Rank: Whale Shark
Groups: Shoal
, Whale Shark
Joined: 1/24/2009
Posts: 272
Location: UK
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Ahab's speech to the severed head of a captured whale is one of my favorite parts of Moby Dick, and was a big influence on book 1.
In fact, this passage was in the frame to be the epigraph for part 4 of Raw Shark Texts for a while, but it was really too long to fit there. It would have been a great opening to that section though...
S
"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"
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Rank: Whale Shark
Groups: Shoal
, Whale Shark
Joined: 1/24/2009
Posts: 272
Location: UK
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On the topic of Moby Dick, thought some folks might be interested to see the way that passages like this –
“Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea--mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides." - Moby Dick, Chapter 94
fed into passages like this –
"What freaks me out, the few times I’ve tried snorkelling, is the huge bank of blue you see when you look out towards the open ocean. Turning my back on it, the scale of it – I don’t know. Mainly, I’m expecting something massive to come rushing out the second I look away and bite my legs off, but partly, maybe, it’s also the scale of the blue itself. Knowing how swimming towards that wall of blue can only make it bigger and bigger and bigger until its face is impossibly massive and all around and behind you too, with the sea floor sloped away to black." The Raw Shark Texts, Chapter 12
I don't usually talk too much about influences on TRST, mainly because I don't want to mess around with other people's readings and associations, but I think the influence Moby Dick - like The New York Trilogy and Jaws - is pretty much a given here, so hopefully I'm not doing any harm by posting this one.
Special gold star if anyone who can spot another MD/TRST like the above.
S
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Rank: Deconstructive Piranha
Groups: Shoal
Joined: 5/7/2009
Posts: 51
Location: Sweden
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This was a really interesting read, and doesn't ruin any of my associations of the book and it's plot. I never read Moby Dick though.
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