Starting Moby-Dick, #6

This narrator knows his experience has utterly changed him, utterly altered what and who he is. To begin this effort to recount and to make sense is to start anew. Thus Moby-Dick's first stroke of brilliance: "Call me Ishmael." In fact, that first real chapter, Loomings, is all about trying to establish a confident narrative voice.

Thus Ishmael talks about his pre-Pequod habit of going to sea whenever he finds “himself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul… and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off…” Sounds nonchalant, easy-going enough in tone. But it’s also a confession of deep disquiet. That is the condition of this narrator before he signs on to the Pequod. This is a person who already periodically feels isolated from those on a public street – a gap so large that it almost incites him to violence. And when that violence becomes a real possibility, it’s time to go back to sea, back to the place defined by water. That’s a reason to sign on to the Pequod.

 But what’s he after as the teller of this tale? He’s after his own experience, which he believes promises – if he can only get it right – “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” High ambition? You bet. But this narrator registers some real optimism: “I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did.” Clearly, for this narrator, the major story is one of memory and of doing memory justice. When memory isn’t available – when, for example, Ahab’s thinking can only be deduced after the fact – then Ishmael will have to supply, somehow, what his earlier self could only guess at.

So Ishmael knows he will need to invent Ahab as much as remember him. And that will mean recreating Ahab’s fascination and obsession with one very large albino whale. Yet in this opening chapter, he expresses some confidence: “in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”

If we are to call this traumatized survivor-narrator Ishmael, then what are we to call the young sailor who meets Queequeg at The Spouter, the young sailor who signs onto the Pequod even as he admits he has no whaling experience? For our purposes, let us call this young sailor Young Sailor, or, hereafter, YS. YS and Ishmael are younger and older versions of the same person. Sometimes they seem quite separate, at others almost indistinguishable. For great stretches of the telling, YS disappears and we have only Ishmael’s voice.

Starting Moby-Dick, #5

We expect a novel to start with some sort of narrative voice, and we expect that opening to initiate a narrative arc. In other words, we expect, on page one, to start reading a story. Not what happens here.

Moby-Dick starts with two sections titled “Etymology” and “Extracts,” and they can seem weird or disappointing. Their position at the book’s opening makes sense when you realize that you have a narrator who’s either unable or unwilling to start telling his story. He wants to begin, but but beginning terrifies him – he knows where, once started, he will have to go. So he starts by consciously postponing the story of action. These two opening sections at least make an easy beginning: the narrator doesn’t actually need to remember anything. (Without Melville’s permission, the earliest British edition shifted them to the book’s end, which must have been an even stranger place to find them.)

“Etymology” reveals two first facts:

A) To spell whale, you must make sure to include the "h." Translation: if you want to truly tell this story, you will need to include all of it, including the part that is silent (like the "h" in "whale"). Without the silent part, "you deliver that which is not true." This book means to tell the truth – including the silent parts. If those cannot be told from direct experience, then they must be evoked.

B) One dictionary says whale comes from Swedish and Danish, another from Dutch and German. Which is it? More than once this narrator will digress, turning to facts as respite from his complicated, often terrifying story only to find that facts contradict; they are never enough.

As for the Extracts -- we'd call them Quotations now -- all of them concern (what else?) whales. They range from Pliny and Plutarch to the Psalms, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Beale's History of the Sperm Whale, and so on and on. Tucked into this long list is a two-sentence bit of dialogue: " 'My God! Mr. Chase, what is the matter?' I answered, 'we have been stove by a whale.' " This bit comes from the story of the Essex, a whaler rammed and sunk by a sperm whale. Only by cannibalizing their dead did some few of the Essex crew survive, among them Owen Chase, who wrote and published a narrative of all this in 1821. Melville knew the story. He'd met Owen Chase's son, who gave Melville his own copy of his father's narrative.

Melville’s narrator has lived an experience he cannot process – it feels too large. It involves unspeakable violence, astonishing heroism, monomaniacal devotion, routine defiance of danger, and, occasionally, an experience of the vast sublime.

One Aspect of a Writer's Ambition

One aspect of a writer's ambition gets reflected in what that writer accepts as finished work.  Another aspect gets reflected and in how that writer makes that decision. 

Starting Moby-Dick #3 & #4

#3

Melville gives his narrator a terrifying backstory: he has watched his ship sink with all hands. He has floated on a piece of wreckage (a coffin) for two days with no water. Only by lucky chance is he rescued by the crew of another whaler, The Rachel. Imagine hauling such a survivor on deck. You’d immediately think to ask this unfortunate and lucky man two questions: "Who are you?" and "What happened?" The narrator of this book has internalized those questions. Neither is easy to answer: Moby-Dick is the effort to try.

So Moby-Dick tells two stories: one a story of action, the second a drama of telling. The lone survivor of the Pequod has no one to turn to for corroboration. What he did not personally see, he will have to surmise and invent. He will need to turn to every resource of language, every technique of story-telling. And he will need to summon the courage to confront issues that, at the book’s start, he does not fully grasp. His story feels to him as elusive as one whale in all the sea.

The action story is one thing, the problem of how to fully tell it another – these two concerns jostle each other almost to the end.

#4

Herman Melville lives in 19th century American New England. Whale oil lights its lanterns. If you're male and your family struggles economically, whaling secures you room and board as well as the possibility of monetary return. Melville had already worked four months as a sailor on the St. Lawrence, a merchant and passenger ship that took him from New York to Liverpool and back. He knew the nautical ropes. Poor and with no other prospects, in he left New Bedford harbor as a crewmember on the whaler Acushnet. He left in January, 1841, and would not return until the fall of 1844.

By the time Melville starts Moby-Dick, early in 1850, he has already written five works, all of them drawing on shipboard experiences. He has seen merchant ship life, whaling life, a good bit of England and Western Europe, the South Seas, the Hawaiian Islands, and ports along the South American coast. Cruelty, astonishment, confusion, violence, terror, the isolation of a becalmed ship at sea – all his experience he tries to process in the God-drenched, deeply ethical, profoundly ambitious Transcendentalist climate of pre-Civil War New England. Thoreau has gone into the woods in order to "front only the essential facts of life." Hawthorne has written The Scarlet Letter; he and Melville correspond. In Amherst, Emily Dickinson has started writing poems; in four years, Walt Whitman will publish his first Leaves of Grass. Something stirs in the New England air. Emerson says “Nature always wears the color of the spirit.” Language seems made for the largest themes. 

Starting Moby-Dick, #2

A typical adult sperm whale’s head measures at least two times as tall and four times as wide as your front door. Its teeth are ten inches long. Its heart alone weighs 200 pounds.

Starting Moby-Dick, #1

Does anyone these days read Moby-Dick outside the context of a college classroom? I don’t know. But if you’re thinking you might want to try, here’s the first of a series of notes that might help you get going – even if this first one does start as on a cautionary note.

Moby-Dick is a big book. Big books can scare us. Perhaps we're right to be a bit afraid of this one. Though this is only reading, you will be gone several months. Prepare to say goodbye to familiar landscapes, family, and friends – to all landmarks (there being none at sea).

You’ll sail from New England to the western Pacific. If you’re in a hurry, think patience – it will take 20 chapters before you even arrive at “Going Aboard.” If you don’t want the company of a troubled narrator, don’t start, for this one can’t speak until he invents that speaking voice. Likely he’s been silent about his story for a long time. After all, it’s not a story you’d want to negotiate in casual conversation: “Hello, I’m a lone survivor.” (In fact, he’s a narrator who we’d describe today as suffering from Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder.)

Will your reading be worth the trouble? Many have thought so. It’s your call. You can keep reading these entries awhile yet before you decide.

Making a new book of poems

Making a new book of poems offers the same challenges as making a new poem -- only now they're multiplied.  As with any single poem that's new (as with all new art), nobody can tell you about the final version -- it doesn't exist yet.  You can't turn to an expert, because nobody's an expert on what you haven't yet made.  

A book manuscript takes these individual poem challenges and extends them to a table of contents.  Yes, eventually you can make some arrangement reflecting some sort of internal criteria as to what's worth including and what's not.  And however tentative those judgments, you can then send this prototype to various readers whom you trust (presuming you're lucky enough to have such readers).  Presuming they are willing and generous, you then become the happy recipient of a new set of challenges, namely trying to figure out how to hear and make use of those comments.  

Sooner or later you must do what any artist making new art must do: you have to figure out what you're up to, satisfy as best you can your own internal criteria, and then take responsibility for the result. 

So maybe this is how it works: you immerse yourself in what you have, you carry it all around in your head, adding and subtracting, rearranging, rethinking.  You scatter it all on a big floor, and while time goes awry you experiment with various orderings.  Then you carry that around in your head.  Then you do this again.  Distractions intervene, you lose ground, regroup.  Slowly the alignments announce themselves and get confirmed.

Repeating all of this to oneself helps a little. Repeating all of this to oneself can offer the illusion of comfort.

And this is no small part of the fun of it.

The Symphony

Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville, 1851

The end of Moby-Dick is ordained from the very start, for the narrator who says “Call me Ishmael” is in fact the only survivor of the ship and the voyage he tries to describe and understand. Up to this point (The Symphony is chapter 132), the book’s narrator has been in no hurry to arrive at the climactic events he must inevitably describe. In fact, he has perfected a number of dodges to slow his progress while not quite entirely breaking the momentum of his telling. But he knows that once he has described Ahab’s refusal to help the Rachel’s captain – this captain pleads Ahab’s help: his son is part of the crew of a missing whaleboat, and Ahab says, “I will not do it.” – once these events are told, Ishmael knows there is little of the story left.

At this point, Ahab eats only two meals a day and he has quit shaving. His beard “darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over.” His life has now become “one watch on deck” as he scans the ocean for any sign of the white whale, the same whale whose pursuit he knows (from his brief encounter with the whale ship Delight) has most recently resulted in the deaths of an entire crew of one whale boat (“you sail upon their tomb,” as the Delight’s captain has said). None of this deters Ahab in the least.

Part of Ishmael’s effort all along has been to try to come to grips with this captain, this man whose commitment gripped his crew (including Ishmael himself) almost without question, leading to their deaths. If Ishmael saw Ahab as merely crazy, his task would be simpler. But Ahab is not merely crazy, and so before the rush of the book’s last action, Ishmael (or, if you prefer, Melville) makes one last effort to capture Ahab’s complexities. This cannot be done simply by repeating what little the young sailor must have seen or heard; it must be done by the older narrator who has already become accustomed to filling in gaps in the story and imagining conversations he could not possibly have witnessed. This last effort to picture Ahab must be done in the one sure fashion Ishmael (or Melville) knows – by drawing contrasts. Inevitably, this means casting Ahab in conversation with his first mate, Starbuck.

The Symphony chapter presents a lull in the action. The weather is fine, the air “transparently soft,” the sun “giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea.” The world of this chapter reveals itself as an uncommon unity of the masculine and the feminine – a wholeness. Such wholeness, calm, and peace reaches even Ahab: “That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stoke and caress him.” As readers, we see the effect before we hear Ahab say a word. What Ahab does is weep – one tear, “nor did the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.”

Starbuck sees this and draws closer to his captain, though he does not speak. Ahab turns to him and says “Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and mild looking sky.”

Thus begins the Ishmael narrator’s last effort to make sense of Ahab. As Starbuck and Ahab talk, we learn that Ahab is 58 years old and that just prior to the Pequod’s departure, he married. In fact, as Ahab says it, I “sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive!” What follows is perhaps as indicative of Melville's deep questioning as any passage he wrote.

Throughout this book, part of the drama has turned on Ishmael’s effort (by no means straight-line) to tell his story – literally, to make sense. In this light, the Symphony chapter represents an astonishing and deeply eloquent culmination. Its last 200 words embody Ishmael’s (or Melville’s) last unanswered questions about Ahab and his actions. “But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the aim smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow…” Soon enough, the Pequod will go down with all hands except one. He will drift on a coffin converted to a lifebuoy. He will be picked up later by the Rachel. And he will then face two obvious and inevitable questions: “who are you?” and “what happened?”

The book Moby Dick is the best answer he can make. He will start it by saying, “Call me Ishmael.”

On For All I Know
by Erik Muller
67 pages, privately printed
Eugene, Oregon, 2008

Consider "For all I know, ..." just as phrase.

Sometimes we use it to introduce an assertion we're unsure of, as in "For all I know, she'll win the lottery." As a phrase, it points to how unlikely something might be. It's also a phrasing that takes its speaker off the hook, a way of saying 'I don't really know what I'm talking about here, so don't take this too seriously.'

But there is at least one more way to hear this phrase, namely as a quite serious act of dedication, one that might be paraphrased as 'on behalf of all I know' or 'in praise of all I know.' This possible confusion of meanings arising out of just a four-word phrase demonstrates the challenge of any writer and most particularly the challenge of any poet: the aim is to make clear, to speak accurately, but the language at hand is often generic ('book' you say, which one?). The phrase 'for all I know' is open to multiple interpretations. Erik Muller titles his latest book For All I Know. Titles call attention to themselves; that's their job. Muller knows the multiple meanings in his title, and he wants them all.

The book's first set opens with poems addressing the ambiguous (or is it unambiguous) topic of two-by-two human company. One could say "marriage," regardless of the political usages which so heavily freighted that term, and Muller's poems do so. Their impulse is celebratory and evident first in dedications: "for Eve and Nigel, married 8-15-97," for example. While the impulse in such poems is clear, the speaker knows that finding the accurate (and adequate) descriptive words "for Naomi and Phil, married 20 years" is not immediately obvious. Here's the opening stanza of "What They Say":

Stone opposite stone.
Poplars intertwined
at root, crowns nodding
with each green shift of wind.
Swales of camas spires
sparking blue volts.
You can know what
they say (if they say).

Each of the sentences in this opening stanza represents an opening gambit, an effort to describe a marriage. They at once start over and build on each other. But it's those camas spires that come closest (so the poem suggests) to standing in for the relationships a marriage both establishes and requires:

Turned up high
jets of camas
say to you: Blue
replenishes, multiplies.
Mark the spare flame
kindling the jay's tail,
chicory, certain
rare eyes.

At its best, a marriage makes an ecology lively and in bloom, so this poem knows. (And it finds room for a rhyme: multiplies / eyes).

For All I Know is a book of loves, affections, observations arising out of a deeply felt connection to the landscape and history of the American West. Sometimes this connection finds expression in images like those camas spires. In such moments, the landscape and the personal conspire. They make their own sort of marriage.

Muller's poems consistently reflect an interest in this sense of place knowledge -- how to make a place for oneself and one's loved ones, but also of how to know, be, and act inside a knowledge of particular locales. All this intrigues Muller, and his poems often note it. "But the Wind" starts by referring to one of the West's great railroad empire builders, James Hill, whose rail tracks still stitch together wide expanses. In this poem, high winds have forced the trains to stop in sheltered areas rather than risk being literally blown off the tracks. As might be expected, passengers fret a little. However, one of them, clearly an Indian, simply pops one of the passenger car doors, jumps to the ground, and heads off overland. The poem's speaker watches this man as he walks, his figure ever smaller "as if / being dissolved in space." The rails will eventually deliver their passengers -- they show one way home. And this one passenger, more deeply native, clearly knows another.

For better or worse, contemporary poets are inheritors of a style and tradition and set of assumptions that tend to value the prosy rather than the poetic, the offhand rather than the studied or rhetorical, the modest rather than the ambitious, the authentic rather than the artifice. These are false binaries, yet they carry some power. At their worst, such default values make for a smaller poetry -- short in length and slight in content. Such poetry can too readily assume that the larger whole is evident in the smallest grain. But a book itself can counter such drift. In a book's length and ordering, larger relationships form and larger implications emerge. For All I Know features two lengthy sequences, and it is divided into four sections. But it succeeds as a book because over its 67 pages it makes and sustains a coherency of interests and style. This is most surely not the only way to make order in a book of poems, but it is one way, and Muller makes it work effectively. The poems make a larger whole. For All I Know betrays its title only in that the sound of sense so evident here could not possibly be finished with the impulse to inquire.

(Note: Author Erik Muller is also the editor of Traprock Books, dedicated to the publication of work by Oregon writers. Traprock Books, 1330 E. 25th Ave., Eugene, OR 97403. )