what a line!...

[alice wellintown]

There is no finer study of how M-D is about work, about labor,  than
CLR James's _Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman
Melville and the World We Live In (Reencounters with Colonialism: New
Perspectives on the Americas)_


There are, of course, chapters that sail, "Catskill Eagles",
metaphysically and metaphorically on the use of lines. M-D works and
weaves the lines of the craft of whaling & writing down into the
depths where only "deep divers", their eyes bloodshot with reading,
plunge. This famous chapter that ends with the beautiful poem on the
Catskill Eagle, the famous description of Emerson, a man who does not
swim on the surface but dives deep, the tangle of lines, like the one
that is cut to free the black boy, Pip. Or is it cut to free the men
of the boy, who would, as his boss reminds him, sell for far less at
auction on a block in Alabama than the value that would be lost were
the whale to be lost? And cut free of the men, whose work must be
done, Pip too plunges into the depths where he has a vision of God's
foot on the treadele of the Mighty Loom, Spinning Tapestry,
yes...Oedipa, a tapestry that is the mantle of Varo's spinners of
threads.

And, though his customs work would never,as it had Hawthorne, produce
threads for Scarlet Letters, it did keep him working, and spinning:




http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/misgivings/?_r=0

Emerson's essa on The Conservatives is very famous and most have taken
a stab at it. Try this one on Emerson:

http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeVI/emersongnosis.htm


On 8/1/13, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Law on her brow and empire in her eyes."   -From "America" by Herman
> Melville, born today in 1819. http://bit.ly/13EczPQ