Call me Ishmael. Years ago, finding myself poor and aimless on land, I decided to sail and view the watery world. This is my method for curing melancholy and regulating my blood. Whenever my mouth grows grim, or my soul feels like a damp, drizzly November, I know it is time to leave. The urge becomes undeniable when I pause before coffin before warehouses, trail behind funerals, or feel a manic impulse to knock hats off in the street. Going to sea is my alternative to suicide. While Cato died on his sword with a flourish, I quietly board a ship. This impulse is not unique; almost all men feel a magnetic pull toward the ocean.
While other poets have sung of antelope eyes and bird plumage, Ishmael turns to celebrate a less celestial but worthy subject: the sperm whale’s tail. From its man-thick root, the tail expands into two broad flukes spanning over twenty feet, their crescent borders exhibiting nature’s most exquisite lines. Cross-section reveals a triune structure—horizontal fibres above and below with crosswise middle fibres—recalling Roman masonry and imparting devastating strength.
The tail concentrates the leviathan’s entire muscular system into one point, a force that could theoretically annihilate matter itself. Yet this power only enhances its grace. Real strength never impairs beauty; it bestows it. The carved Hercules loses charm without its bursting tendons, and Michelangelo’s robust God the Father possesses a magic that soft, feminine depictions of Christ cannot match.
Five great motions belong to the tail. In progression, the whale never wriggles—a mark of inferiority—but coils his tail scroll-wise and springs backward, producing that singular darting, leaping motion. In battle against man, he uses his tail contemptuously, striking by recoil. The blow in air is irresistible; through water, merely damaging, though whalers treat cracked ribs as child’s play. In sweeping, the tail seems to concentrate the sense of touch; in maidenly gentleness it moves across the surface, detecting even a sailor’s whisker—a tenderness recalling elephants presenting flowers. In lobtailing, solitary seas find the whale kitten-like at play, flirting his flukes high and smiting the surface with thunderous concussion like a great gun. In peaking flukes—perhaps the grandest sight in nature—the whale tosses his tail erect before diving. Ishmael once witnessed a herd at sunrise, all peaked in concert, appearing as a grand embodiment of adoration.
The elephant, that mightiest land creature, is but a terrier to the leviathan; his trunk a lily stalk to the tail’s crushing power. Yet the more Ishmael considers this mighty tail, the more he deplores his inability to express it. Some gestures would grace a human hand yet remain wholly inexplicable—hunters have called them akin to Freemason signs, the whale conversing with the world. Dissect how he may, Ishmael knows the whale not and never will. The creature seems to echo Exodus: “Thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen.” Yet Ishmael cannot completely make out even the back parts, and the whale has no face.
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