FYI
This
is what I look at most of the day.
On the other hand, this
is the view out my bedroom window at sunset.
Today’s headlines
ITEM! Bush has a 19% approval rating. Nineteen. That’s a one and a nine. Richard Nixon, if memory serves, was at 23% percent on the day he resigned. But my favorite statistic is theone about the economy. Just about everyone seems to think it’s not going well. How many people think it’s going great? You’ll never guess: 1%. This is because, of course, the economy is going great for 1% of the country, the same 1% who make more than several million dollars a year and get all the tax breaks.
ITEM! In Guantanamo, a bunch of probably innocent people, after years of incarceration, will be tried and executed, so that Bush can justify their illegal arrest and detention. The money quote: “I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.'”
ITEM! Bush visits a museum in Africa and learns a valuable lesson. This is the man whose supporters are saying that Obama is unelectable because he has no foreign policy experience.
ITEM! Retailers, feeling the pinch of recession, decide to go ahead and simply extort money from innocent people. This is, of course, a great idea. You have lawyers, what are you paying them for? Make them earn their keep by sending them out to shake down customers! As far as I know, Best Buy has not yet resorted to sending armed thugs around to local fruit-stand owners to demand “protection” money, but I sense that is coming.
ITEM! Obama Smear of the DayTM: The National Review notes that, as Obama has mixed-race parents, they must certainly have been Communists. Communists! Note to my conservative brethren (and sistren): Communists have not been considered a national threat since 1953 (and were a big fake threat even then). The median age of a voter who is likely to be swayed by the smear that Obama was raised by Communists is Dead.
ITEM! Professional clown Bill O’Reilly shows his typical class when discussing Michelle Obama. Note that when he uses the term “lynching party” he’s stressing that he doesn’t want one — unless, of course, there is enough evidence to demand one, then he’s all for it. On a personal note, let me just add that I’m about the same age as Michelle Obama, and you know what, for the first time in my adult life, I’m proud of my country too. The first election I voted in was 1980 (my candidate, John Anderson, lost) and over the ensuing 25 years I’ve watched my country get shoved so far to the right that I don’t recognize it any more. This primary season does show an electorate hungry for change, and it’s only in the minds of the lizard-heads on the right that that is a lynchable offense.
ITEM! Telcom immunity! Here’s how it works. You can’t sue the phone company for spying on you unless you can prove they’re spying on you. You can’t prove they’re spying on you because all the evidence of their spying is protected by the federal government. You can’t get the information from the federal government because Bush owns the Supreme Court.
Swiftboating Obama
Someone named Taylor Marsh has been granted a spot at The Huffington Post (my favorite news site) to try to do her best to make Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee for president. There’s nothing wrong with that — Marsh is pretty open about who she supports, she’s not posing as an objective journalist in this regard.
What I object to is that Clinton and her supporters will do, apparently, anything to get elected, including adopting the tactics of Karl Rove to attack their opponents. The Rove doctrine says: don’t attack an opponent where he’s weakest, attack him where he’s strongest. If a man does important, high-profile work with children, start a whispering campaign that says he’s a child molester. If a man has the compassion to adopt a homeless minority child, tell all the bigots of the nation that “he has a black baby.” And if he’s a certified war hero (and your own candidate is a proven rich-boy draft-dodger) call him a coward and a traitor.
In the case of Obama, since the man is a gifted orator able to move millions of people with his soaring rhetoric of hope and change, call him a plagiarist and say he’s a con man. Obama’s foes, who have spent the past eight years intently studying Rove’s techniques, have little else to go on. They tried at the beginning to do the “attack him where he’s strongest” game, putting out memes like “Is Obama Black Enough?” and “He Has No Ideas Behind His Rhetoric,” both of which are utter hogwash. Now this. A couple of weeks ago, there was a conservative columnist who couldn’t help wondering aloud if Obama could speak so well if he had no teleprompter. That’s right, a man whose hero, George W. Bush, cannot string two words together under any circumstances without sounding like a complete idiot, is worried that Obama might not be so great an orator as he seems to be, and therefore should not become president.
And I keep waiting, but I’m not seeing the Obama camp coming up with crap like this. There’s plenty a crafty, cynical politician could do to smear Clinton and McCain, but I don’t see Obama or his staff doing that. Which I think accounts for a lot of why Clinton isn’t doing as well as she’d like to be.
(For what it’s worth, at least at HuffPo they let other columnists answer ridiculous charges.)
Sam on Temple of Doom
I’ll admit, I was a little nervous about showing Sam (6) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It’s darker than Raiders, its sexuality is bothmore “adult” and more juvenile, its violence is more brutal, it shows children being whipped and people being lowered into boiling lava after having their still-beating hearts ripped out, its protagonist turns evil, all that stuff.
With one exception. The character of Willie Scott didn’t bother him for her whining, shrieking girlishness or her shallow, conniving gold-digging — she bothered Sam because she wasn’t Marion Ravenwood. “Wait — there’s a different woman every time?” he asked, a little worried. I’m not sure what his concern was, and I wasn’t sure how to discuss it, but it seemed to worry him that Indiana Jones, having professed his love to Marion in the last movie, is now running around with anyone else. In his world, I reckon, a man chooses a woman and that’s his mate for the rest of his life. After all, Anakin Skywalker doesn’t have a string of honeys on his way to becoming a Jedi — he picks his mate when he’s nine years old and sticks with her until she dies in childbirth, and then he’s alone forever. That’s the way it’s supposed to go.
(Once he got accustomed to the idea of Indiana Jones’s serial monogamy, he began to wonder about who might be “the woman” in the new movie. He’s kind of hoping it’s this person, but I assured him that Marion Ravenwood is back — and about damn time too, in my opinion. Karen Allen, one of my all-time movieland crushes, looks fabulous.)
Apart from that, Sam was terribly excited by Temple of Doom. He accepted the “wtf?” dance number that opens the movie, he loved the nightclub shootout and the car chase through the streets and the dive out of the airplane. As usual, he had no trouble following the exposition, even when it was delivered by men with strong accents during scenes of people eating live snakes and chilled monkey brains. I think that’s all down to Spielberg’s uncanny visual sense — I can’t think of another director, from Hollywood or elsewhere, who is able to convey so much story simply through choice of images. When Indy and company show up at the deserted Indian village, with its brown fields and bare trees and homely, sad people, Sam, who has never been to India and knows little of Hinduism, immediately said “What’s the matter with the village? Where is everyone? Did someone take the children? Why would someone take their children?” None of these plot-points had been hinted at in the dialogue, yet Sam instantly understood the emotional hook of the movie and its central mystery, instantly knew what the protagonist would want. He was easily ten minutes ahead of the narrative, which eventually has a bony child wandering into the village clutching, for no discernible reason, a fragment of an ancient scroll that explains the thing about the magic rock that blah de blah de blah.
Sam did crawl up into my lap when the Thugee ceremony began (let’s face it, it’s not every day you see a man lowered into boiling lava), but minutes later he was confiding in me that he liked Temple of Doom “better than the first one” and by the time the mine-car chase came along, Sam was moved to start this conversation:
SAM: Is the movie almost over?
DAD: Oh no — they’ve got a whole lot more to go.
SAM: Good! I don’t ever want it to end.
I’m totally with Sam on this point. For all of Temple‘s brutality and darkness, once the third act of kicks in it becomes a non-stop cliff-hanging thrill machine, one unrivaled in cinema in terms of sheer inventiveness, joy and wit.
(I intend to analyze the Indiana Jones movies, and the rest of Spielberg’s work in the near future, but Sam pointed out one piece of art direction that had eluded me through many viewings of this movie: the stage in Willie’s nightclub act at the beginning of the movie is echoed in the Temple of Doom design, with the symmetrical dragon head being replaced by a giant skull. Both Willie’s act and Mola Ram’s sacrifice ritual are, essentially, show business, created to achieve an emotional effect. Both ceremonies also include unexplained, fantastic events: Mola Ram is able to take a man’s still-beating heart from his chest and have him stay alive, and Willie is able to enter her dragon’s mouth and participate an elaborate, impossible dance routine.)
Literary Oddities: You Can Survive the Bomb
Pulled this out of a long-forgotten box of books earlier. No, it’s not a self-help book written by Ben Affleck, it’s a classic 1961 slab of grim cold-war profiteering by one Col. Mel Mawrence.
The front cover blurb reads, in its entirety, “This book is a myth-shattering guide to bomb survival which offers new hope for millions of Americans. It firmly contradicts the ‘certain death’ psychology of well-meaning but mistaken spreaders of despair and…”
Despair and what? For god’s sake man, don’t leave us hanging! Luckily, the blurb continues on the back cover:
Read more
R.I.P. Ben Stein
Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. Beloved Writer/Actor/Game-show-host Ben Stein is not dead — he’s just left the human race.
Then, in the past year or so, Stein started to make these bizarre appearances on news programs, where he would say things that weren’t merely “conservative” in their viewpoint (which I could respect) but demonstrably wrong. And then he would underline his points by saying something completely insane. And I thought “Gee, maybe Ben should stay at home more.”
Alas, he has decided to go in the opposite direction. He is the star of Expelled, a new “Michael Moore-style” documentary on this ridiculous piece-of-crap notion of “Intelligent Design.” When I first read of this new documentary, I thought perhaps Stein had regained his sanity and had made a movie about the obvious stupidity of not only Intelligent Design but of the stupid, bullying zealots who actively campaign every day to make American children dumber. Surely, I thought, a man as intelligent and well-read as Ben Stein wouldn’t be caught dead supporting a cause as ridiculous as this, would he?
Well, turns out, yes. He would. He has.
Look at that title again: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. That sure sounds like a movie in favor of intelligence, doesn’t it? Good trick guys! Make a movie designed to blunt the edge of scientific achievement and make it sound like it’s arguing in favor of intelligence! Classic Rovian strategy of attacking your opponent where he’s strongest — if schools exist to make students smarter, let’s make a movie that says that they make students dumber!
I was about to chortle about how this movie has no chance of making its money back, but guess what? The producers beat me to it!
Unlike most movies, “Expelled” may be looking to effect policy change more than rack up B.O.
“It’s not important to me whether it makes money. I’ve already been paid, and I might add quite modestly at that,” says Stein, who is making the rounds from college campuses to “The O’Reilly Factor” to evangelical church screenings to promote the film. “I’m hoping that (schools) will at least allow in science classes someone to say, ‘What if it’s not Darwinism, but what if there was some intelligent designer who created the universe?’ “
See? All Ben Stein wants is to create an environment where something besides science is taught in science class! What’s the matter with our world, when we are so caught up in our mania for categorization that we insist on teaching only science in science class! Why can’t we teach Pet Care in math class, or Industrial Welding in Home Economics, or Skydiving in English class?
Watching Raiders with Sam
As there is a new Indiana Jones movie coming out in May, and a new Lego Indiana Jones video game coming out soon after, I decided Sam (6) should see Raiders of the Lost Ark now, before all the cool parts have been reduced to mere slapstick comedy beats through the lovable antics of the Lego characters (we’ve already had many discussions of how the Star Wars movies differ from their Lego counterparts).
I knew what he meant. Raiders, for those who were not born yet in 1981, was a bolt from the blue. I had seen a lot of movies by the time I was 19 years old, and considered myself a pretty sophisticated moviegoer, but I had never seen anything remotely like Raiders when it came out. As Rolling Stone described it, it was a movie of all “good parts.” I sat in the theater slack-jawed, wondering, if it’s possible to make a movie like this, why aren’t all movies like this? It was grittier and more “adult” than Star Wars, swifter than any ten James Bond adventures, more fun than any movie in memory, with incredible action sequences that still hold up today as masterworks of movement, suspense, wit and pure kinetic genius.
Anyway, Sam had never seen it before and I was curious how he would react. He knows nothing about ancient Hebrew artifacts, Nazis or Nepal, and it turns out it doesn’t matter. He knew that the Nazis were the bad guys, Belloq was a more complicated bad guy (“it’s like he’s working with the bad guys, but he’s more like Indiana Jones, and they could almost be friends” was the way he put it, which put him yards ahead of my initial reading of the movie), and, in spite of a ton of exposition delivered by men in suits in Reel 2, he had no trouble following the whole complicated “Staff-of-Ra-leads-to-the-Well-of-Souls-leads-to-the-Ark-of-the-Covenant” storyline. He noted that the music sounded like Star Wars, that Indiana Jones reminded him of Han Solo, and that Cairo looked like Tatooine. Most impressively, in the middle of the truck chase he pointed out that one guy who falls off the back of the truck screams exactly like Boba Fett (actually a Weequay) falling into the pit of the Sarlacc.
Then he crept around the house for the rest of the afternoon, jumping out from behind things with a plastic axe when I least expected it. I don’t know if he was pretending to be a spy, or a crafty native, a Nazi or a living booby-trap but he seemed to enjoy the movie.
The Whale part 6
(A ship, the Rachel, pulls up alongside the Pequod.)
SAILOR. A ship! A ship!
(Activity. The crew comes out on deck. Ahab stands at the rail. The captain of the Rachel, Gardiner, and his mates appear at their rail.)
STARBUCK. It’s the Rachel. Out of Nantucket.
AHAB. That would be Gardiner. (to Gardiner) Have you seen the white whale?
GARDINER. Ahab! Thank God!
AHAB. Have you seen the white whale?
GARDINER. Yesterday – have you seen a whale boat?
AHAB. Yesterday! Where? Where was he? Not killed! You didn’t kill him, did you? What happened?
GARDINER. Have you seen a whale boat? We lost a whale boat. Will you help us search?
AHAB. Where exactly did you see the whale?
GARDINER. We have to find that whale boat! Please help us find it! It’s very important!
STUBB. What was on it? Your watch?
(Everyone on the Pequod laughs.)
GARDINER. My son.
(The laughter dies.)
My boy. My boy was in that boat. Please. Please help me find him. It’s been almost a day and we can’t find him. Please help us look for him. Me. Help me. I beg you. We have to –
AHAB. WHERE EXACTLY DID YOU SEE THE WHITE WHALE?
GARDINER. I’ll, I’ll charter your ship! I’ll pay for it, I don’t care what it costs. You have to help me. You have to.
SAILOR. His son is dead. They’re all dead.
AHAB.(to Starbuck) What do you suppose is this man’s problem that he can’t answer a simple question?
GARDINER. Just say yes. Just tell me yes. You must say yes to me. I won’t go until you say yes. The golden rule.
Sir. Captain Ahab. Your own boy. Your own child. Safe at home. What do you say? What is your answer?
STARBUCK.(to Ahab) Shall I give orders to follow her, sir?
AHAB. Why isn’t he telling me what I want to know?
GARDINER. What is your answer?
AHAB. My answer is no. Captain Gardiner, I’m losing time. Good bye. Good bye and God bless you. I have to go. Mr. Starbuck! The binnacle!
(He exits. Everyone watches him go. There’s a sick pause. Gardiner steps down from his rail, almost falling. His mates help him away. The Rachel glides away slowly as everyone watches. Fade out.)
NINETEEN
(The deck. Typhoon. Action. Men scurry about. Rigging. Alarum.)
STUBB.(singing) Oh! Jolly is the gale, and a joker is the whale, a’flourishing his tail – such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, jokey, hokey-pokey lad is the ocean, oh!
STARBUCK. Can it with the singing, Stubb! The typhoon is singing hard enough!
STUBB. I’ll stop singing when you cut my throat, Mr. Starbuck! And I’ll sing you the doxology for the wind-up!
STARBUCK. You’re as crazy as Ahab!
STUBB. Where the hell is all this wind coming from?
STARBUCK. It’s from the east! Look! If we can turn the ship around, it’ll blow us all the way back home!
STUBB. How the hell can you tell which direction it is?!
STARBUCK. The quadrant!
(He produces a quadrant.)
I’m going to chart us a course to turn us around and get us the hell out of here! We’re heading right into the storm! We have to –
(Ahab appears, carrying his harpoon.)
AHAB. Yes! The quadrant! I’ve been looking for that!
(He takes it from Starbuck.)
The quadrant! The direction-finder! The useless toy! Don’t you agree that the quadrant is useless, Mr. Starbuck?! What can it tell you? Nothing!
STARBUCK. It tells you where you are!
AHAB. What kind of idiot needs to know that?! I know EXACTLY where I am! I’m RIGHT HERE! I’m RIGHT HERE! This toy can’t tell me what I NEED! It can’t tell me where one grain of sand, one puff of cloud will be TOMORROW, and it can’t tell me where to find the white whale! It’s useless! It’s a useless toy!
(He smashes it on the deck. He addresses the sky.)
OLD THUNDER! IT’S ME! IT’S AHAB! HERE IS MY ROD! THE HARPOON THAT WILL KILL MOBY-DICK!
(Thunder. Lightning. The masts glow with St. Elmo’s fire.)
STARBUCK. The masts! Captain, look!
STUBB. St. Elmo’s fire!
(The sailors fall silent before the spectacle.)
STARBUCK. God have mercy on us all!
AHAB. YES! LOOK AT THE FLAME! THE WHITE FLAME THAT POINTS THE WAY TO THE WHITE WHALE! (to sky) HEAVENLY FIRE! (to a sailor) Hand me that chain! I want to feel this. Blood against fire!
(He is handed a chain which is attached to the mast and also glows.)
HEAVENLY FIRE! I WORSHIPPED YOU UNTIL YOU STRUCK ME AND SCARRED MY ENTIRE BODY FOR EVER! NOW I KNOW THAT WORSHIP IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT FROM ME, BUT DEFIANCE! YOU PUNISH THOSE WHO LOVE YOU, STRIKE THOSE WHO WORSHIP YOU, AND KILL THOSE WHO HATE YOU! I OWN YOUR SPEECHLESS, PLACELESS POWER NOW, BUT I WILL, UNTIL THE LAST GASP OF MY EARTHQUAKE LIFE, DEFY YOUR MASTERY OVER ME! YOUR POWER GAVE ME LIFE! YOU BREATHED YOUR FIRE INTO ME, AND NOW I BREATHE IT BACK AT YOU!!
(Lightning strikes the mast, several times. Ahab does not move.)
DON’T YOU SEE? I OWN YOUR POWER!! BLIND ME AND I WILL STILL GROPE, BURN ME AND I WILL STILL BE ASHES!! YOU ARE LIGHT LEAPING OUT OF DARKNESS, BUT I AM DARKNESS LEAPING OUT OF LIGHT! LEAP! LEAP UP AND LICK THE SKY! LET ME BE WELDED TO YOU! DEFYINGLY I WORSHIP YOU!!
(Lightning strikes and fire shoots out the end of the harpoon.)
STARBUCK. God’s against you, old man! Stop this voyage now! Let’s turn back and go home!
(Ahab throws the chain down. The harpoon remains on fire.)
AHAB.(to the crew) All of your oaths to kill the white whale are as binding as mine! If you still have fears, I will now blow them out!
(He blows on the harpoon, which immediately extinguishes. Blackout.)
TWENTY
(Night. Ahab’s cabin. Ahab is asleep. Starbuck stands next to him, holding his musket.)
STARBUCK. He was going to shoot me. With this gun. Look at me. I’ve handled guns a hundred times, and now I’m shaking like a leaf. Is it loaded? Yes. It’s loaded. Should I unload it? Perhaps. Perhaps.
This gun. He was going to kill me with this gun. This one right here. The one I’m holding. Right here. He would have killed me. He will kill me. He’ll kill me. He’ll kill the whole crew. He’ll kill the whole crew. He smashed the quadrant, the typhoon ruined the compass, we’re groping around blind. He will murder all of us. Thirty-odd men. Should I stop him?
He’s talking in his sleep. But at least he’s asleep. Which is the only way I can deal with him.
What could we do with him? What are my options? We could, what, tie him up? Put him in a cage? I’d like to see somebody try. Hell, even if we succeeded, we’d all be driven mad by his ravings before we ever saw land again.
I put the muzzle against his head. One touch, and I get to hug my wife and child again. God help me. Please help me.
(Ahab speaks in his sleep.)
AHAB. Moby-Dick! I clutch your heart at last!
(Starbuck jumps, wrestles with the gun. It looks like he’s wrestling with an angel. He puts it back in its rack.)
STARBUCK. God help us all.
TWENTY-ONE
(On deck. It’s a beautiful day.)
AHAB. Starbuck!
STARBUCK. Sir.
AHAB. Isn’t it a beautiful day?
STARBUCK. Yes it is sir.
AHAB. Look at that sky.
STARBUCK. It’s beautiful sir.
AHAB. It was a day just like this – just like this – I was eighteen – eighteen! Imagine being eighteen! Forty years. Forty years since I killed my first whale.
Forty years I’ve been on this water. Not three on land. Forty years I’ve eaten salted fish and hardtack while the poorest farmer on land had fresh fruit and warm bread. Married. Married one night, somewhere in there. One night before setting out. One night. One dent in my marriage pillow. Wife – wife! She’s a widow. She’s a widow. Forty years I’ve been chasing this fish and my wife’s a widow. Forty years. A thousand lowerings. When would it be enough, do you suppose? To say enough. To say I’m finished.
What a fool I am. What a fool. Forty years and what? Am I a richer man? A better man?
Christ, what a burden. And me with only one leg to carry it. Do I look so old? Starbuck? I feel as old as Adam. All of history piled up on my shoulders.
Brush my hair out of my eyes, would you? I think it’s making me cry.
Let me look at you. Let me look you in the eye. It’s better to look into a human eye than to stare at the sea. Or the sky. Or God.
I see land in your eye. The green land. My wife and child. I see my wife and child in your eye.
Starbuck, do something for me. When we find the whale, you don’t go. You don’t go. You stay. You stay on the Pequod. This is my fight. This is mine. I will go to Moby-Dick. You will go back to the home I see in your eye.
STARBUCK. Captain, why does anyone have to chase that horrible fish? Anyone. You have done enough. This is already enough. A hundred times, a thousand times over, you’ve done enough. Don’t you think? And on this day, on this beautiful day, this perfect day, let’s just thank God for what we still have and just go home. We can do that. Let’s just go. We can just turn around and do it. You tell me and I tell the men and we just do it. Just forget about the damn fish. Let it go on, doing what it does, it’s not our business. Let it keep going on, scaring sailors and making us wonder just what the hell it was all about. We can do that, can’t we? We can live with that, can’t we? We can do it right now. This can all end. All this. All this hate, all this madness, all this horrible waste. It can all end. Right now. This instant. And back to Nantucket. Good old Nantucket, good old stupid backwards Nantucket. You tell me, and I tell the men, and we’re on our way home. Can you imagine that? Happily, hysterically, on our way home. Home. Your family, my family, old age. Loving, longing, paternal old age. And telling your grandchildren your unbelievable tales of the sea. Sir. Captain. My captain. Surely, every now and then, they must have days like this in Nantucket.
AHAB. They do. They do. Summers. In the morning. My boy wakes up from his noontime nap and his mother tells him about his crazy old cannibal father. He’s at sea now, but one day he’ll come back to dance him again.
STARBUCK. My Mary! That’s my Mary exactly! Every day, she promised, she takes my boy to the hill, to be the first to see my sail.
AHAB. Yes.
STARBUCK. Then that’s it. We head for Nantucket. I’ll chart out a course right now and we’ll do it. Can you see your boy’s face in the window? My boy’s hand on the hill?
AHAB. Yes. Yes.
STARBUCK. Give me the order. We’ll be home tomorrow, your face in your young wife’s hair.
AHAB. I know what you’re saying. Starbuck. I do. Why am I doing this? I don’t have an answer. I don’t know. I’ll gladly tell you I don’t know. This isn’t me. I’m not the one doing this. I would never do this. I have no answers; I only have questions.
Is Ahab Ahab? Who moves this arm? Me? God? Or who? Does the sun move itself? Do the stars revolve in the sky on their own, or does God move them? And if God moves the heavens, then what am I? How can this one small heart beat, this one small brain think, unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living?
Smell that wind. It smells like a meadow. Somewhere they’re making hay in the shadows of the Alps, sleeping in the new-mown grass under the noon-day sun. But one day we all sleep. No matter how hard we work, one day we all lie down and sleep in the field.
(He sees something, off.)
What is that? Did you see that? Call all hands! Did you see that? Look! It’s his hump! It’s his white hump! All hands! THE WHALE!
(Blackout.)
TWENTY-TWO
(Ishmael addresses the audience.)
ISHMAEL. This story is over. Ahab saw the whale first, and so the gold coin was his.
Three days we chased the whale. And I have to say, it was something. How it moved through the water. Impossible to describe. Glided. A mild joyousness. Very quick, but very still. A great form, cutting through the waves with an unknowable somnolence. It was hypnotic. We couldn’t stop. None of us. No one complained after that. After seeing it. No one blamed Ahab any more, no one thought he was crazy any more. Not after seeing the thing. We all worked as one in pursuit of the whale. We couldn’t stop. We knew what waited for us, and we couldn’t stop.
(In dumbshow, boats chase Moby-Dick through the water.)
We lowered the boats and chased the whale through the water. After a time, the whale turned and attacked.
(Moby-Dick comes up from the water, knocking the boat out of the water, throwing men in every direction.)
He wrecked the boat, but no one was hurt. We got back on the Pequod and chased it for another day. On the next lowering, he smashed the boat, broke off Ahab’s ivory leg, and took Fedallah down with him.
(We see this as well.)
Again, Starbuck begged Ahab to stop. And once again, Ahab insisted that it wasn’t his decision to make.
And on the third day, Ahab took a boat into the water again. I was in the boat with him. We chased the whale, Ahab, his crew and me. We got a ways out, and then the whale turned and swam back towards the ship. Next thing we knew, the Pequod was sinking. Moby-Dick had stove in her side. And the Pequod sank without a trace. Almost without a trace.
That got Ahab mad. He threw his lance at the whale, and it stuck. By God it stuck. And it stuck hard. The whale pulled us, surging through the waves, so hard, so fast that I fell out of the boat, just like poor little Pip. I bobbed up and down in the water and watched as the whale pulled Ahab’s boat, Ahab, who looked victorious at last. But as Ahab’s line went out, it got caught around his neck, snapped it in two, pulled him over. And that was that. The last of Ahab.
(We have watched the above happen in silence. Now our focus returns to Ishmael.)
And everyone died. As you know. Except me. The only thing left of the Pequod was Queequeg’s coffin. After he decided not to die, we had sealed it, caulked it, and used it for a life-buoy. Indeed.
And so I drifted. A day and a night. The sharks swam by with padlocks on their mouths. Then the Rachel, still looking for her lost children, found another orphan.
(Blackout. End of play.)
I predict…
…this movie will do very well.
Happy Valentine’s Day from What Does The Protagonist Want
JAWS OF LOVE
I’m a man, I’m an idiot, it follows. I’m a man, I’m an idiot.
I’m human, that’s the problem. I’m human, I’m an idiot, it follows. I’m human, I’m an idiot. You can’t teach me anything, I won’t learn, I’ll never learn, I can’t learn, I’m an idiot, I’m trapped and you can’t teach me anything.
You ever look into someone’s eyes and been reduced to the size of a pin? A pin, a pinpoint of light, been reduced to a pinpoint of light? You ever see someone toss their hair back and it made you fall silent? You could be talking to someone — “Oh, yes, the third episode with the dwarf was the best” — and they do this –
[imitation of hair-flip]
— and you fall silent. Because, you know why? Because Something Important Has Happened. Or, or, you’re talking to this person, this person, this certain person who makes your heart want to get in your car and turn on some rockabilly and drive somewhere, and you’re hanging on every word this person says, and then this person says something like —
…”that would be nice”…
— and it dislodges this rock, somewhere in the deep stream of your subconscious this rock is dislodged, and you find yourself thinking about things you haven’t thought about in years. Am I ugly? Do I need some mints? How come I never read any Shelley? Jesus, do I weigh that much? This rock is dislodged, it sets off an avalanche in your head that wipes out everything else in your brain.
And you fall silent. It’s like you’re in church, it’s like you’re worshipping. Because you are in church. You are worshipping. You are having a religious experience.
Why? Why this person? Who is this person? What do you know about this person? Doesn’t this person have terrible taste in music? Doesn’t this person smoke? Isn’t this person ten years older than you? Isn’t this person not attracted to your sex? Doesn’t this person think you’re an insignificant blot on an otherwise charming landscape? Isn’t this person the rudest, clumsiest, most incorrigibly maddeningly frustratingly difficult person you’ve ever met in your life? Well? Then why? Why are you talking to this person? What is the point? Why are you bothering? Why do I find myself in this exact same position right now?!
Because —
[gesture to body]
— this, you see, this, you know what this is, this is flesh. It’s all I’ve got. It’s all they gave me. I didn’t get a book of rules. I didn’t get a wise old mind that could see into the future and tell me that these feelings would die, that lovemaking would become rote and tiresome, that I would lose interest, that we would get into fights over things like, like white-out!
I didn’t get that mind, my mind doesn’t say those things, my mind says things like YES! My mind says things like NOW! My mind says things like DANCE, like, like, KISS, like, like, GRAB THIS PERSON NOW! GRAB THIS PERSON NOW!
I don’t know what it is, of course I don’t know what it is. It’s not meant to be known, not by us, not by me, not in this life, not in this world. It’s a feeling, that’s all, it’s a feeling, you know it when you feel it, it’s like these jaws snapping shut on you, on me, like they’ve shut on me, and I’m trapped, because, because, I’m a man, I’m an idiot, it follows, like I said, these jaws are as big as the fucking universe, and they’ll chew me up and spit me out, and I’ll never learn, I’m trapped, I’m an idiot, and I’m trapped in the jaws of love.