Junot Díaz, who quotes liberally from Moby-Dick in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; whose own literary voice mixes an ecstatic, wild style vernacular with highbrow sensibilities that can be described as Melvillian; who in a 2012 interview with Bill Moyers said, I had grown up in a place called Lemon Terrace, New Jersey, where the guy down the street was Uruguayan, the woman across the street was Korean, the person around the corner was Egyptian. There were Dominicans. There were African Americans. There were white folks. And I felt like we were growing up in this tiny little Pequod…. And when I was reading Moby-Dick, I was like, “Man, this guy really has his finger on the pulse of the America that I came up in.”
David Foster Wallace, whose father read him Moby-Dick as a bedtime story; who counted Moby-Dick as one of his favorite works; who, while struggling with his own mental illness in college, wrote three essays about the “Castaway” section.
Jocko Weyland, who spent years writing his memoir The Answer Is Never: A Skateboarder’s History of the World; who struggled with piecing together so many disparate personal memories, history, inter views, sketches; who was then directed to Moby-Dick, where he found the answer.
Jackson Pollock, who, according to Elizabeth Schultz, spent years in Jungian analysis, where its emphasis upon primitive archetype, myth, and symbol, prompted his interest in Moby-Dick; who executed several paintings based on the novel; who, according to Ellen Landau, may have been able to associate Ahab’s search for the great white whale with what Jung called the Nekyia, or night sea journey.
Sena Jeter Naslund, who grew fascinated with the book at age thirteen; who, decades later, spent more than five years researching, writing, and revising the stunning 666-page novel Ahab’s Wife.
Damion Searls, who, after learning of Orion Press’s recent abridgment of Moby-Dick into a compact edition for the overly busy or impatient reader, decided to trace every item excised by Orion’s anonymous editor, down to the last semicolon, and publish this four-hundred-page demi-book called; or the Whale in a special edition of the Review of Contemporary Fiction; who did this to preserve and celebrate the original novel’s digression, texture, and weirdness.
Tony Kushner, who became obsessed with Moby-Dick in graduate school; who claims the novel is the single most important influence on his work, including the second act of Angels in America; who is quoted in the New York Times as saying One falls in love with him, and I certainly have, completely, as most of the other Melville freaks have; who learned from Melville that it’s better to risk total catastrophe than to play it safe as an artist.
Frank Stella, who spent twelve years creating more than fifteen hundred abstract sculptures, collages, murals, paintings, engravings, and prints, each tit led after Moby-Dick chapters; who claims that this obsession nearly destroyed him; who felt that abstraction was the most effective way of re-presenting the novel, that it mirrors Melville’s drive to express the raw, ineffable powers of nature.
Salman Rushdie, who claims Melville as a literary parent in his polyglot family tree; whose novel The Enchantress of Florence features a seafaring main character and a maximalist narrative style reminiscent of Moby-Dick.
Orson Welles, who played Father Mapple in John Huston’s black-and-white film version of Moby-Dick; who wrote and directed a play called Moby-Dick Rehearsed that was performed in London in 1955; who apparently made a film version of the play that is now lost; who later made another twenty-two-minute film in which he enacts scenes from the production, playing the parts himself—Ishmael and Ahab—while footage of rippling water projects on his face and the wall behind him.
Andrew Delbanco, who wrote the definitive biography Melville: His World and Work; who claims that Moby-Dick was not a book for a particular moment. It is a book for the ages; that Melville experienced the great city as every true New Yorker has always experienced it—with a combustible combination of love and hate; that Moby-Dick is the story of a young man’s rebirth.
Gilbert Wilson, who, during the mid-twentieth century created more than three hundred paintings and drawings related to Moby-Dick; who became obsessed with the idea that the white whale was a potent symbol for the destructive power of the nuclear bomb; who tried and failed to stage an opera called The White Whale, which he hoped would promote world peace.
Barry Lopez, who read the book three times before college, while living in New York City; who cites Moby-Dick as one of the main inspirations in his drive to render in writing both the light and dark aspects of the natural world.
Richard Serra, who grew up near the shipyards in San Francisco’s Ocean Beach neighborhood; whose monolithic steel sculptures are influenced by the process of shipbuilding; who made a famous piece entitled Call Me Ishmael; who said Moby-Dick has become America’s central epic poem. We are all influenced by it.
Dan Beachy-Quick, who created A Whaler’s Dictionary, a collection of essays about Moby-Dick, where he writes, What follows is the result of the mad task I found within myself after more than a decade spent reading the same novel. I meant not to exhaust Moby-Dick of meaning, but to exhaust myself of the meaning I found in it.
John Updike, who was a lifelong admirer of Melville’s novels and stories; who, in a 1982 New Yorker article, explained that despite Melville’s failure as a novelist and a life filled with personal tragedy, he never quit writing, not until his death.
Hershel Parker, who apparently wakes up in the middle of the night to pore over Melville’s personal letters; who wrote the seminal two-volume work Herman Melville: A Biography, each volume weighing in at 941 pages.
Elizabeth Renker, who cried as she read from Moby-Dick at her wedding; who loves Melville’s work but not necessarily Melville the man; who writes openly of his alleged misogyny, alcoholism, and abuse of his wife.
Adrian Villar Rojas, who created a life-size, impaled white whale from unfired clay at a Moby-Dick–themed art show at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.
David Dowling, who documents his participation in a twenty-four-hour marathon Moby-Dick reading in his book Chasing the White Whale; who writes, If we are up to the challenge of endurance that the novel poses, especially as it is read in the marathon format, great rewards not only of survival but also of exultation are in order.
Nathaniel Philbrick, who in his book Why Read Moby-Dick? states that This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick; that it’s the one book that deserves to be called our American bible.
David Shields, who in Reality Hunger writes The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps; who prizes Moby-Dick as a prototypical antinovel; who, in How Literature Saved My Life, lists Moby-Dick as one of fifty works he swears by.
Matt Kish, who on August 5,2009, began making one drawing a day, every day, for all 552 pages of his edition of Moby-Dick; whose work was later published in a book entitled Moby-Dick in Pictures.
Margaret Guroff, who created a copiously annotated online version called Power Moby-Dick.
Nick Flynn, who loosely based the structure of his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City on Moby-Dick; who writes in the final chapter, We know [Ahab] lost his leg, and that that loss became a story, and the story became the obsession that in the end defined, and ended, his life. We have to be careful of the stories we tell about ourselves.
Hart Crane, who wrote the poem “At Melville’s Tomb”; who ended this poem with the line This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps; who later drowned himself in the Gulf of Mexico.
RUBIN MUSEUM
In late October I head for a twelve-step meeting for artists, hoping to talk out my decision, even if it’s with strangers. It’s located downtown, in a LGBTQ advocacy center. I walk in and the place is mostly empty, except for a volunteer who points me toward the third floor. Walking upstairs, I pass a gorgeous Latina woman with thick black hair, pouty lips, a masculine jawline. Something happens when we pass—we both tur
n around, take each other in.
I make it to the third floor, but the place is a labyrinth. I wander around, looking for the right room, until I see the woman coming back up the stairwell, apparently looking for me. I turn and walk the other way, heart racing. I duck into the men’s room, thinking I might lose her there, close myself in a stall.
Attiq doesn’t answer his phone when I call; wanting to avoid detection, I don’t leave a message.
Then the bathroom door opens.
High heels click across the tiled floor.
She opens the stall next to mine, enters.
Her feet look like women’s feet—women’s feet here in the men’s room.
I’m sweating now, feeling simultaneously aroused and sick. I’m still making the difficult transition onto Celexa. Still wracked with indecision and at what amounts to the all-time low point in my life, when I’ve never wanted a moment of connection so badly—I imagine how it will feel, like swallowing an Ativan, how all my problems will evaporate for a few minutes of bliss. This cold collision in my head—between Portland and New York, man and woman, wanting to live and wanting to die, hope and no hope, God and no god, Ishmael and Ahab—comes to some kind of violent, jackknifing apex, and I want so badly to make contact, to crack through the thick ice of my paralysis with just one moment of blowtorch heat.
Then someone else enters the room.
In response, the woman in heels clicks back out the door.
This new visitor wears a pair of nineteenth-century fisherman’s boots, the aged leather creased with brine, soles worn thin by hard, remorseless service and his world-weary gait.
He too takes the stall next to mine, but remains standing and impenetrably silent. And I sit there beside him, missing the entire meeting, the whole room bleary beneath a saltwater tide that keeps rising and rising and rising, the force so strong I fear it might drown me completely.
I finally get myself collected, stumble out of the building and onto the street, where my phone rings. I tell Attiq what happened, that I can’t make up my mind about anything. That I’m afraid I might be completely losing it. He says he’ll have to call me back.
I buy some tea and sit in the park, still feeling dizzy, nauseous. He calls back, says there’s something he wants to do for me, that I should meet him in an hour at a museum on the west side.
I take the train to Seventeenth and Seventh, to the Rubin Museum, an unassuming building that houses a large collection of Buddhist and Himalayan art. Attiq doesn’t arrive for another twenty minutes, so I sit and listen to a group playing Indian music beneath a spiral staircase—one man on sitar and another on tabla, streaming out rich, soothing melodies and rhythms. There’s a trickling fountain in the lobby, the smell of frankincense and chai tea. Breathe, I tell myself.
Attiq arrives and takes a seat at the table I’ve saved in the museum café. He asks me what’s happening, so I tell him what I’ve already told him, six or seven times—that I’m paralyzed with indecision, that I can’t figure out whether to stay or go, that I don’t think New York is healthy for me, but I also don’t want to take what they call in twelve steps a “geographical cure.” That I’ve always wanted to live in Portland, but I’m scared to move there for a low-paying job with no health insurance and Karissa’s impending marriage. He listens quietly, as usual, trying not to appear alarmed as my mind continues to split itself down the middle.
Until he stops me.
“Listen,” he says. “We can sit here and have this conversation, and you’ll just talk yourself in circles all night, like you’ve been talking yourself in circles for the past month. So I want to try something different.”
He takes me up to the café counter, where he buys us both large bowls of asparagus and shrimp soup with French bread on the side. And two steaming cups of tea.
“I’d like this to be a silent meal,” he says. He tells me to pay attention to every bite of my food, every sip of tea. And to feel gratitude for it all, for the sun that grew the asparagus, for the soil and rain that fed it, for the clouds that created the rain and the ocean that created the clouds. For the people who prepared the food and the families who raised them. He tells me to feel gratitude for the fact that we have homes as winter approaches, that we have so much abundance right here in front of us. And he instructs me to listen for my inner voice, to hear what it tells me.
“We’ll take our time,” he says, “and then we’ll go upstairs.”
I follow his instructions. Savor every spoonful of what tastes like the best soup I’ve ever eaten. I take deep breaths in between sips, and feel, maybe for the first time in weeks, a sense of calm, silence. And from that silence comes a small voice, the same one from my bathroom back in Colorado.
The message is clear now: It’s time for you to go.
After eating, we walk silently up the spiral staircase to a sunken alcove with red meditation cushions and walls covered with paintings of deities—gold deities, red deities, black deities, deities with many heads stacked on one another like a totem pole, deities with multiple arms. A crimson demigod drinking blood from a cup. Teachers and saints floating on stylized clouds above mist-ribboned mountains.
Attiq asks me to sit down. He instructs me to close my eyes, take deep breaths.
“Listen to what they have to tell you,” he says. “If you ask, they’ll answer.”
I’m well beyond irony now, willing to try anything, even begging assistance from a bunch of old paintings.
The response is different than it was downstairs; instead of one voice I now experience a convocation of voices, but it’s not crowded or chaotic—they’re all saying the same thing, that it’s time for me to go.
What if I get to Portland and have a total breakdown? I ask.
The answer is clear: Your breakdowns have always been breakthroughs.
What about Karissa? I ask. At this there is laughter; a voice explains that I’m not to worry, that I’ll meet a girl who does yoga and surfs. This strikes me as fucking ridiculous, but I remind myself that this is just me talking to myself—that yes, maybe I’m channeling some kind of disembodied spirits here, but mostly this is just me—my own inner wisdom—leading me back west.
It’s okay, the voices say. It’s really time for you to go.
Attiq walks me outside, where I explain what happened and thank him for this kind thing he’s done for me. In my months of agonizing over this decision, he’s the first to not give me direct advice, to instead create a situation in which I could guide myself.
“It seems like you manifested this job,” he says. “And you’ll get into recovery out there. It’s not just in New York. Recovery is everywhere.”
He instructs me not to talk about what just transpired, not to process it too much or get back in my old ratio cerebral Ping-Pong game. He tells me to buy some incense, listen to some calming music. Sleep on it.
We hug good-bye and I watch him cross the street toward the West Village, walking with his slight limp, dressed in his orange cap and his fleece vest, until finally I lose sight of him in the crowd.
THE NEKYIA
In The Odyssey’s eleventh book, Odysseus descends into the underworld, where he consults with the soul of the prophet Teiresias, in order that he might find out how to get back to Ithaca—that after such a long battle, he may finally reach home.
Teiresias asks for a blood sacrifice, and once he is appeased, he and a host of spirits tell Odysseus what he must do.
THE JOURNEY
The next day, I tell my therapist what happened at the Rubin Museum, that I think I’ve made up my mind.
He looks at me like I’m crazy. He doesn’t like the idea of me hearing voices, even though I’ve explained that they were inner voices, a form of channeling, maybe, and nothing like aural hallucinations. But still he launches in with a line of questioning I know is designed to determine if I’m bipolar. Do I have bursts of energy? Have I ever gone more than three nights without sleep? Do I ever have racing thoughts, grandiose ide
as?
“I know where you’re going with this,” I say, “and I’m not bipolar. I’ve never had anything close to a manic episode. The problem here is that you’re totally unwilling to accept the validity of mystical experience. You and me sitting here, this whole conversation is like a microcosm of the shortcomings of Western medicine. I tell you I just had this subtle transformative experience that finally helped me make up my mind, and you start trying to diagnose me. But it’s a moot point,” I say, “because I’m leaving New York.”
Though I tell my therapist I’m going, I don’t truthfully find the inner resolve to leave until Thanksgiving—more than two and a half months after accepting the Portland job—when my father and stepmother come to visit me in New York. Having family around buoys my courage, especially when my father offers to make the cross-country drive with me.
He helps me pack up my truck, strap my surfboard on top, and together we begin the three-thousand-mile trip back west, driving through the aftermath of a Midwestern ice storm that transformed all the tree limbs and fence posts into sharpened, sun-glinting harpoons, and where I’m surprised to find myself unnerved by so many miles of barren, un occupied space.
THE TRY-WORKS
I drop my father off in Colorado and pick up my stepfather, Jerry, who makes the second half of the drive with me. Somewhere in Wyoming we begin hearing unsettling news reports about a California family that went missing deep in the wilderness of southern Oregon.
As night falls in western Wyoming, Jerry and I pass a string of oil refineries, like some dark vision of Hades, fire spouting out smokestacks, feeding on the night air, releasing a dull chemical stench. In the “Try-Works” section of Moby-Dick, Melville describes the American whale ship as a kind of floating factory, complete with a furnace—a “try-works”—for rendering whale blubber into oil. During a night watch, Ishmael finds himself mesmerized by the hellish scene of the “savage” harpooners tending the try-works. It occurs to him that “the rushing Pequod … laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” As it occurs to me, nearly two centuries later, that this monolithic Wyoming refinery is the material counterpart of Dick Cheney’s soul, George Bush’s soul, the light and dark soul of America. Of my own soul as I drive in a gas-powered vehicle toward an uncertain future. But as Ishmael warns, “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.”
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 20