Moby Dick, Chapter 81: The Pequod Meets the Virgin

"As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knotholes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.

"'A nice spot,' cried Flask; 'just let me prick him there once.'

"'Avast!' cried Starbuck, 'there's no need of that!'

"But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground--so the last long dying spout of the whale." (pp. 280-281)

Flower Children

"Man lived in active partnership with plants and animals for whole geological periods before he fabricated machines. His mental involvement with the world of life began with the consciousness of his own existence. Many of his basic qualities he shares with other animals: prolonged sexual pairing and nurturing the young, social companionship and erotic delight, playfulness and joy. His deep love of life was fostered by finding himself in an environment prepared, not merely to maintain life with the requisite amount of physical nourishment, but to promote its unceasing self-transformation. On these matters, even the simplest organisms have something to teach us beyond the range of our most sophisticated technology. If we were dependent for our instructions and our material sustenance upon machines alone, the human race would long ago have died of malnutrition, boredom, and hopeless despair." (pp. 380-381)

"Long before man himself became conscious of beauty and desirous of cultivating it, beauty existed in an endless variety of forms in the flowering plants; and man's own nature was progressively altered, with his increasing sensitiveness to sight and touch and odor, through his further symbolic expression of beautiful form in his ornaments, his cosmetics, his costume, his painted and graven images: all by-products of his enriched social and sexual life. In this sense, we are all 'flower children.'

"For at least twelve thousand years, possibly far longer, man's existence has depended upon the close symbiotic partnership between man and plants, rooted in thousands of small village communities spread over the entire earth. All the higher achievements of civilization have rested on this partnership, one devoted to the constructive improvement of the habitat and the loving and knowing care of plants: their selection, their nurture, their breeding, their enjoyment, in a routine of life that punctuated and heightened the delights of human sexuality." (pp. 381-382)

From Lewis Mumford's the Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power

Moby Dick, Chapter 65: The Whale as a Dish

"That moral man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it." (p. 238)

"It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feegee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate'-de-foie-gras.

"But Stubb, he eats his whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and englightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary for the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens." (pp. 240-241)

Moby Dick, Chapter 57: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

"On Town-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation." (p. 218)

WAR!

WAR!

War turns aspirations into sucking chest wounds.

WAR!

The big picture

The big picture.

The apperceptive consciousness is a tether between beings and time. Time plays a dramatic role in that the source of a truth about existence is in the past. Our origins right now are explained as being a time and place in the past. From founding of one's nation to the making of one's shoes, all of these originate from a past.

The component missing from education is the big picture. We've traded in a narrative understanding of the objects of knowledge for a technical vocabulary that is standardized into units to ease categorization, comparison, and ultimately grading. From this, the administrator gains control, measures outcomes, tracks progress, generates statistics. As a result of this, students lose interest in the minutiae of learning vocabulary words, key terms, dates, and formulas. As a result of this, they have no big picture. And with no big picture the chance for an education in art, history, language, mathematics, science, and knowledge itself to furnish meaning for their life and their pursuits is lost. Education becomes meaningless to the student. Education becomes meaningless to the teacher. Then education simply becomes a tool for indoctrination and job training, and no longer does it furnish an engaged and informed citizenry with meaningful tools for engaging in a democracy.

"The jungle came alive and took him"

In James Jones' book World War II: A Chronicle of Soldiering he writes about the invasion of Japan as being eerily as Arnold Toynbee had described war under democracy--total war. The whole of the civilian population would be put to the grim task of defending Japanese soil, and in preparation it would be trained and equipped with what tools it could use to carry out this defensive order. But Jones does something very terrific with the imagery of an American GI setting his first foot in an invasion upon the Japanese shore that bears repeating here.

What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japan’s home islands, hardly bears thinking about. (p. 189)

Jones' point is two-fold here. He is discussing the experience of war from the perspective of the GI who dodges chance because bullets, explosions, and shrapnel are all chance encounters on the battlefield. That's how they were engineered. This GI, having lived through several tours of duty, witnessed several different battles, came within inches of whirring rounds and screeching artillery fragments, now recognized he would likely perish at the final stage of a war with all this battle-hardened experience. That experience would help him to both appreciate the scope and danger of any battle, and he could see more clearly than ever before that this would be the greatest battle and the one most likely to end his tour, in a fusillade of enemy fire, face-down on the beach. The second point follows closely from the first. All the Americans taking part in the Pacific war or reading its daily accounts in the newspapers understood the religious zealots that Japan had made for the war effort. The military had to introduce flamethrowers to burn Japanese out of their bunkers and cave complexes. So few Japanese would surrender during the island battles that the GI who had witnessed it and the general who would plan future landings recognized that only in death would the Japanese rest their weapons. And with this ghastly prospect we find ourselves looking upon the Japanese like a roving colony of army ants. Each Japanese body served a purpose to the greater whole, the colony, and each Japanese man, woman, and child was prepared to throw their bodies into the war effort, dying to save their land from invasion.

Reading this passage I cannot help but think about a scene from the film Aliens where the marines first encounter them in their hive, lying in wait along the walls and the ceiling. In that scene, the walls come alive and begin attacking the marines. To imagine the ambulatory population of Japan stirring about in preparation for war was a chilling image. Japan then had a population 64% the size of the United States. That was a lot of life bent on killing or dying in its attempt to do so. This is a very chilling image indeed.

I chose a quote from a movie from a year later--Predator. In that film yet another alien lurks about the jungle in a rapidly shifting camouflage that allows it to literally become the trees and leaves around it. When it comes at you, it looks as if the jungle, at any moment, could detach itself, like a piece of wall paper, and come at you.

These two images, your surroundings teeming with killers or the jungle coming alive and taking you, operate at the margins of normal experience. People are unaccustomed to seeing beings serve both as scenery and as agent at least not in contemporary experience. When the jungles of Africa gave way to the seasonally dry savannahs through a climactic event precipitated by the joining of the Americas at the isthmus of Panama, perhaps the first human-like experience of being chased upright became a possibility. These monkey ancestors, walking upright between increasingly distant stands of trees, most likely fell prey to those predators that lurked in the bushes, barely noticeable, blending in as part of the jungle, appearing as part of that jungle. How many monkey-men went through life with damaged limbs, deep claw gashes, hobbled gaits from near misses with these early predators? Enough to focus that groups' attention on, one, walking in groups, and two, carrying sticks and stones.

It seems as if war is outside of time. It is at once a primordial consciousness of fear, killing, and survival. At the same time it consists of the bleeding edge of technology. This combination of primordial impulses and of cutting edge techniques and tools creates a disruptive model for war in the everyday consciousness of humans. War chews up the countryside. War fills the fields with dead, dying, and rotting bodies. War shatters minds. War disintegrates countries. War erases memory. War enforces the building of its memorials.

Thanatos, the Egyptian god of death, also came to be known in psychoanalytic terminology as the 'death impulse.' In the grand dialectical symbolism of human consciousness, thanatos and eros fought for supremacy, and that would get expressed in the actions of humanity. I am truly unsure how opposed these two impulses are. Many more support emotions and conditions are required for them to be effected in the interpersonal spheres of humanity. I am sure of the fact that human experience is smooth in the center and jagged at the edges. Marginal experiences can be at once vivid and otherworldly. And the stresses of the mind to process information and act in these margins creates blank spaces and discontinuity. The one counter that warfare has learned from this is to drill troops in order that their training makes their actions spontaneous and machine-like. Training will save a man in the pitch of battle because just six months ago that man was milking cows and chasing young girls around his small town. Now he's in Guadalcanal, not Kansas. And he's holding a rifle, not a pitchfork. And to get there, he's taken his first train ride, then his first plane ride, and finally his last boat ride to his final resting place: face down in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific island wearing new boots, and a new uniform, carrying a rifle that he never had a chance to shoot. Chance had got him first, and now he no longer would have another chance to dance with Shelly or flirt with Betty. No, GI Joe lay dead, in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific atoll.

Paul Fussell, writing on the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, makes an expedient out of the need to use it. Forty years on and in the bosom of an academic career, Fussell had both the time and the experience as a GI to reflect upon this decision. His subsequent answer was for its dropping. He also cites that chilling passage from Jone's account of World War II as a component of the thinking that led to the rationale to drop the bomb. The oft-cited statistic which should at least be suspect for its utter neatness is 'one million.' That's how many soldiers the US would have expected to lose in order to take the main islands of Japan and force Japanese surrender. The atomic bomb was an expedient, and God knows those men--having dodged so many bullets, having watched so many comrades die, having sent their share of enemy off to his eternity--they would want no more of it. The whole effort--which was then more so than now, a chain of cooperation among men and women in the coordinated effort to mobilize, build, and wage war--was fatigued. It had had enough. Or perhaps it simply meant that the rear-echelon troops, the sons of senators and powerful businessmen, the movie stars, and the filthy rich would finally be required to take their turn marching into a battle that as yet remained critically abstract and distant enough for them to maintain organizationally.

On that note, perhaps we lost an opportunity for democracy in total war. Perhaps we lost a chance for the war experience to truly level all stations of society, to reduce even the sons of the rich and powerful to rotting corpses. They too would have had that existentially transforming experience that comes from killing an enemy or being shot at or simply lying awake in a fox hole, using your helmet as your latrine. Yes, to have the rich boy exit the croquet greens and find himself in Army greens shitting into an old ration tin inches from his 'suite mate' in a fox hole during a lull in artillery fire while all around him a ghastly bone army poked here and there out of the soil and the smell of decay and the fat buzzing of carrion flies hung about. That is democracy when a rich boy gets his better manners stained over with fear, drill, and survival. When the rich boy is reduced to a wet, fatigued, and vacant expression of battle weariness; when the rich boy's mind is too shattered to run daddy's business, that, that is when we have achieved a modicum of democracy. To have us all ferried about, thrown into alien settings, and rung out emotionally by artillery fire is to reduce us all to the basic datum of battlefield experience, which becomes the common bond, the common understanding, the common traumatic thread by which we can build a society together. In this democracy, this utopia of my mind, we all share the same injury.