Melville and the White Whale

Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room,

On the  Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land

We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea

In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over 

I write down  

This, 

My

Heathen Language.

Making waves. Much  

INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD 

Spilled to find the White Whale —

Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia remind us of Fallen Nature; whose sixty-ton body is smeared with blood of sailors and tears of fishermen; whose grisly altars are sunken ships, torn nets and snapped masts; who is King Molech, Ghastly Demiurge of the Sea; whose whiteness both masks and speaks of the immense and heartless void that lurks behind the flimsy images of the sensuous world. 

Chase him — Over every sea on

All sides of land — Nantucket

Norway Chile Japan until this

Story is

Finished. 

To flesh an iron 

You must

First turn him

Fin up and 

Bury it to the hitches.

I shall have him 

— Scrimshawed,

Hand-spiked 

Blubber-hooked. 

Written in pearly white wax 

I pour from this pitcher of words to the

Brim of this poisoned well. I cannot 

Staunch the oil that

Comes when words are

Squeezed too hard. 

Candle burns low — Adjust the trim for 

Deeper waters — Where away? — Shudder the skies. 

Horizon a-slant — Sea a-heft — There he goes 

(I mean blows) — Flinging his sea-foamed ivory

Weight in the sea-shower — Fins smacking water

As he crashes down — Such sea-quake power —

My sporting spouting mammal fish — 

It is why the gulls

Jubilate and the small fowls

Scream.

From my vigorous pen

Comes a darting harpoon of woods

— Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice — 

Words that might lance the side of God

And dredge him up to earth.

But what we seek to catch may also see us

Captured in the same net.

Entangled in these lines I write, I am

Shot out from my seat into the

Creamy whirlpool, where my stricken prey

Waits for me. To the last we

Grapple — though we be shark-circled in the

Weltering sea — To the last we 

Writhe.

Blooded, bashed and broken we are both

Sucked and sunk into the God-Knows-Not.

The good angels

Flee; the moon’s pale shine is

Dipped in blood.

The drama is done.

The sea’s throne is empty and

I have my ending.

Having disposed of both whale

And man, the sea closed

Over, concealing forever  

The turmoil within. 

No burial rites were proffered; 

No period of mourning

Was announced. 

In the republic that is the sea, 

The white whale was no king at all —

No gnostic demiurge,

No dreadful Molech 

Of Canaanite lore;

No metaphor for Nature, 

No stand-in for Self or Reality. 

Just a whale, he was 

— Physeter macrocephalus —

A pelagic mammal;

Sexually dimorphic;

Of the toothed whales, the largest,

And doing what whales have done

For some fifty million years.

The evil was all mine.

My ship-cabin musings 

And map-room readings were empty.

My high-seas adventures 

Were longshore drifts.

For the whale I wrote death was invented. 

To the bottom I wrote evil was bound, 

An evil to be disgorged 

From the sea’s bowels 

And flushed to hell, 

An evil invented, 

An evil I died fighting. 

 

The evil was in me, the writer.

How here does any one step forth? 

Look ye, reader, though the worst

In me — the vain and selfish part — 

Is sunk to Hell, the better part

Remains to tell the tale. Every fiction

Needs a witness — a reporter,

A tiller of stories as well as ships —

Who survives the descent and rises  

Up, and out, into the vastly peopled world;   

An orphan mouth that can utter  

Three immortal words   

—  Call me Ishmael.