Scene from the opera Moby-Dick, see below. (Via The Metropolitan Opera's website).
Chapters 110, Queequeg in his Coffin” to 116, "The Dying Whale."
Some pretty good passages in this week's section of the novel, as the Pequod sails toward the final confrontation with the Great White Whale.
Chapter 110
It's kind of a trope in science fiction to compare voyages in space with voyages on the ocean. I loved this passage: "For not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. "
Chapter 111
The contrast with the beauty of the Pacific Ocean with the violence and suffering also associated with it reminded me of all of the histories I've read about World War II in the Pacific theatre.
I thought this section of the novel has passages that sounded pagan, e.g. "Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan," and also the blood sacrifice to christen Ahab's new harpoon, and the reference in Chapter 113 to "the Three Fates."
"Bashee isles," they are in the Phillippines.
Moby Dick, the opera
As I don't follow opera news closely, I did not realize until now that there is a well-reviewed, contemporary opera based on Moby Dick. The opera Moby-Dick features music by Jake Heggie with a libretto by Gene Scheer. It seems to have gotten good reviews; here is a review in the New York Times after it premiered in 2010 in Dallas. I have not been able to find an audio recording. There's a DVD that's hard to buy, Moby-Dick apparently may be the most-staged recent contemporary opera.
While most of us won't be able to see it, unless you can get to New York for this month's production at the Metropolitan Opera, it will be broadcast on the radio on March 29, on all of the radio stations that carry the Saturday afternoon matinee broadcasts from the Met. Here is the radio station finder, with a link for the live webstream.
The Met has an on-demand streaming option, so I would guess Moby-Dick should become available at some point. Bits of the opera are available on YouTube.
Next week: Please read Chapter 117, "The Whale Watch," to Chapter 124, "The Needle."
6 comments:
Chapter 110 brings another near death experience, this time it's Queequeg. But before that, the crew empties the ship's hold looking for the leak they discovered in the previous chapter. Melville takes this opportunity to get in another dig at Aristotle: ""Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head."
Queequeg pulls back from the brink of death and attributes his "sudden convalescence" to remembering he had something still to do and couldn't die yet. He's asked "whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly."
The last paragraph of this chapter I find the most interesting. It begins: "With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest;" There appear some qabalistic coincidences – I don't mean to suggest Melville intended these, though it seems possible, we know he knows of Cabala. In a great invocational work, these coincidences or synchronicities tend to occur whether intended or not.
The alliteration of "With a wild whimsiness" gives us 666 by gematria (w = 6);
"he now used his coffin for a sea-chest", coffin suggests death, sea-chest = 68, so I see the death/Tiphareth motif here connected with continuation of life. The previous passage quoted where Queequeg gets asked about death, if he can stay alive through his own "sovereign will and pleasure", we find that "sovereign will" = 66 and "pleasure" is the name of the 6 of Cups in the Thoth Tarot. Cups, of course, corresponds with Water.
The final paragraph has the now healthy Queequeg transferring the coded hieroglyphs on his body, i.e. his tattoos, to his coffin. This suggests, to me, the continuation of life after the physical demise. His tattoos present: "a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth." It seems another way of stating the famous Hermetic maxim "As above, so below."
I frequently used to listen to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. I haven't heard "Moby Dick".
Chapter 111 reminds me a little of Finnegans Wake. First, the number recurs in FW; the initials to Anna Livia Plurabelle, ALP add to 111. Then this passage speaking of the sea: "for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds;" A popular theory about FW holds that it represents the dream of the main protagonist, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.
The ocean often symbolizes the Great Mother archetype, though Joyce in FW corresponds that archetype (represented by ALP) with a river. Melville suggests the Ocean as Mother when he writes: "[The Pacific] seems the tide-beating heart of earth."
Wonderful bit about Death and Life in the last two paragraphs of Chapter 112, For instance: "Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried;"
I concur with the interesting parts about life and death. Chapter 112 also has this bit: “bury thyself in a life which […] is more oblivious than death.” This life at sea, away from land, appears described as being an in-between of sorts, not quite real life, neither proper death. Very much a bardo. That this would attract men “who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide” reminded me of the very first paragraph of the book, when Ishmael describes his own reasons for enrolling on a whaling ship: “it is a way I have of driving off the spleen”, and “this is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
If we want to bring in Tiphareth, the “thousand mermaids” make it even more plain: “come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death”. Having a broken heart is here seen as bad enough that it qualifies as a kind of death. A century later, the French Existentialists would take things one step further by adding to the lack of an open heart the issue of being lost in the labyrinth of one’s own mind (see for instance Nausea), a very tricky situation which I think we can call Chapel Perilous. I think the problem with Sartre & co was in part that they failed to see that matters of the heart cannot be healed at the level of the intellect. Then again, I wouldn’t advocate for killing whales as a way to lift up one’s spirits either.
Interestingly, chapter 114 has a bit that sounds proto-existential to me: “doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If.” And Melville appears to know that the answer lies not in cold and detached reason: “loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!”, “let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.” He seems to be saying that one does not open their heart by thinking, but through an act of faith and surrendering.
I concur with your great whale of a comment, Spookah! I once owned a copy of Being and Nothingness but never made it as far as reading any of it before it disappeared from my library, living up to its title on my shelf.
We are all greater artists than we realize, and with a bit of imagination one can find value in almost everything. Being and Nothingness can make for a weapon against burglars in case of home invasion. Alternatively, one can stand on it when needing to reach for something on the highest shelves.
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