Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-hand, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:- repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold, was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it into one of his ever ready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost landbird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsmen sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;- yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulater; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior- though a little swelled- of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.
Melville fairly canonizes the carpenter in this chapter, making him a descendant of Noah, no less. The carpenter shaves wood and bone. Engraves oars. Pierces ears. Extracts rotting teeth. It seems that the carpenter is the jack-of-all-things on the Pequod. Dentist, beautician, artist, craftsman. And, for Captain Ahab, a leg-carver.
Today, I spoke with a person I hadn't seen in many years. He asked me if I was still into theater, because that's how he knew me in the past. I told him that I hadn't done theater in many years. "Well, what are you doing now?" he asked.
I went on to list my current occupations: English professor, healthcare worker, church organist, musician, poet, writer, husband, father, Bigfoot bard, laureate, editor, blogger, radio show performer and host . . . He stopped me after a minute or so.
"Wow," he said. "You're quite the Renaissance man."
I'm not telling you this story to brag. Ever since I was young, I've always thought myself to be really unfocused. I've bounced from one interest to another. At various times as an adolescent, I said I wanted to be a writer, movie director, music composer, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, actor, teacher. Although I was never diagnosed as a child, I see a lot of myself in my son, who has been diagnosed with ADHD. My son takes medication to help him focus. I, on the other hand, was enrolled in piano lessons by my mother. Which did the trick.
Piano made me sit down. Calm down. Focus for an hour or so. It calmed my restless mind for a while and gave the members of my family a little bit of a break from the dervish of my day. As I grew up, my many interests served me well. I graduated from college with a major in English and minors in math and computer science. I earned a Master's in fiction writing and an MFA in poetry.
Perhaps Renaissance men/women simply had ADHD. Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo. Cicero. Galileo. Thomas Jefferson. Isaac Newton. Perhaps they all lacked the ability to focus for long periods of time. Maybe my Bigfoot book of poems will be my Sistine Chapel or Mona Lisa.
Hmmmm. I've always wanted to try my hand at painting.
Saint Marty is thankful this evening for poetry and painting and music and math and . . .
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