Continual whaling
On grand old ships
Keir Starmer took Downing Street two years ago. He is resigning now, and his successor will make the sixth prime minister since I could vote.
An old article about another Labour politician warns against planning. “Planning,” the journalist Bruce Page wrote in 1981, “is only the precondition for the creative improvisation that must be called forth by stress.”
One might like to imagine perfect plans that release one from strainful action for good. But “events impose nightmare and disaster with the same narrative remorselessness as the monsters which afflict Bunyan’s characters in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Overcoming one is no more than a qualification to confront the next, and misfortune or irresolution are penalised indifferently, and at once.”
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On Thursday I loved attending the Museum Awards at the Cutty Sark, a grand old ship, one of the last tea clippers. Museum of the Year this year, you might be interested to know, is The Box in Plymouth. The announcement was made in a large excavated chamber under the hull. As you went down the steps the heatwave air was alive with flourishing fans and chic clothes.
The combination of the hull looming above and stylish people all around reminded me of my idea for an essay comparing Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada and Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. Both obsessed to the point of destruction, both feared, both so full of woe and force. I thought posting that idea would set off a flood of essays but it turned out no one was interested. Worse still, when I asked AI to write it instead “with roughly the kind of twinkly-eyed profundity a writer like George Monaghan might manage”, it just answered “Who?”
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It was sublime evening up on the deck, with a late white sun and the smell of the Thames and the weakness of the ship’s wood and the terrifying rope ladders up to the mast. It recalled to me how thankful I am for books like Moby Dick, which I read in Italy after leaving my job, alone and afraid and alive.
Of all, the most beautiful and heartbreaking scene was Ahab’s lament to Starbuck, when it is just them on the deck.
“Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceable land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep!”
I meant Peaceable Land as a lighter balance to writing novels, my “war upon the horrors of the deep”. But PL has come to feel pretty deep in itself. It started at just the same time as Starmer’s premiership; this is issue 104 and we are at the end of the first two years. I never imagined it would be so rewarding as you folks have made it. Thanks so much for your reading and for your support. I hope you’ll enjoy what comes next.
GM
So good to see someone else who appreciates the exact same paragraph in a book! But you missed out the best and most tragic part of Ahab's lament: "away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck"
And I have to add that my own favourite part of the book is Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand, and in particular this paragraph:
"Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti."
You have a facility comparable with that of David Renwick. I'll let that dangle with understatement and resist elucidating, else risk affecting an urbane Rick Beato doing "What Makes This [blog] Great". [Though last June dissecting Stairway To Heaven, he's similarly respectfully understated, for a Yank.]
The AI bit had a similar effect to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0tiNwOpZ68
But the gamut's there and that's the point: nothing's forced or favoured. It turns up when it should. To the values joy, love, peace, humility, self-control, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and patience, you add poise, timing, surprise, reticence, and poignancy.
So, to summarise, with my best meta-AI pseud effete, one does not simply read George Monaghan, one travels through his words like summer shade through branches of elder.