I read from Moby Dick for most of the afternoon, sitting in the faded Adirondack chair on the back deck. The day remains overcast, indefinite, grey, the surf’s machinery toiling quietly, deep in the mills of the known day.
For obscure reasons, my reading these days takes me into deep waters. I travel with the Pequod into the mid-Pacific Ocean, the fat book in my lap oracular, singing to or from a conch deep in my ear. I don’t know if this spell has been brewed from all of the big books I’ve read over the year (among them Gravity’s Rainbow, Finnegans Wake, Shakepeare’s tragedies, the Odyssey and Beowulf, Goethe’s Faust, Conrad’s sea-tales, the Vitae Brendae and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridean, Faulkner’s verbal spells and Don DeLillo’s laser-sharp sentences), or simply the sum of so many cadences settled down the vast tonnage of turned pages, but I find myself getting increasingly lost in this reading, into big spaces that both terrify and excite me, stir me in ways that there doesn’t seem to be a precise name for, as if I were hearing gnostic scriptures being read out loud on the undersides of the page, written there by a hand that feels obliquely familiar and yet maddeningly black, black, black ...
Melville’s ocean sloshes and washes and tides in my ear, hearkening me to a road to everywhere, pregnant with abysms and shores ... There is a Door this wild and strange tribe of Authors open with their sentences, revealing not so much the world as its subterranean barrows, leading me down deeper hallways all lined with sea-mirrors, refractions of personal depth, shared intimacy, some profoundly resonant bass note racing shore to shore through the nation of verbal souls living and dead.
Dark and cold, brutal and wild: this is the general heft in the verbal undertow, thunderous with the gait of a Long Man in the tongue, ancient, cruel, irreproachable: How could anyone love such a song? Yet I do. Some deepest part in me sings back, thrilling to the sound of it, greeting it like the Cliffs of Moher shudder and scream something pent with orgasm and death as massive North Sea waves collide into them.
Melville thought he writing one book when he started Moby Dick, but it took off on him. Something leapt from his ambition to write a better sea-tale, rising from depths which apparently were revealed for the first time to him in the months which preceded and led through the writing of the book. He was doing some deep reading at the time, going through all of Shakespeare’s tragedies--enthralled with the poet’s “blackness” -- and, about the same time, read Hawthorne’s Mosses at an Old Manse, whose essential courage to peer into a “blackness of the darkness beyond.” Add to this stack Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also on the list, giving Ahab the creator’s ambition to track down the monster he had raised, and the sea he voyaged the crew of the Pequod over become far, far deeper and wilder. He felt that was writing two books, for two audiences perhaps, the peanut gallery and the court of the ages; or perhaps it was the difference between the goings-on of the surface tale and the wild black wings married to the tale from far under, providing sail and rudder for a hoarier, more Biblical story than could ever be related in any safely-heated Nantucket inn. One book’s “unfathomable cravings [drank] his blood,” he reflected back after completing the novel; “the other only [demanded] his ink.”
Et tu, c’est moi. Have the years of deep readings gestated this hard, low, granitic voice in my wildest affections, wilder than any depth I could have reached in a bottle, a depth I was seeking in all of the wrong dives? Does Man Reading become a gospel of words? Of late, neuroscientists have been attaching electrodes to the heads of meditating Tibetan monks; the research indicates that areas of the brain were activated and channeled via the mediation, re-writing the neural trade-routes, overwriting instinctual ones with their more conscious others, so that sexual gratification becomes a greater sympathy, compassion. All of this defies the conventional neurscientific literature which states that chemistry affects mood, our mental ills curable through pharmaceuticals .... Does deep reading similarly morph the neural chemistry, amplifying or weighting the blue end of the verbal thalamus, making ever-more audible the voices of angels, changing the entire brain’s chorus, weighting it with a sea-warding boom?
If so, to what purpose? Is it an archetypal reflex, innate to the species, a dark drowned hall reaching back to the first articulations on the million-year savannah? I speak, therefore I am ... that’s what writers say ... But to what end now, with the whole nation of Authorship threatened by the rising tide of nonverbal media, its institutions fading, libraries succumbing to indifference and disuse, mandarin academics arguing Texts into specie of postmordern white noise ... The Book like a ship split on rocks of modernity, its contents scattered and lost on a shore where digital images cavort and scream and jism mute agons of futurity. Words are a booty no longer tenderable anywhere, readers having lost critical interest, turned to other media, their antennae blunted, no longer moved by plainchant, no longer patient or cohesive enough to read novels, write poems, peruse a lifetime of writing.
With the reality of the state of the Book is so dim and zeroing, am I so stirred by my reading by a grand jester, a mocking cruel voice? Is it the laughter of Death? In her novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill wrote, “The more withered the reality, the more gigantic and tyrannical the dream.” Thus the big night music I hear in my ear, in precise alternation to the small day music of the known? Cormac McCarthy picks up the same thread in The Road: “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.”
That’s what this big stirring feels like in the deep end of my reading, a happiness bordering on doom. Does this grand voice herald its end, that coming day when the last words sink below the surface and disappear for good? Does it provide then comfort for the final walk over to the other side? Is that why I’m smiling so as I rouse from “The Honor and Glory of Whaling,” Melville sings of this deep singing’s tribe:
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods and prophets alone compose the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is till to be named, for like royal kings of old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wonderful oriental story is now rehearsed from Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord; — Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
When Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?Ur-god, ur-poet, ur-song, ur-boat all voyaging from a text rescued from the bottom of the sea -- that’s where Melville found the ribs of his ship, before and after Ishmael opened his mouth. Down on the beach the day rolls on dull and lustreless, still freighted with the grey principalities of sky and sea, dutifully toiling and droning beneath flocks of breezes which stroll in, crossing the porch this way then that. Me in this saddle of a chair with Moby Dick as my horse, hanging on for dear life as the beast gallops and dives and breeches and blows. None of it relevant to the ship aways offshore wanton for real gold, or the young lovers walking down the beach in the dreamy postfuck uterals of awakening love, or the graves of my wife and son back in the interior, sailing silently on in their coffins while I remain here.
***
Whatever rouses deep in my reading, it has the dark proximity of dreams, and whatever it means or signifies, I will know it to the same futile extent I understand my dreams -- darkly. The deeper my nights fell into the bottle, the wilder my dreams, baroque technicolor rollercoaster rides through vampire cities under mountains, doing battle with chain-wielding skinheads and world-ending monsters to terrible to look at, much less name. Did such feral magnificence, soaked in cartoonish colors, calibrate an Other which was hue of my empty nights in reverse, those desaturated, zero-bandwidth grayshouldered immramas down to a forever not-empty enough whiskey glass? Like binaries, my dream and that reality, the former always at right angles to my zero, trumpeting an orchestral doom in each night’s looming wave.
But how can we know dreams, being Other than our knowledge, always the precinct of darkened minds, a substrate older than the Devonian Sea, glowing daily as the fuse by which all life is lamped and wardend and furthered? If dreams are what I can’t know, then how am I to ever understand them, position them with any utility? Jonah dreams of far shores in the belly of Leviathan, of serving girls pouring wine, their nipples huge and roseate pressing against gauzy blouses, their eyes like green seaglass afire with summer suns: And wakes in the excremental stench of the worst seas, pillowed by bowels lumpy with squid, the whole shittiness of creation ... Is not Jonah’s agony clarified and raised to its greatest intensity by his dream, as if the archangel Michael himself wielded its lysis, cleaving him at the precise center of his darkest sin? So we seem to believe, and thus Jonah repented, cried out for mercy, made his promise to Obey ... and woke from his nightmare on the soft shores of the world, never to dream of shore girls again.
Now that I live by the sea, it figures less visibly in my dreams. More the jaw-proscenium which swallows me, harrowing my way back to an interior I have lost, so that the surf breeze is Jan’s breath in my ear as I slowly wake in our bedroom, afraid to wake further, knowing if I do I will lose her, the way I once dreamed of clutching a thirteen thousand dollar bill tightly, tightly in my hand, waking with a corner of my sweat-stained pillow crunched uselessly there. Her breath sursurrating back to the liquid vowels of the sea, as impossible to hold onto as a fistful of sand. The ocean now is the Interior, my lost life fully the Other, and i dream of her belly, pale and warm and sweaty as my own presses against it, angling my hips and cock deeper into her as her hands squeeze and knead my asscheeks, and she begs me to come, to deliver our son unto her. Come, the waves sing in the vast disaster of first light, come; muting as I wake to the harsher sound of gone, gone, gone ...
Day now fading from the shore, immutably greyer and steelier and darker. The salvage ship rocking and toiling at roughly the same spot for the past few hours; they must have found the wreck. What the hell. What the hell. I need something more than too many words in this chair high up the mainmast of a vastly old ship. Wild and turgid and deeply resonant, yes, but what’s to echo down empty shores? Let Ishamel row on home, I pray. Let him get on to the next tale, even if he must board a savage coffin to get there ...
