Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 11

Chapter 11

Table of Contents

If you’re new to the story, I suggest beginning with the table of contents so you’ll understand the origins of the text and why I say it was co-authored by Herman Melville.

And now,

Kraken in a Coffee Cup.

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.

—Thaddeus Thomas

---

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