condor's quill
Moby Dick (ch. 102,102,104)#53
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics.. but as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing….
Ishmael is covered in numbers and soon a poem - while Queequag being closer to being in touch with all that is world is covered in all the mysteries of the Universe - yet as this and the next chapters unfold Ishmael lets us know that the numbers help tell the story of the Universe - he is like Feynman or Gödel ——yet
How vain and foolish, then I, for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddying’s of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out
where is reality to be found - does H2O get us any closer to water and what it is than the child swimming knows water - from the first inklings of thought we as a species have trying to get back to the world -
in case you are wondering what this book is about - Melville steps in and tells us -
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. GIVE ME A CONDOR’S QUILL! GIVE ME VESUVIUS’ CRATER FOR AN INKSTAND! Friends, hold my arms! For the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and through out the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying , is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a might book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried.
wonder if this is where Kafka got the idea to write about a beetle in the Metamorphosis