An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (17 page)

“Actually, they unwind the whale—like a scroll—before they chop it up. To just chop it up would be irresponsible. So much of the whale would be lost in the process.” The boy with the gray eyes continued. “And I—I love those chapters.”

“Of course you do” the scowler scowled. “You're—” and searching some seconds for the right word, spat it out: “predisposed.”

“You just want to read a book where you get to turn the pages as quickly as you can.” The gray-eyed boy didn't seem flustered; he seemed happy to settle into a conflict long overdue. “You want to be entertained.”

“Yeah. I'd like to enjoy the books I read. Call me crazy.”

“If you were crazy, you wouldn't need to enjoy something to think it mattered. You should work on being crazy. Everything is interesting to the crazy.”

“Like Ahab?” Venom-voiced. “He killed his whole crew to chase a whale. He wasn't
interested
in
everything
. He didn't care about anyone.”

The gray-eyed boy had a curious look on his face. “Ahab doesn't read books.”

“What kind of answer is that?” The boy was furious, and visibly attempted to calm himself down. “What kind of answer is that?
Ahab isn't real
. Just like this class. Just like you. Not real.”

The gray-eyed boy turned around and looked to the front of the class. “That's why you're no good at this—reading. You think you're smart, maybe you are. Who cares, though? Being smart doesn't help. You don't think anything's real that isn't real to you. All those chapters you hate, all that information about killing whales and processing them, they're beautiful. They're more dramatic than Ahab's chase. They make everything real. They make us part of it. They make it real to us and they make us real to it. You know why you want to be entertained?”

Disgustedly, “Why?”

“Because you have no imagination.”

“Fuck you.” And the boy stood up from his desk, slung his backpack over one shoulder, grabbed his book, and said, “I'm done with this class and your pretentious . . . all your pretentious shit.” He dumped his copy of
Moby-Dick
in the trash can beside the door—one loud metallic thud rang out in the shocked silent room—and left.

Everyone in the class stared at me, save for the gray-eyed boy. He gazed out the window, watching the angry student cross the lawn at a clip, kicking off the head of a dead dandelion. I saw him do it; I looked out the window, too—looking aside so as to think for a moment, not to dispel the palpable tension in the class, but to feel it longer, this sense of open and wild expectation unclouded by each student knowing what word must come next, what point must be established, reaching a conclusion, getting to say what it is something “means”; the only sense was that something must happen, would happen.

I stood up and walked to the window. I didn't turn around, but I could feel the eyes of the class follow me, so that to see me was also to look out the window. Their classmate small in the distance had almost disappeared from sight. “There he goes,” I said, “another orphan.” It could have been a joke, but I didn't mean it as a joke, nor did I say it as one. And without turning around,
“Since I'm anonymous, and you all are anonymous, I think I'll make a small confession. I hate to lecture, and I'm tired of teaching—and I think I'll give it up. I didn't even prepare to teach all of you today. I've read this book more times than I can count, and I thought ‘why prepare?' So I didn't. It makes one weary, you know? Thinking about what you think. Whether each one of you, or even just one of you, leaves a class—even a class I'm teaching—feeling ‘fortified by education'—well, it's shameful to say (but I don't feel ashamed), but I don't think I care.” If I couldn't see the class in the window's reflection, I would have thought the room empty. “What's-his-name, the one present in the attendance checklist alone, he kicked a dandelion head as he stormed across the lawn. A funny thing to notice, isn't it? I saw the cloud-puff of seeds when he did it. He kicked it in anger, anger at one of us, maybe at many of us, maybe at me, yes, but also at the book we haven't even yet talked about. That's fine. I feel angry, too. I don't know why I'm angry. This book—it isn't rational, it isn't reasonable, it incites emotion. Maybe his anger is a legitimate interpretation. I don't know. I do know that he kicked the weed—I
witnessed
it—and now despite him and his fury the seeds will float delicately, even beautifully, through the air (it's happening right now, even as I speak) and will eventually settle, and some will die, and some will take root, and some will grow and flower and go to seed again, and one of these, maybe more, maybe none, a child will pluck off its stem, and before blowing
all the seeds away, that child will make a wish. Isn't it good your fellow classmate got so angry? Now a wish will come true.” I turned around, somewhat surprised at the childish angle of my thought. “So, I'll make a wish, too. I'll be the child who makes a wish, and you can be the angels or monsters or fates or gods who grant it. Like every real wish, mine is a question, not a demand. I wish to know what you think about Ahab, what you think about Ishmael, and what happens to these two men, very different men but also much the same, at novel's end—which, I hopefully assume, all of you have read for today.”

“I don't know what to think about Ahab,” a girl who came to class in her jogging outfit said. “Part of me hates him. When I put down the book I hate him. I hate what he did to all those men. He seems so selfish. But when I'm reading he intrigues me. He's—magnetic.”

“He is magnetic. He describes himself or his soul as a ‘Leyden Jar.' He's magnetic, he's electric, but is he selfish?” I asked.

“I think so.”

The gray-eyed boy spoke up. “Selfish isn't the right word. His absorption in himself is deeper than that. We're all selfish. Ahab is something different.”

“Ahab is Ahab,” I offered, walking back to the desk. “Ahab is forever Ahab. He reads the coin he nailed to the mast and in every symbol stamped on it he sees Ahab. Everyone on the ship is to him another Ahab. Only the white whale isn't him—” I paused, thinking—

“But part of him is in the whale. His leg—” The gray-eyed boy said, looking through his book for a passage.

“Ahab is over-complete and incomplete. He's not simply ‘mad.' As he says himself, he is ‘madness maddened.' He is too much and not enough.”

A young man growing a scraggly beard beneath which a palpable shyness leaked out said, “If Ahab thought everyone was Ahab, then he didn't really kill them. He just killed himself.”

The girl in the jogging suit: “But that ignores the horror of what he did. Dozens of men lived on that ship. And it was Ahab who led them to their deaths. They had wives and children . . .” her voice trailed off, imagining it, “and now their bodies are gone, lost at sea. No grave for anyone to visit, no—” and abruptly, she stopped speaking.

“They become anonymous again, death being a return, perhaps, to anonymity,” I said, mindlessly turning pages of the book, looking down at none of them. “A strange correlate of that thought is that our class today, each of us being for an hour nameless, is having a deathly, deathlike conversation. Maybe we need to think of ourselves as in the water with the drowning whalers, the white whale swimming between us with our captain lashed to its giant body, and our speaking of these men, of what happened to them, of what never ceases to continue happening to them, gives them the only air left they can breathe. Maybe their lives are in our hands, and
class isn't about learning anything at all, it's not even about reading a book—it's about,” I waited for the word to come into my mouth, “resuscitation.” The class was quiet, not distracted. “And the book begins in anonymity. ‘Call me Ishmael.' All we know from the first sentence is that whoever it is that says ‘I' in this book isn't named what he asks us to call him. He's anonymous, a self without a name, without the fate of a name, as if he has lived through his own death and been born again, born blank, and having no parents, this orphan, he must name himself. Ishmael—”

“Yes?” The gray-eyed boy looked up, as if out of a reverie, and then coming back to the present moment, looked abashed, and turned his eyes back to the book in front of him.

“More and more, I think about Ishmael at novel's end. Floating there in the ocean.” I felt a surge of emotion in me I thought I must control. “Ishmael—but let's remember this is
before
he is Ishmael—floats there in the ocean, the infinite ocean, just as Pip had done before him, below the singular god above him in the sky, above the multitudinous god below him in the water, a single man, a mote, merely a mote, but not nothing. Is it hopeless or hopeful? I can't tell. He calls himself an orphan, but it's not only his family that's missing. It's everyone. It's everything. His name. The world. Here is the nameless, worldless man (think for a second how these two conditions always go together) with his arms around his friend's coffin. The coffin is all that keeps him alive. To
stay alive, he puts his arms around death; this coffin that rose to the surface, buoyant because there is no body in it, only breath is in it, only air. That coffin—you'll all remember—is carved with the mystic markings tattooed on Queequeg's body, inked by the prophet on his skin, symbols Queequeg himself couldn't read—the secrets to the universe, the meaning of life. This coffin is a library,” I felt a giddy exhaustion, “that cannot be read, self-enclosed. You cannot read what is in it, and yet it exists, and yet it is real. So many years I've taught students,” looking up, “just like all of you. So many of you think you come here to learn something, that in these books, this book,” holding it up in my hand, “there is some meaning you can read that will help you, that will be of use to you . . . but here is a book on your class's last day that denies any of that is true. You don't read a book. You don't learn something from it that will help you. You don't get smarter.” A wellspring of feeling flooded up in me, a feeling that I could not help but say what I had to say—the very feeling I had spent years training myself to ignore, to tamp down, to refuse. “You don't read a book. You put your arms around it; and it saves you.” I looked up at the class again. “Or it doesn't.” Most of the students were looking down at their desks, looking at their hands. The gray-eyed boy stared at me, scrutinizing me. I felt in an uncanny way that I'd met him before, that we knew each other, but hadn't seen each other for years. The feeling didn't ease my mind, the tension of my mind—it did the opposite. The sense of familiarity, of not being
wholly alone in my thinking, gave me more fully over to my abandon. “Ishmael. He ties the book's end into its beginning, a snake with its tail in its mouth. It is only his being so deeply orphan, no name, no world, no ability even to say ‘I' as he floats on the ocean, lost to everything but the infinite fact of the world extending limitless past his poor self-shard that, years later (we don't know how many years intervene between the last page and the first, we only know the last page impossibly comes before the first page, and that time in the novel is backwards and because backwards is a version of fate—we read toward what has already occurred) he can say, or he
must
say, ‘Call me Ishmael.'” I took a breath; I looked at the window as I walked over to it. “A book begins by defining ‘Who I am'; it ends by asking ‘Who am I?' We are allergic to the world; consciousness is an allergic reaction to the fact of the world; it is our understanding that is a form of irritation, a rewarding irritation, and we think, because we think, we have accomplished something noble, something valorous, that we can say what it is something means; but it is just a symptom of the allergy, the mind trying to rid itself of itself, of what enters it by casting it back out, words for world.” The grass outside the window waved in the wind. “But this book, our book, it ends before the book it is has been written. We end at the wordless beginning, when the whole world is unspeakable, unknown, and all capacity to make use of it, to turn it into something that feels like it means something, is gone. We ourselves are survivors. Everyone
we know is drowning below us, is already dead. The world is an awful, undeniable fact. But we survive—lucky us—we survive. We are the ones who remember. We must relearn our names or give ourselves new ones. We must keep our arms around the book to survive.” I leaned my forehead against the cool glass. I breathed deeply, slowly, deliberately. My heart raced. “Ahab—I think he knew this. And the young gentleman in class is right. Ahab doesn't read books. He doesn't want to read books because he doesn't want to survive. Ahab wants the opposite, our awful hero. Ahab—he had a question about death that he could only ask to death itself, and if that required dying, well, then he'd die. Isn't Ahab also Ahab in death? Isn't that his terrible question? And if he is Ahab isn't he captain still to all his crew? All his dead crew? Can't he, even in death, gather them again, and put them within the mystery of his command? Ahab knew another world hid darkly behind this bright one, and in that ancient quest, as every hero must, he found a way to thrust himself into the dark world where living and dying aren't opposites.” I closed my eyes. “A book and a whale—both of them, it seems, are more than themselves. They resemble each other, not perfectly. A white page and a white whale. Both are passageways into the wider world, where death is an end that does not end, is different than we expect, where death may be deathlike, or not death at all. The book and the whale—they are the death that is an event of life, they are the death one lives through.”