The anger and the fury

I'm reading again. Melville, The Whale. Moby Dick. I picked it up again this afternoon. It was lying on top of a pile of books in our half-moved-into new apartment, it's old green cover faded with the dust that has worked its way in. My father used to read this very book to me as a child, this very copy I now hold in my hands. I flip open to near the end, the last few chapters, and before I know it over three hours have passed and I'm still sitting on the floor reading, completely enveloped. I'm supposed to be getting work done, homework. But here I am, reading this old tome from my childhood and not tackling the mountain of text assigned to me. But I can't stop, it's the part near the very end where they are in final pursuit. The suspense, though I've read this story a thousand times before, is palpable, thick. Addictive.

Revenge, a madness not to be considered lightly...

I turn the page and a passage leaps out of the story and grabs me. Intertextual signifigance presses my conscious sub/un/conscious awareness of meaning in a postmodern vice grip. The words squeeeeeze. I read:

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." --Chapter 41

Memories of music flow from the past...
We may chase down our enemies, even bring them to their knees.
We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace.

As I close the book the voice in my head that is at once me and not me asks me:
What would Captian Picard do? WWCPD?





for a klondike bar?




oh the madness of the times, everything a tribute to the schitzophrenic thouroughly unwittingly wittingly postmodern...yet altogether, Human......condition.