Tuesday 30 November 2010

Ahab's Philosophy

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask... Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
Moby-Dick, Ch.XXXVI

What follows is my effort, taking Ahab's outburst a little further:
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'They will tell you, if you let them, a great deal about our common father Adam, but all of it is false. They will tell you that it was his greed and disobedience that caused mankind’s fall, and they will push the lie further and say it was Eve’s fault before then. They will not say that it was hatred and jealousy, man’s twin and natural states, for these are truths unpalatable to many. They will not say that in his naked form, ostensibly clothed in innocence, that man raged at his creator as all men have done since. But his anger was the greatest, for he was the first. The indignity! To be the prototype of a fumbling demiurge, the product of his inexpert and trembling hand, the whetstone for his dull scalpel! Who can truly imagine this first man and his first, roaring hatred?

You who ask for proof of this conjecture, witness the lessons of history! Of ancient and attic warriors who endured starvation and thirst in boundless deserts, who walked for months and years to bring bloody war to a people they had never known. Witness those at war for a decade for the sake of a whorish princess they never even saw. How else do you explain such actions, veiled as they are behind such thin and petty tissues? Hate, I tell you, is as much a part of man as his very blood, the blood that is spilled and spills the life of other men into the dust for no reason other than to satisfy animal urges that most men cannot control or name.

Moby Dick - Herman MelvilleBut the utmost proof I can provide is stored deep within you, though you know it not. Every shred, every tatter of self-loathing, of humiliation, of despair redounds to the curses of your creator. Man is not an instantaneous, unspawned hater of others, but was made in the image of another. Life is not so bleak! We are not without precedent, alone in this world; our actions are validated and confirmed by the actions of our maker. Not for nothing were we made weak, and jealous and wrathful, and not for nothing does everyman seek to improve his lot by shedding the blood of his neighbour.

What man, then, can hate anything so much as he hates his god? Though he venerate him and burn for him the thighs of oxen and totemicise the heads of his enemies; though he lets the vital fluid of his own kin, his son or his daughter, and boils their blood upon ancient stones worn and reddened with centuries of propitiatory murder; though he preach to his flock words of peace and admiration and mocks up his god in a language of love, what man can consider anything more worthy of his hatred? What greater, more fitting foe could be found for a species which has toiled for millennia slaughtering one another, whose sole aim is manifestly the attempt to satiate the bloodlust that burns within them? What better action for a species wracked with jealousy, and with the arrogance that takes jealousy by the glove, and with the rage that cavorts behind them, gnashing his needlelike teeth! What finer expression of hatred and arrogance can there be than hatred of the creator?'

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