July 15, 2025: “Beyond Harm,” Moments, “Hills Like White Sharks”

All lives are made up of small moments strung together to create an experience, all the experiences strung together to create a day, all the days strung together to create a season, all the seasons strung together to create a lifetime.

That’s how it goes.  Some moments/experiences/days/seasons are better than others.  There are seasons in my life I’d love to revisit.  Other seasons are better off left in the past.  But I know that I wouldn’t be who I am right now without all the struggles I’ve faced.  Adversity shapes a person just as much as success.

Sharon Olds gets some late-in-life love from her father . . . 

Beyond Harm

by: Sharon Olds

A week after my father died
suddenly I understood
his fondness for me was safe – nothing
could touch it. In those last months,
his face would sometimes brighten when I would
enter the room, and his wife said
that once, when he was half asleep,
he smiled when she said my name. He respected
my spunk – when they tied me to the chair, that time
they were tying up someone he respected, and when
he did not speak, for weeks, I was one of the
beings to whom he was not speaking,
someone with a place in his life. The last
week he even said it, once,
by mistake. I walked into his room, and said, “How
are you,” and he said, “I love you
too.” From then on, I had
that word to lose. Right up to the last
moment, I could make some mistake, offend him, and with 

one of his old mouths of disgust he could re-
skew my life. I did not think of it,
I was helping to take care of him,
wiping his face and watching him.
But then, a while after he died,
I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always
love me now, and I laughed – he was dead, dead!

It’s an amazing moment—Olds’ dad letting his guard down, admitting his love, and Olds holding onto his words, afraid they might evaporate like snowflakes in June.  She recognizes that her father has given her an unintentional gift that she keeps opening over and over after he dies.

We all do it, return to cherished memories in times of struggle or sadness.  These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my kids’ childhoods, when most everything was simpler, easier.  Trips to the Wisconsin Dells and Walt Disney World.  Birthdays and Christmases.  Great moments.

The one memory to which I keep returning is watching Zootopia outside, under the stars, at the Boyne Mountain Resort.  My then 17-year-old daughter and I sat close together on a bench, ate popcorn, and just kind of blissed out that August night.  I rarely use the “p” word, but it really was perfect.

Of course, no moment (perfect or shitty) lasts forever.  There have been some rocky paths since.  But, just like nobody can take away the “I love you too” Olds’ father gave to her, nobody can take away that shared movie and popcorn, our fingers and lips coated in buttery salt while the crickets sang.

I keep reminding myself of this temporality.  I may be sad right now because my daughter moved downstate for medical school, but that sadness will be replaced eventually, maybe with joy or surprise or anger.  Who knows?  That’s how life works.  Nothing is permanent.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for today (featuring one of his daughter’s favorite movies) based on the following prompt from July 14 of The Daily Poet:

Today we’re going to burrow like crabs.  To start digging, set a timer for six minutes and freewrite off a randomly-chosen line or phrase.  Examples:  the donut hole is thriving or a cloud stretching a thousand miles. When the chimer chimes, reset it for four minutes and make the last three words you’ve written the first three words of your next freewrite.  Repeat this process two more times (setting the timer for six and then four minutes).  This slight pause and backing up will allow you to go deeper.  Later, extract the best parts of this exercise and turn it into a poem.

Hills Like White Sharks

by: Martin Achatz

I was too young, had to wait three years to see it, long after the Orca sank, Millennium Falcon blasted out of Mos Eisley, Dreyfuss boarded the Mothership at Devils Tower.  By that time, everyone was back in the water, not remembering Quint’s final moments in the shark’s mouth, kicking, punching, screaming like he was throwing a temper tantrum on a playground.  What do I remember about my first time?  Three guys on a boat, drunk, comparing battle scars, singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” Robert Shaw monologuing about the Indianapolis with a smile on his face, as if he was on the cusp of delivering a punchline.  But he wasn’t.  It reminded me of the story where a couple sits at a train station, the man talking about letting air in, the woman pleading for him to please please please please please please please stop talking.  Because we’re all just treading water, trying not to drown, while below us something big and hungry wants to shake us, tenderize us, swallow us whole. 

July 21: Ultimate Question, Chasing Dreams, Fishing

And now a few words from the stupendous super computer, Deep Thought . . .

"Might I make an observation at this point?" inquired Deep Thought.

"We'll go on strike!" yelled Vroomfondel.

"That's right!" agreed Majikthise.  "You'll have a national Philosophers' strike on your hands!"

The hum level in the room suddenly increased as several ancillary bass driver units, mounted in sedately carved and varnished cabinet speakers around the room, cut in to give Deep Thought's voice a little more power.

"All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything."  He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone's attention, before continuing more quietly.  "But the program will take me a little while to run."

Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.  

"How long?" he said.

"Seven and a half million years," said Deep Thought.

Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.

"Seven and a half million years!" they cried in chorus.

Seven and a half million years for a stupendous super computer to figure out the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.  I don't feel quite so bad that I'm still working out what I'm going to be when I grow up.

When I was my son's age, I was sure I was going to be a full-time writer/movie director.  That was my dream.  I read biographies of famous writers all the time.  Robert Frost,  Charles Dickens.  Ernest Hemingway.  William Faulkner.  I studied the work of directors I admires.  Steven Spielberg.  George Lucas, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford.  I was committed to this dream.

Of course, as so often happens with dreams, reality intervened.  I graduated from high school and found myself majoring in computer science at college, while stealthily stacking up credits from the English Department.  Eventually, I realized that I didn't want to spend my life communicating with computers (even if they were stupendous super computers).  Then I went to graduate school and stacked up some advanced degrees in English and creative writing.

And here I sit now.  Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula.  Contingent English professor at a university.  Full-time medical office worker.  I am NOT Robert Frost or Alfred Hitchcock.  I can barely cobble together enough time to write a little, 500-word blog post every day.  I struggle with depression on a daily basis.  My wife struggles with mental illness and sexual addiction.

Hardly the happily ever after I envisioned as a ten-year-old boy armed with a library card and a boatload of dreams. 

I miss those times when anything seemed possible.  I know that I will probably never direct a Hollywood film like Jaws or Vertigo.  I'm not going to be the next Stephen King or J. K. Rowling.  I still have those writerly aspirations, but they are mostly relegated to daydreams driving home from work.  That's right.  I have become Walter Mitty, imagining myself as a world-famous writer, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, owning a mansion with a swimming pool and library. 

Last night, my kids went fishing.  They landed a couple big ones.  My kids are full of dreams right now.  The future is a wide sea, and they have the fishing rods in their hands.  I hope they never give up or settle.  I hope they keep chasing their dreams until they come true, whatever they are.  I hope they continue to land the big ones.

Saint Marty will be happy if he lands a nap sometime this week. 

May 16: Stubb's Exordium, Pale Ale, Summery Romance

The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;- a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.

While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, "All ready there, Fedallah?"

"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.

"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck. "Lower away there, I say."

Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats below.

Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a fourth keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.

"Captain Ahab?-" said Starbuck.

"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!"

"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great steering oar. "Lay back!" 
addressing his crew. "There!- there!- there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!- lay back!

"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."

"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now. Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What say we, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."

"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness. "Why don't you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands come to help us never mind from where the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men- all hearts alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry- don't be in a hurry. Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so, then:- softly, softly! That's it- that's it! long and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don't ye pull?- pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out! Here," whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; "every mother's son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That's it- that's it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her- start her, my silverspoons! Start her, marling-spikes!"

Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun most terri and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsmen could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped- open-mouthed at times- that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.

If this were a movie, the John Williams' score would be soaring as the ships were lowered and the sailors jumped over the railing into them.  It would be full of horns and flutes, accompanied by a steady percussion.  Think of the music from Jaws when Quint is shooting the shark with harpoons and barrels while Hooper is at the wheel, chasing after the shark.  That's what's happening here.  There is no immediate threat.  Just high-spirits, the crew pulling their rowboats toward the sighted whales.

Sorry for not posting anything last night.  I was out doing poet stuff.  You know, workshopping and drinking beer.  We laughed and passed around plates of food.  Argued over images and gerunds.  Propped each other up in this pursuit of poems, which is necessarily a solitary kind of vocation.  It's only after the writing is done that there's time for hummus and chips.  Maybe a pale ale.

Tonight, I have a concert to attend.  Both my son and daughter are in it.  It's the end-of-the-year performance, with choruses and bands from all different grade levels.  My daughter is in three of the groups performing.  My son is in one.

I love these kinds of events.  The music is always entertaining, and young people bring a kind of energy that's almost breathable into the gymnasium.  Perhaps because June is fast approaching, followed by three months of freedom.  Sleeping in.  Late nights.  Ice cream and swimming.  If you're a teenager, trying to score beers from your older siblings.  Summery romance that smells like coconut lotion.

If you detect a hint of nostalgia in that previous paragraph, you are correct.  Summer vacation, for most adults, has a golden burnish to it, like old photographs from the 1940s and '50s that curl and yellow and fade a little bit.  Everything carries a patina of yearning and melancholy.  I have experienced this myself, watching movies from my youth like Jaws, reading books I first read as a teenager like Carrie or The Catcher in the Rye (although Holden tends to irritate my middle-aged self now).

Pretty soon, the lilacs are going to start blooming in my backyard, and caps and gowns will start appearing on the streets.  It's an exciting time for young people to get that first taste of adult freedom.  Climbing in their $500-dollar cars and setting off like the sailors of the Pequod in pursuit of something big and exciting.

I need to go take a shower now.  Get ready for the concert.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for his daughter and son.  They make him feel young again.

January 9: Exasperated Whale, Coincidence, My Sister's Best Friend

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.- It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.- It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.- It's a blasted heath.- It's a Hyperborean winter scene.- It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

One thing you may have noticed about Moby-Dick since the beginning of the year is that Melville makes use of the second person point of view a lot.  Yes, the book is narrated by Ishmael from the beginning, but Ishmael has a way of saying things like "you found yourself" and "you at last come to the conclusion."  You are Ishmael, and Ishmael is you.

These three paragraphs ponder a sooty painting, one that does not surrender its subject easily.  Melville offers several possibilities, from Time to the Black Sea to a blasted heath.  He settles on the image of a ship being torn apart in a hurricane, and, over the ship, a breaching whale, about to be impaled on one of the ship's towering mast-heads.

Art imitating literature imitating life imitating art.  I find that happens a great deal to me.  For example, a couple months ago, I was talking to a good friend and colleague at the university.  I was wondering aloud what book I should focus on for 2018 in my blog.  We kicked about many possibilities, including Bluets by Maggie Nelson (a favorite book for both of us) and The World According to Garp ("Too mainstream," my friend dismissed).

Then, he looked across his desk, on which sat a huge tome.  He nodded and pushed it toward me.  It was an illustrated, annotated version of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

I wasn't immediately convinced.  I have had a love/hate relationship with Melville's masterpiece for a very long time.  It's not an easy read.  Full of weirdness and density.  That day, I sort of laughed at my friend, shook my head, and pushed the book back to him.  My way of saying, "Thanks, but I'd rather do Green Eggs and Ham."

Then, through October, November, and December, I kept encountering references to Moby-Dick in things that I read, movies that I watched.  For example, one night, I was watching Citizen Kane and realized that the name "Rosebud" appears in Moby-Dick.  It's a ship the Pequod encounters.  I saw a snippet of Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan in early December.  Khan is an Ahab-quoting fanatic.  I saw Moby-Dick references in Family Guy and Jaws, too.

The universe seemed to be sending me some kind of cosmic message, short of a white whale jumping out of Lake Superior and landing on top of my Subaru Impreza.  It was like I was staring at the dirty painting on the wall of The Spouter-Inn, trying to figure out, along with Ishmael, what I was supposed to be seeing.

I never believe in coincidences.  Coincidence is just a way for people who lack faith to explain seemingly miraculous things.  Let me give you an example . . .

My sister, Sally, was the administrator of an outpatient surgery center.  One day, she was interviewing for a circulating nurse in the operating room.  In walked one of my best friends, Lydia.  She had no operating room experience.  Her most recent nursing work had involved hospice care.  Before Lydia went into her interview, I went to my sister's office and told Sally, "I think Lydia would be a perfect fit for this place."

Sally and Lydia had a long interview.  They spoke very little about operating rooms and surgery.  Instead, they spoke about Lydia's work in hospice.  My sister asked Lydia many, many questions about her experiences.  At the end of the interview, Lydia walked out of Sally's office thinking that she wasn't going to get the job.

Lydia got the job, and she became my sister's best friend.

Seventeen years later, Lydia put her hospice knowledge to work when my sister was dying of lymphoma of the brain.  She cared for my sister.  Advocated for her.  Ultimately, Lydia loved her enough to know how to help her die with dignity.

After my sister's funeral, Lydia said to me, "I think God put me in Sally's life for a reason."

I agreed.  No coincidence.  It was the gears of the universe working.

That is why I chose Moby-Dick this year.  Too many white whales crossed by path in the ending months of 2017 for me to ignore.  Just call me Ishmael.

Saint Marty gives thanks for the "coincidences" of his life tonight.

January 6: The Spouter Inn, Color of Snow, New Kind of Rabbit

With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The Crossed Harpoons"- but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn," there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,- rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The Crossed Harpoons," and the "The Sword-Fish?"- this, then must needs be the sign of "The Trap." However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath- "The Spouter Inn:- Peter Coffin."

Ishmael is on the search for an inn to lodge.  He's in a strange city.  Knows nobody.  He is walking by instinct, trying to find a place that seems in keeping with his situation.  His boots are worn.  He has little money.  Some of the establishments are too bright and crowded.  Others, too rundown and questionable.  Even The Trap, an African American church, fills Ishmael with a feeling of unwelcome.  And then he happens upon The Spouter Inn, run by Peter Coffin.  Whales and death in one little sign.  Like the Holy Family, Ishmael finally finds a place to stay, even if it isn't ideal or particularly amenable.

It's strange.  Ever since I started Moby-Dick six days ago, the language of my blog posts has changed.  I find myself using words like "amenable" and phrases like "in keeping with his situation."  It's as if Herman Melville's prose is seeping into mine.  That's okay, though.  I don't mind if Ishmael finds a room in my words.  I love the density of the phrases and sentences and paragraphs.

There's something very postmodern in Melville's tale, I think.  A kind of self-consciousness in Ishmael's words.  This becomes even more obvious later in the book, when Melville spends pages talking about the color white.  I'm not sure how the manuscript of Moby-Dick would fare in a graduate school fiction writing workshop, however, let alone with the contemporary publishing industry.  Melville may have had to self-publish it as an e-book.

Yet, Moby-Dick was published in 1851.  Not too much fanfare or acclaim.  Over time, it has grown in stature and importance in the American literature canon.  Dissertations are written about it.  Movies.  Television.  Even the film Jaws owes something to Melville, with the shark hunter, Quint, coming across as some modern-day Ahab on the trail of his great white shark.  It's amazing, really.

That's what happens with great works of art.  They sneak into culture in strange and non-obvious ways, just like Melville's writing style has sort of sneaked into my blog posts these last few days.  Maybe, at the end of this year, I will be writing long, digressive posts on the color of snow or the legs of snowflakes.  That's what writers do.  They steal the best things from writers they admire.  

I can say that my work has been greatly influenced by quite a few poets--Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Billy Collins, Judith Minty, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman . . . I could go on for a long time.  I learn things from other writers.  Throw their tricks into my magic top hat, wave my magic wand, and, hopefully, pull out a new kind of rabbit.  One that is wholly mine.

I don't mind wandering around the dark streets with Ishmael.  Don't mind getting lost in Melville's maze of language.  There's something comforting in it, like being in a classroom with a teacher you love but not really understanding the lecture completely.  Listening to Albert Einstein speaking about time.  Stephen Hawking about black holes.  Barack Obama about civic responsibility.  Herman Melville about whaling.

Saint Marty is thankful today for great writing and great art.

January 2: Meditation and Water, Unconscious, Vacation

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies- what is the one charm wanting?- Water- there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick- grow quarrelsome- don't sleep of nights- do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;- no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,- though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board- yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;- though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bakehouses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

Herman Melville's whale book is long and full of these kinds of reflections and ruminations on water and work and art and food and mythology.  All these things sort of swim around in this ocean of words.  It's weird and beautiful and, in a lot of ways, post-modern before there was a modern.  Ishmael is restless, craving the sea.  He doesn't want responsibility.  He wants the anonymity and rootlessness of oceans and lakes.

I sort of understand Ishmael's urges.  Any person with any kind of life burden can understand what Ishmael means when he says, ". . . meditation and water are wedded for ever."  Every night, when I go to bed, my mind takes me to oceans.  Last week, when the water lines of my house kept freezing, I was bombarded by the sound of water.  When I fell asleep, I dreamed my bed was adrift in a desert of blue.  All I could see, from one horizon to the other, were waves and sun.

It's a subconscious thing.  There's something about water, and what swims beneath, that excites and frightens most imaginations.  Jaws works because it plays into our most basic anxieties of the unknown.  Melville's white whale is just one big symbol for our most secret obsessions and needs.  Those things that drive us.

I'm sitting on my couch right now.  It's a little after 11 o'clock.  Snow is falling.  The wind is picking up.  Tomorrow, a storm is in the forecast.  My kids, in the oceans of their hearts, are praying for an extended Christmas vacation.  Two days of bad weather and wind chills.  Enough to cancel school for the rest of the week.

The white whale in my ocean tomorrow will be reading and cleaning.  I am hosting the Christmas meeting of my Book Club this weekend.  I have a book to finish and a house to put in order.  Not to mention food to buy and prepare.  It's my last holiday hurrah before I have to head back to dry land.

You can't stay at sea forever.  Eventually, you have to return home and resume your normal life.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for his time off, away from the dry land of his jobs and work.

April 4: Jaws is Stranger than Fiction

I have a dilemma.

Because so many class days were cancelled at the university because of snow this semester, I can't show all of the movies I originally intended for my Intro to Film class.  After Brokeback Mountain, I have Will Ferrell's Stranger than Fiction on the syllabus.  Before spring break, I told my students we weren't going to view Jaws.  Now, I'm reconsidering that decision.

The majority of my students were disappointed that I'd chosen to eliminate Jaws.  One guy tried to talk me into getting rid of Brokeback Mountain instead.  Hardly anyone is looking forward to Stranger than Fiction.  My dilemma is whether I give into popular pressure and show Jaws, thereby insuring more positive student evaluations at the end of the term, or stick to my original plan and screen Will Ferrell next week, incurring wrath and recrimination from my students, not to mention some shitty evaluations.

If I was a purist, I wouldn't cave in.  I'd tell my classes that Stranger than Fiction is a more interesting film, exploring ideas of comedy versus tragedy, a life of quiet desperation.  However, Jaws is a kick-ass movie, taking on the themes of man versus nature, Captain Ahab versus Moby Dick.  I'm completely at a loss.

I think what I'm going to do is bring both films to class next week.  It will depend upon my mood and chocolate intake as to whether the last film of the class will feature Bruce the shark or Will the tax man.

In the mean time, Saint Marty will be up on Brokeback Mountain, tending the sheep.  (Do no read anything into that statement.  No subtext is included.)

This...

or...

this?