September 18: Understanding of the Poem, Dante, Math of Life

Merton studies Dante at Cambridge . . .

In these days I seem to remember there was a little sunlight. It fell through the ancient windows of Professor Bullough’s room in Caius. It was a large, pleasant room, lined with books, and with windows opening on the grass of two courts. It was below the level of those lawns and you had to go down a couple of steps to get into his sitting room. In fact I think his sitting room itself was on two levels, and in the corner he had a high medieval lectern. There he stood, a tall, thin, grey, somewhat ascetic scholar, placidly translating Dante to us, while ten or a dozen students, men and women, sat about in the chairs and followed in our Italian texts. 

In the winter term we had begun with the Inferno, and had progressed slowly, taking each day part of a Canto. And now Dante and Virgil had come through the icy heart of hell, where the three-headed devil chewed the greatest traitors, and had climbed out to the peaceful sea at the foot of the seven-circled mountain of Purgatory. And now, in the Christian Lent, which I was observing without merit and without reason, for the sake of a sport which I had grown to detest because I was so unsuccessful in it, we were climbing from circle to circle of Purgatory.

I think the one great benefit I got out of Cambridge was this acquaintance with the lucid and powerful genius of the greatest Catholic poet—greatest in stature, though not in perfection or sanctity. Because of his genius, I was ready to accept all that he said about such things as Purgatory and Hell at least provisionally, as long as I had the book under my eyes, in his own terms. That was already much. I suppose it would have been too much to expect some kind of an application of his ideas to myself, in the moral order, just because I happened to have a sort of esthetic sensitiveness to them. No, it seems to me that I was armored and locked in within my own defectible and blinded self by seven layers of imperviousness, the capital sins which only the fires of Purgatory or of Divine Love (they are about the same) can burn away. But now I was free to keep away from the attack of those flames merely by averting my will from them: and it was by now permanently and habitually turned away and immunized. I had done all that I could to make my heart untouchable by charity and had fortified it, as I hoped, impregnably in my own impenetrable selfishness.

At the same time, I could listen, and listen with gladness and a certain intentness, to the slow and majestic progress of the myths and symbols in which Dante was building up a whole poetic synthesis of scholastic philosophy and theology. And although not one of his ideas took firm root in my mind, which was both too coarse and too lazy to absorb anything so clean, nevertheless, there remained in me a kind of armed neutrality in the presence of all these dogmas, which I tended to tolerate in a vague and general way, in bulk, in so far as that was necessary to an understanding of the poem. 

This, as I see it, was also a kind of a grace: the greatest grace in the positive order that I got out of Cambridge.

I read Dante for the first time when I was a teenager.  Fifteen or 16-years old.  I don't know how much of it I actually understood, but I diligently worked my way through Inferno and Purgatorio and Paradiso.  Yes, I climbed all the way from hell to heaven with the great poet.  I reveled in the phantasms of hell, and purified myself in Purgatory.  And, in the end, discovered it's all about climbing to the stars.

It has been a rough week with my son.  A week that has tested my patience, tolerance, and understanding.  I will admit that I didn't pass all the tests.  I lost my temper a few times.  Swore.  Slammed some doors.  My son, who is a lot like me, knows my wiring.  He can intuit exactly how to short circuit my brain until it goes into complete reactor meltdown, and then I am reduced to sputtering and saying things my father used to say--"Because I said so!" and "My house, my rules!"

It feels as though I'm stuck in Purgatorio, somewhere between the third and fourth terraces.  That's the territory of Wrath and Sloth.  A couple times this week, I simply fumed, all . . . day . . . long.  Then, I reached the point of exhaustion, where I couldn't work up the energy to care about anything.  In the morning, I didn't want to get out of bed, and, in the evening, I put off everything but the most necessary tasks.  I changed my clothes.  Showered.  Ate.  Took my puppy for walks in the backyard.  That's about it.

Today, however, was a good day.  My son met with his therapist.  Went to school.  Came home and didn't retreat behind his pink hair and laptop.  Small victories, but victories, nonetheless.  I want to say that I'm making progress.  Climbing toward the Empyrean.

I'm still being purified.  I know my son may wake up next Monday morning and refuse to get out of bed, yell at me that school is stupid and a waste of time.  My favorite line this week:  "When will I use math ever?!"  I may have won a battle today, but the war is far from over.

The math of life never ends.  There's algebra, then geometry and trigonometry and calculus.  Circles and terraces and spheres to surmount, all in order, in the end, to gaze into the face of love.  That's what my son wants.  It's what I want, too.  It's what we all want.

Dante ends Paradiso with this epic simile:

     As the geometer intently seeks
to square the circle, but he cannot reach
through thought on thought, the principle he needs,
     so I searched that strange sight:  I wished to see
the way in which our human effigy
suited the circle and found place in it--
      and my own wings were far too weak for that.
But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
and, with this light, received what it had asked.
     Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already--like
a wheel revolving uniformly--by 
     the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of Love that moves all things.

June 18: Stubb's Whale, Big Dreams, Baby Steps

Stubb's whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with piglead in bulk.

Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod's decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tall to the bows, the whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel's, and seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two- ship and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.*

*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad flukes or lobes.

If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.

"A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his small!"

Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.

About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

The aftermath of the whale's death.  Its great bulk is slowly rowed to the side of the Pequod-- a daylong task.  Then, it's chained to the ship for the night, where it becomes a feast for hungry sharks in the dark waters.  For a whaling ship, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of celebration on the part of the crew, aside from Stubb.  Ahab, himself, disappears below deck before the whale is even secured to his vessel.

It's a strange thing to get exactly what you want.  It doesn't happen very often.  Stubb gets his whale, but Ahab doesn't get Moby Dick.  Nobody is this world can say that their lives are perfect.  That they have everything they have ever wanted.  From Presidents to movie stars to Nobel-Prize-winning writers, everyone nurses disappointments, small and large.

I read somewhere recently, and you'll forgive me for not remembering the source of this wisdom, that the best way to avoid disappointment and failure is not to set huge, unreachable goals for yourself.  Don't go hunting for the albino whale.  Instead, set small, achievable tasks.  For example, instead of telling yourself that you're going to write a Pulitzer-Prize-worthy collection of poems, how about writing a 20-page chapbook about your father's vegetable garden.  Instead of saying that you're going to declutter your entire house, start by decluttering your bathroom or kitchen.  To paraphrase Richard Dreyfus in What About Bob?, it's all about taking baby steps.

So, today, I took some baby steps toward some of my goals.  I wrote a new poem.  I revised another poem.  I met with a close friend and talked about poetry.  Tonight, after these small victories, I'm going to relax.  Maybe watch some TV or go for a walk.  Try to avoid stress for a few hours.  I didn't land a whale today.  I caught a lake trout.

That's my wisdom for you this evening.  It's not earth-shattering advice. but I have to remind myself of this little rule every once in a while.  I'm a big picture person.  I want to win the Pulitzer Prize, or, better yet, the Nobel.  Like George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life, I dream big.  Also like George, I sometimes lose sight of small, important things.  Sweet potato nachos.  A daughter's smile.  A son riding his scooter down the street.  A woman who shares your dreams.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for baby steps.