The prophesy is ringing true
men's fears are the ghosts that stalk them
and cause said men
to run headlong into folly
whence a simple ascertainment
of the matter at hand
would render such inklings
as nothing more than that
a vague notion
 
all is well
except in your head matey
 
It seems as though Ahab may be the only sane one on the boat. Sure, driven by revenge and ambition, he and his chosen few are the ones who only have one vision.  The rest of the men, if you would call them that, are harpooned in the blow hole, and will soon be spade. Impertinently so. lacking in reason are they.  Prisoners of the deep, to be human flesh nevermore; and somewhere a mother sighs.
 
Jesse Q. Screed
 
Melville's meanderings below.
 
For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.
 
such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.
 
So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.
 
Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;—merry’s the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all.
 
the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
 
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death!
 
That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.
 
when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
 
While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.
 
Moby Dick.
 
For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.
 
unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.
 
to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
 
in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
 
And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s utmost energies.
 
repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
 
while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea.
 
a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.
the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that destroyed him.
 
I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.
 
man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
 
Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
 
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
 
The White Whale, the White Whale!”
 
as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line
 
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
 
easy, easy—only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys—that’s all. Start her!”
 
—“Stand up, and give it to him!”
 
If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

In his Lecture, Dylan speaks deeply about Melville’s work.  Dylan admits that the themes and allusions have made their way into his songs.  Dylan seems to find a secret there, but cannot himself expressly share the secret, he can only be immersed in it, much like an ant, which in its diminutive form, has no perception of Mt. Everest, but is surely dwarfed by that immense uplifted stone plate.
 
I remember Dylan, commenting some such notion to a fanatic who pressed him as to what a specific song meant.  I thought Dylan was being coy when he told the fan that he himself did not even know what the song meant.  But he repeats the same idea in his lecture.
 
Dylan says, “We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit. Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book. Here's a face. I'll put it in front of you. Read it if you can.”
 
And it is the last four words which are a direct lift from Chapter 79 of Moby Dick, “Read it if you Can.”
 
In Melville, the sentiment is similar, “Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.”
 
In both Melville, and Dylan, genius was not in what their writing suggests, but rather, what their writing expresses, using words to produce illusion. until the imagination is piqued.  That is the gift of a great poet, and songwriter, and that is where the bar is set. 
Now it is for us to find a way over the bar, to see what’s on the other side. It begins with learning from the Masters, of which arguably, Dylan and Melville are on the Board of Directors.
 
So the saga continues.  These men aboard the Pequod, one chasing fate, the others chasing myth, so easily convinced they are, wil nil.
 
On a special note, particularly notice how Melville describes the Tail (towards the bottom.).  To me, it is as sensuous as can be printed without being explicit.
 
Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?
 
It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed.
 
“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”
 
Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen.
 
all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction.
 
O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
 
Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
 
Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.
 
There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!
 
Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.
 
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
 
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”
 
O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”
 
The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others.
 
I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice.
 
I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals.
 
Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.
 
what matters it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
 
a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water
At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse.
 
but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one,
 
Doesn’t the devil live for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil?
 
But I am going now to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going on, I’ll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say—Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it;
 
So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.
 
The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.
 
Laplandish speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.
 
Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded history.
 
this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad.
 
his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.
 
If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
 
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can. 
 
to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
 
The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.
 
I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.
 
And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to know.
 
Pull now, men, like fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils.
 
I say, pull like god-dam
 
But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
 
It was most piteous, that last expiring spout.
 
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
 
Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders.
 
and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
 
with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
 
he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head.
 
in any creature breathing is only a function indispensable to vitality
 
Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!
 
Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
 
My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all.
among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it.
the spout is nothing but mist.
 
He is both ponderous and profound.
 
from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts.
 
And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations,
 
 that vapour—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapour.
 
And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.
 
And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions.
Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.
 Tail
At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes.
 
the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their might;
 
Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it.
 
Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
 
Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no fairy’s arm can transcend it.
 
but when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view.
 
this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven.
 
Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld
 
The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable.
 
But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.
 
for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
 
Jesse Q. Screed