LIKE SHIPS IN THE NIGHT
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
July 22, 2001
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was without form and void,
and darkness was upon the face of the deep;
and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters."
(Genesis 1:1-2)
How quickly we forget the earth is round. So ready we are to flee restraint, to launch out and away from, to go to sea. I first relished the ocean at the age of twenty, leaving New York harbor aboard the Queen Frederica headed for the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. A spare two weeks I reveled in salt air and the rocking of the wave-tossed vessel that I boarded without a backward glance. Did the mere reality that my foothold was a stolid ocean liner in any way diminish my sense of adventure? Did I swell with any less bravado than if I had marched straightaway onto a spare fishing vessel or a mere yacht? I inhaled the salt spray as if drawing my first breath.
Of course Anna wanted to go to sea. "I was twenty," she recounts. "People are always crazy at that age--and I wanted to work on a yacht." As a barmaid on a luxury vessel, she headed for the Atlantic, and her story unfolds through a nameless narrator, who joins her at a nameless port.
"Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?" queries Ishmael, soon to depart the harbor of Nantucket on the Pequod, whose course was charted by the formidable Captain Ahab.
How is it that the voyages of Anna and her companion narrator and Ahab and Ishmael coalesce–the voyage of Anna and friend in Marguerite Duras’ novel, The Sailor from Gibraltar, the voyage of Ahab and Ishmael and the crew of the Pequod in Herman Melville’s magnum opus, Moby Dick? While these works are incomparable in scale and over a century distant in writing–Melville’s published in 1851, Duras’ in 1947, there are strains that rise up from both in a harmony that has long haunted me.
Now I will not and could not begin to re-tell these sagas. Duras and Melville have rendered their arts with brilliance that only a fool would attempt to distill. Of course fools and angels keep company with astonishing regularity, but I’ll try to refrain from joining either camp. I shall only allude to dimensions of these works that coalesce in my ponderings. And no reference, no quote, even if from the final pages of either work, would ever "give away" the story, for each is much more, so much more, than a plot or a storyline. One must embark with no thought of return into the pages of Duras and the full tome of Melville, to know the depths plumbed by each.
Fragile indeed are the roots of those who would go to sea for a voyage of any considerable length. "Call me Ishmael." That compelling trinity of words that opens Melville’s saga echoes the tale of that earlier Ishmael, the outcast son of Abraham and his mistress Hagar. Yet Hagar had been told by an angel of the Lord to call her child Ishmael, which means "God hears," for she had been rescued from the wilderness into which she had been cast. Melville’s Ishmael ventures into the wilderness of the sea, yet hears and sees and reports all that transpires. He is a faithful and modest witness, neither judging nor absolving those who board the Pequod–most especially, the tormented Captain Ahab.
In his introduction to the Heritage Press edition of this classic, Clifton Fadiman describes the Pequod as "a heaving hell of lonely and grief-touched souls, whose solitudes are gathered up and made manifest in the figure of Ahab." (viii) On Christmas Day, the Pequod sets sail from Nantucket.
"Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic." (Melville, Moby Dick, The Heritage Press 1943 edition, 112)
From the outset, the Pequod’s captain made it ominously clear to his crew that his mission was singular--to capture the white-headed whale known as Moby Dick.
Now Ahab’s presence was striking not only in that lock-jawed face with a seaward glare, but in the steady clump of the percussive instrument that was his wooden leg. Starbuck, the first mate, takes courage and questions the captain as to whether it was this same Moby Dick who took off with his leg.
"Aye…it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye…..Aye, aye! And I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! To chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out." (173)
The ever-wary Starbuck dares to question further: "‘I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance…. Vengeance on a dumb brute…that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’" (174)
Ahab’s vengeance is quick to find words:
"‘All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event–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….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." (174)
How far was Ahab’s relentless vow from the New Testament message of Paul to the Romans: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." (Romans 12:19) Yet vengeance was Ahab’s. Aboard the Pequod were rootlessness, restlessness, and a parching thirst for revenge.
This rootlessness, this restlessness, and a peculiarly variant form of vengeance are so at the heart of Duras’ tale. Of the narrator, we know only that he was a long-suffering civil servant from Paris who had just dumped his girlfriend, bored with her chatter. "I was tired by life, one of those whose tragedy it was never to have encountered a pessimism equal to their own," he reports. (27) So he strikes up a relationship with the magnetically beautiful Anna, reputed to be searching the globe for a nameless sailor with whom she had long ago engaged in a torrid affair, a sailor from Gibraltar who was said to have murdered an American in Paris and was ever in flight from capture. It was an affair Anna was driven to resume, with a vengeance driven by an amorous score to settle, for in this encounter, she had left a piece of her soul and had become no longer Anna but the woman in pursuit of the Sailor from Gibraltar.
It had begun soon after she had first gone to sea. Only hours out, a man in a rowboat was sighted. He was hauled on board, thirsty and tired.
"When I try to remember his voice it’s always those words I hear," Anna recounts. " The sort of thing people say all the time, but that’s more or less important according to the circumstances…. His face was burned and stripped by the sun and the sea; his hands were raw from rowing… He was young, twenty. But he’d already had time to become a criminal. I’d only had time to go to the cinema." (121)
Of her discovery that he had murdered a man, she discounts it: "….he’d done it almost involuntarily." In the next breath, she discounts his sentiment for her. "’he didn’t love me. He could have done without me, without anybody…’" So what was her attraction? "‘….when you have met innocence, when you’ve seen it sleep beside you, you can never quite forget it.’" And our narrator, blasé meeting blasé, replies: "I’ve always thought…that anyone who makes someone else doubt the foundations of his morals hasn’t lived in vain.’" (121)
Long after this first encounter with her sailor, Anna had married a wealthy industrialist. One evening in Marseilles, walking through the early morning streets with her husband, her sailor appeared. She managed a tryst. Again he disappeared. She abandoned her husband, who died soon after but left his yacht to Anna, and at the helm of the newly-named Gibraltar, she was off to the far reaches of the globe in her search. He who tells the tale joins Anna in a complicity of flirtatious intrigue as port after port, they play out her search, stirring their compatible ennui in glass after glass of whiskey and Pernod.
"‘…perhaps she would have liked me to ask her where we were heading for, or to say something about my going, or the dusk, or the sea, or the motion of the ship, or perhaps about the feelings you experienced at suddenly finding yourself on that ship…. I might have thought she expected me to express some opinion about all these things that were so new to me. But I didn’t really think so….how could I have any opinion, even about the dusk, even about what sort of a sea it was? Once one had embarked on this ship, and without actually having decided to do so, one could have no opinion about anything, even about the setting sun." (130)
They continued on. Port after port, continent after continent, until one afternoon, while all were ashore off the coast of eastern Africa, the Gibraltar was destroyed by fire.
"We considered for a whole evening whether we should leave on a passenger steamer like ordinary people or buy another ship. In the end, so as not to have to separate and to give ourselves something to do, we decided to buy another ship. All we could find..was an old yacht, smaller than the Gibraltar and much less comfortable. But we all felt like a change, so it didn’t bother anyone. Particularly not Anna."
Then, after receiving a message from Havana, they headed for the Caribbean. (318)
How apt is Joseph Conrad’s reference to the sea as "the accomplice of human restlessness!" (Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, 33)
The restless souls of the Gibraltar and the Pequod bear cargoes heavy with obsession, which cannot–no, will not, divert course for anything or anyone. Yet the will of this strange duo is marked not by fate or by some divine destiny, but by an attitude of soul.
The late Dr. Walter Donald Kring, senior minister of this church for the quarter century prior to Forrest’s arrival, had the strange fortune to discover that Melville himself was a member of this congregation, joining in 1885. With this discovery Dr. Kring set out to explore Herman Melville’s religious journey and issued a book under this title. While Kring exposits Melville, he tarries understandably on the sweep of Moby Dick and comes down firmly on the free choice given Ahab by Melville, contending that "Moby Dick is a tragedy because there was free choice." (Kring, 83). The only predetermining factor in Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale was his own monomania. "‘He could have turned away from the chase at any time…." (84)
It is Ahab’s willfulness that renders him mute to anything or anyone who would steer him off course. He has engaged the crew of the Pequod in his voyage of madness, and it is this "chosen madness" from which there is no turning back. Nowhere does this seem so tragically established as in the Pequod’s encounter with The Rachel. As uncommon as it was for ships to pass within mutual visibility on the vast stretches of the Pacific, it happens. It happened. And Ahab’s first words as he waves to the captain of the Rachel: "‘Hast seen the White Whale?’" " ‘Aye, yesterday,’" blew the reply. "’Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?’
In the habit of commanders of crossing ships, the captain of the Rachel boarded the Pequod and immediately revealed his purpose–to engage Ahab and his crew in a search for the missing whaleboat. The men of the Pequod surmised that this was an anxious matter indeed, confirmed by further words from the captain of the Rachel: "‘My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake–I beg, I conjure’…Yet Ahab stood still like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own."
Even when the desperate captain pleaded and petitioned him as a father with his own child safely at home, even when it was revealed that a second son too had been lost in the search, the immutable Ahab bellowed to his crew: "’Avast…touch not a rope-yarn’; then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every word–‘Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time, Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.’ And he retreated to his cabin," at which the stunned Captain Gardiner had no choice but to retreat to his own grieving Rachel. (567-58)
Ahab could have, but would not.
What were the ponderings of this monomaniacal seeker? Ishmael watches and reports: "Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity." (580) But it was the profundity of that great white whale, stealer of Ahab’s leg, that he who had lost all compassion sought to pierce with the lethal flight of his harpoon.
The encounter ensued, and the chase began. One day, two days, three days, they tease and spar. Again Starbuck takes up his cry of blasphemy: "‘Great God! But for one single instant show thyself…never, never wilt thou capture him, old man…Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!" To which Ahab replies:
"Ahab is forever Ahab, man…. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ‘Tis Ahab–his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs… ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet." (601)
Starbuck’s pleading is to a frozen wind. Ahab hurled his line, and just as swiftly was hurled into its coiling velocity to be joined at last with Moby Dick, while the others beheld their own fate as "concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight." (613)
The words of Hart Crane visit me:
"…in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars. "
(from his poem, "At Melville’s Tomb",
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 590)
Who was left to tell the tale but the lone Ishmael, the ill-begotten Ishmael, the biblically castaway son strangely redeemed in the book of Genesis itself? And who rescued Ishmael, but the Rachel–the all-forgiving Rachel, searching for her lost children.
Searching, pursuing, chasing with the monomaniacal intensity of Ahab, the mono-dimensional passion of Anna are souls, ships, that pass in the night. They lap the waves that stare back with a layered mocking that teases as the water-rippled image of the mythical Narcissus teased him into a fateful seduction he would not recognize.
Anna’s voice returns: "….as soon as I found him I knew I should lose him again… he’d been round the world three times. … I said that if he went on like that the world would soon seem too small for him. He used to laugh. He said no, the littleness of the world hadn’t bothered him too much yet, and that its roundness delighted him. He liked the way it was made because like that, when you went away from one place you necessarily got closer to another, and when you had no home a round earth was the best kind you could have."" (179-80)
How quickly we forget the earth is round. So ready we are to flee restraint, to launch out and away from, to enter the restless deeps. The "fierce unrest" that we sang out in our hymn this morning, may not be that disquietude that invites us to knowing or recognition or compassion or forgiveness. Lest we unwittingly vent the passions and obsessions of our own Anna, our own Ahab, our own nameless narrator, our own Starbuck who would plead with our better natures yet sign on with the fateful crew, lest we board those lonely soul-ships that "pass in the night" and dissolve again into darkness, may we be reminded that this earth is round, our course is reversible, and we cannot ultimately flee from a Spirit that moves ever with us, "over the face of the waters."
"Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!
If I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea…"
(Psalm 139:7-9)
They pass like ships in the night, their hulking cargoes bulging with rage, teeming with unsated passion, unleashed onto a course whose wake would alarm Neptune himself–yet a course which by a simple act of will is reversible, is wholly reversible.
A great white-whale surges in each of us. An elusive lover seduces from afar. A grieving Rachel pleads in all of us at the most inept of all possible times to change course. An indifferent narrator stands by, ready to set sail at our whim. A not quite dispassionate Ishmael, incarnation of our own interior wilderness, offers yet another narrative. Ishmael….God hears. How might our tale be told? How might our tale be told? Amen.