The Whale

What pained dilation suffers the pupil-heart, when– lo! one should, blinded, squint and glimpse vagrant Heaven’s blazing glare; alas!– only to turn back, facing again the e’er-lapping waves of encircling mundane darkness, as envelop the dampened planks of a sinking ship. All its lanterns sink in vain! For their sounding absence would fail to beget a darker abyss than that within those pitch-oceaned pits, the eyes, gazing blankly anew at vacant nocturnal horizon…

Or so thought I upon the conclusion of my enthralling voyage on the fateful Pequod–– more truthfully, upon completing a read of Herman Melville’s whaling epic, Moby Dick. Mark my words, I would never esteem one single facet of the whaling business as aught but cruel and senseless– notwithstanding the rather dark, or at least unlit world that would have manifested in its absence on lanternless nights of yore– and though I regard whales with more reverence and awe than I do any other animate or inanimate thing; yet in my experience no artistic expression, literary or otherwise, has so formidably commanded my affections, and consequently inspirations, as has that great tale of cetacean barbarism which inspired the present work.

Indeed, ere the last of Melville’s words had sunken into my mind, it had already been made up that a musical treatment of the story, if not my subjective experience thereof, was outright necessary, lest I explode under the pressure of unexploited passions. How fortunate it was that the edition which I owned had been interspersed with chance pages of viscerally beautiful color etchings depicting certain quotations from the volume, these quotations handily residing on the reverse side of the etching pages in addition to within the body of the text. From a carefully, albeit still somewhat arbitrarily selected handful of these very quotations, which I felt loosely conspired to reconstruct the narrative experience, I derived notions for each of this Suite’s five constituent movements and their respective titles.

If I may at last pretend at the role of cetologist, however, I might observe that though my Whale and Melville’s Dick ostensibly embody similar skeletons; yet these two creatures, to say nothing of the difference in the qualities of their blubbers– for Melville’s could light a thousand lanterns with one drop of his oil, and I would fain manage lighting one lantern with a thousand drops of mine– yes, these two creatures, as will be seen, are not the same Whale. Let each, I say, swim its own ocean; and you, yours; and me, mine!