Sperm whales sleeping.
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt …from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The drama's done says Ishmael at the conclusion of Melville's masterpiece. He has survived the wreck and lived to tell the tale of Captain Ahab and the whale. He steps forth as courageous witness to record his testimony. The prose is biblical in its intensity, or Shakesperean, or both. There is little time or space for the reader to breathe. The waves pound the beach and the survivors on the beach. All of us, if we are not in government, are on that selfsame beach gasping for air, grasping for solid ground as we are thrown onto dry land entangled in seaweed and the detritus of the slaughtered leviathan—our body politic, ourselves.
Every day has its drama, and its personal challenge, as we try to prepare for what may come next. In the smallest of ways, in the largest of ways, each family will feel the impact of the draconian upheaval in Washington. My EU friends write notations of commiseration as though they might somehow escape the consequences of what has transpired here. It would be foolish to diminish what has happened, I tell them, or to turn away for long. That said, I recommend poetry, odes to nature, musical inspirations. As Yeats was walking down a busy Fleet Street in London, with its grey cement sidewalks, he heard the sound of a fountain and was transported back to his childhood wanderings in Innisfree. Lines such as this console a crenellated spirit: "And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow."
Dropping slow. Only Yeats could have written this. I attempt a line: The sky tonight, on the top of the ridge, is cloud-filled. And that is all I can write. The poetry becomes prosaic with worry. Nearly dusk and the water main break just north of where I live is nearly fixed, workers underground and above ground in freezing temperatures. For this, at least, I am grateful today. To have free-flowing clean water.
Human madness is cunning and feline, Melville wrote, and it shape-shifts into forms blatant and subtle. It is irascible, it is rigid, as unfathomable as the white whale, a sperm whale—the largest of its species—it sleeps vertically to be closer to the surface. If we flail against it, as Ahab did unrelentingly, how will we survive? How to make order out of the chaos of "executive actions," and continue to live purposefully for the greater good?
Is it madness to have any expectation of progress now, however we define it? Or shall we remain in perpendicular stasis like a whale at rest?