Moby Dick Amnesia

Everyone of my generation was forced to read Heman Melville's MOBY DICK. The first line of this epic novel "Call me Ishmael" was burned into our memories and teachers spent days trying to decipher the meaning of the novel, but few of us were aware of MOBY DICK's voyage in American Literature had only sold 3000 copies during Merville's life. After slipping out of popularity Melville was employed at the US Customs House in Lower Manhattan.   

I have visited that oval room many times and imagined Melville working day after day at a meaningless job dreaming of foreign places and a pen in his hand, except that Beaux Arts structure hadn't been erected until 1904, however I later discovered dew-masked bust of Merville near the Customs House, but in recent years I haven't been able to find the wall panel, as if he was once more banished into neglect. Thus flees fame and Melville died in 1891 with none of his books in print. but I still love TYPEE, his romantic novel about two sailors deserting their whaling ship in the Marquesas Island. It shed light on a world beyond the land.  

First lines from TYPEE    

CHAPTER ONE

THE SEA--LONGINGS FOR SHORE--A LAND-SICK SHIP--DESTINATION OF THE VOYAGERS--THE MARQUESAS--ADVENTURE OF A MISSIONARY'S WIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES--CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTE OF THE QUEEN OF NUKUHEVA Six months at sea!  Yes, reader, as I live, six months out of sight of land; cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific--the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else!  Weeks and weeks ago our fresh provisions were all exhausted.  There is not a sweet potato left; not a single yam.   Those glorious bunches of bananas, which once decorated our stern and quarter-deck, have, alas, disappeared!  and the delicious oranges which hung suspended from our tops and stays--they, too, are gone!  Yes, they are all departed, and there is nothing left us but salt-horse and sea-biscuit.  Oh!  ye state-room sailors, who make so much ado about a fourteen-days' passage across the Atlantic; who so pathetically relate the privations and hardships of the sea, where, after a day of breakfasting, lunching, dining off five courses, chatting, playing whist, and drinking champagne-punch, it was your hard lot to be shut up in little cabinets of mahogany and maple, and sleep for ten hours, with nothing to disturb you but 'those good-for-nothing tars, shouting and tramping overhead',--what would ye say to our six months out of sight of land?  

My family whaled the oceans.    

Atlantic and Pacific.      

My great-grandfather died at sea twice.        

I have killed nothing and never eaten man.          

I'm not scared of nothing than the jaws of Mooka Dick.            

Moby WTF

 Written 4/12/16 6:25 PM

Several Palm Sundays ago I woke with an urge to see the ocean. It was a sunny day. The Hamptons were too far away for a day trip, however Rockaway Beach was close. When I told my roommate about the excursion,  Vladmar laughed at me, "Rockaway Beach not ocean. It is song from Ramones."

"It's enough of the ocean for me." Sea gulls and waves and a greasy green sea. "You want to come?"

"For what? To see garbage float in water." Vladmar lit a cigarette and went out on the deck. 

"See you later." I walked to the subway stop and caught the L train to Broadway Junction. 

Less than an hour after leaving Graham Avenue the A train crossed the Broad Channel. 

Several fishing boats trawled the current at the bridge. 

I got off at the next stop and strolled down a desolate street to the beach. The wind blew from the west. A young man flew a kite. Seagulls flirted with the string. Gentle swells cordoroyed the ocean. 

I could feel the chill in the water and turned my face to the sun.

Sun, sea, wind, and earth.

The four elements.

The horizon was slabbed with low-lying fuel tankers. A single surfer rode the waves. A black object bobbed in the water. At first I thought it was a large piece of flotsam i.e. floating debris versus jetsam, something which has been jettisoned by a ship's crew. 

The object dipped under a wave and then reappeared fifty feet away. This flotsam moved fast and had a small fin. Too small to be a shark.

"A whale."

Thar she blows.

A whale in New York City.

I watched the cetacean for several minutes. No one else on the beach noticed its passage. They were busy on their cellphone or texting SMS. I called Vladmar.

"I saw a whale."

"No way you see a whale."

"Yes, I swear I did."

Vladmar hung up on me and phoned several other friends who said I must have been hallucinating about Moby Dick. I can't remember ever reading Melville tome, even though I can recall the first line.

"Call me Ishmail."

It is not my name.

A whale on a flashback. I wasn't sure of what I had seen, but on Wednesday the NY Times confirmed that a humpback whale had been wandering the waters off the Verrazano Narrows. Vladmar apologized and asked, "You have picture?"

"No." The whale had been too far off shore and my camera is a cheap Cannon. "I only have it in my head."

And that's where it will stay.

Moby What the Fuck.

Where Went Melville

Herman Melville was born in New York to a respectable family, which fell on hard times and forced the young boy to work, but to escape impoverishment he went to sea culminating in a voyage to the South Seas, where he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. This escapade formed the basis of his highly popular TYPEE about two sailors who seek refuge with cannibals and how one falls in love with a woman named Faraway.

Once more with money he married and wrote more novels. Most notably MOBY DICK. A literary failure. Melville retired from writing and worked as a customs inspector in downtown Manhattan. I always thought thzt the US Customs Building was where, but it had been erect in 1907. Decades after Melville's death. Inside the Beaux Arts building is a large oval desk overlooked by maritime murals by Reginald Marsh underneath an oval rotunda, which replaced the Seaman's Museum. I imagined Melville at this desk. Not so.

Melville faded into a comfortable obscurity.

Somehow thanks to a Melville revival in the early 20th Century MOBY DICK was declared a masterpice and assigned to school reading lists. "Call me Ismael." I remember the first line well.

"And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

I don't remember a single word in between unlike the Oxford Dictionary aardvak and zyzzyva, a tropical weevil or beetle. I have a copy of TYPEE someplace. Years ago I stumbled on a bust of Melville by by William N. Beckwith outside of 6 Pearl Street. It is no longer there. Such is fame. Fleeting and eternal in the mnds of the unreading public of the modern age. I wonder where the bust when.

to read more go to read Herman's Head by Adam Mellion

https://allvisibleobjects.substack.com/p/hermans-head

Adam Mellon further seeks Melville's bust in https://allvisibleobjects.substack.com/p/hermans-head-part-2-the-bust

The only known bust of Melville. heck out Adam Mellon's substack site All Visible Objects