by Don Hynes
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| Vantage Point | Culture and Politics by Don Hynes |
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"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong.
He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so,
the prejudice will be gone." - Tom Paine
January 25, 2004 A Myth for Today To understand the direction of our society we need a vehicle large enough for the enterprise. You can’t capture America within a polaroid snapshot. You may trap a revelatory image here or there, one that cracks a hole in the fence and allows for a peek into the field of action, but looking through the occasional knothole is less than satisfying. No, to really view the voyage of destiny that is the United States you need the lens of myth, something written and wrought on a grand scale, because it is an awesome endeavor, awesome and awful in its size, its idealistic foundations and violent determination, its furnaces of industry and militarism driving the pistons and titanic screws, forcing the nation on, over the oceans of history, culture and intelligent causality toward a destination our collective consciousness may imagine as paradise. The American writer who went to depth in our cultural direction and destiny was Herman Melville, who wrote the myth of America in theme and in detail. He perceived the American psyche and foretold the ultimate expression of its unacknowledged inner conflict. Setting out from nostalgic New England, with its tidy houses, church steeples and town square, only Melville imagined the journey of the Pequod. Mainlanders, with their shop and trade, their accounts receivable both earthly and heavenly, whose god was an accountant like themselves, and a lawyer and a judge, who couldn’t be troubled except in commerce about the ocean which lapped at their shore in a dark and inscrutably rhythmic response to their petty accounts. Ahab was the extension of New England rigor and supposed normalcy, a man of absolutes. His concern was with transcendent accounts, good and evil, this one-legged scar-faced veteran. Ahab was confirmed about the evildoer and what his biblical obligations were in hunting down and destroying the great white whale. Ahab was passionate and devoted to his apprehension, his mania for purity and revenge, and the whaling, the industry, was only means to his apocalyptic end. Starbuck, Ahab’s first mate, was the embodiment of industry and virtue. He melded his Bible with a mission of commerce. Loyal to his trade and the Calvinistic ethic that supported his venture, his dedication to the sea was like mechanic to shop, grocer to store, officer to corporation. He was on the ocean to make and take his due and further the prosperity which his god encouraged as strongly as his shareholders. His economy was paradisiacal, agrarian in motif but industrial in intent. Starbuck hunted for whales as lumbermen stalked trees or railroad men laid tracks. They cared not for the ocean or the forest or the prairie. They were men of industry, their work straight rowed and orderly and the harvest was their due. But what does this industry breed? What virus would their paradise infect when the world became their factory? That revelation was beyond the penny saved penny earned moralist devotion to progress. Lincoln witnessed the spawn in the aftermath of Antietam and Gettysburg, his faced forever etched and fissured by the horror that destroyed ten thousand in an afternoon. Lincoln’s tragic awareness was rubbed out of our cultural sensibility, substituted with sentimentality, preparing the way for Henry Ford’s crankshaft of endless production, the sanctified virtue and promised utopia of unlimited manufacture and unfettered free trade. Melville knew who would eventually take the helm of the American ship and where the course was directed. The piety of Sunday parsons and order of uniform factories were founded in aboriginal death, slave galleys, buffalo carcasses, a field of white crosses at Arlington, slash pit coal mines, oil tankers, slaughter houses, and unlimited immigrant fuel for the steel bellied engines that would tame the darkness we couldn’t be troubled with while we fabricated the city of god upon what we apprehended a savage wilderness. Eventually Ahab would emerge. His field of dreams is not agrarian. It is Armageddon, the battlefield where the good of civilization will finally defeat the vast and uncontrollable darkness of the uncivilized, the unconverted, the evildoers who stand in the way of religion and its furrowing tractors, its behemoth dams, its Apache reincarnate as helicopter and its mother of all bombs. Ahab would eventually captain this ship, just as Grant was the only officer drunk enough on alcohol and mission to complete the suffocating violence of a “civil” war. In the story of the Pequod we read the parable of America, the ultimate Puritan expression of godliness, of manic virtue, of an ivory stumped idealism determined to destroy the force it cannot contain in its hardware bins or criminal codes or tame among its brethren. Ahab would have his demon and let the business and prosperity be damned if necessary in the death of Moby Dick. Ahab had Tashtego, the native American, nail his piece of gold to the mast and all his harpooners swear on blood that they would not cease until the object of Ahab’s fury and hate succumbed to their knives. Ahab’s fanatical view was only opposed by Starbuck, loyal to the corporation and concerned about lost profits that suggested to him a wandering by Ahab into heresy or even madness, but Starbuck eventually converted to the death mission, the ultimate - though largely hidden to the conscious mind - necessity of whaling to not only destroy whales but to destroy Whale herself. Such is the mission of industry, albeit largely unconscious to the earnest who dream of liberty bells and torch lit harbors, a rainbow utopia where each man is harnessed to his proper plow, every furrow straight and true, the profit belonging to those who labor. Melville wasn’t taken in by piety or idealism. He fathomed the deep ocean and the course that was being set by the light addicted half of the American psyche, to subjugate or destroy all that was unknowable, fertile and dark. The course had been set for many years and Melville as myth maker knew eventually an Ahab would one day take command of the American vessel. Today is that day for America, and the ship of more than state, of nation, is on a perilous course toward the swirling vortex that took the Pequod and crew to the bottom of the sea. Only one structure floated from that oblivion, the coffin of Queequeg, the aboriginal reverent for both death and birth, light and dark, eternally wedded to the forces that are the reality of life, as it is, where it is understood that darkness will not be defeated, the light will not be consumed, and where resides the knowing that the real deities of heaven and earth will not be mocked. Ishmael alone was saved from the disaster, the individual who participated with compassion, who was friend and ally to native and merchant but who knew himself apart, who was afraid of Ahab and the sea but who followed his destiny beyond the confines of new Bedford and that circumscribed existence. Ishmael was willing to put himself upon the ocean and Melville cast his hope in the individual who would be raised by the ancient wisdom of the past, with a vivid unblinking awareness of the present and an undying faith in tomorrow. Melville’s myth saves only one. Perhaps our challenge today is to live the story of one, finding our individual salvation from the sucking doom of Ahab’s mania and misery, and then create a story together of new collective hope. Interestingly, Ishmael’s strength was not in opposition to what took the Pequod down. There were limits to his loyalty and a disinterestedness in what ailed Ahab, preferring an awe for what the captain sought to destroy. Ishmael slept with Queequeg to begin his adventure – in a bonding we’d easily de-construct and mis-interpret today. He took the primitive into his measure of what was before him, and although he could not revert to the past, he had the innocence and forbearance to make the surety of Queequeg’s cosmology part of his own, and in the end it was that inner marriage with ancestor that was intrinsic to his salvation. Looking today for ways to move into a collective response that would right our national course, there are many fine programs offering alternative action, from mercy Corps to MoveOn.org, from the Hunger Site to the NRDC’s Bio Gems. Steve Earl rasps out a prophetic voice and the Dixie Chicks lambaste pretension and remain at the top of the charts. Perhaps for now the alternate course is more confederation than unified strategy, yet whatever the instrument and degree of participation, it is the individual soul that must be heard within at the outset. It seems like such a trifling matter, but it is an art and discipline to reckon with clarity the inner compass amidst the present cacophony of confusing voices and frightening directions. It takes “guts of steel” as Carlos Castaneda wrote, and a willingness to be within fully and accurately before assuming that the ways we move without will prove integrative. It takes listening to each other and a willingness to participate in the kingdom of little things, to offer a kindly word, acknowledge another in the tedium of everyday task, and to make a virtue not of piety but of how we might carefully extend a hand of support and guidance to those within our reach. Although we each must make the individual journey, we are not alone. We will be buoyed up, despite the repetitive downward spiral of the mechanical man with his need for domination and violence. Guided by the unerring wisdom of soul, we may find each other and our common destiny, beyond belief, beyond culture, beyond wealth and reputation. We are on a journey in the “bane of interesting times” as the Chinese adage goes, our voyage forever supported by the vast ocean and inspired by the bluest sky. A Vision for Tomorrow Dr. Martin Luther King had the audacity to face the forces of his day with courage and integrity and to speak with an unflinching and prophetic voice for justice and compassion. The Map by Don Hynes There is a map in me; a great spirit hid it, mapping a world round with perfection, complete, whole, joyful. Some days I wonder its worth, this map of a world that could be but isn’t. Looking down at the earth in early spring, the land is like elk hide, brown and lustrous, the mountains veined white with melting rivers. I clutch the map tightly to my heart though it is older than me and won’t be lost even with my death. Peace. *** |
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