself as the ship glides through the night waters.

Crew often gathered in the light of the try-pots and witnessing the scene Ishmael falls into his fugue. I quote the slip in full because it’s some of my favorite prose so far in the book:

“Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.”

Ishmael falls asleep at the helm and just as he was going to wake himself by prying his own eyes open, realizes that he’s completely turned around, turned away from the wheel, turned away from the compass. He wakes and saves the ship from capsizing. But offers us this warning:

” Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp–all others but liars!”

The sun reveals things in their glory, the fire distracts and flips you around.

If it’s not clear yet, the Mast-Head, the place where monks once perched to contemplate the nature of the universe is heaven; whilst the Try-Works, which reveals in fire, is hell.

And just at the moment when I think I understand what Melville is arguing for or against, he flips again; he obfuscates and changes imagery on us. There are false men and true men, and the truest man is the Man of Sorrows (Jesus during the crucifixion). And while the sun contrasts the fire there are also contrasting books and “the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe… this willful world hath not got hold of un-christian Solomon’s wisdom yet.”

Proverbs is interesting and it strikes me that you could make a Proverbs quote of the day calendar and call it “how to be a good human!” But Ecclesiastes is what H. Mellville is truly after here in this chapter.

For most of us Ecclesiastes is best known as the basis for that awful Byrds song “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
(etc.)
Ecc 3:1-3

But more pertinent to our reading this week is the not so small fact that this book is Solomon’s life lessons and that in the end, they are quite unsatisfying. Solomon gives us great insight into how to live – reiterating the words he wrote in Proverbs – but here he is a man at the end of his time “under the sun” – a phrase repeated which means his or our time on earth – and he’s found the greatest lesson of all, that everything is meaningless, that grasping at meaning is meaningless, that good works go unrewarded and bad unpunished, and that either way, no matter what we do we all die in the end: all is vanity. Melville says the same in the chapter the Try-Works: “all is vanity.” but then emphasizes, “ALL”.

Vanity doesn’t mean staring at oneself in the mirror, but rather the Hebrew word (Hebel) which means “vapor” or “breath” which Solomon repeats at various places saying “all is vanity and a chasing after wind”.

Seeking knowledge? “What happens to the fool will happen to me also: why then have I been so very wise?” Vanity

Praising god? Vanity. Eating, drinking, chasing women? Vanity. Working? Vanity. “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” Vanity.

And what then does Solomon tell us to do if all is vanity? Live. Eat. Celebrate.

Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.

Even those who live many years should rejoice in them all; yet let them remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity.

Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgement.

Solomon encourages us to live because as he says the end times are coming: the sun will be blotted out, the skies darkened with rain, strong men are bent, women stop milling grain, businesses close, heights offer no solace, and terror is on the road. “Because all must go to their eternal home.”

“Vanity of vanities, says the teacher; all is vanity.”

The more I read of the Bible, the less I see it as a cudgel and the more I see it as an argument that has taken place between thousands of people, over thousands of years, with the central question of “how do I live a good life?”

I’ve wondered why Moby Dick is so confusing, so difficult to understand. But I think I get it now: Melville’s Moby Dick is confusing because he’s confused. If he’d have wanted to make a straightforward story, a parable or even a simple argument one way or another he could have. But instead he invested a huge portion of his life to a book which is telling us that he doesn’t have the answers and taking that even a step further, takes a cue from Solomon in saying that even his writing this massive book is a vanity.

Me reading Moby Dick? Vanity.

Me writing about Moby Dick? Vanity.

Ha! I feel like here we are at the pivotal chapter, perhaps the artist is doubting himself, he’s looked back on this entire project after reading Ecclesiates and wondered “what’s it all for???!

I’m like Melville, I don’t have an answer: be one with the universe I guess? Squeeze yourself into another’s life; eat, drink, be merry; know that God is judging you and the end is coming? But that it was all just a vanity anyway, even the bits about God’s wrath, and now it’s time for us all to take a dirt nap.

Melville ends the chapter with the image of the eagle soaring and diving in the mountains; even if the eagle dives into the valleys of those mountains and even if he stays his whole life in those valleys, he’ll still be soaring high above the lowly plains eagles, even though they too soar.

Qq

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