winter reflections with ishmael...

     Outside it's about 8 degrees above zero.  [Of course, I always forget the dreaded wind chill - I could romp in the snow in my shirt sleeves were it not for the wind.]  Everything seems dull gray and black against the endless white blank of snow.  As I look over the scene, I feel what you could call a kind of metaphysical chill.
     ‘This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds'.  So says Ishmael as he descants on ‘The Whiteness of the Whale', seeking in reflection the reason for that metaphysical horror induced by the very existence of the beast.  He revolves the polar bear, terrible in its aspect in any case, yet more horrible by virtue of its blank whiteness.  He thinks further on ‘a midnight sea of milky whiteness' at which the mariner feels ‘a silent, superstitious dread':   ‘he never rests till blue water is under him again'.  Ishmael considers ‘the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of the mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of the prairies' - and yet he has not ‘learned why it appeals with such power to the soul', why, in short, ‘it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's deity' while yet being ‘the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind'.
     Well, there hangs a tale - for he remembers that ‘in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of all colors'.  Thus it ‘stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way'; and - in this Ishmael seems to look over my shoulder out the same window I do this blank day - ‘is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows - a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?'  Oh, perhaps my friend, perhaps.  But here, dear reader, Ishmael betrays his familiarity with Goethe and others - let me offer at length what follows:
    
‘And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues . . . are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in the substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnelhouse within'; and when we proceed further, and consider that the principle of light, for ever remains white and colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge - pondering all this, the universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him'.

     Recall that Goethe had fashioned a kind of wheel on which he hung the moral qualities of different colors.  White is, being the mixture of all colors resulting in a blank absence of color, an absurdity.  What's more, everything dead approximates to whiteness.  Note also that Goethe's theories of light and color and optics departed radically from the regnant Newtonian consensus by emphasizing the constitutive role of the eye and mind in making colors what they appear to be.  Oh, and for Goethe, colors thusly played upon the surfaces of things; they had naught to do with substantial reality.  For Ishmael, then, exposure to this line of thought grounds much of his metaphysical reflection, and provides ample justification for his felt before understood horror at whiteness.  Thus, he can conclude, ‘Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright'; and ‘of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol'.  But where o where could Ishmael have gotten such ideas?
     From Emerson I would guess, who wrote of Goethe in his usual rhapsodic, disconnected way:

‘It is really of very little consequence what topic he writes upon. He sees at every pore, and has a certain gravitation toward truth. He will realize what you say. He hates to be trifled with, and to be made to say over again some old wife's fable, that has had possession of men's faith these thousand years. He may as well see if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be the measure and judge of these things. Why should I take them on trust? And, therefore, what he says of religion, of passion, of marriage, of manners, property, of paper money, of periods or beliefs, of omens, of luck, or whatever else, refuses to be forgotten' [‘Goethe, or, The Writer', in Representative Men].

Emerson fancied Goethe's theories of optics and color because they elevated the eye and the mind over brute matter.  ‘Eyes', after all, ‘are better, on the whole, than telescopes or microscopes'.  So much Emerson.  It seems to me, in all humility, that Ishmael was led to Goethe by way of Emerson. 
     So, may we conclude that Melville himself has offered his unvarnished revolutions of thought through his avatar? 
     Well, not so fast.
     On March 3, 1849, Melville wrote to one Evert Duyckink, ‘I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw.  It was, the insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions'.   As far as I can tell, his appreciation for Emerson remained equivocal.  Why you have only to consider ‘Mark Winsome' as found in The Confidence Man - found along with ‘Egbert', that is, Henry Thoreau.  The point, the matter, you ask?  Why simply that Ishmael ain't Melville.  That seems simple enough.  In fact, it may be that Ishmael here recites a litany grounded in a philosophical whimsy that Melville himself found unfounded.
     Well, not so fast.
     Ishmael is equivocal, not absolute.  He ain't Melville, but it's likely that there's a lot of Melville in him.  In these revolutions on the horror of whiteness and the White Whale as the Symbol of that horror, the horror of the world ‘formed in fright' in its ‘invisible spheres', Melville offers us a coherent, if nihilistic, way of accounting for the ‘charnelhouse' of the world, just as Starbuck's naïve goodness is also on offer.  [That goodness, of course, is also equivocal; it will not prevent him from driving ahead with Ahab's mad quest.]
     Again I look over the scene outside my window.  I've not seen the sun.  If I knew nothing of that minor star, I could only conclude that an amorphous light of unknown origin was fading away leaving darkness.  The whiteness of the snow gives way in such a fading light to another shade of gray in the general grayness of the world.  All is cold, wind-swept, mute.  Again, if I knew nothing of the Son, I could only conclude that this frozen, gray world was formed in fright.  Perhaps it was - without our fall, there could be no killing cold.  That fall is the source therefore of the fright that has indeed formed a post-lapsarian world.  But I dare not, though tempted sorely so to do, I dare not forget that love which gave it form ‘in the beginning', which reforms it even as we speak, and which therefore ‘moves the sun and other stars'.  Contra Ishmael, though I'm tempted to follow his thought, I can only say that though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in fright, the invisible spheres were formed in love, and love is stronger than death and so certainly stronger than all that frightens us in this groaning world.
     That will have to do for warmth as night falls.