Books to bind the broken-hearted: the poetic elevation of Moby-Dick

If you read Story Street, you are probably carrying a mighty hope: to write, to become a writer, to become an author. Like any real hope, that mighty hope is mightily heavy. At certain points the weight becomes too much. We think about writing so much, we talk about writing so much, we steel ourselves to receive writing rejection after writing rejection – and even if we know each rejection is a win, on rough days, those wins don’t feel all that victorious. All this thinking about writing, all this talking about writing – when it becomes too much, when words about writing become nauseating, it can feel as if our very hope is breaking us.

In those moments, at these points, a book often arises to cut through all the noise. This book lands in our lives like a meteorite, like some falling star. In wonder, in fire, the words in this book bind up our wounds, giving us just enough strength to carry on for another season. (I like to imagine shelves of kind, gentle, mighty books somewhere, shelves with famous titans like Moby-Dick and Brothers Karamazov alongside resolute newcomers like The White Book and Brandon Sanderson. Before these assembled heroes, an angel of mercy arrives in a flutter of feathers to plead for help: some human is in need of saving, and these heroes are her only hope. And as this angel of mercy casts her eyes about for a book to save this human soul, one among their number raises its hand and says, like Isaiah, I’m here – I’m here, send me.)

We get so caught up in talking about a thing that we forget the thing itself. What religion does to God, thinking about writing can do to writing. There are writing days when I feel overwhelmed, lost, meandering, listless, pointless – every season or so, a time like this comes. I expect many of us aspiring writers find ourselves in this boat – or we find ourselves having just fallen off the writing boat, and now we’re floating out in the sea in the middle of the night, just bobbing, hoping for salvation, hoping for a reminder why we do this – why we love this strange thing, why we love words in the first place.

Moby-Dick has arrived as my heroic reminder.

Surprises abound in Moby-Dick. I’m not sure what I expected – isn’t it strange that as soon as a thing is well-known, our expectations of it seem to veer wildly off course? – but Moby-Dick is certainly not what I imagined it would be. 

One of the many surprises worthy of reflection is the poetic elevation. That’s what I’m calling the moments when Melville launches – entirely sudden, entirely unexpected! – from a mundane moment up and out into a reflection on the cosmic, the numinous, the divine. From nowhere, he drops the floor out from under us or rips the sky out from above us, zooming in or zooming out into life and death and fate and time. He just goes for it – and it is immensely refreshing when so much I’m reading these days feels restrained; unsentimental; hyperlocal in focus; happy to remain fixed, consistent, and accurately triangulated in grimdark literary realism – as if that is all there is. That style is all well and good for some brains, for some hearts – but others are flighty. (This is especially true in broken times, I expect.) We want scale and feelings like explosions; we are drawn to color and chaos; we find consistent, unmixed metaphors deeply fucking boring; we love beauty for beauty’s sake, but for the love of God, we hate talking about it so much – ‘When you use words, you can ruin something, you know? When you use words sometimes, you can ruin it,’ says Arsenal’s new no. 10, Eberechi Eze – because for us it’s a sin to retrace our steps to wonderland. It’s a sin to look back at the page and try to explain the feeling: it’s killing the butterfly. 

I will briefly sin – for the good of us all, I hope – by looking back at beauty in Moby-Dick. I’ll look at three moments of poetic elevation with the very simple hope that you’ll enjoy these words, because they’re beautiful. And it’s good to remember why we do this, why we love words – because sometimes, they’re really beautiful. (Read them out loud if you can.)

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A distracted, lazy youth becomes a wise contemplative 

Ishmael imagines a young sailor manning the crow’s nest, a role that calls on him to look for, and more importantly, to find whales. But this particular sailor never sees a thing. Maybe he’s just up there getting high, just chilling, just absent-minded – Ishmael imagines sailors saying such things and then granting, with wry smiles, that perhaps there really aren’t any whales at all, there really haven’t been any in three years. But then Melville drops the floor out from under us with this dive from light-hearted, generational criticism into pure ecstatic wonder:

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Ahab

Always beautifully poetic and mythical and symbolic, Ahab is of course a subject of many such poetic elevations. 

‘Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t’-gallant-sails and royals to be set, and every stun’-sail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.‘

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From chores to the Loom of Time

In this wondrous example, Ishmael sees in the most mundane of chores a connection to the divine and a meditation on free will.  

‘It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self. 

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; the savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—no wise incompatible—all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motion directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.‘

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I’m only halfway through Moby-Dick, so there are many more surprises ahead… 

I’m thinking of making a list of books like this, something like ‘Books that Bound the Broken-Hearted’. If you have one, email me the title and how the book helped you at alex@storystreetwriters.com.

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