special ships

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Well, ships are a hobby of mine, so I'll hope you will excuse some, uh,
free-floating associations:

Kai wrote:

>  ~~~ witnessing the pequod's fate chapter by chapter, i came to think about,
>  well, s p e c i a l  s h i p s. by this i mean ships which are not of mere
>  military and/or economic character.

Nice distinction. At the beginning of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" the fact that the trees
have not yet been felled to sail the seas is one of the features of the Golden Age.
No overseas trade, then, and no war. Another feature of the Golden Age, according to
Ovid, is the absence of ditches and trenches, i.e. borders, lines.

> (playlist addition: "ship of fools")

John Cale?

>  michel
>  foucault talks about in the beginning of "histoire de la folie" [1961], a book
>  which was partly written in hamburg. according to foucault, the narrenschiff
>  motiv first appeared in european literature around 1500; there is also a
>  related picture by hieronimus bosch. but these mad-ships did really exist; in
>  germany, and also in some other european countries, the madmen & -women were at
>  that time, in some cases, first collected by the city's authorities and then
>  shipped away by business people who got paid for it by the city. hardly in
>  any harbor these ships were welcome. foucault, you perhaps remember that, reads
>  this institution, together with the epoch's complementary cultural obsession
>  with the theme, as an indicator for the beginning exclusion of madness from
>  european civilization ~~~

Thanks. I didn't know Foucault was talking about this in "Histoire de la Folie",
otherwise I would probably have read the book by now. Relevant for Ishmael's story
as well as for Cherrycoke's.

> ~ and those who've tried are bones and skulls, and lie
>  beneath ~ the sea. ~ and the little fish like messengers swim in and out their
>  eyes, ~ singing, 'fuck ye not with gory gnahb and her desperate ~ enterprise!'

Compare "The Tempest", Ariel's Song (I, ii, 399-405).

>  there are probably many other death-ships in literature (anyone?)

I have not read Traven's eponymous novel, but you could try E. A. Poe's "The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". Death-ship indeed.

More generally: Hugo Rahner - a Jesuit familiar with Giordano Bruno and just about
everything else written in Latin, Greek or Hebrew; also brother of Karl - has
written a very, very brilliant book about the symbolic meaning of ships and the sea
in ancient and Christian literature. If I remember correctly, the title should be
something like "Symbole der Kirche. Die Ekklesiologie der Väter." Father Maple's
sermon, for example, takes on a whole new meaning in the light of Rahner's book
(well, for me it did).

Thomas