167 years from this day!

Yes, dear reader, as Herman Melville lived, 167 years from this date he jumped ship and began an exotic adventure that jump started one of America’s great and tragic literary careers. There’s nothing particularly significant about 167, unless you’re predisposed to celebrate prime numbers. I just ran across the date the other day and it stuck to me since I've been reading Hershel Parker’s Herman Melville, A Biography: Volume 2, 1851-1891, an account so exhaustive it has kept my lips moving for several months – and prodded me into a renewed interest in poetry. I’ve spent so much time reading about Mr. Melville and, in the interim, his own work, and in so doing become so attached to him that I’m sure I’ll get emotional when he passes, especially knowing that he departed the world not knowing that his work would ever be celebrated.

But his first two books, Typee: A Peep At Polynesian Life and Omoo: A Narrative of the South Seas, were very popular in their day, so today’s anniversary is a joyous occasion, marking the time when a new mode of travel adventure was created and made Mr. Melville one of the first sex symbols of America with expertly crafted narratives of jumping ship, bathing with young Fayaway, partaking of calabashes of poee-poee, stirring up mutinies, combing the beaches of Tahiti, bowling in the Sandwich Islands before such alleys were known in the States, and serving aboard a United States Man-of-War.

So celebrate: prepare a vessel of bo-a-sho, crack open a young coconut and enjoy a chaw of arva root. Let Herman Melville know you care.

for Memorial Day

a poem from Herman Melville's Battle Pieces (1866)

On the Men of Maine
killed in the Victory of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
___________________________
Afar they fell. It was the zone
Of fig and orange, cane and lime(A land how all unlike their own,
With the cold pine-grove overgrown),
But still their Country's clime.And there in youth they died for her -
The Volunteers,For her went up their dying prayers:
So vast the Nation, yet so strong the tie.What doubt shall come, then, to deter
The Republic's earnest faith and courage high.


.

Gloomy humbugs and bug bears

From Melville's The Confidence Man, which I've been rereading after finishing P.T. Barnum's Struggles and Triumphs (more on that later...maybe. I haven't been into commitment of late). The following is from Chapter IX: "Two Business Men Transact a Little Business." The two men are discussing the stock market:

"Why, the most monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked art of manufacturing depressions; spurious Jeremiahs; sham Heraclituses, who, the lugubrious day done, return, like sham Lazaruses among the beggars, to make merry over the gains got by their pretended sore heads—scoundrelly bears!"

"You are warm against these bears?"

"If I am, it is less from the remembrance of their stratagems as to our stock, than from the persuasion that these same destroyers of confidence, and gloomy philosophers of the stock-market, though false in themselves, are yet true types of most destroyers of confidence and gloomy philosophers, the world over. Fellows who, whether in stocks, politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion—be it what it may—trump up their black panics in the naturally-quiet brightness, solely with a view to some sort of covert advantage. That corpse of calamity which the gloomy philosopher parades, is but his Good-Enough-Morgan."

"I rather like that," knowingly drawled the youth. "I fancy these gloomy souls as little as the next one. Sitting on my sofa after a champagne dinner, smoking my plantation cigar, if a gloomy fellow come to me—what a bore!"

"You tell him it's all stuff, don't you?"

"I tell him it ain't natural. I say to him, you are happy enough, and you know it; and everybody else is as happy as you, and you know that, too; and we shall all be happy after we are no more, and you know that, too; but no, still you must have your sulk."

"And do you know whence this sort of fellow gets his sulk? not from life; for he's often too much of a recluse, or else too young to have seen anything of it. No, he gets it from some of those old plays he sees on the stage, or some of those old books he finds up in garrets. Ten to one, he has lugged home from auction a musty old Seneca, and sets about stuffing himself with that stale old hay; and, thereupon, thinks it looks wise and antique to be a croaker, thinks it's taking a stand-way above his kind."

Close-up: Melville looks closely and curiously at two heads.

Since I've been unable to settle on a single or series of cinematic close-ups, I could not help but think of one of the most fascinating close-ups in literature. Moby Dick is teeming with chapters closely examining the physical nature of whales and whale hunting and such, but two chapters immediately sprung to mind. Both are in the middle of the book, when the Pequod has (through a series of events) two whale heads hung from her sides: one from a sperm whale's head, and the other from a right whale. Melville's scrutiny and pondering, as expressed through Ishmael, is so infectious that it had me interested in the otherwise driest parts of cetalogy. Starting with Chapter 74 and the portion concerning a sperm whale's vision.:

*****
THE SPERM WHALE'S HEAD - CONTRASTED VIEW

Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own.

Of the grand order of folio Leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck: - where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?

In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt color of his head at the summit, giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a "grey-headed whale".

Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads - namely, the two most important organs, the eye and the ear.

Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.

Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. in a word, the position of the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man - what, indeed, but his eyes?

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.

A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. so long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things - however large or however small - at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.

*****

Read the rest of the chapter here. And then the following chapter: THE RIGHT WHALE'S HEAD - CONTRASTED VIEW And for imagery's sake, here's the right whale's head:

More movies, Mr. Malick

As Wagstaff mentioned, Terence Malick could do wonders with Typee, Omoo, Mardi and "The Encantadas" – the “Melville period” they would call it…that is, if he chose to do it. At Malick’s pace, that “period” would span several decades. Still, as I add on the following suggestions, I would urge Master Malick to work faster, please.

I figure, with The New World, he’s pretty much done Emerson.

Assuming it would be too much to ask Malick to direct a picture corresponding to each of Melville’s stories, he could concentrate on two periods of Melville’s life:

Part 1) the seafaring years – essentially Typee thru White Jacket – an adventerous period of whaling, jumping ship, living with cannibals, taking part in a mutiny, working at a bowling ally in the Sandwich Islands, hopping aboard a US Navy vessel around the cape and back home. Malick could pick from it like a seasoned old lady picks from a bountiful produce market. Good stuff, and lots of it.

Part 2) the Pittsfield years – roughly the period when he met Hawthorne and reworked Moby Dick up to the Piaza Tales and short stories around it. Malick would have ample opportunity to show lush leafy Massachusetts nature through any number of his autobiographical works – such as a picturesque hike he took with Hawthorne and some other literary friends up Mount Greylock. For the winter season, Malick could choose Melville’s visit to a paper factory in the "Tartarus of Maids". Just thinking of various episodes in Melville’s work as if it were in a Malick movie, will make one smile. I'd pay $8.50 to see his adaptation of Clarel.

When he’s through with Melville, he should do The Scarlet Letter up right – to make up for the damage done by Roland Joffé, Demi Moore and Gary Oldman. In fact, any Hawthorne Malick could spare us would be most appreciated. And then there’s salts like Conrad to tackle.
But back to reality….I just want more Malick movies – wherever they come from. Perhaps he’s been sitting on another script for decades, like he did with The New World. Please, please….