Chapters 10-12: Kraken in a Coffee Cup
A ship sails beneath the sea, claiming the souls of drowned sailors.
Cornelius Mathews, The Motley Book: A Series of Tales and Sketches.(United States: J. & H.G. Langley, 1838)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851)
Kraken in a Coffee Cup
Chapters 10-12
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Chapter Ten
I am a man cut away from the stake, saved from the fire which first wastes all the limbs and then consumes them, but in the captain, there seems no sign of bodily illness about him, nor its recovery. His whole high, broad form, seems made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mold, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. He is no ragged old seaman counting off his remaining sails, if such a passing ever comes to men beneath the waves. I cannot fathom what the captain, if not the captain, means to be.
“On my maps, you’ve seen ourselves multiplied across the sea,” he says, and I agree that this is true. “Ours is the ship of Theseus, and what you’ve seen is both truth and deception; they are not us, nor can they be. They are older and younger ships, and older and younger crews. On some, you sail, and on others, you’ve not yet arrived.”
I attempt to articulate his point in a form I understand. “We are split in time, not in matter.”
“It makes no sense to wonder how much time I’ve spent upon this calling, but it’s been time enough. There came the day when the map showed our ship sailing seas I’d not sailed, and I imagined it sailed without me. It became my intent then to train up my first mate and find a way free. I’d pick my time and place to walk ashore and embrace a future enriched by fate, but that Christmas came while I still formulated plans; the beast struck, and, for a time, I saw in it retribution.”
If retribution, it took the wrong man.
“Then you fell upon my deck,” he says, “sent to join a widow’s husband at sea.”
The tavern’s air, for a brief moment warm, carries again the sting of ice.
“Ask Ligeia the meaning of your arrival; she knows my intent; we formed it together. We came here to mourn and communicate her loss. I confessed my desire to be delivered and the end that desire wrought against her lover. It was she who disabused me of such notions and taught me to harness our calling’s power for my own coveted end.”
My mug, though firmly in my grasp, remains untouched. “Dare you tell me her solution?”
“Find her. Know your name, for it’s time for us to sail. Beseech her to complete the truth she began; your very arrival is proof of a life I’ve not lived and a love I’ve not known.”
#
It strikes me strange to couple (in mind) the mast-heads of the land with this pinnacle at the bottom of the sea; but in the early times of Nantucket, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. The image comes as I ascend the tower without Ligeia’s swift assistance.
I think, too, of the mast-heads upon the sea, where I stood in voyages past, a hundred feet above the silent deck, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath me and between my 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. There I stood, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolled; the drowsy trade winds blew; everything resolved me into languor, me, whose job was to be alert. Such is the Sirene pinnacle; risen to keep watch, yet slumbering through these many years of darkness. It has purpose, yet not purpose fulfilled.
What’s my purpose, ancient tower? Why have I sunken to such depths? The torrents of emotion have given way to numbness, and in the balances, hell weighs against the captain’s chair; and I’m moved neither to joy nor terror. Be it what it will, for good or evil; the body of this tale was writ without me. I’m but a player on the page.
#
I reach the tower’s topmost plateau and find it empty, and though I should not expect to find her waiting, even if to this very spot the captain directed me, it’s much more to be deplored that this mast-head offers neither shelter nor comfort. It is in this way akin to a southern whale ship which are unprovided with those enviable crow’s-nests in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas.
(Stop speaking; stop. Your own comparison shames you. This position presents neither weather nor sun, and as for the unforgiving surface, you float, suspended. Wait in silence; she comes soon enough.)
I wait and wonder if the crew continues in their drinking.
(They do not; they prepare for departure, for launch will come at your arrival. They work, while all that is asked of you is that you wait.)
I still feel my own drink within me, both buoyancy and weight within my veins.
(...go on.)
Perhaps, I’ll be sick.
#
If the southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as the Greenlandmen, that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which they mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging, resting in the top to have a chat with anyone off duty; then I’d ascend a little farther and throw a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.
Beware of enlisting in vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with philosophy instead of mathematics in his head. Beware of such a one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint the richer. The whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many who are as I used to be: romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the worrisome woes of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. The Byronic hero perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless, disappointed whale-ship, and cries:
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.
The sea is no place for a philosopher, unless his fare is paid, and my only fare was assumed by the captain who gave me to the sea. I was my own payment and his as well; perhaps he thought by disowning me from the sea he might appease the gods and bless his sailing. I feel the poverty of his capitalistic superstition.
Still, Ligeia does not come, and I see at last what there is always only there to see; roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean.
Chapter Eleven
The sea is no place for a philosopher, I say as I stand upon a tower peering into eternal blackness. No souls ever blanketed this sky with stars; but why would they build so Brobdingnagian a tower, except to perceive something I could not; or unless they required a tuning fork to train their own perception?
Captains take their absent-minded young philosophers to task, and mine needs now to do as much with me; upbraid me for insufficient interest in the voyage; I am so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, I would rather not see souls than otherwise. The young Platonist has a notion his vision is imperfect; he is short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? He has left his opera-glasses at home—yes, and I stand atop my own.
What was it Ligeia told me? —We have seen vermillion stars; the carpenter supplied the constellation, and our ancestors observed similar in our dark heavens, and while this pallidness burned aloft, few voices were heard from the enchanted city; who in one thick cluster stood on the sterncastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence which was enlivened by that connection, thought to thought, intelligence to intelligence.
No voices are now heard, none of that which once rang outside my bedroom window and drove their sailors, I once supposed, to sea. They sought silence, I said, because I, myself, was blind, but now I stand on that sterncastle and loosen my thoughts upon the dark blue deep:
Seek thy rest on fortune’s chest,
And find fate’s circle closing.
I choose their song as mine, not knowing if the choosing matters; I mean only to honor those who stood here before me. With eyes closed, I feel each thought as if it were a physical vibration, resonating between the tower and the bubble’s transparent shell. The words return with other remembered sounds: my own halting steps as I pace a street, a creaking sign, the tinkling of glasses within, and the muffled rumble of my own starvation.
Sirene gives way to New Bedford; I pass the sign of The Crossed Harpoons; it looks expensive and jolly there, and I imagine the warmth of life inside. Further on, from the bright red windows of the Sword-Fish Inn, fervent rays melt the packed snow, for everywhere else the congealed frost lays ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement against which I strike my foot. (From hard, remorseless service, the soles of my boots are a most miserable plight.) Pausing one moment to watch the broad glare and hear the glass, I think again: expensive and jolly; but go on, famished fool; don’t you hear? get away from before the door; your patchwork boots stop the way, and the stench of approaching death unsettles their digestion.
Hunched shoulders and downcast eyes give way to the raised face that pleads to heaven against the cruelties of earth; but between Bedford-black awnings, a stretch of starlight shines.
The carpenter has supplied constellations to twinkle in the deep dark sea.
From this high pulpit on world’s bottom, I see the afterglow of God’s passing, and what could be more full of meaning? The pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part, and from thence the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried (and those men standing watch must bear the earliest brunt). From thence the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds, for the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; the pulpit is its prow.
From the pulpit, the pinnacle, the pyramid, those old astronomers were wont to sing out for new stars. Having now sung, I open my eyes, and I am not alone; the light of souls surrounds me, as much as if I bathed in the belt of Orion or swam with the Pleiades. Oh, sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings speak of hidden souls beneath; and meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
Their light overwhelms me from within that unaccountable mass of shade and shadow, and in my blood, which pulses with their rhythm, I feel their lack of rest. Paradise denied them, their souls forever search the ocean’s desert floor, alone with themselves in the vast, dense, darkness; and there, I find my own New Bedford, which, though neither heaven nor hell, might be either for the man who brings her with him; and I carry both her cold and indifference; a past escaped, still awaiting.
These lights cast shadows. They fill the sea with their troubled wake.
#
The watch passes on the slumbering city, and my attention turns from the souls above to the souls below. What I find surprises me. Even at this great distance, I see movement in the harbor where there is work underway to prepare the departing Shade. People glow as if reflecting the soul-light above them, and I can discern the identity of each. This one is the cabin boy, that one the helmsman, and this one the cooper, and just as I chastise myself for believing the impossible, another light presents itself, glowing with unquestionable certainty. It is Ligeia. With a light, fish-like pace she measures the ship from taffrail to mainmast.
I push off from the pinnacle and as I do the lights both above and below dim and dwindle. In a moment, they are all but gone, but when I cover half the distance between that tower and the ship, when I am still too far away for the feat to be physically possible, I nonetheless make out individuals among the ant-like movements. I catch hints of their soulish glows, and I know each as well as if I stood among them.
Had Ligeia taken me, hand-in-hand, I could have covered the descent in half the time, but eventually, I arrive. All work has haltered and the crew has gathered to witness my approach. At the front wait the captain and Ligeia.
“It took you long enough, but you saw it in the end,” the captain says.
“You’ve seen them, too,” I say. It begins as a question, but that is not how my statement ends; I know the truth too well.
“Every officer must and most the soulmen,” Ligeia answers.
“Someone could have told me,” I say.
“Not if you’re to lead,” says the captain.
The crew cheers, and I know I am one step closer to being fully welcomed as one of their own, but still, I’m not quite there. If I am not yet crew, I am certainly no officer, and if I am no officer, how can I presume to think I’ll be their captain. Yet, by fate’s will, so it must be.
“Are you here to give me my name, at last?” I ask Ligeia.
“In part,” she says. “There is something more happening here, and the current of my fate has merged with yours, at least for now. The captain and I both feel it.”
“She’s sailing with us as a harponeer,” the captain says.
The cabin boy can’t restrain himself. “It’s the first time ever a Sirener has sailed upon the Shade.”
“There was a time when no one but Sireners sailed upon her,” she counters.
The cabin boy steps back, sheepishly. “First time since.”
I see in the faces of the crew the same expectation as on the night Ligeia and I were first introduced; I know she must sense it, too. The captain gives me leave to address the crew.
“There was a misunderstanding among some in the city, and it will not stand at sea. A heart is not manned as one crews a ship, where we mourn the man’s loss but fill the slot and sail. I’ll earn my place upon the Shade, but Ligeia is not similarly to be won. She’s her own and will seek no other, until both she and fate decide the time.”
Once again the crew cheers, if a little awkwardly, and I assume this means I’ve spoken well, whether they believe my words or not. The moment ends; the captain addresses the crew, and I’m no longer at the center of their attention. I look away, back to the darkness where the countless souls are but a hint of phosphorescence, a sense of depth to the deep.
The crew thinks them damned, and those we gather, blessed, but I have seen them and felt their truth. They wait (for what I cannot know), and they wait with whatever they brought with them. If our role is to gather from the scattered seas and deliver them together to a fate such as this, what will we bring with us when our time comes? Or, perhaps, that’s not the fate of a soulman; perhaps we sail forever or be destroyed by that which holds power over body and soul.
Chapter Twelve
Call me Eleazar. From some leagues below—never mind how many precisely—having little or no terror in our souls, and nothing particular left to drink in Sirene, we sail back into the shadowed deep to seize the watery fates of men. Souls drive before us and gather in our wake as phosphorescent trails. No one chastises me for standing at the bow in slack-jawed wonder while others toil; most know something of the moment I am perpetually discovering, like a sailor crying first sight of land, only to discover an archipelago, one shore after another; land ho, land ho, land ho.
This is your name, says the shore. This is your crew.
The cooper’s name is Cooper, which is both sensical and disappointing, and the cabin boy’s name is John. The creature we fear, he, too, has a name, and I feel his presence surging. In the profound hush of this nearly invisible sphere, a quiver in my soul detects him, this strange specter; and in the distance, a great gray mass lazily rises and disentangles itself from the darkness. He gleams before our prow like an avalanche, newly slid from the hills, glistening from horizon to horizon.
I expect the boats to be launched in battle, but transfixed upon his brilliance, I cannot see that I alone behold him: a vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, innumerable long arms radiating from his center and curling, twisting like a nest of anacondas. No perceptible face or front does he possess, undulating there in the billow-less sea, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
With a low sucking sound he slowly disappears again; and my mind gasps for even a vague idea of his true nature and form; and in my soul, I know, that the one to whom these arms belong, by them formed the ocean’s bed and tucks to rest all who sleep there.
I recall the great kraken preached by the Norwegian bishop, but kraken is not his name; neither that nor beast, as we most often call him. The gospel of Matthew tells us: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
A superstitious crew will call him devil, but the scripture never speaks of a devil who reigns in hell. No. Hell was made as his chastisement. The one able to destroy both body and soul in hell, he is god; and I have seen him manifest.
#
I awake from blasphemy into the cabin, upon the cot I call my bed. In this room filled with shadow, a shadow moves, and I recognize the form of the captain watching me. His angles are not correct, and I reason the captain must be standing near the light; what I see beholding me is his shadow cast upon the wall; yet, no candle burns nor wick within its lantern.
He has a name, but that true name remains hidden from me, another presented in its place. With no intended humor, he calls himself Captain Charon.
“You’ve seen the creature, lad,” he says.
It’s not right to call a creature that which is not created.
The shadow moves off the wall and through the space that spans between us; now suspended, without the wall’s firm surface, it blurs into another form I recognize, one of the dusky phantoms which chased our boats at the captain’s orders.
“What are you?” I whisper.
“Your familiar captain is standing upon the deck and leading his crew.” He passes over me and lays flat upon the wall that stands between me and the sea, and there the silhouetted form of the captain stands watch over me again. “We are one, he and I, each the other’s shadow cast.”
“Impossible,” I say.
He moves out just enough from the wall to turn his head and still hold the form of his head turning; two black eyes and the captain’s jaw. “Don’t clutch to concepts which here cannot apply.”
#
I sit among that small scattered congregation, near the door and beside the black-eyed widow, and I ponder death upon the waters—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity. But what then? What they call my shadow is my substance.
The storm-pelted door flies open and the chaplain’s shadow shades the pulpit. His face is the hardy winter of a healthy old age, but among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shines certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom—the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February’s snow. He carries no umbrella and has not come by carriage, for his tarpaulin hat runs down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket fights to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it’s absorbed. Hat and coat and overshoes are one by one removed and hung in an adjacent corner; then, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly ascends the pulpit.
Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which forms its back is adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers. High above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floats a little isle of sunlight, from which beams forth an angel’s face; and this bright face sheds a distinct spot of radiance upon the ship’s tossed deck.
The pulpit itself is paneled in the likeness of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rests on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak. What could be more full of meaning? The world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; the pulpit is its prow.
The father rises in a mild voice of unassuming authority. All is quiet and every eye upon him. He pauses a little; then kneels in the pulpit’s bows, folds his large brown hands across his chest, uplifts his closed eyes, and offers a prayer so deeply devout that he seems to kneel and pray at the bottom of the sea.
Then, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship foundering is a fog-breached sea, he reads the hymn;
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
With a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots and a slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, the congregation rises and echoes in response;
The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day;
Our singing swells high above the howling of the storm.
E’er since by faith I saw the stream
Thy flowing wounds supply,
Redeeming love has been my theme,
And shall be till I die.
The father drops, and then lifts his face again, a deep terror in his eyes. “The bottom of woe is deep. But is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? When the ship of this base and treacherous world has gone down beneath us, delight in him whose strong arms yet support Him. Delight, though He bring you good or evil; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”
He says no more, but waves a benediction, covers his face with his hands, and so remains kneeling, till all the people depart, and he is left alone.
#
My recumbent position grows wearisome, and by little and little I sit up; my clothes well tucked around me. I sit in this crouching manner for some time, until at last, I open my eyes. No man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essence. Coming out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness, a disagreeable revulsion consumes me. I am a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then can I unite with this wild captain in worshiping his tentacled deity? But what is worship? I answer myself; to do the will of god, that is worship.
And what is the will of god but fate?
—Thaddeus Thomas
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