The Man of Sorrows: Ishmael and Melville’s Misericord
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The autonomous individual does not treat his own conclusions and decisions as authoritative but chooses with his eyes open, and then keeps his eyes open. He has the courage to admit that he may have been wrong even about matters of the greatest importance.
-Walter Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice
This paper will examine Melville’s democratic tragedy as a call for fellow feeling in the face of man’s insuperable longing for wholeness and universal suffering (Milder 23). Specifically, I will examine Moby-Dick in relation to the concept of misericord: a unique form of sympathy, associated with heartfelt commiseration, as well as mercy, compassion, pity, and charity. “In the teachings of the Christian churches, charity was a religious emotion, a divine fire that destroyed the love of self to make room for the love of God and neighbors. Closely related to charity or caritas was mercy or misericordia” (Pullan 447). Tragic insight into the absence of divine sympathy, fills man’s heart with sorrow, misericord; he is bound to his shipmates, his brethren, not from the depth of his intellect, but by the strength of his spine and the depth of his sympathies. Inspired by Shakespeare, Melville created Ishmael, his pilot-prophet of the democratic man, and Ahab, his tragic hero in the manner of an Old Testament king. Together with the crew of the Pequod, they harvest the purest fuel for illumination (spermaceti oil) from “the dark side of earth,” rather than “the theoretic bright one” which Emerson described in the Over-Soul (Melville 467). From the depths of his sorrow, Ishmael calls the reader onwards. Ishmael’s emphasis on the universal brotherhood of mankind should not be attributed to the ideals of man, but to the ordeals of man. Ahab’s quest to pierce the “ungraspable phantom of life” leads him to forsake the warmth of human sympathy in search of divine recognition but his labyrinthine hunt for the white whale ends in an abysmal downward vortex that swallows all but Ishmael. Like the rest of the crew, Ishmael joined with Ahab in his Promethean rebellion. Yet, while Ahab, like Prometheus, is bound in fatal agony to his tormentor, Ishmael is unbound and castaway.
Ishmael finds his salvation in a coffin and, like Lazarus, rises from the ashes of the Pequod’s fatal collision with the walls of Fate. Man cannot “strike through the mask” of illusion; “the prisoner” cannot “reach…through the wall” (Melville 145). Yet perhaps another passage to freedom remains, that of the “Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel!” (Melville 146). Their sympathy is for themselves and their brethren and against the chaos that looms in the inscrutable depths of nature and lurks even in the familiar. The pull of celestial white becomes siren-like; drawing man lee-ward only to bash him against the rocks. Thus “the incantation of this whiteness… is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind” (Melville 175). To Ahab, the white whale becomes inhumanity and chaos personified, and in doing battle with it, he becomes a sort of Anti-Christ, who seeks satisfaction, not through prayer, but through defiance. In “The Whiteness of the Whale” Ishmael senses that all “stately or lovely emblazoning… are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within” (Melville 175). Ishmael’s direct experience with the tragic undrside of man’s Romantic illusion of divinity, only serves to bring man to his knees. Ishmael’s renaissance is a felix culpa; his salvation is disillusion.
Ishmael assumes the responsibility of a modern Moses, who leads his tribe from the torture of fire worship to the worship of “visible truth.” Ishmael asks the reader: “Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.” Similarly, in “Extracts,” Ishmael, surveying the expansive references at the beginning of the book, compiled by the “Sub-Sub-Librarian,” sends the reader off.
Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm…—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!… But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!
In this manner, Ishmael comes to embody the vocation of “pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things” “who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven” (Melville 42-3). In a similar fashion, Melville asserted that “With no son of man do I stand upon any etiquette or ceremony, except the Christian ones of charity and honesty” (Melville 511). According to the Encyclopedia of European Social History:
In the teachings of the Christian churches, charity was a religious emotion, a divine fire that destroyed the love of self to make room for the love of God and neighbors…Christ and to find him in deprived and afflicted people and in wanderers, pilgrims, galley slaves, and the inmates of jails (Pullan 447).
Current usage of this word relates predominately to “A shelving projection on the underside of a hinged seat in a choir stall which, when turned up, gave support to a person standing in the stall” (OED). Other historical meanings include:
“a “larger measure of wine” given to a sick monk, to the short dagger or “sharp, straight, double-edged poignard that is called a misericord” (Bacchelli), used to “finish off” a wounded or dying enemy… But above all, the term was and is used to indicate the instruments of first aid to the sick or wounded… and the pious associations and confraternities that …centred on the works of mercy: burial of the dead, succour of the poor and sick, charitable works towards widows, orphans and these in Prison. Even the bell that summoned the members of the Compagnia in emergencies was also – by metonymy – called a misericord (Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages)”
The phrase misericord seems conducive to an analysis of Melville’s conception of charity for many of these reasons, especially its special relation to orphans.
In “Monkey-Rope,” Ishmael alludes to an “interregnum in Providence; for… even-handed equity never could have sanctioned so gross an injustice” (Melville 287). Here he is speaking of the risk that man poses to his fellow man; one man’s accident could be the death of an innocent interconnected individual. While Ishmael senses injustice, Queequeg takes action and demonstrates an instinctual sympathy for the suffering of others. Twice, he saves men from the deeps while others stand and watch self-consciously. On the first occasion, he saves the life of a man who had just insulted him and whom he had just pummeled with the rear-end of his harpoon. Yet, while Queequeg is proud, he is not vengeful. When the same sailor is swept overboard, he dives in after him and brings him back safely to land. Upon witnessing this authentic act of misericord, Ishmael exclaims:
Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians (Melville 54).
Here we find Ishmael juxtaposing Queequeg, the Christ-like cannibal, against the virtue-signalling of urbane societies of misericord (fraternal charitable institutions) and finding the latter to be wanting in relation. As Ishmael joked, I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy” (Melville 45).
The readiness with which Queequeg accepts Ishmael demonstrates the depth of his sympathy, while the cannibal’s insistence upon splitting his prior earnings with Ishmael shows him to be closer to Christ than any Christian we encounter in the book. In contrast to Queequeg , Ishmael marvels at “The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!” In emphasizing Queequeg’s superior moral character, Ishmael venerates the cannibal alongside (or above) the Christian. Ishmael’s emphasis of Queequeg’s humanities may have a precedent in the Calvinist concept of misericord. In his book, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England, Abram van Engen emphasizes
Calvin’s sense that sympathy arises from human nature and extends to all. In fact, Calvin believes that even fallen, unredeemed human nature tends to melt at the suffering of others─a sentiment he often expresses with words like ‘misericord’ (mercy), ‘condolescere’ (condolences), and ‘humanitas’ (humanity)…Here, sympathy means being affected by the misery of another, and Calvin thought such a response fundamental to being human (Van Engen 35).
Calvin viewed misericord as an inherently human affect but his his highest conception of sympathy, love of the brethren, was reserved for those united in the body of Christ. Man finds himself amidst an “interregnum in Providence” (Melville 287), man must serves as his brother’s keeper.
I would like to propose that Melville’s misericord exists in the absence of divine sympathy and inverts this hierarchy by equating misericord and love of the brethren. As Richard Broadhead writes, “By positing a lowest common denominator of human identity he makes the stranger just like himself; by reversing his preconceived definitions of civilized and savage he makes the cannibal not only acceptable but actually desirable as a companion” (Broadhead 136). This form of fellow feeling is forged in the depths of the sorrowful heart of a man who has “survived himself,” that is, overcome egocentrism through tragedy. Such a man becomes a kind of pilot-prophet with “doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly”; “neither believer nor infidel, but…a man who regards them both with equal eye” (Melville 335). Like his prodigal son, Ishmael, Melville stated, in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, that
a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth -- and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister” (Melville 335).
Melville’s sense of equality is derived in opposition to Emerson’s transcendental concept of self-reliance. Similarly, Milder notes that “compassion for others, as much as loftiness in oneself, was for Melville the very mark and measure of the tragic vision” (Milder 65).
Melville expressed this sentiment in another letter to Hawthorne of his letters to Hawthorne. “Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses—for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it—not in [a] set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation” (Melville 514). Whereas, Emerson’s equates man’s highest instinct to Reason, separating spiritual awareness from empiricism, Melville elevates authentic and unconscious misericord. It is from the depths of their sympathy that men draw their strength and “in those men who have fine brains and work them well, the heart extends down to hams. And though you smoke them with the fire of tribulation, yet, like veritable hams, the head only gives the richer and the better flavor. I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head” (Melville 512). As Milder writes: “Not only was love "compatible with universal wisdom," as Emerson wrote in his own essay on Shakespeare, it was the natural consequence of wisdom, and wisdom the precondition for the highest love. And both of these things emanated from sorrow. Thus the tenderness and sympathy in Hawthorne's work could furnish "clews" for Melville of an "intricate, profound heart" deeply touched by suffering, for only "this only can enable a man to depict it in others" (Milder 65). Herein lies the essence of Melville’s Hawthorne and his Mosses.
Melville’s sense of “shared victimhood” is the axis upon which his ethics and metaphysics turn. What makes the whiteness of the whale so terrifying is its inscrutability. The question becomes, not necessarily whether or not there is a God, but as Goethe writes, “What is Praedestinatio? Answer: God is more powerful and wiser than we are; therefore he deals with us as he pleases.” So what is man to do with himself? Milder argues,
The basis for egalitarian brotherhood in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" is not "humility before God," as F O. Matthiessen claimed of Melville…; it is vulnerability before apparent godlessness. Ontologically, democracy rests on what Melville called "the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiassed, native and profounder workings"…From this it draws the ethical and political corollary that a shared victimhood communalizes us beyond differences of wealth, class, race, gender, education, and taste (Milder 66).
Hawthorne and Melville seemed to share a perception of the self-reliant individual as a potentially dangerous narcissist who could easily perceive a “dark necessity” behind their manipulative and self-centered actions. Both writers seemed to find the cure to the malady of egotism in the same heart it consumes: the ideal individual is tempered by sympathy. This can be seen most clearly in Hawthorne’s story The Minotaur.
Hawthorne describes Theseus wandering through the labyrinth guided by Ariadne’s sympathy: “He would have left quite lost, and utterly hopeless of ever again walking in a straight path, if, every little while, he had not been conscious of a gentle twitch at the silken cord. Then he knew that the tender-hearted Ariadne was… giving him just as much of her sympathy as if she were close by his side. O, indeed, I can assure you, there was a vast deal of human sympathy running along that slender thread of silk.” The Scarlet Letter, shares Mapple’s preoccupation with truth and authenticity, as well as infidelity and egotism. In both cases, we are admonished to be True and shown that there are consequences for naïve hubris. Father Mapple proclaims:
Woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!’ (Melville 42-3).
Both Arthur and Jonah shrink from perceived moral necessity when it seems to compel them to face some primal terror, which in both cases, delivering “mortally intolerable truths” to an angry mob. Although they are charged with the duty of proclaiming God’s truth, they shrink from their responsibility due to fear of their fellow man. Whether through weakness or hubris, they slip into egocentrism and seek to flee instead. “Bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached” (Melville 42). Similarly, Arthur is compelled to confront the sanctified with the unwelcome truth of his wickedness, yet he too is “appalled at the hostility it should raise” and “fled from his mission” to the forest, where he “sought to escape his duty” by fleeing via ship with Hester and Pearl.
This emancipated individual would be a non-conformist and a free-thinker but their egotism would be checked by their commitment to truth and sympathy. As Father Mapple preached, “Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.” At the same time, Melville illustrates how Transcendental worship of the sun, only increases the gulf between the ideal and the actual. The transcendental ideal fails its hypothetical test and Ishmael must “make a life-buoy of the coffin” and return to tell the tale (Melville 464). The “universal thump” is the cost of membership in society, as each man must wear a “monkey-rope,” but it is, at the same time, your only hope of getting your “shoulder-blades” rubbed. The universal thump is the tragic aspect of man’s condition, but it also serves as a thread of sympathy which conjoins all individuals, whether they recognize it or not.
The mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof; calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:— through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally (Melville 437).
It seems that the riddle of the Oedipal Sphynx, is man’s permanent condition (Milder 23).
Ishmael returns to land with a “free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy” but, nevertheless, we find him still cycling between land and sea by at the mercy of his hypos like Bulkington, who had fallen from the prow to a watery death. Ishmael invokes a Stoic resolve in the face of inevitable death, having already faced its direct prospect. “Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case may be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest” (Melville 205). Ishmael’s renaissance, however, merely prepares him for another “cool, collected dive at death and destruction” (Melville 205). The Pequod’s Promethean quest finds man orphaned but not without light. Ishmael points out that society is a joint stock venture. The example of Ishmael’s friendship with Queequeg shows him to be a man who can overcome prejudice through fellow feeling and an appreciation for subtle truths. The personage of Queequeg shows that ‘moral refinement’ seems to have resulted in a loss of essential humanity.
F.O. Matthiessen likens Ahab’s fatal pride to Lear’s and argues that Melville’s emphasis on Fate was partially attributable to the residue of Puritanism and partly driven by his skepticism regarding Emersonianism and points to Ahab’s tragedy is a “fearful symbol” of the tragic consequences of “self-enclosed individualism” or egotism (Matthiessen 455-9). Matthiessen wrote, “A concentrated view of Ahab will disclose that he was born from the matrix of Melville’s age. He is an embodiment of his author’s most profound response to the problem of the free individual will in extremis, Melville’s first detailed characterization of him stresses his apartness and his suffering, his ‘infinity of firmest fortitude,’ and yet the ‘crucifixion in his face.’ (Matthiessen 447-448). Mapple’s sermon, on the other hand, defines the pilot-prophet’s mission in terms of self-overcoming: “all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.” (Melville 37). Here, we might perceive the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated the book.
Matthiessen may overstate the significance of Puritan’s influence on Melville but it seems to have been one of many factors that influenced his conception of evil (Milder 23). Milder sees a pattern of discontent in Melville’s work and argues that
Whatever the literary mode and degree of authorial distance, the underlying attitudes were bitterness toward God for his detachment from history and a visceral indignation at the callousness of human beings. ‘We talk of the Turks, and abhor cannibals,’ Redburn says, but may not some of them, go to heaven, before some of us? We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of the world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its dead. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys, will we become what Christianity is striving to make us” (Milder 24-5).
Melville elevates moral feeling over moral norms, fidelity over familiarity, and common humanity over civilization. Above all else, however, Melville emphasizes the importance misericord. In a letter to Hawthorne, Melville wrote “that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. ‘All is vanity.’ ALL.” (Melville 380). In this passage, Melville explicitly correlates fidelity and virtue with a sorrowful heart. Conversely, he emphasizes that a joyful temperament is evidence of a mortification related to an excess of egocentrism. In his essay Circles, Emerson wrote that “We all stand waiting, empty, — knowing, possibly, that we can be full…Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things.” Ahab believes that he may be that god. He perceives that “all visible objects” are but as pasteboard masks” and he becomes unable to tolerate their inscrutability. In his defiant spirit, he is possessed by an unquenchable desire to, as Emerson wrote, “burn up the veil which shrouded all things.” He devotes himself completely to his desire for vengeance believing that in
the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me (Melville 145).
Hawthorne might as well have been describing Ahab, when he related that “there is a pleasure--perhaps the greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible--in displaying the wasted or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is that cancer, or that crime, which constitutes their respective individuality.” In a similar manner, Melville wrote:
Small reason was there to doubt…that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung (Melville 164-165).
Ahab’s dying soliloquy is the antithesis to Dimmesdale’s, as Ahab dies vaingloriously, celebrating his Promethean transgression and reveling in his Titanic contempt and in misericord with Tashtego, who had fastened a bird to the mast with his hammer and thus, “like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it” In a frenzied rage, Ahab thrust his spear into and “piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” (Melville 164-165):
‘I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! (Melville 507).
In his steadfast and defiant death, Ahab functions as a cathartic vehicle for both the writer and the sympathetic reader. Tragically immersed in his fatal limitations, he now turns away from the sun and unrepentantly curses Moby-Dick and plummets to the depths, “fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate” along with all but Ishmael (Melville 507). Towards thee I roll,” Ahab cries, “thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; 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, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!’ (Melville 507). In spite, Ahab turns himself from the sun and acknowledges the overwhelming presence of evil in the world or, rather, its inhumanity and dies in violent defiance of it.
Earlier, however, Ahab asserted his brotherhood with an ancient Leviathan: ‘He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh that these too-favoring eyes should see these too-favoring sights. (Melville 441). In his search for possession of the divine fire of unmediated insight, however, he becomes imbalanced. On the third day of the chase, Ahab reflects that, “thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it” (Melville 498). Ahab’s singular preoccupation with his fiery hate has made him hard but frigid. In a moment of clarity, Ahab laments “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?” (Melville 481). Ahab’s monomania has sundered his humanities yet, in his final confrontation with Moby-Dick, we sense in ourselves a common plight, a bond of misericord. As Broadhead writes, Melville “shows us a world so fully inhuman that Ahab’s rite of cosmic defiance seems like a noble and necessary response; then he returns us to an everyday world in which canny skill and cheerful sociability seem like sufficient images of ultimate value” (Broadhead 151). The novel does not seek to provide a transcendental solution to the human condition but, rather, sees synthesis in the conscious acceptance of discord.
In “The Try-Works” Ishmael seems to momentarily lose himself to the dark siren call of Ahab’s world. He sees a world of darkness and flames spread out before him and realizes that he has lost sight of the ship’s compass. Awakening from his dream, he realizes that he is facing the wrong way and turns the rudder in just enough time to avoid sinking the ship. Ultimately, it seems, Ishmael is saved by his skepticism, whereas Ahab is doomed by the fixture of his purpose. Accordingly, Ishmael issues a direct warning to the reader.
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar (Melville 380).
As Emerson wrote, “The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When, at night, I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association.” Broadhead comes to a similar conclusion: “The Catskill eagle may dive or soar, may see grounds for disbelief, doubt, or faith, but it can never alight. We will never achieve a fast repose of final knowledge either of ourselves or of our world: we can only have a self and a world in mutable motion, the experience, sometimes satisfying, sometimes desperately wearing, of the weaving of the warp and woof of existence” (Broadhead 150). Herein lies man’s common bond, in his humanity, for all else is inhuman. The realization that he is at odds with the world can only be justified by the realization that he is not without company. He is conjoined to every other man in misericord, in the recognition of his insuperable longing and through the extension of mercy to himself and others. As Ahab exclaimed “let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God” (Melville 480).
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