Further limbs of the exquisite corpses

...remarkable that they exist at all, is what I'm saying. As opposed to remarkable in themselves. The main thing is that I wrote something using this method, not that I wrote something that was good.

Anyway. I'll just give you the highlights.

The top drawer contained only a stack of clean handkerchiefs and a new concept in personal comfort.

We all laughed out loud, more from a deep drain in the centre of the floor, a musty odour and curl of smoke rose of sharon. Seeing that it wouldn't hurt, but once I heard the stutter of the tattoo gun, I knew my chest, knocking her backwards. She seemed almost to hop in a question I could not formulate even for myself. "If this is it," I said, "Then rather than stars and colder than night: it all collapses."

This process works better with more than one person, clearly. Then, it juxtaposes different habits of thought, contrasting syntactic reflexes. Much of what I left out I omitted for being too coherent, rather than the opposite, which seems weird (even uncomfortable) in itself. Maybe this is a bit like brushing the dust off what might be the foundation stones of the story always running in my mind. Or maybe it's February.

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Towards the tail end of Moby Dick

I admit I have difficulty telling whether Melville is being sarcastic.

(Sargasso, I almost typed. Are you sincere, sir, or are you being sargasso?)

Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the sperm-whale, for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present .... because, as has been elsewhere noticed, these whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast by widely separated, unfrequent armies (472).

I wonder if this is true. It is an enormously tragic image -- yes, ha, whale, enormous, but then yes, again, enormous, ocean-spanning, a tragedy on a scale above the human and therefore difficult for us to imagine clearly. These pods, families, civilizations (because they are, if we admit it, civilizations, aren't they? Monuments or no monuments) huddling together in the sea for safety -- but there was no safety. And Melville's hubris is a different kind of hubris from the arrogance of kings -- the hubris of the small creature who thinks "I cannot possibly damage this enormous world." Utter confidence in your inability to do harm.

Melancholy reading, this novel, in itself and in retrospect. Not what I expected. The plot is almost irrelevant -- Ahab appears on maybe eight pages in each hundred? It's all about the attempt to calculate the incalculable whale.

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