Home | To seek a newer world | CD Liner Notes | My Life as a Reject | Fayette Baird
To seek a newer world; or
“Am I ready for happiness?”*
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” -Thoreau, Walden
A note about this background image: a lone whale in the sea.*
It reminds me of Pip in Moby-Dick, who, in the wild and bloody hunt of whales, leaped from the hunter’s boat into the sea, where he was abandoned by forewarning Stubb, who had stopped for Pip after his first jump, but said he’d leave him if he jumped again. And so Stubb continued the chase, and twice-leaping Pip was left alone in the ever-expanding seas, feeling ever smaller in the heartless immensities, where his sanity sank to the deeps.
In contemporary terms, we might find a parallel in the Cassini photo of Saturn eclipsing the Sun, the generous Earth but a tiny speck in the far left distance, on edge of the second outer ring. (For a better view, click the link to “In Saturn’s Shadow,” then find the PIA 08329 link, and download your own Cassini vision.)
So what’s Keith been up to?
I’ve always felt essentially alone, and the image of Pip helped keep me sane. Ishmael’s sense of self-laughter was more vital. In the opening paragraph to Moby-Dick he laughs at his furies, and takes to the sea as his “substitute for pistol and ball.” He and Ahab are much alike, the most distinct difference in Ishmael’s sustained ability to laugh at himself. (Ahab laughs at himself once with Captain Boomer, who also lost a limb to Moby Dick, but soon regresses to his obsessional fury.) And so Ishmael is the sole survivor of the Pequod tragedy, and in the long-day float for rescue—a coffin for a life-buoy—felt something of that same abandonment, until the distraught Rachel, “in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”
The feeling of aloneness found odd relief in late December 2009 when (click here to seek more info ...)
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*Thanks to Jon Sullivan and PDPhoto.org for Jon’s photo of the deeps and the whale’s celestial reach,
and thanks to each visitor for stopping by.
© 2010 Keith Fahey, All Rights Reserved
