It is just as David Milch described it in his lecture: art, poetry, literature - what-have-you - stands contrary to rational thought. Art forces us to stretch, test limits, see how far we can go. It forces us beyond our ego-centric demands for logic and meaning. It makes us confront that dark abyss that underlies everything.
And so with Moby Dick, Melville has this sense that there is something deeply wrong with Ahab's obsessions, and something equally wrong with the existence of this white whale. Ahab's a whack-job and the whale is some sort of demonic force, fine. But how can you explain it? How did this situation arise? Is this typical, or extraordinary? So Melville has to build his case around this idea he has. It's this nagging feeling, like a bad itch, that there's something scary out there in the sea and here in the human heart that is unique and problematic. Something that he can't name but is worth his and the reader's time to struggle with despite the impossibility of its meaning. For 700+ pages that's what he does: slowly, methodically, leaving out nothing. We learn everything he knows about the ocean, about whales, about ships, about the crew, about the rituals of sea-life, until he finally reveals this lacuna at the center of the story where the captain and the whale reside. They live beyond our logical reasoning and occupy a metaphysical space.
Near the end, in the chapter called The Symphony, Starbuck and Ahab talk about life back in Nantucket. Why shouldn't they just abandon the hunt and go home? they wonder. They have wives and children and could live normal lives. And Ahab, pushed to the brink, can't even explain to himself what he's doing out there in the Pacific any longer. Can't justify it to Starbuck, can't justify it to himself. And for just a second, there's a glimmer of an alternative path. Something other than the tragic destiny that Ahab has set for himself.
But the whale is sighted, and as we turn to The Chase, The First Day, you know nothing good is going to happen from here to the end. Once the whale arrives on stage, we're past the point of reason and it's all, "To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."
It's unbelievable stuff. An Apollonian novel with a tragic Dionysian heart.
More stupidly, it's like a really well written, intelligent, Lovecraft story. Only its we who call to Cthulhu and not the other way around. Instead of the structures of sanity collapsing all at once at the sight of some horrible tentacled creature from beyond time and space, we see how those structures can be stripped away layer by layer until there's nothing left of the ego to stand between us and the abyss. How obsession leads to darkness, and ultimately destruction. How the life of a community can be destroyed by the overreaching of one madman. How our pleasure seeking, death loving id can send us straight over the edge.
That's art.
And so with Moby Dick, Melville has this sense that there is something deeply wrong with Ahab's obsessions, and something equally wrong with the existence of this white whale. Ahab's a whack-job and the whale is some sort of demonic force, fine. But how can you explain it? How did this situation arise? Is this typical, or extraordinary? So Melville has to build his case around this idea he has. It's this nagging feeling, like a bad itch, that there's something scary out there in the sea and here in the human heart that is unique and problematic. Something that he can't name but is worth his and the reader's time to struggle with despite the impossibility of its meaning. For 700+ pages that's what he does: slowly, methodically, leaving out nothing. We learn everything he knows about the ocean, about whales, about ships, about the crew, about the rituals of sea-life, until he finally reveals this lacuna at the center of the story where the captain and the whale reside. They live beyond our logical reasoning and occupy a metaphysical space.
Near the end, in the chapter called The Symphony, Starbuck and Ahab talk about life back in Nantucket. Why shouldn't they just abandon the hunt and go home? they wonder. They have wives and children and could live normal lives. And Ahab, pushed to the brink, can't even explain to himself what he's doing out there in the Pacific any longer. Can't justify it to Starbuck, can't justify it to himself. And for just a second, there's a glimmer of an alternative path. Something other than the tragic destiny that Ahab has set for himself.
But the whale is sighted, and as we turn to The Chase, The First Day, you know nothing good is going to happen from here to the end. Once the whale arrives on stage, we're past the point of reason and it's all, "To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."
It's unbelievable stuff. An Apollonian novel with a tragic Dionysian heart.
More stupidly, it's like a really well written, intelligent, Lovecraft story. Only its we who call to Cthulhu and not the other way around. Instead of the structures of sanity collapsing all at once at the sight of some horrible tentacled creature from beyond time and space, we see how those structures can be stripped away layer by layer until there's nothing left of the ego to stand between us and the abyss. How obsession leads to darkness, and ultimately destruction. How the life of a community can be destroyed by the overreaching of one madman. How our pleasure seeking, death loving id can send us straight over the edge.
That's art.
