A Month of Somedays

Astral Facts, February 2014

A Month of Somedays

Astral: (Theosophy) Consisting of, belonging to, or designating, a kind of supersensible substance alleged to be next above the tangible world in refinement; as, astral spirits; astral bodies of persons; astral current.

  

As we hit the end of February, I always find it interesting that the shortest month seems to have the most packed into it.  Every four years we need to add an extra day.  It is National Black Heritage Month, the SuperBowl is usually near the start of the month (extra super in the Pacific Northwest this year), the first Saturday of the month is always “Ice Cream for Breakfast Day” (hard to find those cards at Hallmark though), Valentine’s day is on the 14^th,  the 26^th is always “National Pistachio Day,” and the 22^nd is always “National World Thinking Day.”  Four years from now, it’s another Olympic Season to boot!

It is a time of birthdays as well, with three of my children, my brother, my uncle Walter and my grandfather, and even me myself celebrating birthdays.  And, by the way, we also celebrate the birthdays of the Presidents.  It used to be that we noted the two most famous individually – Lincoln on the 12^th and Washington on the 22^nd  - but with the establishment of Martin Luther King’s holiday in January, we seem to have maxed out the quota for Federal Holidays, so those two got compressed into the Monday in between: the 17^th this year.

But it’s also a good time to light a fire in the fireplace and curl up with a bowl of popcorn and a good book on a cold winter’s day.  Here in the Astral Facts labyrinth, the question about what makes a “good” book gets a lot of play.  

Recently I was chatting with a colleague during lunch, and she said her grown son and some of his friends who also took a “non-humanities” track in college have been doing an informal “book club” activity to try to fill in those missing gaps in their world view.  She said he suggested that they next read Herman Melville’s  Moby-Dick together, and his suggestion was loudly shouted down by his peers.  Apparently they had heard about the book, and what they heard hadn’t been good.  It seems like one of those things like Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Nora Helmer – either you love them or you hate them.

But as a book, Moby-Dick is more than a book, which we can say about most great literature.  For those reluctant to take a flying leap into the water, I might suggest easing into it by paging through the book Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick.  Its pocket sized 127 pages could serve to whet one’s appetite for the full course of around 700 pages (depending on the edition). 

And perhaps it is fitting to consider this in February as we focus on Black Heritage Month and the Monday between the birthdays of those two great presidents, for at the time of its publication in 1851, the United States was also in the time between those two great men and the establishment and maintenance of this country as a republic, of the people, by the people, and for the people – including all the people.

Philbrick observes how Melville has sailed the ship as a metaphor across an allegory of the sea, which can be looked at from a distance, but then applied up close.  Philbrick notes the section where Melville describes the melting of the whale blubber to extract the whale oil, a predecessor to the petroleum that fuels our current society:

“To kindle a fire on an oil-soaked wooden ship was risky at best, but it was the only way to boil the blubber into oil.  Wood was used to start the fire in the brick try-works, but once rendering of the blubber had begun, the flames were fed with the crispy bits that floated up to the top of the bubbling try-pots.  This meant that the fire that consumed the whale was fed with pieces of the whale’s own body.  The smoke that poured forth from this organically fueled flame smelled even worse than the fumes from burned human hair.  According to Ishmael, ‘It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres.  It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit’” (90).

And as the ship maneuvers, it is surrounded by this dense fog of smoke as it ploughs through the darkness of day and blindness of night, dragging this corpse of the whale – “plunging into that darkness of blackness, seeming [to be] the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul,” [referring to Capt. Ahab].  And as this continues, Ishmael finds himself turned around so that he is facing the stern rather than the bow and he must steer in the opposite direction of where he wants to go in order to get there (90-91).

In this scene of twisting and confusion, Ishmael recognizes, “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness” (91). 

Melville’s insight, according to Philbrick is “What is needed more than anything else in the midst of a crisis is a calm, steadying dose of clarity, the kind of omniscient, all-seeing perspective symbolized by an eagle on the wing” (91).  

Here Melville presents the metaphor:

  “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” (91).    

Philbrick further observes,

 “Here Melville provides a description of the ideal leader, the anti-Ahab who instead of anger and pain relies on equanimity and judgment, who does his best to remain above the fray, and who even in the darkest of possible moments resists the ‘woe that is madness,’” (91).

Philbrick continues,

 “As I have said before, Moby-Dick is a book that was written for the future.  In this portrait of a person who resists the fiery, disorienting passions of the moment, who has the soul of a high-flying Catskill eagle, Melville, in his preternatural way, has hit upon a description of the political figure America desperately needed in 1851 but who would not appear on the national stage until almost a decade later, when Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States” (91-92).

Of course, it is just a story, and it seemed to fit in that time and that place.  

However, these things tend to have resonance that vibrates through time as well as up and down the levels of society.  Who knows, maybe some can see the application in the here and now!?

Walter Lowe
Astral Facts is a somewhat regular presentation of Humanities Science, produced in the bowels of the Humanities Science offices during the academic year.