Aftereffects of reading Moby Dick

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. 

STARTLING SANDWICH

Mixed reading diet, a startling sandwich of a lost gay novel from 1928 and a much lauded Norwegian trilogy from 2014. 

In my diary from September 14th 1974, two weeks into Ireland and a touch of mania already setting in, loneliness and consequent plunder of all resources, I read a novel I have never seen since, To Kiss the Crocodile. How come in all this time I have never noticed a novel on my shelves with a title like that? I looked up across the room to the newly rearranged bookshelves under the windows. A black volume, with the spine missing. Yes. Soft inlaid paper, 1928. To Kiss the Crocodile, a novel by Ernest Milton, actor, well-received interpretations of Hamlet etc, I learned on wiki, but there was no mention of a novel he wrote. No mention either of a newly transplanted, newly invented french lecturer, lodged with her books and music in the annexe of an early Victorian villa looking out on Cork Harbour reading it straight through in a day and wondering if she'd forgotten something, a whole human being, perhaps, herself?

Ernest Milton is prey to what he can't say, which gives rise to a long, repetitive, desperate, tumultuous, frozen novel. In 2024 I read it fast, impatient and sympathetic, both. My impatience, and my sympathy, is not only with Ernest Milton, it is also with my younger self who bought the book in the first place. 

Jon Fosse writes an elemental tale out of his Nordic inheritance, his sureness. Like Tarjei Vesaas, he knows a tiny village by a fjord, isolated people, small, intense compass: a cottage, a boat, the glittering fjord, fiddle playing, floating with the music, with hunger, expedience, and the still form of the story through several generations around which he'll ply his language. 

Between the elemental and the tumultuous in a fine week in September.