Ask Ishmael: The sea

I'm excited! Today we introduce a guest blogger, whom I hope will stick with us for the duration of this project. You can call him Ishmael; he's a friend of mine currently riding the high seas in pursuit of a whale. Whaling is awful! you cry. Yes, my environment-loving friends, I hear you, but remember that in our day we got our energy from giant sea mammals rather than from the ground. To each his own, okay? Also, Ishmael knows what a dirty capitalist machine he's on, and since a hipster never does anything without at least pretending to be ironic, I think we can safely say he's aware of what he's doing. And Ishmael, my friends, is so hip he disdains the very notions of hipsterism.

Anyway, Ishmael has agreed, whenever he's close enough to land to steal a wifi connnection, to get on this blog and answer whatever questions you readers have for him. So with no further ado, I give you installment one of Ask Ishmael.

Q: Dear Ishmael, what does the sea mean to you?

A: The sea, my friends, the sea is life; the sea is the very beating heart of the world! The sea connects all of humanity, past and present, hides us down in our depths, contains a very multitude of souls! Indeed, "the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnabulisms, reveries,; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness. ... The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham..." [1]. I'm not a religious man, but if I believe in anything, I believe in the sea. I give myself over to it.

I once said that “Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out” [2], but perhaps I was speaking metaphorically. Perhaps, too, only in the perils and eddyings of the great rolling ocean can we hope to understand the mystery of this thing called life. Indeed, "in landlessness alone resides the highest truth" [3].

Like Ulysses in the song, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. His song is mine when he says,

                             ...Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die. [4]

Our friend Henry said he went to the woods "because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" [5] -- an honorable sentiment I do not disagree with, and yet--and yet!-- what danger is there in living in a comfortable cabin in the woods! Better that you confront the essential facts of life when trapped on a storm-tossed ship being pushed against a port that offers "safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities" [6], but also sure death! That, my friends, is the cost we must pay if we are to maintain the independence of our souls.

For "better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!" [7] Because the sea, after all, is that which we Americans hold most dear of all: freedom. Captain Jack Sparrow I agree on this.

[1] Melville 422
[2] ibid 399
[3] ibid 110
[4] Tennyson
[5] Thoreau para. 16
[6] Melville 110
[7] ibid 110