Now I'm in for it...so I shall take my stand
Been zipping about, posting here and there, and now some folks have showed up on my modest little site; perhaps I should consider sprucing it up a bit. I am not an erudite political analyst; in fact, I am growing increasingly impatient over would-be wise men on both sides of How America is Contributing to the Fucking Over of the Planet. This is from a poem by Herman Melville, best known as the author of the insanely fabulous novel, Moby Dick; the poem is described as an 18,000-line meditative poem, is entitled "Clarel," and based on this excerpt I want to read it in its entirety:
The Anglo-Saxons - lacking grace
To win the love of any race;
Hated by myriads dispossessed
Of rights - the Indians East and
West.
These pirates of the sphere! grave
looters -
Grave, canting, Mammonite freebooters,
Who in the name of Christ and
Trade
(Oh, buckled forehead of the
brass!)
Deflower the world's last sylvan
glade!
Arrh, Herman, I be with ye! Grab yer marlin spikes and board this sinkin', stinkin' ship o' state,
And send it to Davey Jones' locker!
I am deadly serious. And can you believe the timelessness of Melville's words? (People moan and gripe about how "boring" Moby Dick is to them, BTW, and I say, you aren't reading it deeply enough. Or go get your People magazine and ogle Paris's funny- looking tits, or FLT's; there's someWMD of one's eyesight, anyway. )
No more pulling at one's bottom lip and nodding sagely; no more egotistical Battle of the Nuances bullshit; shut up and go out and do what all these hypocrites did to get into office: create a base, only not one made up of credulous morons.
Okay. Action not merely reaction.
The Anglo-Saxons - lacking grace
To win the love of any race;
Hated by myriads dispossessed
Of rights - the Indians East and
West.
These pirates of the sphere! grave
looters -
Grave, canting, Mammonite freebooters,
Who in the name of Christ and
Trade
(Oh, buckled forehead of the
brass!)
Deflower the world's last sylvan
glade!
Arrh, Herman, I be with ye! Grab yer marlin spikes and board this sinkin', stinkin' ship o' state,
And send it to Davey Jones' locker!
I am deadly serious. And can you believe the timelessness of Melville's words? (People moan and gripe about how "boring" Moby Dick is to them, BTW, and I say, you aren't reading it deeply enough. Or go get your People magazine and ogle Paris's funny- looking tits, or FLT's; there's someWMD of one's eyesight, anyway. )
No more pulling at one's bottom lip and nodding sagely; no more egotistical Battle of the Nuances bullshit; shut up and go out and do what all these hypocrites did to get into office: create a base, only not one made up of credulous morons.
Okay. Action not merely reaction.
posted by isabelita at 11:20 AM
4 Comments:
Isa,
I found Moby Dick to be very salient for the times. Melville really was ahead of the game. Here's one of my related posts while I was reading Moby Dick:
"In the last pages, I got to thinking that Melville was particularly prescient and his work is a marvelous parable reflecting today's political situation. If Osama bin Laden is Moby Dick, that makes W Ahab. This begs the question, if this parallel can be drawn why is it that OBL has been reduced to a secondary or even tertiary concern for W while Ahab never relents. Perhaps it is because W read the book. No, that can't be. He doesn't read."
There is more at the following link:
http://educationalwhisper.blogspot.com/2005/07/moby-dick-obl-w.html
kathyr: Yes, I suppose things have always been shitty. I also tend to be pessimistic, and so I wonder if we're approaching one of the final turns of this terrible cycle. I think I responded to these lines of Melville's because they held such a strong recognition of humans' awfulness.
I wish we could mutate and get out of this hole...
windspike, I'm not sure I buy the W/Ahab, OBL/Moby Dick interpretation. W has NEVER, from what I've read about him, been focused on any one thing for very long, nor accomplished or completed anything successfully. Ahab, maddened as he was by wanting that whale, at least had staying power, even if it was fatal. He also knew how to do his job. However, there were many passages in which Melville made authorial asides about the society of his times which could be accurately depicting ours. Evidently Melville was very disturbed by the excessive greed of the Gilded age... My copy of MD is adrift somewhere in our son's room, flotsam under his futon, I fear, so I can't look them up...
No, W sure as hell don't read; probably Laura reads to him.
Oh yeah, the blessed English, them from whom we got our 'moral values'. That certainly is a past-prescient (if there is such a thing) excerpt from Melville. Yes, let's not forget that the first slave ship chartered under the Queen of England's blessing was called 'The Good Ship Jesus'.
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