Meditating on the mast-head

It seems I have a bit of an Ishmael obsession; I have not even mentioned Ahab, nor Starbuck, Stubb, nor Flask. I love them all, but my real love is Melville. And as careful as I try to be about separating narrators from authors, Melville’s narrators are Melville-narrators. Is Ishmael’s voice stronger than Tommo’s or Taji’s? Yes, Ishmael is the most wondrous creation of all. But within him there is so much that is familiar.

Take “The Mast-Head,” one of the earlier chapters taking place on the Pequod itself. We’re just being introduced to whaling and haven’t so much as sighted a spout yet. As Ishmael lays out the situation on board, we get an interesting lecture on the mast-head, and how they differ on sperm and Right whale hunters, and what it’s like to keep watch:

In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.

A dreamy meditative man, you say? Perhaps someone like Ishmael himself? He fairly warns other whalers away from him and his kind:

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude,—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head.

It’s not just Ishmael, but many others like him, romantic, meditative men, like all the previous Melville-narrators, and also with clear nods to the likes of Richard Henry Dana, whose “vision is imperfect.” And White-Jacket, or, I should say, White-Jacket, comes rushing back as well:

[L]ulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature: and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. …

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.

We must warn the captains of Nantucket against ourselves, but how else to lose our identity and find the perfect place to meditate? Ishmael will prove to any friend with his first chapter that we are all inevitably drawn to water in this way, where we “all unite” and where we find our own reflection, “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” But awful danger lurks there as well.