I am closing fast on the end of Melville’s classic and for some reason I came across this reflection on my own thought. It would seem that I am occasionally disposed to tossing zingers. Zingers is a family term that the maternal side of Mr. J’s family uses to describe linguistic darts, which we might grant the more familiar representation, prickly criticism.
Oh sure it can easily slide into snark sarcasm or some such familial genera, but the chief characteristic is a quick, penetrating, smiting discomfort tossed as instruction and most often without warning or objective correlative. In this, for reasons of familial comity, brevity is preferred to outright lecture; the epigram to the treatise.
Now you may have gathered by way of reference that this trait of mine owes something to a family gene that worms its way forward to my tongue, that it bypasses otherwise perfectly functioning judicious brain cells, but by a conduit I know not what.
Now I am in no way forswearing the fun of snark, parody, ridicule or simultaneous use of all three or their familial relations where events demand, or merely warrant the fun of their articulation, but I am suggesting, nay asserting, that there are times where I would rather have not said what I’ve said, and this I blame on genetic defect.
That being said, I confess a wish to rid myself of said defect, and though acknowledging its genetic origin, and therefore impossibility of absolute good riddance, I do but claim my free-will as a balm against its unmitigated ill effect. That is I struggle to keep said tongue in its place until said judicious brain can team out the worthy ridicule from the unworthy, and while conceding this is not a perfect scheme, let alone science, it does seem to me it is a worthy vocation to which the shorn and torn tongue I own is the shape it is due to my biting my own.
Now you might ask, “what has this to do with Ishmael and Ahab and the happy crew of the Pequod?”
Madness of course. As the most debilitating aspect of madness is its surrender to itself, and this is the constant condition of Ahab. This is the constant definition of the ego unmollified by relationship: The ego unmollified by responsibility and obligation to something beyond itself.
But lets listen to a smattering of what Ahab has to say on the subject:
“ ‘Lad, lad [speaking to a young deck hand named Pip] I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt [of Moby Dick], my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here….
‘They tell me [Pip speaking], sir, that Stubb [2nd mate] did once desert poor little Pip [another Pip who drowned]… ‘But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.’
‘If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.’
‘Oh, good master, master, master!’
‘Weep so, and I will murder thee! Have a care, for Ahab is mad….”
As you see Ahab prefers, has surrendered, willfully even, to his own madness. He is consumed with, consumed by, his own ego.
Now of course Moby Dick is about a good deal more than all consuming ego, but from just this theme we can see the likeness to it in our secular society as envisioned, promoted, and expressed by “left progressive thought.”
The madness inhered by perfecting, of ridding, the world of destructive forces, Moby Dick, the whale, the recondite force whose meetings with sundry ships “contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the White Whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eye’s, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see.”
And there we have Utopian insanity: My ego made whole by ridding the world of that which offends it (epiphany for Joe Biden--can you say Jihadi). And here too we have Nietzche’s madness that has infected our own society and seeks nothing less than absolute will be granted Government so that it can slay the indifferent immoral whale of existence.
Which is any of us who do not agree with the practicableness, let alone desirableness, of what can only be termed tyranny. And note there is the profoundest difference between protecting one's own person from extinction (see Allies vs. Axis) and from asserting one's own existence as all.
It is well to take "arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them."
By the by, yes I did see the religious allusion of which I am sure Mr. Hitchens approves, but then that is a discussion for another time.