Ahab (Capitalist) & the red hand and hammar of Tashtego (Socialism) go down together

[Ian Livingston]

I always kinda thought Melville was pointing out the futility of
working for the man, because the man is freakin' crazy.

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 7:46 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> not many better verbal riffs than one of Melville's for the first work day
> of the new year.
> "It's about work"---Alice.........Thanks, alice.
>
> Think Progress site reports "progressive' is the term most view favorably in
> PEW Research
> poll.....over 70%.......
>
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2012 6:40 AM
> Subject: Ahab (Capitalist) & the red hand and hammar of Tashtego (Socialism)
> go down together
>
> But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
> sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
> erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the
> flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the
> destroying billows they almost touched; at that instant, a red arm and
> a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of
> nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A
> sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from
> its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding
> Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad
> fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously
> feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his
> death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven,
> with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and
> his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his
> ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a
> living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
>
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant