William Carlos Williams (portrait by Man Ray, public domain photo)
This week: Chapter 95, "The Cassock," through Chapter 100, "Leg and Arm"
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Chapter 96 reminds me of Lovecraft at times:
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.
Coincidentally, I have mentioned Ecclesiastes repeatedly to my seventh graders this week, which Ishmael calls “the truest of all books.” I find it interesting that optimistic Bob Wilson loved Moby Dick so much, and Ishmael seems very pessimistic. Perhaps Melville did not share Ishmael’s pessimism. Or perhaps I oversimplify Ishmael’s perceptions.
In chapter 99 various characters interpret the doubloon as we interpret the novel and the interpretations of the doubloon, and then we interpret each other’s interpretations of the interpretations.
Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
- “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”, William Carlos Williams, 1955
“I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” - John Cage. I think I first encountered this quote at a concert for composer Elliott Schwarz’s fiftieth birthday on January 19, 1986. Cage loved Finnegans Wake.
I feel grateful to this study group for helping me make it through the transition to the second Trump presidency. I don’t feel like I have much to say about the novel, but it helps me put things in perspective. I still don’t understand the connection with Koko’s lucky harpoon in the “Yacht Rock” web series. The final episode of the series does remind me of the ending of Bob Wilson’s The Homing Pigeons.
I don’t think of Moby Dick as poetry, but I do read it out loud usually. When I read that quote by Williams, I often think of Homer, but I don’t know what Williams really had in mind. Our current situation, what Bob Heinlein called “The Crazy Years”, does feel like finding oneself lost at sea.
5 comments:
I love a good book club. This is how I wish they all could be!
Cool picture of William Carlos Williams.
Some pretty vivid sentences in Chapter 96, "The Try Works."
"The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed ... 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."
Chapter 96, "The Try Works" has the coincidence that the Gematria of 96 = "Work". The first paragraph metaphorically represents the striving for higher consciousness when taking into account puns and qabalah.
"Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks."
It seems alchemical. The brick-kiln = the alchemical furnace; masonry joining with oak and hemp suggests constructing something – a "completed ship"; oak corresponds with Tiphareth;
When Ishmael starts falling asleep on his midnight watch, it goes into a strong and obvious voyaging in the bardo sequence. He states it explicitly: "A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me." It's the paragraph that starts: "But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me.
Fascinating lens to read this chapter 96, Oz!
“The most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship.” Of course, ‘masonry’ can be taken as meaning occult knowledge. And I am glad to read that, if oak corresponds to Tiphareth, the other most important thing needed for ‘the completed ship’ is hemp!
We also read of “the famed Greek fire”, “which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging”. My copy has this annotation: “burning mixture used in medieval warfare by the Byzantine Greeks.” But this Greek fire could also be understood as the Promethean fire.
“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!”
Fire Kasina meditation is a practice aimed at producing mystical visions by looking at flames. Here’s a podcast on the subject:
https://deconstructingyourself.com/the-liberating-practice-of-the-fire-kasina-with-daniel-ingram.html
Michael Taft was the interviewer on the RAW Explains Everything tape.
In chapter 98, I found the last part about metempsychosis quite striking, where one during their lifetime has “learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul”, but no matter what “the ghost is pouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.” I see something almost of the karmic wheel in this. Reminds me of Lon Milo DuQuette’s recent discussion of the Buddhist implications of the film Groundhog Day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iucybzxt0aU
In the Doubloon chapter, I admit that I could not follow Stubb’s rant on the Zodiac, as interesting as it seemed.
And in the Leg and Arm chapter, I quite liked the name ‘Captain Boomer’. Sounds like a Gen Z insult type of thing.
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