(THANK GOD SOMEONE, specifically Herman Vaudeville, DID THIS!!!!!
Although I'd be happy to film one myself, too.)
In the beginning, and in the end, there is Ishmael.
One of the pieces of Ishmael as the presumptive narrator of Moby-Dick—except when Melville himself becomes almost
aggressively present on the page—that most interests me is to imagine the
trajectory of a young grumpy possibly ex-schoolmaster and merchant seaman of Manhattan
and/or New England to a tattooed adventuresome storytelling whale man. He
starts as a lonely little man who is pissed off at the world, depressed and
seeking at once the wildness of the sea and the companionship of a friend, and
ends we do not know where.
Because I have felt that grim November in my soul when I do
not feel I fit with the world around me, because I have sought escape and
solace from that feeling in wild places and in the hearts of near-strangers, I
feel somewhat obligated to love and defend Ishmael as a sort of
sibling-traveler. Not that I don’t find him arrogant, prissy, pompous, and a
guileless racist of his time and place—I do—but, perhaps even in those flaws
there is as much resonance with me as there is in the rest of his character.
It’s a bit like looking back at younger versions of yourself and wincing a
little about all that earnestness, and no idea what rough seas would challenge
and upend all one’s sophomoric certainties.
Ishmael becomes a man so thoroughly covered in tattoos that
he has to save out special patches—in between the poetry he inks on himself—to
record the measurements of a whale-skeleton temple in the Arsacides. He becomes
a man at home telling stories in Peruvian bars with cavaliers and priests.
He—conveniently for his author—has been present at all manner of strange whale
sightings and taken careful—though not accurate to biology—measurements of baby
sperm whales and all whale rib cages. He becomes a man up all night drinking in
a stormy gam off the Patagonian coast with the crew of the Samuel Enderby of London. He becomes interesting—never mind his retelling Ahab’s final story,
Ishmael’s own biography would be fascinating.
All of Ishmael’s scraps of adventure are a far cry from the
man who would rather freeze on a bench in the barroom than share a bed at the
Spouter-Inn with a stranger. Albeit, the stranger in question is a cannibal,
but to imagine the life that Ishmael goes on to lead with broadened confidence and
experience replacing his early, petty, anxieties that lead him to pretend to
believe that a tortuously cold and narrow bench is better than the assured a
warmth of an unknown is strangely sweet. I feel I know him.
Many of my friends and I spend our twenties roiled in
self-involved crises and fits of pique. We would be naively and absolutely
certain of things for a week, a month, maybe a year, and then evolve into
something else. We were sponges for experience, and mostly were pretzel twisted
with pretentious rationale for many of our actions. We had hopes higher than
any mast and depressions deeper than any whale can dive, as it were. We were,
many of us, Ishmaels—pre-Pequod.
And we were exhausting. To ourselves, certainly—turning
thirty and putting much of that angsty confusion behind was like taking off the
albatross. Probably more so to people around us, all waiting for us to grow up
just a little bit, soften just the smallest fraction.
In getting to witness Ishmael uncurling from his priggish
principles into a deeper man, I am reminded to not judge anyone as harshly as
my younger self did. I am, we are all, still unfolding and unfinished.
I have scribbled in the margins a note about “those who come
through the fire. Ishmael?” Because Ishmael is fictional, it’s pure and hopeful
speculation that he becomes the sort of person I imagine—broad-minded, mellow,
capable and flappable only by beauty—after his ordeal of sailing with the
single-minded and selfishly obsessed Ahab, and all the other adventures that
come after. I think that there is some crucial bit of grounding that comes from
all the false starts and passionately pursued mistakes that we go through in
forging ourselves. The fire, in my notes, I suppose is all of this—the often
painful uncertainty of joining up with wildness and strange bedfellows and all
things mad and unknown. In coming through the other side of all that
searching—for oneself, whatever the maps and ships’ logs might say—there is
peace.
Ishmael is, I choose to believe, like this. And so there is
hope for all of us who resonate along the same sort of journey.
