I read Moby Dick on the Ilha da Tavira, not as a sea person but as a woman displaced from her meadow and finding it, with interest, in Melville's language, his sousing in matter, in nature, and the mind. Chapters end with a thought more than a brink. The end of Chapter 70:
"Still ho! cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
"Aye well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunderclouds swept aside from his brow. "That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. —Where away?"
"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!"
"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."
The Sperm Whale is a Platonian, says Melville, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. Ahab is madness maddened. Everything weighed in the scales of the New Testament. Ishmael needs more than a hundred pages to set out from Nantucket in the Pequod, as Tristram Shandy takes most of his book to be born. Captain Ahab is as unseen as Orson Welles lurking beneath postwar Vienna in The Third Man; Ishmael has to meet and become brothers with Queequog, the royal from an off-the-map south sea island, before the ship can sail.
Before we meet Ahab we must experience killing whales, hauling them on board, cutting them up, barrelling the oil, we must encounter other whaling ships and their tales, the globe circled in search of a white whale, oceans as meadows, the soul fully stretched, Ahab's special lunacy storming his general sanity, and then ours.
The beach in October. Yes. Who's there and what are they thinking about as they lie there, or walk west, or east; what are they relieved of, what do they have to say, who is listening. A man called Paul has set up at the back of the beach, his enclosure, his base. Because it is a public place, he states his case about nudity. Others are encouraged. It's the end of the season, mosquitoes are out in calm spots. Ferries ply to and fro, a warship goes through, a yacht or two in the distance.
To this day people are uncertain as the function of spermaceti, the substance in the whale's head that gave lighting oil and a base for unguents in the nineteenth century. One of the Pequod's crew nearly drowns in a whale's head, rescued by Queequog, royal, modest, throughout. Ishmael likes to think that the oil rises up through the ship's masts, union of whale and wood.
Chapter 94
A Squeeze of the Hand
.... As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost with in the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their one; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow ....
