Why July?
I dread the month of July.
Some of the most painful events of my life have taken place in July.
So now I always feel like the 4th comes way too early to do any good, and afterward, we still have a full 27 dangerous days to get through. (Because of course July has 31 days. OF COURSE.)
So as long as there continue to be Julys, I will greet them nervously, at best.
This particular July, I’ve been thinking a lot about Herman Melville’s (famous? infamous?) novel, Moby-Dick, published in 1851.
I first started writing about Moby-Dick in 2006, shortly before my dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. (He passed away in, you guessed it, July of that year.)
So it’s been surprising to me to see how much recent scholarship on the novel draws on the ideas and the analysis that I started working on way back then.
I finally finished that article—on Melville and disability— in 2012, during another difficult July.
And it was finally published in June (not July, thank heavens) of 2014.
I never think of literary scholarship as “evergreen,” but the fact that, in recent years, others have felt compelled to return to my ideas and heel so closely to my own previous analysis of Melville’s novel, has made me think otherwise.
This particular July, though, I’ve been thinking about a chapter in Moby-Dick entitled “The Line” (Chapter 60).
As the narrator, Ishmael, explains, the length of rope known as “the whale-line” is both “magical” and “sometimes horrible.”
One end of a whale-line is looped, and hangs over the edge of the tub in which the rest of the line is coiled in a “round, cheese-shaped mass.”
A modern copy of a whaleboat at Mystic Seaport. … The 2 tubs containing the whale rope are in the after half of the boat, and the rope is led round the loggerhead and then forward to the bow, between the chocks. The harpoons are already attached to the rope. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaleboat
This end is unattached to anything in the boat. (Because when you’ve harpooned an angry whale, you really don’t want it immediately attached to your little boat.)
When a whale boat is lowered in pursuit of a whale, the other end of the whale-line is threaded along the length of the boat, “resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jobs against his wrist in rowing.”
This end of the whale-line also runs “between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales.”
It is ultimately attached to the short rope connected to the harpoon.
As Ishmael explains, “the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction.”
When the harpoon has been launched at a whale—“when the line is darting out”—“to be seated then in the boat is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.”
If you think you’ll stay safe by sitting motionless, Ishmael reminds you that you can’t: “the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning.”
Not surprisingly, Ishmael acknowledges, there are “reported whaling disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of this or that man being taken out of the boat by the line.”
As with everything in Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s description of the whale-line and its dangers becomes a metaphor for life itself.
As he reminds us, “All men live enveloped in whale-lines.”
But “it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death” that we “realize the silent, subtle, every-present perils of life.”
According to Ishmael, it is “the graceful repose of the line,” the time before its complicated coils become dangerous and potentially lethal, that “carries more of true terror.”
Like the calm before a storm, it allows us to forget the “whale-lines” that run around and against and between us, that can, at any minute, spring into action and snatch us out of the boat of life.
I’ve come to think that this description of “the line” in Moby-Dick describes the dread that accompanies the month of July for me.
What I’ve been thinking about this July, though, is Ishmael’s description of the balancing act the occupants of a whale-boat have to perform at sea, as they try to keep themselves from being caught in the dangerous uncoiling that surrounds them.
Ishmael argues that it requires “a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action” to survive the running out of a whale-line.
As I come to the end of yet another (really not so great) July, I’ve been thinking about this “volition and action” and the “self-adjusting buoyancy” that accompanies it as a metaphor for resilience and hope.
Can they only be learned when the line is darted and the chase is on, when we find ourselves, as Ishmael puts it, in “the heart of [the] perils”?
