So I walked along the hedge, amazed at its bulk, sheared into a perpendicular face and squared off at the high top, until I came to an opening. Something like a pointed Gothic arch had been carved out of the lower five and a half feet of greenery. Above the passageway, the top of the hedge was still perfectly knit together. I entered this hedge’s opening, and with no trouble at all walked into my neighbor’s yard.
Here was a garden! A world of purple, pink, rose, and white flowers—hydrangea, cosmos, rose of Sharon—and in the middle an enormous green sperm whale. He was fashioned of privet, but not at all angularly. In him all was fluid curve and beveling, from the bulging forehead to narrowing torso to spreading tail and flukes. And from his forehead sprouted a perfect green plume of privet-spray. I could see only six inches or so into the creature before the density and multiplicity of leaves became impenetrable to vision. By no means did the size of this whale rival that of a flesh leviathan; this was a garden whale. Yet in comparison to myself, he was impressive and overwhelming.
He had no expression, though I have never seen a real whale that was not able to project by some facial means and bodily gesture an attitude toward himself, his world, and his assailants. Here all was a green, vegetable blankness.
Around the base of the privet monster, hundreds of white cosmos tossed their airy heads, somewhat resembling the foam of the sea. Then the collar of flowers became a ring of bubbly blue hydrangeas, mixed here and there with a purple rose of Sharon shrub, and the outer ring was dotted with rosebushes and other rose-colored flowers, so that the whole effect was that the green whale swam haloed in a sea reflective of a sunset palette.
I had never seen anything quite so charmingly artificial. The whole yard was walled in by the mighty privet hedge. I felt as though I had entered the labyrinth of Crete, which held in its center not the Minotaur, but a bull whale. Whether he was captive or king, and how he regarded his green self, I could not tell, for as I said there was a blankness about the sculpture. Beginning to feel myself something of a trespasser, I slipped back through the hedge to my own grassy yard.
From the back edge of my own yard, I descended a set of wooden steps lying against the slope down to the beach. From the foot of the stairs, a path passed through some stunted apple trees, bearing misshapen yellow fruit, and led me through scrubby white pine trees. Then the path parted sea grasses for perhaps twenty feet and stopped on a lip of sand where the beach sloped more abruptly to the sea. I stood on the lip of sand before the broad water. And so began my habit each morning, not only to acknowledge the sea from my house and yard but also to go down to her, to commune with her close at hand, intimately.
I SEE IT NOW: the first morning on the beach at ’Sconset, the waves roll in on long diagonals. The water builds and builds to a steep, high crest and then folds in the middle into a high line of foam which quickly dips in front and spreads on each side in a widening scallop. Rolling in, the wave scampers itself into a flowing, milky apron of white. How densely white this froth, more cream than milk! And behind this turbulent flounce of white, from the backside of the translucent crest, floats a broken net of thin foam, patterned like a mosaic.
The mosaic is lifted by the next long, unbreaking roll, which passes under it without disturbing the netting, only stretching it here and there. The ceaselessness of the whole greeny-gray and startling-white drama of it! The casual constant, unmonitored crashing goes on and on, like the pulse of a body. So it was and so it is.
THAT RESTLESSNESS lay open-faced before me. With the sea there was no secret longing for change, for at no moment did it even pretend to hold still. Why did people speak of the eternal sea? An unwanted answer rose up from my own depths: perhaps because all her heaving and sighing were endlessly futile.
I decided to waken Justice and to cook him an egg.
CHAPTER 126: Journey Toward the Starry Sky, in Present Tense
IT IS A SPLASHING, spanking surf tonight. Earlier, there were fists in it, and the water pow-pounded the shore.
Sometimes it is pouring, pouring, as though there were two oceans—one continually pouring into the beaker of the other, and back and forth between them a watery juggling. Whose hands hold those beakers?
Sometimes it’s the swish and swirl of it and the whistle of the wind, many pitches at once, like a mouth covering ten pipes on a harmonica, this wind breathing right at the window glass. And now the slight rattle of wood against wood, of the movable window against its frame.
Now I imagine roses in the surf—bushels of roses being emptied headfirst against the shore. In the morning I will find heaps and heaps of them in a long row that stretches for miles along the ’Sconset beach. Their imaginary stems will lie across and over each other weaving their own pattern of stemmy X’s, and the heads of all the roses will lie sodden and limp as clusters of red rags.
Sometimes I can hear the ocean jumping—I mean there is a discontinuity; it gathers itself and then a leap—silence—and a landing of heavy water. Like an athlete leaping forward, there is a takeoff—the wave pushes off from the other water, lifts its feet entirely into the air where I cannot hear it, and lands. Ha! Water “lands” though water falls back into water.
Here Ahab would say I quibble-fiddle with the language. Oh, where is Ahab tonight? Here at ’Sconset I listen, listen (in the night what good are eyes?), for the sound of wind in canvas far at sea, or the special hissing water makes when parted by a ship’s prow, but all I hear is the sound of black ocean wringing its hands over and over.
So I will walk the roof walk and look for Ahab. If the try-pots be burning, I can see him far out in the sable Atlantic. Probably this is what has happened: they were almost to Nantucket, and there was one more whale. The Pequod was already rich as an autumn honeycomb, every cell brimful of oil, sealed and stored in the hold. Once I was like a cask of grief storing myself there, just a girl hiding from my mad young husband, but then the sea sent up its strangest flower, the droplet-bushy exhalation of a whale, and there was calling from the masthead, then excited feet on the deck, lowering of boats, and the chase. Avictorious chase, and there was the chaining-in of the great carcass, snugged beside the ship like a natural, fleshy shadow for the artificed boat (with its delicate, noble construct of masts and lines, of layered decking, of internal staircases and ladders, fitted drawers with china knobs, and closet doors). All this I imagine again to justify the try-pots, surely burning now out in the darkness like two red eyes of a moving sea monster.
Oh, the constant rhythm of the sea in the dark—its patient, long application to shore, like a lover coming into her and into her, ponderous with age and experience, heavy and full of groaning love.
Though it be night, I could see the Pequod out at sea, if the try-pots burned.
I’ll just arrange the lamps—the whale oil lamps—along a path through the room leading to the stairs. Now one on the bottom stair…now one on the top. I look back and find them pretty, each with the wick turned low, steady-burning glowworms to show Justice the way, if he should wake up and miss me. His logic will follow mine, and he will know I’m on the roof. How strange that he should so urgently miss his father, when he can scarcely remember the father who danced him and told him stories, whose ivory leg Justice smoothed and petted as though it were a sleek white cat. Justice spoke as he stroked—“Nice leg, good leg. You are a good leg to serve beneath my father.” Well, here’s the lighted way, Little One, if you would follow me.
And here’s the creaking hatch to the roof walk.
TO MY PLATFORM I carry no lamp, for it would ruin vision for distance. There is Mary Starbuck’s house. She has a wisp of smoke in the chimney. Probably before the hearth she has made Jimmy’s pallet, for he has had a cold in his chest. There’s a water-filled iron pot, herbs swimming on the surface, bubbling in the embers, to help open his breathing. I imagine Mary’s sweet face in the fireglow too dim to sew by, but she crochets a line of lace to ornament her underdrawers, where it will be safe from the eyes of all the Q
uakers, save one. Her fingers know the stitches; the hooked needle, like a shining harpoon, darts down to pluck up the thread. Her fingers know, and she does not need to see. She has learned how to wait better than I have. But then she has never been to sea, cannot begin to imagine the vastness of that ever-shifting bend and bulge of water.
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, dismas
ted 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.
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