For long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched out in one hammock as his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another, and so interfusing, made him mad. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 41 

And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks back at you.  Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Boese)

 Be not afraid of madness; some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon them. After William Shakespeare

Here are two extracts from Herman Melville’s classic treatise on seafaring, whales, obsession, and madness.  These were among the many inspirations of the poem ‘Chapter Forty One’.

Moby–Dick, Chapter 41

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.

Moby Dick Chapter 135

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.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

The Featured Image: Gregory Peck stands steady at the bowsprit as Captain Ahab in  Moby Dick (1956 MGM)

Chapter 41 

From In That Howling Infinite – Poems of Paul Hemphill,Volume 5

© Paul Hemphill 2013.  All rights reserved.

Named for Chapter 41 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, an  allegorical saga of the Mad Captain and his nemesis. On one level it could be the ultimate tribute song. Jack Sparrow, Tom Waits, Captain Ahab and Moby-Dick, Nietzsche, Der Fliegende Holländer, Peter Paul and Mary, Otis Reading, The Ancient Mariner, and Bob Dylan rise from the raging waters. It is a song that is part sea shanty, part treatise on madness and obsession. “Down, down, deep we dove, in a tangle of rigging and rage, down to the deep where the dead sailors sleep, in the darkness of Lucifer’s cage”.

Prologue

 Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen   white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.   Moby Dick, Chapter 135

I met a drunken sailor who sang strange songs to me,
Of acid trips on phantom ships upon the endless sea.
He spoke of brave old Ulysses who’d drifted years and more;
And the lean and hungry Hollander forever barred from shore;
And stories too of the Wandering Jew, cursed by his god to roam.
Exiles all, in pride did fall, long lost to folks back home.

One

I met with Captain Jack as he came limping back
From an all-night drinking party In New York.
And he told to me a tale of a great albino whale
That sunk his pirate schooner west of Cork.
“That’s a tall tale” says I, but He looked me in the eye
And said that He’d seen stranger sights at sea.
So here all its glory is that drunken sailor’s story,
Of a chase that has gone down in mystery.

Two

We found the whale fish off Brazil;
And chased him down to Brazzaville;
I swore an oath that whale to kill –
And that was how it started.
From Galway Town to Killybegs,
We tracked the whale to Winnipeg.
He broke my boat and took my leg,
And left me broken-hearted.

Heave ho and away we go,
If only god could see us.
Bound to the boat for eternity
Or ‘till the sea shall free us.

We chased the whale to Petrograd;
The need for take him drove me mad
From Grozny, south, to Old Baghdad –
He left me empty handed.
We stalked the whale to Marrakech,
He drew me deep into his mesh –
He drank my blood, he ate my flesh,
And with his mark, I’m branded.

Heave ho and away we go,
If only god could see us.
Bound to the boat for eternity
Or ‘till the sea shall free us.

Heave ho and away we go,
If only god could see us.
Bound to the boat for eternity
Or ‘till the sea shall free us.

Three

My broken body and my bleeding soul
Together in anguish lay,
With blinding obsession, unholy procession,
Chasing my reason away.

Down, down, deep down we dove
In a tangle of rigging and rage –
Down to the deep where the dead sailors sleep
In the darkness of Lucifer’s cage.

Down, down, deep down we drove
In the harness of hubris and hate –
For such was the power and such was the pain
Of our tortured and intertwined fate.

The whale and me, in the depths of the sea,
Where only god could see us.
Tied to the mast for eternity
Or ‘til the sea shall free us.

Four

Now, my friend Nietzsche told me this
(and I do believe its’ true):
If you look too long into the abyss,
The abyss looks into you.
And to do thus would not be wise,
For surely that way, madness lies.
You’ll never sail to Honalee,
And you will not be free, no, you will not be free.

The whale and me, in the depths of the sea,
Where only god could see us.
Tied to the mast for eternity
Or ‘til the sea shall free us.

Now some folk say that he’s sailing still;
And some say he’s in heaven;
Some people say he’s on the Dock of the Bay
Or outside the Seven Eleven.
But out on the formless ocean,
Where lovely mermaids go,
Captain Jack, with the whale upon his back,
Is walking Desolation Row.