HERMAN MELVILLE’S MOBY DICK

by William H. Benson

July 31, 2003

     Unlike Jonah’s great fish, the White Whale had a name–Moby Dick, and unlike Jonah’s short story, Herman Melville wrote a lengthy novel.  But like Jonah and the whale, Moby Dick is a fish story.

     Captain Ahab’s crew included an odd assortment of sailors–Starbuck, the first mate, Stubb, and Flask; the harpooners– the tattooed Queequeg and Tashtego and Daggoo; and Ishmael, the narrator of the story.  Melville began his novel with the words, “Call me Ishmael”.

     And then there is Captain Ahab who had lost a leg on a previous expedition when this great White Whale he had named Moby Dick had somehow bitten it off.  Motivated by hate and anxious for revenge, Ahab finally told his crew of his true intentions of finding and killing Moby Dick after they had set sail, and the crew agreed to join him in his hate campaign; after all, what choice did they have?  And so the objective of the voyage shifted from that of gathering whale oil and bone to that of seeking revenge.

     Few readers today have the patience to get through to the final pages, but Ahab and his crew eventually find and chase the White Whale for three days.  Then, at one point the crew could see that Moby Dick seemed determined to swim away from the ship.  “Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day to desist.  See! Moby Dick seeks thee not.  It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him.”

     It was strange that a first mate on a whaling vessel did not want to harpoon a whale, but Starbuck by then understood that Captain Ahab’s obsession to kill the whale had driven him and his crew along a self-destructive path that could consume them all.

     And then Moby Dick turned and head-butted the ship, the Pequod, seriously damaging the hull, and the crew realized that the voyage was over.  A harpooning mechanism knocked Captain Ahab into the ocean, and was never seen again. 

     In his last few moments before the ship sank, Stubb cried out, “Cherries! cherries! cherries!  Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”  And Flask replied, “Cherries?  I only wish that we were where they grow.”

     The Pequod took on water and sank along with the crew.  The phrase at the top of the half-page Epilogue is a quote from the book of Jonah: “And I only am escaped to tell thee,” because Ishamel, the narrator, survived to supposedly write the story.

     At the end of Candide, another major literary work, the French thinker Voltaire summarized his philosophy with the sentence, “Each of us must cultivate our own garden,” a conclusion that philosophers and thinkers have pondered over much through the years, often wondering how to apply it to humans and to their institutions and to their individual circumstances.

     Applied to Moby Dick one can conclude that it is difficult to cultivate a garden out at sea, certainly when following someone else’s crazed notions of righting past wrongs and of seeking vengeance.  It is difficult to bite into a garden’s fruits and vegetables when we have not planted and cultivated and then harvested from our own garden.  For at sea we can only dream of tasting a bing cherry.

     August the first is Herman Melville’s birthday, and perhaps it can be a day to go fishing, but perhaps  not for a whale.  But it is also the season to cultivate and yes even harvest tomatoes and cucumbers and watermelons and green peppers and onions from our own gardens.  

THEORIES

by William H. Benson

July 17, 2003

     So much of how we, the members of the Western tradition, see and experience our world is derived from, or at least shaped by, the theories presented by a series of original thinkers.

     For example, Karl Marx, a German intellectual, wrote about class conflict between the bourgeoisie, the merchant class, and the proletariat, the labor class, and he predicted a revolution where the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie and that a classless society would result where everyone would share equally.

     Albert Einstein, a Swiss patent clerk, presented his special and general theories of relativity and his vision of the relationship between space and time and energy and the speed of light within the universe.

     Charles Darwin, the English biologist, thought deeply about the variations in the species of animal life and arrived at a theory of evolution based upon “survival of the fittest” in a process he called “natural selection.”

     Sigmund Freud, the Viennese medical doctor, delved into the inner workings of the human mind and came up with his own vocabulary: repression, renouncing desire, the unconscious, the id, the ego, and the superego, the Oedipal-complex, libido, as well as his own science which he called psychoanalysis.

     Each produced a theory within a distinct body of knowledge: political/social, physics, biology, and psychology, and in the years since each of their theories have been accepted by some, rejected by others, tried by many, attacked by a few, or denounced by the multitudes.

     In whichever country it has been applied, Marxist Communism has proven a failure, a bankrupt ideology, where all the people end up poor, for Karl Marx failed to understand how powerful capitalism was as an engine for human advancement.

     On the other hand, astrophysicists have made gigantic strides in understanding the workings of our universe by incorporating Albert Einstein’s ideas into their ever advancing theories.

     Darwin’s theory of evolution is today accepted by the anthropologists and biologists as a cornerstone in knowing how animal life has progressed through the eons, but it is still a live issue that continues outraging the fundamentalists who argue instead for a creationist theory.  Some scientists have even tried to unite the two theories into one–a creationist evolution.

     But psychologists have pushed aside Freud’s theories, as if they were “stuffed birds on the shelf”, as the literary critic Harold Bloom put it.  “Freudian psychoanalysis arrived, had its equivocal triumph, and then departed forever.”  As a science Freud’s provocative ideas are today remembered as relics, one-time novel concepts that had merit only for a moment, and so  psychologists have forged ahead, leaving Sigmund Freud behind in the dust.

     Within each body of knowledge theories appear and then are overshadowed by new theories, and it may seem that the most recent proves the previous wrong.  Actually new theories may include information from a preceding theory, and some old theories once discarded then can and do re-emerge at a later point. 

     One might wonder what new theories are waiting in the wings off the stage of our awareness for some thoughtful person to discover.  It is just speculation but I think that men and women of the twenty-first century will present new and startling and breath-taking theories that will attempt to unite various bodies of knowledge together into a single theory.  

     As typical Americans our lives this summer are hemmed in by concerns about family, job, home, food, ball games, travel, vehicles, the war in Iraq, and the approaching political campaigns.  But beyond those matters, beyond the outer reaches of our thoughts, an ideological war is raging, where theories as to what is truth are battling for pre-eminence and for power.  Some are wrong in that they do not benefit all the people.  Others are ill-conceived.  Others are dangerous.  But  cccasionally, some theories fit the facts, benefit the people, and are over time accepted as good and true.  We can hope that the twenty-first century will be a new Age of Discovery of the best theories.

THOMAS PAINE

by William H. Benson

July 3, 2003

     Thomas Paine has never received a place equal among the other Revolutionary leaders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, even though Paine’s assistance may have made the difference in the War for Independence.

     But Paine had some serious detractions.  He was filthy.  He bathed infrequently and as a result smelled badly.  Most days food stains covered his shirts.  His clothes were cheap-looking and out of style.  He drank heavily all of his adult life.

     Besides being physically repulsive, he was usually penniless and often failed to pay his bills.  He refused to accept any royalties for his written works, such as Common Sense and The American Crisis, but then after the war he begged Congress for a house and land, which Congress grudgingly gave him.  But all of his adult life he moved from one room to another, dependent upon the generosity of others, who ended up often evicting him, causing a big fight.  Visitors found his room always dirty.

     He married twice when still a young man in England.  He buried his first wife just months after their wedding, and his second wife he abandoned when he came to America.  He never pursued a divorce from her and never remarried, preferring young French harlots.

     The British despised him during the Revolutionary War, and then later convicted him of treason when he tried to foment a Revolution against the King in Britain.  He encouraged the French Revolution which threw out their King, but then the Reign of Terror swept him up and tossed him into prison, where he narrowly missed facing the guillotine.

     Once released from prison he finished his The Age of Reason, a diatribe against Christian beliefs, pointed and blunt.  Whatever fame he had enjoyed as a writer during the war he lost due to this work which detailed his deistic beliefs.  A hundred years later Theodore Roosevelt referred to Thomas Paine as “that dirty little atheist,” which he was not, but is still misunderstood today.

     Still in France Paine wrote a vicious letter to President George Washington, accusing him of trying to become a King in America as well as deliberately keeping Paine locked in a French prison, both untrue accusations.  Paine went so far as to have the letter printed in a Philadelphia newspaper.  Washington wisely shrunk back in a reserved and dignified silence, preferring not to get into a public fight with a former friend.

     In casual conversations, usually at a tavern, he came across as a know-it-all, who would not listen to others opinions.  People soon learned to steer around Thomas Paine.

     On a more positive note, Thomas believed in revolution, because as he saw it, the status quo was always wrong.  As for government, he believed that people should rule themselves because the idea of a monarchy was an injustice.  Also, he hated the slave trade in the colonies, and pushed a law through Pennsylvania’s Assembly outlawing it there.  He favored a social welfare system with care for the poor and the elderly, but above all he believed in independence for the thirteen colonies.  “There is something absurd,” Paine wrote, “in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”

     Paine’s personal habits, his behavior, his attitude, and his bearing all combined to prevent him from ever achieving anything more than that of a controversial and indeed influential writer who stirred up his readers with novel ideas.  One reads his biographies and is struck less by the genius of his thoughts and words than by the missed opportunities.  He could have remained in America after the war and helped with the new government, serving as President, or Vice-President, or as a Secretary in the Cabinet.  Instead he chose to live fifteen years in France where he did not ever learn to speak French.

     Is Thomas Paine a Founding Father?  Perhaps yes.  Perhaps no.  One could say that in 1776 it took all kinds of characters to stand up to the British.  It took the likes of an oddball like Thomas Paine who wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country.”

STONEHENGE

by William H. Benson

June 19, 2003

     The ancient British built Stonehenge almost 4000 years ago, beginning around 1850 B.C. and completing it in 4 phases over some 300 years.  Originally, 30 blocks of gray sandstone, each about 13 1/2 feet, stood above the ground in a circle 97 feet in diameter.  The later builders then created a rectangle within the circle, with arched circles, and horseshoe-shapes, all of massive stones standing upright.  It still is quite an impressive accomplishment for those early people.

     Yet the oldest orientation of all, the axis alignment to summer solstice sunrise, was never lost; rather it was maintained, duplicated, and emphasized.  On a certain day each year for centuries a 6-foot man standing in the center of the monument-temple could watch as the sun first broke the horizon and touched the heel-stone and then soon climbed up and stood for a moment atop that heel-stone.

     For ancient man this was an annual moment of admiration and awe, but also a point to begin marking the days until he should plant crops.

     In 1963 the astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins with the help of a computer determined that the stones when paired formed 16 alignments on 10 of the 12 unique sun or moon points when rising or setting.  Later builders then duplicated 8 of those earlier, two-position alignments in arch-wayed vistas.  Hawkins concluded that in essence Stonehenge was a calendar, a first attempt to map time.  Still, man needed a machine to measure his days; he needed a clock.

     The Earth’s year is composed of 365 1/4 days, with four recurring seasons, and a 28-day lunar cycle–nature’s methods of dividing time.  But it was human beings, our forefathers, who then created the 12-month calendar, the 30- or 31-day month, the 7-day week, the 24-hour day, the 60-minute hour, and the 60-second minute, and a leap year with an extra day.

     Each of those so-called “inventions” was a way of harnessing time, of fixing events and people to agreed-upon points in the past, say to July 4, 1776, or to setting goals or appointments or dreams in the future.

     But why is it a 7-day week?  The ancient Romans started with an 8-day week; they worked 7 days in the field and then went to market the 8th.  But then they switched to a 7-day week, and we of the modern Western world have inherited their arbitrary 7-day week, which simply became a way of clustering the continuing procession of days into measurable portions.

     And then why is it a 24-hour day?  Searching the records of the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, historians have surmised that an ancient man or woman must have thought it a convenient way of dividing each day’s time into segments that they could number, the same for each day.

     For without those inventions, early man suffered the tyranny of the cycle.  The historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “[Early man] tended to see the passage of time, not as a series of unique, irreversible moments of change, but rather as a recurrence of familiar moments. . . . And, in that age of cyclical time, before the discovery of history, the repetition of the familiar provided the framework for all the most significant and dramatic occasions in human experience.”

     Today modern man has a different conception of time.  He divides it into the past, the present, and the future.  He recognizes the past for what it is–a record of the follies and tragedies and triumphs and achievements of human beings.  The present is today, and the future is open, not just  for the new, but for the possibility of the new.  Life is not trapped in a perpetural recyle of what has gone before.     

     We who live in the Northern Hemisphere will experience a summer solstice on Saturday, June 21, 2003, a day that we can label and number and distinguish among all other days before and after.  And certainly men and women at Stonehenge will watch in astonishment as the sun crests that heel-stone.  We differ from those ancient British in that we have a calendar and a watch and a clock and a history.

THE SIX DAY WAR

by William H. Benson

June 5, 2003

     It began at 7:10 a.m., Monday morning, June 5, 1967 when the first of the Israeli fighter jets lifted off and headed toward Egypt, and by 7:30 a.m. some 200 aircraft were aloft.  Their only goal was to destroy Gamal Nasser’s Egyptian military power.

     It ended on Saturday, June 10th, one hundred and thirty two hours later, or six days; hence, the name the Six Day War.  Because that name conjures up an image of a lightning conquest, the Arabs ever since have refused to call it that, referring to it instead as the June War or the Setback.

     I recently picked up Michael B. Oren’s new book, Six Days of War–June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, in which he listed a series of aftershocks of those six days.

     The Egyptians lost between 10,000 and 15,000 soldiers, including 1500 officers and forty pilots.  Jordan lost 700 soldiers, with another 6000 wounded or missing.  Syria counted 450 dead.  And yet, Israel reported losing 679 soldiers, but actually it may have been closer to 800.

     All but a small percentage of Egypt’s military hardware, some $2 billion worth, was destroyed; all of Egypt’s bombers and 85% percent of Nasser’s combat aircraft were eliminated.

     Somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000 Palestinians fled the West Bank of Jordan during the war and ended in the desperate refugee camps where they suffered horrible conditions.  Israel did little to cause that unfortunate human flood, but then Israel did little to stop it nor to encourage the refugees to return to Israel after the fighting had ended.

     The angry, shocked, and deeply hurt Arabs lashed out at the Jews living elsewhere in Arab countries; mobs burnt down Jewish synagogues and assaulted Jewish residents.  And yet, some 1.2 million Palestinians who now were living under Israeli rule were spared much persecution

     During those six days the Israeli military had conquered 42,000 square miles of new territory, and had increased the size of Israel by three and a half times.  Jerusalem was then reunited into a single city, and the Jewish state, once vulnerable to attack, was afterwords within striking distance of the major Arab cities of Damascus, Cairo, and Amman.

     Israel’s military had earned the solid respect of the United States, and a feeling of euphoria swept over Israel.  Harry McPherson, an LBJ White House Counsel, reported, “The spirit of the army, indeed of all the people, has to be experienced to be believed. . . . It was deeply moving to see people whose commitment is total and unquestioning.”  

     Moshe Dayan, with his black eyepatch, and Yitzhak Rabin were elevated to icon-status.

     But not all the Israelis were pleased about the win.  One Israeli soldier named Shai said, “We weren’t especially excited or happy about killing Arabs or knowing that we’d won.  We just felt that we’d done what we had to do.  But there’s a big difference between that and feeling happy.” 

     The Arab intellectuals came away from those six days with an intense disillusionment with Arab nationalism.  Some stressed the need for modernization and democracy.  Others suggested a militant radicalism like in Vietnam and Cuba.  Still others called for a return to the fundamentals of Islam.  Michael Oren wrote, “Painful examinations would be made of Arab society, its inherent propensities and weaknesses, and of the Arab personality and psyche.”

     The Arab politicians refused to accept responsibility for the defeat.  Nasser blamed his insubordinate Egyptian officers for the loss and put them on trial.  Jordan’s King Hussein talked fatalistic, “If you were not rewarded with glory it was not because you lacked courage, but because it is Allah’s will.”   After Nasser’s death in 1970 the Egyptian Salah al-Hadidi, wrote that, “I can state that Egypt’s political leadership called Israel to war.  It clearly provoked Israel and forced it into a confrontation.”

     Michael Oren concluded his book with the comment that in a larger sense the Six Days War has never ended, even after thirty-six years, for basic truths still persist–Israel is still incapable of imposing a lasting peace, the Arabs can still wage a military campaign, suicide bombers can rip apart a peaceful morning, and Israel’s right to exist still hangs in suspension as does the Palestinians’ right to repatriation and statehood.  Today it is sadly true that the Middle East is once more in the grip of turmoil.