The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (3 page)

I
n the posthumous afterword to the poet Charles Olson’s book
Call Me Ishmael
, the writer Merton Sealts describes visiting Olson in his tiny Greenwich Village office, where Olson was holed up, surrounded by old, heavily annotated copies of
Moby-Dick
, while he was finishing his doctoral dissertation on Melville. Sealts offered him a draft of one of his own essays on Melville. Olson—a great bear of a man—sat reading it, smoking his pipe, nodding in approval.

“Well,” Olson said, “I see … that … THE WHITE DEATH … has descended … upon YOU … too.”

I contracted my own White Death back in graduate school, when I was first assigned
Moby-Dick
, and had to wake up at five or six in the morning to swim its immense dark waters.

In a typically droll essay, David Sedaris details how he had to force himself to get through
Moby-Dick
by not taking a bath until he finished. I loved
Moby-Dick
from the beginning, but I can sympathize with Sedaris. Melville’s language is often brilliant, pulse-quickening, Shakespearean—
the deeper midnight of the insatiable maw
. His intensity and worldly wisdom are apparent, but so is his insecurity about his lack of secondary education, a fact of his upbringing that he often tries to cloak with vainglorious prose or rampant alliteration:
mingling their mumblings with his own mastications
. You sometimes feel embarrassed for him, the way you do for historical interpreters or people in costume at a Renaissance fair. Or, like many
Moby-Dick
readers, you simply give up on him about half way through, exasperated by long-winded tangents about the minutiae of whaling.

Not one to give up easily, though, I made it through
Moby-Dick
.

It’s a book about constant movement—about the relentless pursuit of passions—to which I can seriously relate.

I became obsessed with a book about obsession.

Searching for critical work on Melville, a couple grad school friends and I ventured down to the fiction and literary criticism sections in the basement of the Colorado State University library. The library was flooded during a torrential rainstorm the previous year, copies of my favorites like
The Odyssey
and
To the Lighthouse
and
The Shipping News
tossed around and taking on muddy water, little paper vessels foundering in a storm. Though all the drowned books had been restored via irradiation, the basement still had a faint mineral smell of floodwater.

After browsing a few stodgy critical anthologies, I discovered a title called
Melville’s Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia
by Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger. I’d always been fascinated by Carl Jung’s theories—with the fact that he accepted and honored spiritual experience whereas Freud denied it. In
An American Nekyia
, Edinger proposes the very Jungian interpretation that all the characters in
Moby-Dick
constitute one unified entity, that each individual crew member is actually a different splintered archetype within the psyche of the main character—a spiritual seeker named Ishmael.

As proof, Edinger quotes from passages like the following:

The word
Nekyia
derives from the title of the eleventh book of
The Odyssey
, wherein Odysseus descends into the underworld to commune with the dead. According to Edinger,
Moby-Dick
is the quintessential
American
Nekyia—a metaphorical “night sea journey” through despair and meaninglessness, symbolizing the dark passages that we all embark on during our development as individuals and as a society. In Jungian theory, most spiritual journeys begin with a kind of universal descent into the underworld, where we come face to face with our own darkness, weaknesses, and fears—our shadow. So
Moby-Dick
can be read as Ishmael’s confrontation with his dark side in the form of Ahab, just as most of us wrestle daily with our own dark moods and impulses, and our country reckons with its imperialistic shadow side. The clash turns bloody and violent, and Ahab’s resentful pursuit of the white whale brings down the entire ship. Only Ishmael is reborn through the wreckage; having assimilated his shadow after this deep psychic battle, he floats upward through a spiraling whirlpool. In Jungian terms, this circular current is a mandala, an ancient symbol of wholeness and individuation.

I liked this spin on Melville’s tale—especially because a more literal analysis of
Moby-Dick
tends toward the melodramatic and purely tragic. The Jungian interpretation allows for darkness and shadows and tragedy, but ultimately points toward the light.

This is where it began: my own White Death, a syndrome characterized by obsessive thoughts about
Moby-Dick
and Herman Melville, the collecting of old volumes of the novel and the schlepping around of one or more of these volumes at almost all times, and constant talk of
Moby-Dick
—its brilliance and relevance to contemporary life—to anyone who’ll listen.

These early symptoms are mild compared to what manifests as the disease progresses.

I
n many ways, New York is perfect for someone with my peripatetic obsessions, my need to move. It’s a city where everything and everyone are in constant motion, flux—via trains, helicopters, bicycles, skateboards, taxis, strollers, horses. Even in movie theaters you can feel the subway rumble and pitch beneath your feet. The weather’s always changing; buildings are always rising up and coming down; everyone’s trying to get somewhere else—from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from Manhattan back to Brooklyn, from entry level to management, understudy to lead, assistant to editor.

The problem for me is that, having grown up in the West, I’ve always been in control of my movement, the pilot of my own vehicle. But in New York, you’re at the mercy of forces larger than yourself, both dark and light; you have to resign yourself to being a passenger.

My third night in the city, a friend invites me to an art opening near Union Square. I’d visited the city plenty of times as a tourist, but this is my first subway ride under the East River into Manhattan, and about halfway through it dawns on me that not only am I now living in New York City—
New York Fucking City
—but I’m also trapped three hundred feet below a polluted river—so deep that my eardrums pop—hurtling along at top speeds, with no way to stop what I’ve put into motion, to slam on the brakes and eject myself from this whole noisy, grimy, two-thousand-miles-from-home ride onto which I’ve willingly hitched myself. Suddenly my heart is a pipe bomb inside the suitcase of my chest, threatening to blow apart not just my body but also this entire train car and all the two hundred strangers who are about to witness me
completely blow apart
. I’ve been told that it will take me a few months to get used to the city, that these kinds of freak-outs are normal, but this does not feel normal, not at all.

The train ride mercifully takes only a few minutes, and then I’m released through sliding double doors, through silver turnstiles and dirty-tiled corridors and up a staircase back into open air. But “open air” is maybe not the right term for Union Square—not for someone from Colorado, who despite spending months in the woods, hiking without a compass or map through vast evergreen forests where people can and do become hopelessly disoriented—some of them even perishing in the cold, cold woods—now feels, perhaps for the first time in his adult life, utterly lost, abandoned by what he has heretofore considered a keen sense of direction.

J
ust before I’d left for New York, Karissa’s father lost his job at Hewlett-Packard, even though he’d been management-level for over twenty years. Her mother was having emotional problems, and then her grandmother passed away, and in the midst of all this chaos, Karissa had to move back home to finish her last year of college and try to save up enough money to follow me out East.

We talk for hours every night, cell phone pressed against my head for so long that I worry I might develop cauliflower ear.

Our conversations develop a predictable trajectory. First, I tell her all about whatever amazing New York City thing I witnessed that day: some new street art, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Autumn Bowl, the collection of medieval art at the Cloisters. Then, sensing her jealousy and longing, I apologize, try to downplay what I’ve seen, tell her how much the subway freaks me out.

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better. You only hate the subway ride beneath the East River.”

“I would say that in general, the subway makes me very nervous. It’s growing into a problem, actually.”

“You think you have problems? At least you don’t have a boyfriend who moved to New York.”

“You’re moving out here soon, too.”

“Right. Just as soon as I save up three thousand dollars. Working at a
sandwich shop
.”

I remind her that she’s flying in for Thanksgiving, that we’ll talk then. That we’ll work things out.

“All right then,
good times
,” she says.

O
ne night my roommates and I visit a bar just down the street from our apartment, a newish, comfortable place with wood-paneled walls that approximate a Swedish sauna—a quasi-Scandinavian aesthetic that’s popular in Brooklyn and maybe has something to do with Ikea. We’re standing around talking, drinking Pilsner Urquells, when someone taps me on the shoulder.

He’s a tall guy with dark curly hair, and it takes a minute to place him, but then it all comes swimming back—it’s Asa Ellis. The two of us worked together at a skateboarding/snowboarding camp on Mount Hood, Oregon, nearly six years ago. Before making the move out from Colorado, I’d heard from a mutual friend that Asa was in the city, doing well, writing for the
Village Voice
, so bumping into him isn’t a complete surprise, but it’s a nice coincidence that warms the part of my heart that’s ambivalent about my move to New York. Like me, Asa grew up in the West—in his case Los Angeles, in a bohemian canyon enclave above Santa Monica. His parents were proto-hippies who gave Asa freedom to roam around the beach, surf all day, sleep in the sun, and hang out with budding pro surfers. He eventually moved to New York to study creative writing at the New School; he ended up writing for the
Voice
and occasionally the
New York Times
, and generally has the city dialed. But with his blue eyes and broad shoulders and beatific smile, there’s something very laid back and West Coast about him.

Asa and I exchange numbers, and then a couple weeks later he invites me over for dinner at his studio apartment, in an ocean-blue building above a Park Slope hardware store. Just back from a surf trip to Ecuador, he’s in well-worn huaraches, shorts, and an ancient T-shirt with tiny holes all over the shoulders, the look of someone stranded happily on a deserted island. Thick shoulders and ropy arms—it’s apparent he’s spent a hell of lot of time in the ocean. His place is cozy, with uneven hardwood floors, partially exposed brick walls, a couple cats lounging around on thrift store furniture, a record player and a substantial vinyl collection. And a stack of surfboards near his bed.

“Feel free to throw on a record,” Asa says.

I’m on a Talking Heads kick, so I put on
Stop Making Sense
.

He makes gazpacho with cilantro and wedges of fresh avocado. We eat out on the fire escape, where his wetsuits are draped over the railing, and where a little arc of a moon curls over Brooklyn. We catch up on old times and mutual friends and chat about surfing. He tells me how he used to ride his bike to the subway station with his surfboard under his arm, then take the A train out to Rockaway Beach. One night he got home late, rode with his board through Crown Heights, where an old woman spotted him and said, “Now where you goin’
surfin’?
” Asa’s imitation is spot-on, funny without condescension. We also talk books: it turns out he’s really into
The Odyssey
, in the same way I’m obsessed with
Moby-Dick
.