Haha, that’s me!

Hoo boy, I had an exhausting week. Had a dentist appointment, went to a couple of podcast live shows, and had an endodontist appointment (where nothing actually happened). Turns out I’ve got a tooth that is all messed up and needs a root canal, not looking forward to that… except I kind of am, because it’s starting to ache more and more. Ugh. What a pain. Literally, in this case. But I won’t let that keep me from my whale-related responsibilities!

Summary

The Pequod is now deep in the Japanese cruising grounds, which are living up to their name. The crew are spending almost all of their time hunting whales, only able to rest in those brief interludes when a whale dives into the depths of the ocean, and they must wait on the surface until it returns.

During these brief interludes, the almost supernatural calm of the Pacific Ocean seems almost to be the same as a peaceful meadow. Even Ahab is in affected by these intense moments of peace and reflection.

We get a glimpse into the thoughts of Starbuck and Stubb in their murmured asides. Starbuck looks deep within and finds that his faith is his last bastion, and for Stubb, it is his jolly nature.

Analysis

Man, where does one even begin with this? Definitely a chapter that I hastily glossed over my first couple times through the book. “Oh, that’s just Ishmael talkin’ about some nonsense again, some of that prose is nice, though.” And indeed it is!

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.

The idea here being that these moments in the midst of extreme effort (ie: chasing a whale in a rowboat), when one suddenly has an hour or two to kill, in the most perfect peaceful calm imaginable in the middle of a vast ocean, it allows a certain special relief. And thus, a special type of self-reflection.

That Deep Dark Truthful Mirror

What is it about this interlude in the midst of a great hunt that allows for such deep reflection? Well, I think I can follow Ishmael’s logic here, and it goes something like this: In the course of life, you bounce from one way of thinking to another.

Starting off as a child, you’re perfectly faithful, having never known doubt. Then you pass through doubt, skepticism, full-on disbelief, and then a more reflective attitude which he calls “If”. One fully believes, rejects that belief, then comes around and considers it more thoroughly in the wake of that rejection.

Not unlike the cyclical patterns of government in Plato’s Republic, these modes repeat throughout life, and through different topics. The question is: where does it all end? Is there a true end to everything? Is there some answer that could be found, beyond death?

The closest one can come to answering that is a way of getting out of the hustle and bustle of life and truly have no distractions or attachments. And one sure way to do that is to be in the exact situation described at the beginning of this chapter.

Think of it: absolutely alone, in silence, in the middle of the ocean, with nothing to do. Waiting on a great force of nature to run its course. Staring at that deep, dark water, perfectly blue, flashing golden with the sunlight in turns. As far as one could be from the riot of human society, each individual man in the boats is able to truly probe the depths of reverie in peace.

What Are You On The Ocean?

Essentially, the question that is being asked is: if you strip away all social connections, all trappings of civilization, what is left? What do you see in yourself, out there in the absolute middle of nowhere, on the surface of the ocean? No conflict, no connection, nothing but your own soul staring back at you.

Hm, come to think of it, this is a place where the “savage” pagans and the rest of the crew are all equals, huh. Before the grand majesty of nature, all bereft of their past and future. Think of it as a different form of a sensory deprivation tank.

Ishmael tells us that Ahab is not immune to this effect, but does not give us the barest hint of what he is thinking at this moment. All we get are the murmurs of Starbuck and Stubb. It’s been a long time, but I believe Ishmael himself is usually in Stubb’s boat, so that makes a certain amount of sense.

Let’s take these in order.

The Man of Faith

What Starbuck says it this fuckin’ banger of a line:

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”

Faced with this utterly calm and dreamlike sea, Starbuck finds that he rejects his knowledge in favor of his aesthetic taste. He knows that there are murderous sharkes beneath his feet at that very moment, down below the placid rolling waves. He knows that the sea is a harsh and cruel force that would kill him dead in an instant if he let it.

But in this moment, he has faith. He lets his own fancy overlay that terrible truth. He allows the charnel house of nature to bewitch him and cover up its terrible truths. Because it is the only way to live, at the end of the day. He is a man of faith, and that means ignoring the evidence of his brain, and trusting the evidence of his senses.

After all, what is faith if not a rejection of logic in favor of evidence? To stick to your own beliefs in the face of rational conclusions, to interpret and twist the findings of your eyes and ears to support one column over the other. Starbuck is not bound by his faith, he is freed by it. It protects him from the abject cruelty of the world.

The Man of Joy

Meanwhile, Stubb gives us a somewhat less poetic, yet still profound quotation:

“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!”

Just a dude livin’ in the moment. Yes, he’s had his ups and downs in life, he’s said some things and experienced some things that he would rather soon forget. So let’s just… do that, for now.

What matters to Stubb, deep in his heart of hearts, is this moment. He is willing to swear on a stack of bibles that he’s always been a jolly man. If it’s not true, well, who cares. All that matters is the here and now of it, this time of joy and exuberance.

There is some self-consciousness here, of course. He also knows that this is an absurdity, to claim that this moment, this particular “now”, is exactly who he’s been forever. But who could argue? It’s a fun philosophical position to play around with.

We had some discussion of this in my epistemology class, the idea that if the universe only existed starting this second and all your memories were false, would you be able to tell? Would it matter, in any real way? Isn’t the phenomenological experience of the present moment the only thing that really exists in the entire universe?

And so on and so forth, proving any particular position is extraordinarily difficult, for certain values of “proof”. At the end of the day, all you can really say is that you must believe what allows you to continue living your life, in the way you are accustomed to.

So yes, in a sense, Starbuck and Stubb are peas in a pod, ideological brothers, separated only by a veil of sophistry and social fog of war.

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Aww yeah, always feels good to bust out the epistemology. Perhaps the most obscure, and yet most accessible, of all philosophical doctrines. I talked to one of my professors about how one goes about doing epistemological research, and the answer is just… sitting, and thinking. What else could it possibly be?

Oh right, I suppose I should address the chapter title, this is as good a place as any: a gilder is a golden coin from the Netherlands. My own family hails from that region, at least in part (on both sides!). Though the name is not actually native to those lands, there is no district called “Gilder” in the Netherlands, though there is a “Gelder”, which is in fact a much more common name.

My name is unknown on the continent of Europe, but not entirely unknown in the Americas. There’s some old family lore my father dug up in geneological research, that it was simply made up by some distant indigenous ancestor, in order to fit in with his Dutch neighbors. I’m not sure how much stock I put in that, but hey, stranger things have happened.

Anyway, I believe Ishmael is relating the golden sunlight reflecting off the sea to the golden coin, and thus in turn to the doubloon fastened to the mast of the Pequod, which several characters also used as a tool of reflection many chapters ago. It’s all of a piece, so to speak.

Until next time shipmates!