What Is It, What Nameless, Inscrutable, Unearthly Thing Is It; What Cozening, Hidden Lord And Master,

“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? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”

I love everything about this passage but line about the judge – God – being dragged to the bar

I don’t know why this part broke me, but this part broke me:

I think that there’s something so stubborn and childlike about it, and in the previous chapter (“the symphony”), Melville describes:

“the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.”

And the way Starbuck speaks to him is almost like a young father to a child, not trying to reason with him but to appeal to speak to his best self; the self that retains agency and control over inexplicable desires that are so very human of us, and certainly not foreign to him:

Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter the course!

I think it is perhaps the desperate outpouring of emotion that arises precisely because this is the point of no return. This confession is not something they will have to live with, or live down.

A childish and stubborn and truthful train of thought, one I think we’ve all experienced to some extent: I want, I want, I want—without knowing how, or why.

"A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, 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."

I didn't expect this ending to be so gruesome. There's something so gutting about a bird being nailed to the mainmast as a flag and thus being pulled down with the ship. It's such a haunting image to end on.

There's something also about the motif of birds in this book; the final paragraph mentions small fowls flying over the whirlpool where the ship goes down, the sea-hawk that stole Ahab's hat, the albatross. So many omens through birds and it feels right that we end with one being caught in the shipwreck of Ahab's hubris.

"of the broken keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg"

Yeah sure why not let's throw another omen on the pile

Starbuck is wishing so so hard that he'd killed this maniac when he had the chance

Tatsuro Yamashita utterly killing it doing backup vocals for his wife, Mariya Takeuchi, at her Souvenir concert in 2000.