MDDM Comparing Wicks and Ishmael as narrators

[Terrance]

One of the moments Hindoos and Chinamen are are ever said to be having,
entire loss of self, perfect union with all, sort of
thing...Insane...Sea Voyage in those days being the standard
treatment...  M&D.10

Perhaps, or maybe I'm now stretching the tales too tall, like Huck, but
I do sense a bit of Pynchon Parody here, so to The Mast-Head (Ch. 35,
M-D), wherein our narrator has been and will continue circling the Lines
(both narratives make circles of Lines)  of thought from several Schools
(now if all that stuff about a whale being a fish is not embellishment
and Stencilization, would you believe a reader trap, a cul de sac, red
herrings all?) and now turns to philosophy. Still thinking of the
business of men, why his pulpit is  at the top of the floating factory
after all here, he admonishes them not listen to the preaching of a
mystic like himself, but of course he is only teasing the men of money
and gets more serious as his sermon proceeds and as he imagines himself
at one with the Universe, an entire loss of self. This loss of self is a
direct contrast with what a narrator describes as the split of Ahab's
body, mind, soul, when he dreams. Now how a first person narrator got
inside Ahab's dreams is a question worth asking, but here, Ishmael, like
White Jacket before him (who falls creating the Artist), atop the world,
almost as if he were in Betrand Russell's Balloon in The ABC of
Relativity, his thoughts wedded to the sea as his soul has been wedded
to the darkness in the black church and in the savage bed, not the
foolish  "meditation and water are wedded for ever" of chapter one, but
a serious metaphysical dive deeper by the imagination, he imagines a
fall into the depths of thought, but he is awakened now to the trap set
by philosophical preoccupations, that trap is Nothing. The self is lost
or as in Wicks, Deadened and if "resurrected" by the approach to
Nothingness, just as it is enLivened by an approach to Being. The
philosopher's self is but a Line to/of Death if it has not Art's round
and round. 

"But here is an artist." Ch. one, M-D, well, maybe not yet.