Anything I try to read after Moby Dick is awkward. Jon Fosse is very awkward, benumbed, northern. Machado de Assis, the essential stories, is from Brazil, so the air is thicker and the pages hold back with some unexpected turns and perfumes. And these are short pieces, a page or two, not more than fifty. Lakes and chasms, shards and shafts, moments.
Moby Dick is six hundred pages. Ahab's inner life and Melville's across the four ocean meadows of the globe, the explanatory map at the back of the book, with its dotted line ending in shipwreck somewhere off Japan, all you need to know. The white whale triumphs. Too many whales died in order to light the words of politicians declaring their protection of living things.
In Moby-Dick, Melville calls the ocean the"dark side of this earth" and he's right" ... "almost all the ocean is dark almost all of the time."
This afternoon I read Verlyn Klinkenborg, 'What the ocean holds' in The New York Review of Books. He sets up on a scale Melville would understand, the globe and its oceans, its heaving inner life.
Billions of pounds of plastics and micro plastics and nano-plastics—smaller than the dust particles we breathe—are washing into the ocean every year, affecting nearly every aquatic species in ways scientists are only beginning to understand.
We are used to talking about global etc, but our speech is corrupted. It's possible, says Verlyn Klinkenborg
that our capacity to adjust to almost any "new normal" may turn out, ironically, to be one of our greatest liabilities as a species..... it's now estimated that Earth's biosphere is "95 percent deep ocean". Think for a moment what that means: most of this planet's biosphere, as one scientist put it, "exists in the dark."
Like Ahab. Like most of us.
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