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.
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