Category Archives: Religious Quest in the Modern Age

The Final Dark Truth

civilization, Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, racism, reason, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, The Sleep of Reason

 

In his novel Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad tried to show us what he thought was a dark truth. It is not just a truth about European society, he showed it was a truth about all of us. You and I too.

Bu how can a person face this horrifying darkness?  Marlow has some advice. Clearly pious phrases are not the answer. Nor noble truths.

“Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look without a wink. But he must at least be as much of man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true self—with his own inborn strength. Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags,–rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.”

 

You need deep inner strength to face such horror. It takes strength of character and courage. It reminds me of the person Leslie Fiedler, an American literary critic described in his bookLove and Death in the American Novel—the person who had the courage to go the end of the dark cave with a torch to see the tragic.  Fiedler like Conrad, realized that “The final horrors, as the modern society has come to realize, are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds,” Fiedler said in his book.  We are the final horror! What an awful truth to face.

Fiedler saw this as the final consequence of the age of reason. I disagree. I think it is the final consequence of the abandonment of reason. Racism, white privilege and exploitation on an insane scale,  were the result of reason being forsaken in favour monstrous desires. The age of reason Fielder said, dissolved in sentimentalism, “in a debauch of tearfulness; sensibility, seduction, and suicide.”  Fiedler noted how the French philosopher Diderot wrote about Richardson the author of that classic novel, Clarissa: “It is he who carries the torch to the back of the cave… He blows upon the glorious phantom who presents himself at the entrance to the cave; and the hideous Moor whom he was masking reveals himself.”  Surely, “the hideous Moor” is a striking symbol of the demonic in ourselves, which the Enlightenment inadvertently discovered in its quest for light.”  Not that dissimilar from Kurtz who found that demon in his pursuit of noble ideals in the deepest jungle of Africa. We have created that image of the hideous Moor.  He is not real except in our own minds.

 The racial component here is not accidental either. The hideous Moor is, of course, black. He is at the heart of darkness. It is the black Moor that we fear the most and will do anything to stamp out. But that Moor is Us! He is the product of our original sin!

Kurtz found that demon when he looked at those shrunken shriveled heads on poles.  Heads that showed shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of teeth grinning horribly and “continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.”  Those heads “only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts.”

From that came the understanding only at the last that “the wilderness had found him out early and had taken him on a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it whispered to him things which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.”

As I said earlier, the horrors perpetrated by Kurtz in the jungle were never described by Marlow. That was because he did not know what they were. He just knew that they would be even worse than the heads on spikes. Marlow had the feeling that

“such details would be more intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz’s window.  After all, that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief.”

 

The heart of darkness within the human mind was much, much worse. That was what Marlow could not bear.  He could not carry the torch into the back of the cave and confront that horror, as Kurtz had done. He did not want to know. He did not want to know the truth about himself. Do we want to know truth either?

 

Philanthropic and Missionary Enterprises

civilization, Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the novel Heart of Darkness, Marlow had no regard for the philanthropic or missionary enterprise.  The marauders used such concepts as camouflage—to fool their prey and even themselves. They used such words to convince themselves that they were doing good—God’s work. Kurtz first, and Marlow second, saw through that hideous lie. They thought of themselves as exploring the world in search of Eldorado—the city of gold. Yet according to Marlow, they were “reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.”  They were worthy of no respect—only shame.  All they really wanted to do was loot, pillage no matter what the cost.  “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

 

Then astonishingly the natives treated these rapacious burglars like gods. Imagine that!  The whites no doubt could hardly believe what they saw. Marlow compared that to how “sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.” That is exactly it.  It is entirely unreal—fantastical. Horribly fantastic. Marlow described the scene this way,

 

The earth seemed unearthly.  We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.  It was unearthly, and the men were,–No, they were not inhuman.  Well you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one.  They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours  the thought of remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes it was ugly; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in which you—you remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.

 

Marlowe also calls it the “edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.”    Again, he is vague and circumspect, but all the more chilling and terrifying for that. It is an incomprehensible horror. And the real horror is that this is the result of our humanity. It is not inhuman; it is human incarnate. No matter how frightful that seems. This is the heart of darkness. Our own dark centre.

 

The Real Prince of Darkness and the False Gods

Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, Indigenous Issues, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

When Marlow found Kurtz in the centre of the heart of darkness, he had already given in to the powerful forces of darkness. He fell under the spell of the prince of darkness within his own heart. This was no bogey man devil created by religious zealots to scare us into submission. This was the real prince of darkness who resides in us all and who can conquer us as he did Kurtz if we allow it to do that.

Joseph Conrad, through his protagonist Marlow, described Kurtz this way,

“The wilderness has patted him on the head, and behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favorite.”

 

Kurtz had become the pampered favorite of the forces of darkness.  As a result, he found unimaginable heaps of ivory. Stacks of it. “You would think there was not a single tusk left either above, or below the ground in the whole country,” Marlow said. That was his ivory.  That was what he got in exchange for his soul.

When the Europeans arrived in Africa, as when they arrived in the New World, they were seen as gods. At least some Europeans thought they were seen as gods. Evil gods perhaps, but gods nonetheless. That is what happened after the good intentions of men like Kurtz failed. Many white men succumbed to this dangerous illusion that compared to the indigenous people they were Gods.

This was the original sin! The sin of believing they were superior!

 Some whites still suffer from that sin. It continues to stain some of them.

Noble Causes

Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Joseph Conrad in his short novel shreds western illusions viscerally. For example,  Fresleven, was the most gentle and quiet creature enthralled by the “noble cause,” but he was seen whacking an old black chief with a stick.   Conrad knew that the illusions would fail and then something brutal would happen.  I want to warn you there is an awful word coming here. Conrad described it this way, “he probably felt the need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way. Therefore he whacked the old nigger mercilessly, while a big crowd of his people watched.” That tells you a lot about Fresleven. It wouldn’t be the same without that awful word.

Kurtz came to the centre of Africa thinking he would do good work. He had the best of intentions.  Yet those intentions ended with a ring  of hideous human heads on spikes around a campfire in the centre of the dark jungle. This was a place where Kurtz came to be worshipped like some evil god. That is where his good intentions and illusions inexorably led.

After being in the jungle, in that darkness, Kurtz came to see everything as belonging to him.  It was all his.  As we know that is a common western attitude. As Kurtz said,

“‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my’– everything belonged to him.  It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.  Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.  That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible—it was not good for one either—trying to imagine.  He had taken a high seat among the devils of the land—I mean literally. You can’t understand with pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?”

The Europeans thought they owned everything. There was a big illusion.

In that dark place people no longer have their illusions to protect them. They are naked subject to the devilish forces hiding in the dark terrible forest. No policeman can help us there, for none is available.  We have to rely on our own inner strength and convictions genuinely held. False pretenses of doing charitable work will not save us.  No cause no matter how noble will be enough. Only the truth can save us.

Guarding the Door of Darkness

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the novel the Heart of Darkness, Marlow, like Kurtz before him, and like countless Europeans before them too, ventured out from safe London to journey up that river into the heart of the continent.

That big river that “resembled an immense snake uncoiled” had a powerful attraction for Marlow. He admitted that, “it fascinated me as a snake would a bird.”  It was the fascination of the abomination.

Most of such adventurers were dreaming of the glories of exploration.  Some were lusting for exploitation. Many succumbed to the lures of treasure, and power, and unspeakable gratifications. Some sought the salvation of souls. Kurtz was one of them.

Many of those who came to the river where their journey began were, according to Conrad, “the joy pioneers of progress” who could drink their “jolly lager-beer.”  They had no idea what they were getting in for, but they would find out.

In the outer room of the company office where these journeys began sat two old women knitting. They reminded me of Dickens’ old women knitting beside the guillotine as heads rolled in a Tale of Two Cities. A cat sat on the lap of one of them.  When she looked at Marlow her glance over her glasses was described by him as follows, “The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me.” It was a simple but ominously elegant description.  Marlow often thought of them when he was far away.:

“Often far away there, I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes.   Ave!  Old knitter of black wool.  Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half by a long way.”

 

Marlow also described the company accountant who kept up his appearance “in the great demoralization of the land.”  Marlow respected that, for it kept the accountant sane (sort of anyway) in a crazy land where everything else was in a riotous muddle.   The accountant refused to be distracted by the pain around him.  As he said, “The groans of this sick person… distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.” Clerical errors were more important than lives. One could even expand that to include moral errors!

It was there at the company office that he learned about Kurtz “a first class-agent”.  So he was described to Marlowe, He was remarkable for he sent in more ivory than all the others put together. Of course, at what cost was he able to gather all that ivory? It really didn’t matter.

Marlowe was disturbed by the insanity of the company business in the yard.  He saw many men there. He described it this way, as part of  a strange religious quest:

“I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence.  The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.  By Jove!  I’ve never seen anything so unreal in all my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

 

Conrad knew that the entire European invasion was “fantastic” and also, was driven by “imbecile rapacity.”   That is part of the dark center of this dark continent. And it is part of the dark centre of people.  It is not innocent people who are led to imbecile rapacity. It is in their nature.

Conrad was also disturbed by the false consciousness of the European enterprise in Africa. It is astonishing to think that many of them believed they were there to help the downtrodden.  They really believed they were bringing civilization to savages.  They believed the illusions. That created a surreal world. Conrad said “It was as unreal as everything else—as the philanthropic pretense of the whole thing.”

Joseph Conrad and The Heart of Darkness and The Conquest of the Earth

Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, Indigenous People After Contact, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

It is time to return to the classics. The novel, The Heart of Darkness is certainly one of the best books I have ever read. I think I have now read it 3 times.   It is well worth a re-read. It is a definitely a classic. And it is a short read (unlike Moby Dick).

The book was originally serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine in England in1899 by Joseph Conrad whose original language was Polish. He only became fluent in his twenties. It always amazes me that he became such a good writer in English in such a short time.

It is a simple story. A steamboat captain Marlow, travels up the Congo River to meet Kurtz an agent of the ivory company for whom he works. There, Marlow finds Kurz living among “the savages.” He tells the story to a group of civilized Englishmen drinking and smoking cigars while sailing the river Thames in London.  The setting is important. A key question is whether or not the heart of Darkness is London or the Congo.

The novel describes a journey by Marlowe, the protagonist and narrator, to the heart of Africa.  It was a trip up the winding Congo river, (we presume). That river is described, not accidentally, as a snake. There Marlowe found a corrupt agent of the English company hunting for ivory.  The book powerfully describes the black heart at the centre of European colonialism and exploitation of the continent of Africa and other places as well. He reveals the deep dark truth hidden by the pretense of lofty moralistic goals.  Illusions he calls them. Of course, the book is more than a trip to the heart of the darkness of Africa, it is also a trip into the heart of darkness of each of us who remain behind in the safety and comfort of our homes. That darkness exists there too.  And what Marlow finds, and what we would find in the centre of our own heart of darkness, if we were brave enough and honest enough to make the journey was horror!

One of the interesting things about how the story is told, is that it is told by Marlowe to 4 or 5 others sitting on a boat in the Thames. Why there? Why is this relevant?  In my view it is important because Conrad wanted to make it clear that everyone is capable of savagery. The savage is within each of us–even civilized people in London, the centre of the world at that time. London is also in the heart of darkness!

Conrad lays bare the reality behind the ‘civilizing’ goals of the European traders. With that he lays bare the thin veneer of civilization and the thin armour around our own darkness inside of us, for none of us are pure. We are all tainted.  We all share the rapacity that engulfed the traders like Kurtz.

With Conrad’s analysis we also learn the despairing truth behind the notion of the “benevolent despot” that has so tortured Africa. It is a lie. A lie that Kurtz embodied.  Kurtz who eventually gave way to unspeakable lusts and gratifications had gone to the heart of the continent with enlightenment goals. Sentimentally, he wanted to be a humanitarian helper. So many Europeans have gone with similar lofty goals only to be thwarted. Not usually as sensationally as Kurtz, but they have been destroyed nonetheless by their own rapacity and naiveté.

As Marlow takes the trip up that river he realizes the land is a swamp and he feels the reality of the person who ventures into this dark heart on behalf of some commercial enterprise back home.  Conrad feels for the innocence of that intrepid venturer, who does not know what he is getting into.

” Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know,–coming out here in the train of  some pretext, or tax-gatherer or trader even, to mend his fortunes.  Land in a swamp, march through the woods, in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had close around him,–all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.  There’s no initiation either into such mysteries.  He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.  And it has a fascination, too that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate. “(emphasis added)

 

Our commercial enterprises into the heart of dark continent have come cloaked in lofty goals.  But, according to Conrad, the people who came may have looked like religious zealots looking to help the poor savages, but they were the real savages.  They came with strength. It was an accidental strength based on the technological weakness of the indigenous.  There was no moral superiority that accompanied it. Conrad described those efforts this way,

“It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.  What redeems it is the idea only.  An idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before and offer sacrifice to.”

 

One of the things Conrad looks at in the book is the conquest of the earth by the men of Europe a dubious enterprise at best.  Conrad took a close look at colonialism and the sense of superiority and what he saw as the darkness at its heart. As he said, it was not always pretty.

Resurrection Day Three—lone survivor

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

This may please some of you. This should be my last post on Moby Dick.

Remember the “rainbowed air”? On the third day of the chase (I call it the quest), as in the Bible, there is resurrection. There is one more brief respite from the bleak world of Captain Ahab. That occurs on the very last page of the book in what is called the epilogue. In fact, as I learned from Lara Rae, this one-page chapter was an afterthought. Melville originally published the book without it, but people asked what happened to Ishmael? He was the narrator, but it seemed like everyone perished at sea after Moby Dick attacked the boats and the ship. How could he then tell the story?

So, in one final page Melville,  through his narrator, explains that Ishmael was about to drown with all the others when the coffin Queequeg had made for him when he thought he was dying, “burst upward” from the bottom of the sea and rose with great force beside him. The coffin became a life-buoy and floated by his side, and Ishmael was saved. Resurrected by a coffin. He floated on the coffin while “the unharming sharks, they glide by as if with padlocks on their mouths, the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.” With the death of Ahab, the war of man against nature was over.  Nature won.

After floating on the sea for a day, Ishmael was rescued by the Rachel who was still looking for her lost children in a quest in which Ahab had refused to help.  So, the Rachel “found another orphan.” Ishmael. Here was a genuine connection. Here was a genuine spiritual quest.

As a result, one of the crew of 30 men was not destroyed by Ahab’s monomaniac religious quest. And you can call him Ishmael.

And so ends this religious quest.

A Better Way: The Insular Tahiti

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In Moby Dick we saw where hatred led. It led to the apparent death of all the men on the ship and the whaling boats. Total catastrophe. All of this is incredibly bleak.

However, I want to take a slight meander away from all this madness of the quest to something benign. Melville offers some amazing hints about this possibility. The quest need not be malignant. There is a better way.

Ishmael asked us readers to consider an alternative. This is what he said,

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal wars since the world began.”

 

That was one side of the story. Those wars are of course waged by sparring creatures such as sharks and men.  They seem interminable. Yet there is an alternative and Melville suggests we consider that. As his narrator Ishmael says,

“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find strange analogy to something in yourself?  For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return.”

 

We have both the good and bad in us. The land and the sea. Ahab and Starbuck. We have choices. Starbuck offered it to Ahab. Ahab turned it down. This insular Tahiti is not just a far-off dream. It is real. Melville through his narrator Ishmael draws it to our attention at various times in this book to give us relief from the mad quest of Ahab. It is a place of peace in an otherwise often mad world of turmoil and strife.

Earlier in the novel, in pursuit of another whale, in fact a herd of whales, the ship

“glided between 2 whales into the inner most heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface called a sleek…we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.”

 

There was also the time the ship the Pequod found calm sailing in the heart of the Japanese cruising ground where,

“At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe,; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.”

Sometimes the turbulence and dangerous upheavals the sea is prone to, are quiet and peaceful and we forget about the monsters gliding by underneath.

Such times, occur even on land, and are dreamy and idyllic:

“The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides, as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-weaned children there are sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that the fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.”

 

Clearly, in Melville’s mind these times of peace are rare and brief. And it was acknowledged that such soothing scenes affected Ahab, though “of temporary effect” and “if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret golden treasures, yet did his breath upon them prove tarnishing.” Ahab could ruin even such golden days. Such blessed calms don’t last. “A storm for every calm.”

We get moments of peace even in our most mad quests. But they are not long-lasting. And in the end, Moby Dick midst “enticing calm” the hunters “allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes.” The serenity could be hideously deceiving. And woe to the person who forgets that. There is a tiger heart beneath.

Mad Hatred

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the end we learn what hatred brings us. The whale approached Ahab’s boat.  One of the crew, Parsee, who had harpooned the whale the day before had held on so tight that the whale dragged him all night until he was stuck to the whale, lashed there by the harpoons rope wound round and round him. That is where hate brings you. Or at least the half of his body that remained was stuck to the whale after two days.

Now Ahab’s irrational hatred of the whale—hatred of his god—becomes alive.  Ahab “darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.”

Finally, the whale reacts to its relentless foe, becoming a “down coming monster” as a result of the thirst for revenge levied against it.  That’s what revenge creates—a monster.  Ishmael describes Moby Dick wheeling round to Ahab’s boat:

“in that evolution, catching site of the nearing black hull of the ship, seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.”

 

Ishmael came close to admitting what Ahab always claimed, that the whale has “intelligent malignity,” but he just says it “may be” that it is “bethinking.”  What is certain, though, is that Ahab is a rational creature made irrational by hate, lust for revenge, and mad about his holy cause. Ahab says, “I grow blind.” Ahab asks, “Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? All my life-long fidelities?”  The answer is clear-yes! That is the end of mad quests.

The whale rams into the ship, with all the men on it, and the men gazed at the whale with “enchanted eyes,” as it moved

“his head side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.”

 

Through his own hateful seeking vengeance, Ahab transformed the whale into exactly what Ahab was. That is the child of hate. Hate begat hate. Ahab realizes his ship is now just a “God-bullied hull.” Ahab realizes, “Oh now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” He is a tragic hero of sorts. Yet even with that knowledge, Ahab does not relent.

Instead of relenting, Ahab thinks,

“Towards thee I roll, thou all destroying but unconquering whale; from hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool, and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, thou tied to thee, thou damned whale.”

 

Of course, it is not the whale that is damned. Even as Ahab hates to the last, we note the reverential use of “Thee” and “thou” the phrases appropriate to conversation between human and god.

With that the Pequod and the whaling boats  and all the men in them all sunk into the sea even as the “faithful harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts.” They all go down with their ship. There followed an astounding image, of Tashtego, Stubb’s personal faithful harpooneer, a  Native American from Gay Head, the westernmost point of Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, sinking with a whaling boat, but still with his “red arm and a hammer” hovered” above the surface of the water in the act of nailing Ahab’s flag faster and faster to the subsiding spar.  Then a sky-hawk tauntingly came down “from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag and incommoding Tashtego there” but it got between the hammer and the wood, and still,

“simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-grasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

 

Despite all the hatred of Ahab for nature—i.e. the white whale—nature won in the end. The obsessed man lost. The mad quest was over.

My wife Christiane used to wear a pin (until it was lost or stolen) that said, “Religion is no longer religion if it leads to hate.”  Maybe this is what Moby Dick is all about.

The Chase for Moby Dick—the Third Day

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

The third and final day of chasing Moby Dick was a “lovely day in “a new-made world.” It was a ‘summer house to the angels.” The Pacific Ocean again was tranquil. The calm before the storm. This time a metaphysical storm. The crew of the Pequod followed the whale “in his infallible wake.” Like so many true believers, they followed their god to their doom. “A fairer day could not dawn upon that world.”

 

Once again, the 3 boats each filled with a small crew of harpooneers, set out into the “wondrous blue” in search of Moby Dick. The sharks “know” that they should only follow Ahab’s boat. They ignore the others. Even Ahab sees this and asks, “who can tell…whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?”

 

Sure, the crew heard the whale before they saw him. It was a “subterraneous hum” after which all the men held their breaths when “a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air and then fell swamping back into the deep.”  Melville hints at a resurrection. As the whale went down water, white water 30ft. high was pushed up, “leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.” As Ishmael described it, “Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.”

Starbuck again tries to convince Ahab to relent. He says to him, as the whale goes down again, “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly sleekest him!”

None of this persuaded Ahab to give up the quest.  For the true believer, nothing can convince him or her to give up a religious quest. That is one of the dangers of such a quest.

 The crew met up again with their mighty foe on this tranquil day. Not to be tranquil for long. After that we learn what mad hatred brings us.