Now I must look beyond Mary Starbuck’s faith and patience to the blackness beyond. I hear the roaring of the sea. With my eye, I can discern neither where the sea meets the shore nor where it blends with sky. Perhaps, erroneously, I am looking for a boat in the sky, since sea and sky are indistinguishable. But those beacons are stars, not try-pots burning. No one can calculate the distance to stars, Giles said, with the yardsticks we now have.
In crow’s nests, I have been a skilled lookout, and I know how to sector out the world, how to ever so slowly turn my head, how to alert the sides of my eyes, which see motion better than does the direct gaze. Still I gaze and gaze, and the ocean twists and rolls as usual. There’s booming always and the sound of spray rushing in the air.
Ahab, my captain, my beloved; Ahab, again, I call out to you. My spirit rushes over the water searching, searching for the Pequod. Is there not even a plank of her left floating? Adrenched scrap of sail washing along just under the surface of the water? Remember when I looked for icebergs for you?
My eyes have swept all the way to the south. Now I retrace, but lift my gaze the breadth of a thumb, closer to those constellations that hang low over the water.
When I stand here in the day, there are friendly clouds to tease me, but this night is moonless, cloudless—only black and stars. That liquid black, the sea, runs in to me, sighs and retreats. His roar has become a groan. Oh, the effort of heaving himself! Does the human, heart-driven pulse sometimes wonder if it will ever get to stop? So much more must the mind of the sea suffer from travail.
I look again. My eyes burn with blackness. Oh, I would penetrate it. Let my vision encircle the globe till I find one old, ivory-clad whaling ship. And there my lover, white-haired, ivory-legged, but a true lover. Let his brain not be boiling with revenge on that dumb beast. May all the embers be under try-pots, and none in Ahab’s breast or mind. When he pivots on the ivory leg, even at this great distance, my spirit circles round like a falcon on a tether.
What was that snap? What is this centerless flight? I’m hurled through space! I fly tangent, away, out from my center. Now I look frantically.
Back and forth I swing my head. No boats at sea. None. Nothing but blackness. The harness of discipline is cast away; all unsystematic, all impulse, I cast lances-of-gazing hither and yon, left and right, near in, as though the Pequod were beached, and out far into the domain of stars. Why have I chosen this unyielding night to look?
I AM STILL. For the first time, I know. If I were a lighthouse whose beam could bend to embrace the curve of the earth, I know I would not find him. There is no use to look out.
I feel it in my face. My mouth has settled at the corners. Resignation. There is no use to look out.
But I will stand here awhile. I could be wrong.
My bones are weighing me down. Here, my fingertips feel the splintery top of the railing, the rough grain of the wood. Ahab is gone.
But is he gone? I only know that I can no longer wait, looking out for him. Still I stand and face the dark.
What is this force that tilts up my chin? Why does my gaze climb up a ladder of stars? Why do I no longer look out, but up? Up! And there the heavens blaze and twinkle. In this moonless night sky, the endless stars declare ascendancy.
With my face up, I drink and drink the black goblet, the universe.
Like funeral cloves are these stars, spiky and spicy. Like cloves in an orange, they are the preservers of the skin and of the black flesh of space.
Oh, Starry Sky, can you hear this moaning of the earth? Let the sea be our voice, our loudest voice. It speaks to every dark corner of you, Star-studded Sky, as we spin and turn through space. The sea is moaning to your blackness and to your bright fires. Might some warmth, some comfort, from you kiss the cheek of earth, light if not warmth sent unerringly over distances too great to measure.
And yet when I blink, I seem to collect configurations of stars—perhaps it is to know them. My eyelids slide down, followed by a smooth, lubricated lifting, and there you are, Starry Sky, no longer out there, but through the lens of my eye brought home into my head. Into the brains of all and any beings who lift their faces and open their eyes.
The Roof Walk and the Starry Sky
There is the great journey yet to be taken. Let my mind be a ship that sails from starry point to starry point. In my brain, I feel those cold black spaces containing nothing. I approach a pinprick of light closer and closer till it is a conflagration of such magnitude that I am nothing. And yet with my mind I caliper it with contemplation.
Where is my place before this swirling ball of star mass, edgeless and expansive, without horizon? Where is my place, when I know that this is but one of ten billion? Here the categories crack. Beauty—that gilt frame—burns at its edges and falls to ash. Love? It’s no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps there is music here, for in all that swirling perhaps harmony fixes the giants in their turning, marches them always outward in their fiery parade.
That I can see their glory, that is my place. That I have these moments to be alive—and surely they are alive in some other way. Perhaps it is only being that we share. But something is shared between me on this rooftop and them flung wide and myriad up there. What was the golden motto embroidered on the hem of my baby’s silk dress? We are kin to stars.
I reach my hands toward them, spread my fingers and see those diamonds in the black V’s between my fanning fingers. To think that I could gather them into my hands, stuff them in my pockets, is folly. But I can reach. It is I myself, alive now, who reach into the night toward stars. Their light is on my hands.
Their light is in my hands. I gasp in the crisp air of earth and know that I am made of what makes stars! Those atoms burning bright—I lower my hands—why, they are here within me. I am as old as they and will continue as long as they, and after our demise, we will all be born again, eons from now. What atoms they have I cannot know. I cannot call their names, but they are not strangers to me. I know them in my being, and they know me.
Little scrap, little morsel, the stars sing to me, we are the same.
CHAPTER 127: ’Sconset Morning
THAT NIGHT of truth and stars, I tried to sleep lying on the roof walk. I wanted my friends, the stars, to grate over my body. Oh, I went down into my house first, to get covers. I was not so ecstatic a star-gazer as to forget how to conserve my human warmth.
Descending to my house, through the trapdoor onto the top step where my lantern waited, I seemed to enter the Essence of Snug. Up there, the denizens were fearless and bold, but we mortals have our warrens here, and they are worthy. Our walls have been plastered and smoothed by human hands; our light emanates from lamps of lung-blown glass; the flame dances on a wick woven by human devising, and the flame consumes sailor-harvested oil. These small globes of light, in scale and warmth so like gifts of human love, illumine everything interior: the walls of my house and all its precious contents.
My child.
My table. The blank page, the glass lip of the pot of ink, the white shaft of my quill pen. The soft chevron of feathering attached to this eagle shaft.
Once Tashtego’s fingers grasped this feather, slid its tip through his straight black hair, along his scalp. How much space has interceded between those fingers and this feather hovering over the page? Place defined all; not time, but place, I thought. Where was Tashtego who had given me a feather? If I knew where, what need of time? And Daggoo with his golden-hoop earrings? Did they sit adrift, slack-armed, in some whaleboat, as I had once done with Kit and Giles, and was Ahab with them?
No. Not even their images persisted; less substantial than mist, Tashtego, ebony Daggoo, inscribed Queequeg, dismasted Ahab—they disappeared into darkness.
I saw only black ocean rocking itself, blank of boat.
And yet I could not weep. This knowing—what was its character? Too quiet for tears. No storm here. An inland sea. Contained. A wide, quiet pool of unverifiable knowing.
There did seem a
small boat upon that sea, but that boat was myself. It was this house and all that was in it, and I was alone at the tiller, reading the stars.
Though I had descended the lamp-lit steps from the roof walk down into my house that night, I needed to go back with my blanket, to lie flat, cocooned from the night air, to contemplate that endless void and the stars that navigated it. So I left the world of Snug, climbed aloft, a humble height this time, and laid myself down to the sky.
I laid myself down, the small tooth of a gear, in all that wheeling universe. And yet I was a part. The inner sea, right-sailed, had wholeness to offer, and this, this vastness—it let me partake of harmony.
Thus, I felt and thought and loved and yearned till daybreak.
And what was the residue from my stay in that dark furnace? The morning after that night, peace inhabited me and intimations of distant joy.
CHAPTER 128: More of Morning: Tashtego’s Feather Makes the Letter S
S IS THE SOUND of the sea. Her surge and suck, her spray and surf. Sometimes she seethes. She knows the sound of smooth. With her s, the sea marries the shore, and then there is scamper and slush in the sand. With curling s’s the sea rises to stroke the side of her superior, the sky, who loves and meets her in the s of spray, spawned in liquid and air.
Will I someday send my son to the sea? Will the ships and sails call to the heart of Justice my son, seduce his soul just as they have my husband? Let him go. Let him set sail as I have, as well as his father. But I think the journey there is bounded by the spherical size of the globe. Circumnavigate this globe, and you but return to the place of your departing. The bigger journey is up there. Though now it is morning, and my eyes and ears are full of the surge of the sea.
S-s-s, the first sound my mother taught me.
And suppose the universe itself is but some greater globe where it is possible to travel through rather than on its curving surface. Or suppose that—that we are only on the surface of a dark expanding globe—then where is the journey to the place that is limitless? I find it within. Last night I found it within me—independent and single. No, I do not unmarry Ahab. But I marry myself. I take my fate as within. Would that I could give this thought to Ahab. His singleness of purpose is all fastened on the white whale. Yet I do not think that in his most extreme moment he forgets his wife and child. I know that there is a part of him that longs for us, for home, for Nantucket.
He sees us in the mirror-eye of Starbuck, whose heart is with his wife and child. Yes, Ahab can see all that is human and relenting in Starbuck’s eye. Yet, my imagination tells me he looks in Starbuck’s eye and looks away. His gaze roams the horizon for a slash of foam, for a low and bulbous cloud that resembles the white whale. He fixes his own heart to the tip of a harpoon that is ever seeking the heart of Moby Dick.
Without his heart, I fear that Ahab my husband is but a standing ash. Such a column is all powdery, and frail. The breeze blows against him, and he is scattered. So I sit at my window, open a bit, in ’Sconset. Does this breeze bring me some small atom of Ahab? Is he scattered in the sea? Do his cells brush boundaries with whatever is left of my ashy father, or rub against an enduring shard of calcium from Giles’s bones?
How one we surely are with one another. And one with all that fiery burning scattered through the endless night. Such an idea surely brings peace. Is it a form of worship? I feel that I should walk to the beach and randomly select a grain of sand. That grain I should enshrine at home and call my god. In its impenetrable complexity, there is surely enough to fill my mind with wonder.
My boy is stirring in his bed. I shall put three turtle eggs in a pot of water and boil them for our breakfast and cut two thick slices from the loaf Mary gave us yesterday. I will spread that fragrant bread with a good smear of clear rose-hip jelly that Mary made from the fruit of the sea roses. I will call her pet nanny goat to come stand in the door and let me milk her on the threshold. Yes, Justice is stirring under his quilt, a lasting gift from Mary, a quilt pieced in triangles of sea green, pale blue, and storm-cloud gray, bound and bordered in the tan of sand. He straightens his leg, he turns his face my way, though his eyes are yet closed, so that when he does open them he will see my eyes of love. Fitting for a child, fitting for the father of the child!
For me, this morning and every morning and may it ever be all my life, my eyes are greeted by the surprising, ceaselessly rumpling sea. And every morning my heart will rise to meet the sea, which is what we know here on earth of infinity and change.
What is the word for where the sea meets Una? There are my origin and my immortality.
CHAPTER 129: The Neighbor Beyond the Hedge
SOMETIMES the past returns as present—at least those moments that never leave us do. All happened as I thought it would: my Justice awoke to his day. But before my son opened his eyes, he smiled and came close to laughing. When his eyes did look into mine, I asked, “Why are you happy?”
“I dreamt I got it at last,” he said.
“Got what?”
“My father’s watch.”
And I went and fetched it from the mantel. He took the pocket watch in his hand and kissed its face and rubbed the smooth silver back of it against his small palm. The grooved winding knob on the stem he rotated between his chubby thumb and forefinger. Looking up at me, his face was ashine with delight and gratitude.
While Justice and I breakfasted on turtle eggs, a question formed in my mind about my neighbor’s hedge. Many houses on Nantucket boasted a handsome hedge that divided them from their neighbors or shielded them from the dust of the road. Perhaps some were cultivated to sieve the sea wind, as well—I don’t know. But few hedges, I thought, had carved through them a Gothic opening so that one neighbor might pass freely into the garden of another. I wondered if on the far side as well as on my side the neighbor had cut a door.
“Have you seen the neighbor’s privet whale?” I asked Justice. “Would you like to go with me into his garden?”
“Couldn’t we build houses on the beach?”
Clearly my boy already had plans for his morning. I agreed to play with him, and he agreed to my plan as well. When we reached the sand, he was dismayed that all his building of the day before had been washed away, he having been unfamiliar with the reach of the tide at ’Sconset. His eyes overflowed, and he bit his lip to keep from sobbing.
“Look,” I said, kneeling down. “It’s soon rebuilt,” and I scooped up sand in my hand.
Justice made no move to help, though I constructed one little castle and began another. “Help me,” I said encouragingly.
“No,” he said. “When you’ve built them all back, then I’ll build again. I had fifteen.”
I stood up and put my hands on my hips. “I’ll not reconstruct the world for you, child. There’s no fairness in asking that of me.”
“Then I won’t,” he said.
“And I won’t either,” I replied.
He kicked the sand and sent a slur of it toward the water. Then he ran to the ocean and stamped on the edge of it that was washing to the depth of an inch deep onto the shore. Far from me to tell him not to splash his clothes! He could wear them sandy. Still, I thought he was a foolish lad. Neither I nor Frannie had ever stamped the water.
“Water feels not a thing,” I called. The wet sand clung to my fingers, and I brisked them together. I saw I would have to walk to the water to rinse them. This I did, being careful of my shoes and standing a distance from my splashing child. But while I bent over, clutching up my skirt in one hand and washing the other, Justice charged at me like a little bull from the sea. I lost my balance and fell shoulder first, wetting my whole side, into the water.
Now I was angry. “You imp,” I said, and Justice ran for the wooden steps. I was after him in a flash, and being much-longer-legged and angry to boot, I caught him by the shoulders and hauled him off. Then I dragged him to the water—oh, he struggled all the time—and forced his body down into it—not his head. The water was cold, and he res
isted me so thoroughly that I was drawn down into the water in my attempt to dunk him. I began to feel ashamed as we struggled. My clothes became sodden and full of sand; my hair fell down and the length of my braid was dunked into the sandy water as well. Justice had not a dry hair or thread on him. I feared for the leather of our shoes.
“Let’s stop, let’s stop,” I pleaded.
“I win,” he shouted.
“Very well, you win. But let’s stop.”
And so we waded to shore, I breathless and embarrassed, he still sullen despite his triumph.
At this moment a large black dog bounded up and barked at Justice, who suddenly grew stiff and still with fright. I walked slowly to my son and took his hand. “It was time to go anyway,” I said and led him toward the stairs. Now the dog barked more furiously. I put Justice ahead of me and told him to keep going. The barking stopped. Halfway up the embankment, I turned to see what had become of the dog. He was sitting below, a large stick of driftwood athwart his mouth, wagging his tail.
“Look,” I said. “He only wanted to play.”
Quick as a minnow, Justice darted past me and down to the beach. He took the stick and flung it across the sand, and the dog ran to fetch. So all our fright was turned to fun, and I could see that Justice thought himself honored to be chosen to play by the big dog.
Sometimes the dog ran so hard to the stick that his braking almost covered the trophy with sand, and then he dug energetically for it, though sometimes he was inaccurate as to the stick’s position and his digging only tossed more sand over it, and then there was a mighty digging. I stood at the foot of the steps and watched all this, and of course I was glad that Justice had found a friend. I resolved that the next day I would go and call on Mary and have some adult companionship of my own, though I did not want to make a pest of myself now that I had moved to ’Sconset.
Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer Page 65