I am starting to read Moby Dick again.
I am doing this as I am nearing the first edit of my coming book, An American Resurrection. I need to get back into writing shape to answer my editor’s thrusts of elucidation and literary constriction to make the work as well defined and existentially lucid as possible.
I will blog as I leave the port of Nantucket in the novel and the safety of the “Nantucket’ of my known experience before shoving off.
Read along, comment or delete the entirety of the activity. It is good and accepted. This will simply be the log of my mind’s eye experience as I cross the equators of the work and my life to see where I am when I step back on solid ground. If I do….long journey and very treacherous seas can devour sailors on their journeys.
I just hope for an authentic crossing of the blessed waters of this wondrous sphere and hope to tell some good sea stories.
The novel is a multifaceted journey of a whaling ship that leaves port to sail in the deepest of seas in the most lethal of journeys.
The medium of sea travel and the vastness of mystery pushing miles down below your known norms allow for the destabilzation of the most concrete of norms.
Norms of identity, of place and of bias. The journey of sea travel creates a microcosm of society on the shipboard landscape and allows for a the anchors to soul to drag along the ocean floor of your being.
As Ishmael introduces himself to the work, we find ourselves in New Bedford, Mass. Ishmael is looking to catch a whaling vessel out of Nantucket and is forced to spend the night at the Spouter Inn in the howling and freezing winds of Coastal Mass.
He finds the Spouter Inn at the end of a long narrow avenue on the corner of the raging winds.
Ishmael cannot find a single room. And is forced to share a room. he waits in trepidation at the prospect of meeting his roommate, the ‘savage’ harpooner Queequeg.
Queequeg is out selling his shrunken heads while Ishmael waits in the dark confines of the inn when sailors from a 4 yr cruise enter.
One of the crew is named Bulkington, he is well regarded by the crew but seems unable to share their glee at arriving safe after a 48 month cruise to hell and back.
He is forever catching cruises back out to sea. He is described as being unable to stay on land, that the land burns his feet, burns his soul.
He needs the sea, the mystery, the deaths. He will be on the Pequod when it departs under Ahab and he will once again be in motion.
He is a New England Faust. Forever in motion. Never taking in the totality of the totality. Forever caught in the churn of the crest and troughs of sea travel and the isolation of being a constant home to himself with no ports to meet other inhabitants.
We can lose the ability to function outside of the swirl, the chaos, the constant motion of a life interconnected by a thousand electronic mediums. Forever lost in the invisible currents that lock into another 4 yr journey.
Bulkington will make his trip and we will make it with him.
Queequeg is physically tattooed from head to toe in a checkerboard/crossword pattern and Ishmael is dismayed at this initial physical introduction.
But there will much more to the story of QQ. Heathen, defender, gentleman and harpooner, his actions will be the forever journal Ishmael is forced to process against his ghastly first impression.
The first three crew mates we meet are worlds on themselves. Ismael as the observer. The critic. the center of experience about to enter the least centered landscape on the planet, the deep deep ocean. Bulkington, a man on fire to stay on fire, yet at the sometime he is water incarnate, cursed to forever flow or dissipate into the nothingness of the atmosphere, fighting his mortality in a life led under the false premise a man in motion cannot die.
And Queequeg, QQ, the tattooed savage. The man of action from worlds unknowable by Ishmael. The man on no ego, no pretense, the living man, tattooed by life and living his story. Defaced on the outside but truly living from a wise and human core.
All to step off into the death of the sea. All life built on death.
The baptism of sea travel.
Sea service.
The change a man is forced upon after months on top of a potential watery coffin 24 hours a day.
Like Hart Crane, the 20th century American poet, called a modern-day Walt Whitman, they will feel the call of the sea. Crane stared for hours at the wake behind his early 20th century schooner making its journey between the Caribbean and NYC. Lost in the questions of the ocean, its loving whispers of spray letting him know he will never be alone, until one day he leapt into the deep blue arms of his lethal lover and was lost from the world in a millisecond of release to that which is greater.
Dead but not gone. Buried but free. Lost to the dream and forever trapped in his heaven.
