The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (30 page)

Along with Kelly, I spend time with Gabriel and his family, and my old friend Dan, the tattoo artist, and my stepbrother Tim and his family, who live just a few blocks away. And I meet people like Moe Bowstern, who works summers on an Alaskan salmon boat, then spends winters in Portland working on her writing and artwork, and who leads the crowd in singing sea shanties at IPRC benefits. And Dan Hack, who turns out to be my very distant cousin, both of us descendants of Hockings in Land’s End, Cornwall, both of us having fulfilled some genetic imperative to migrate west across the continent, to finally settle down in a lush, forested place near the sea.

M
y new workplace is located directly above a bookstore called Reading Frenzy, in many ways the epicenter of Portland’s vibrant indie lit scene. I spend my lunch breaks there, perusing zines and comics, or across the street at Powell’s City of Books. One of the largest physical bookstores in the world, Powell’s spans an entire city block, and, unlike most retailers, stocks both new and used titles on the same shelves. For this reason their Melville section is uncommonly robust. It’s the first place I gravitate during daily visits, where I search for rare
Moby-Dick
editions or obscure Melville criticism. I haunt the section so often that I start to think of myself as kind of freelance
Moby-Dick
salesperson, offering unsolicited advice on the cheapest, most portable version (Signet Classics); the most pedantic version, with poorly laid out text and some stuffy critical essays, but an impressive illustrated section on whaling and whalecraft (Norton Critical Edition); or my all-time favorite version, with artful typesetting and abundant illustrations by Rockwell Kent that give it the feel of a prototypical graphic novel (Modern Library Classics).

Beyond having such an expansive Melville section, Powell’s Books was literally built on a foundation of
Moby-Dick
. A sandstone pillar shaped like a stack of classic books supports the store’s northwest entrance:
The Mahabharata, Hamlet, War and Peace, Psalms, The Odyssey
, and
The Whale. The Whale
was the title of the English first edition of
Moby-Dick
; according to the founder’s legend, a leather-bound version of
The Whale
was one of owner Michael Powell’s first great finds as a rare-book dealer. Copies of the first American edition now sell for upward of $40,000, so it’s not a stretch to assume that
The Whale
provided some of the seed money that established what many consider to be America’s finest independent bookstore.

It’s fitting, then, that some fellow Melville freaks and I persuade Powell’s to host the first part of a twenty-four-hour marathon reading of
Moby-Dick
.

The lead crew members on this epic, semilunatic undertaking—which we name “Take to the Ship”—include my new friend Amy, an environmental activist who happens to have been a close high school friend of Asa Ellis’s; a writer/researcher named Tom; and the writer Kevin Sampsell, who moonlights as the manager of Powell’s impressive small press section.

The first five hours take place in the third-floor Powell’s reading room, where we enlist sixteen local artists and writers to bring the book breathing to life. After I welcome on board the audience—whom I call
shipmates
—I read the first chapter, “Loomings,” which contains some of my favorite lines—
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?
The entire section reckons with this particular madness; it’s a sorting out of Ishmael’s cracked motives for signing on to “this shabby part of a whaling voyage,” just as, a few paragraphs into our eight-hundred-page undertaking, I wonder just what the hell I’m getting myself into here—a question I’m sure many audience members share, as do the intrepid runners of actual, 26.2-mile, foot-pounding marathons.

By chapter’s end, we have the answer:
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity
. At the heart of the book—and in the hearts of us marathoners—lies an obsessive quest for even a glimmer of knowledge of the deep mystery within ourselves and within nature. Here at the start, the room feels electrified by a powerful sense that we’ve put in motion something large and important and a little frightening—
twenty-four straight hours
—but this is also what draws us shipmates together: like Queequeg and Ishmael, we sit shoulder to shoulder, pulling oars together on an insane task—
I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it
.

And I can’t help but feel that somewhere, from whatever inscrutable vantage point, Melville might appreciate what we’re doing here—that we’re part of a vibrant ongoing revival that in so many ways redeems his literary spirit, his decades of toiling in relative obscurity. If
Moby-Dick
was far too postmodern for Melville’s contemporaries (one hundred years before the term
postmodern
even existed), those of us living in the internet age are perhaps more comfortable channeling its polyphonic host of voices, its endlessly digressive, hyperlink-like associative riffs.

Two chapters later, actor Mykle Hansen performs “The Spouter-Inn.” His animated, irreverent delivery of lines like “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly”—and his description of the tattooed harpooner Queequeg inadvertently crawling into bed with Ishmael—elicit waves of laughter. I hadn’t anticipated the way that, in the right hands, live reading can so enhance the book’s bizarre humor, its radical weirdness.

Of course, transcendent moments abound. We enlist the musician Laura Gibson to perform an angelic, a cappella version of a hymn from “The Sermon”:

The writer and filmmaker Arthur Bradford gives an impassioned version of Father Mapple’s sermon, gesticulating like a preacher, his powerful voice hitting all the heavy registers—
But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep
.

By chapter five the house is packed, though there’s an expected ebb and flow within the crowd. Most people drop in for a few chapters. One tall, bearded young gentleman shows up at Powell’s to purchase his first copy of
Moby-Dick
and happens to hear a loudspeaker announcement about the reading. He stays for the entire event, as does a sweet, soft-spoken woman in her fifties, who wears a contented expression of authentic awe for the better part of twenty-four hours.

Amy refers to them both as
our new converts
.

After the sixteenth chapter, we move the reading to Amy’s candlelit living room, where she’s draped a quilted harpoon over a podium, creating an oddly cozy, wake-like atmosphere.

Throughout the night and well into the next afternoon, one hundred people read the remaining 119 chapters.

In the dead hours of a February night, the sense of questing transforms into something more akin to a vigil, a midnight mass. As my energy dwindles, I’m continually astonished by Melville’s colossal creative vigor—his endless currents of Shakespearean prose; his stunning ear for sound, song, and syntax; his encyclopedic knowledge of everything from whaling to coconuts to metaphysics—and the staggering fact that he channeled and scribed and collaged such an immortal masterpiece in just two years.

There are also moments of deep, unshakable boredom, as when Melville conducts a long-winded taxonomy of whales in the “Cetology” section—a chapter that, in the light of day, I love for its genre-defying digressiveness but by one in the morning find tedious. And thus for me, though I fight it, there is a period of sleep.

Amy’s a hardier breed of Melville fan, someone I often describe as simply
badass
. A veteran antilogging activist, she’s spent many all-nighters one hundred feet up in old-growth Douglas firs, where nodding off might mean falling to your death, just as Ishmael warns during his reverie from high in the crow’s nest during the “Mast-Head” chapter. She stays awake the entire time, recording every minute on her laptop and posting frequent updates on the Take to the Ship website, even reading a few extra chapters for late-night no-shows.

After a few hours’ rest, I spontaneously agree to read “A Squeeze of the Hand” for another no-show. It’s an infamous chapter in which Ishmael describes rendering spermaceti oil by hand—
squeezing sperm
—with his shipmates, and how they sometimes mistake each other’s hands for sperm—
let us squeeze ourselves into each other
. Reading the chapter—
a sweet and unctuous duty!
—I find myself going a little unglued, maybe from the lack of sleep or as a result of immersion in Melville’s manic creation.

Like Ishmael squeezing spermaceti, I am overcome by a
strange sort of insanity
while reading the chapter—a few paragraphs in I begin bouncing from foot to foot, doing a crazy little jig.

While I read, Amy posts the following on the website:

Justin Hocking is getting a little excited with chapter 94—A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND
.

Then, awaking from my brief Melvillian trance-dance, it hits me: I’m standing in front of a room full of people, getting intensely
worked up
while describing what amounts to a kind of cosmic circle jerk. Reading the line “I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it,” I’m overcome by what I dimly recognize as shame. You can only imagine how most prudish nineteenth-century readers might have reacted to this chapter during an era when, in many circles, it was taboo to mention the
leg
of a chair. On both aesthetic and emotional levels, writing
Moby-Dick
was a profound act of exposure and courage. With chapters like “A Squeeze of the Hand,” Melville invokes a classic dockyard bawdiness, but beyond the sailor’s antics there’s a sense of him jettisoning conventional decorum, defiantly jettisoning shame—
Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!
Melville’s brazenness buoys my own courage to write about things that will always carry a mild current of shame: the codependency issues and twelve-step program, the romance novels and the dark emotional periods. Whether or not Melville embodied this fact during his lifetime, he often grasped it within his writing: only by risking exposure and vulnerability do we find deep connection—
such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling
. And now, spotting my best friend, Gabriel, in the audience, making quick sketches of me and all the other readers, I find the resolve to continue reading, knowing full well that like anyone else worth having in my life, Gabriel has witnessed all of my most shameful falls from grace and has never so much as blinked—
let us squeeze hands all round
.

By nightfall, having traversed a literary Atlantic and Pacific, we arrive at the end.

The final full chapter—“The Chase—Third Day”—goes without question to Fred Nemo, a performance artist and dancer in his early sixties. Back in the nineties, Nemo performed unhinged improve dance pieces with the seminal Portland indie rock band Hazel—he’d often strip naked, shimmy into an evening gown, then break into animated lip synchs on an old-fashioned telephone, coiling himself in the phone cord and bouncing around the band members like a straitjacketed maniac.

With his unpredictable energy and his long, grizzled gray beard, he’s pure Ahab.

There’s a palpable shift in the room’s energy when Nemo steps up to the pulpit, clasping a five-foot-long, splintered oar in his left hand: the mad old captain is at the helm now, about to bring down the ship—
the voyage is up
. During his reading, he employs the oar to strong effect as harpoon, crutch, wizard’s staff, and wooden leg. Halfway through the chapter, Ahab lowers with the harpooners Daggoo and Queequeg; Moby-Dick charges and narrowly misses their boat, but turns flank, revealing the gruesome sight of Ahab’s mercenary agent, the Parsee, his corpse ripped to shreds and lashed by frayed harpoon lines to the white whale’s scarred underbelly.

Unnerved by this ghastly sight, Ahab drops his harpoon. At this moment, Nemo slams the oar down on the hardwood floor, the thunder of this dramatic action booming through the floorboards, startling us into military attention.

In the final showdown, a full fourteen pages into the chapter, Nemo’s voice begins to falter, from the vocal burn of speaking aloud Melville’s incandescent prose, and also the pathos of Ahab’s struggle—
Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life!
At the grand culmination of our twenty-four-hour journey—filled with so much light and dark, so many dives and breaches—the collapse of Fred’s voice feels entirely appropriate, imbuing the novel and Ahab with a shattered grace, especially as he lifts the oar above his head and howls the mad captain’s last line—
Thus, I give up the spear!

His incarnation of Ahab is not so much a kook as a heroically flawed, fully human being, wounded to the core.

Amy—the true mastermind behind this event—delivers the Epilogue:
one did survive the wreck
. Among us crew members is the momentous sense of having
endured
, a feeling I carry for days after the reading—the lived experience of
Moby-Dick
as a survival story.

Amy finishes the final lines and then we break into exalted applause, all of us embracing our shipmates, and most of all Fred, the man who went down with his vessel, who so poignantly draped
the great shroud of the sea
across the day’s dark finale.