Moby Dick Chapter 70 The Sphynx
Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2012 10:06 pm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/270 ... m#2HCH0070
The whale must be beheaded, but his lack of a neck produces another fine piece of occupational health and safety.
And Rubens shows the result
Enter Ahab for his conversation with the riddling beastie, like unto the Great Sphinx of Egypt sitting as a dark mystery in the eternal desert sands, telling a poem of the head that had seen enough to split planets. Surely Yeats had read this chapter and the previous one in his description of the sphinx: "A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds."
The whale must be beheaded, but his lack of a neck produces another fine piece of occupational health and safety.
The deed successfully accomplished on the treacherous deep, the trophy is hoist again.the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?
Carravagio shows the first step by Stubb the master surgeon -with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.
And Rubens shows the result
Enter Ahab for his conversation with the riddling beastie, like unto the Great Sphinx of Egypt sitting as a dark mystery in the eternal desert sands, telling a poem of the head that had seen enough to split planets. Surely Yeats had read this chapter and the previous one in his description of the sphinx: "A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds."
Captain Ahab wrote:"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"