Summer's Lost Sound

On summer afternoons in 1989, we marched through the woods with toy guns spray painted black and mimicked the sounds of warfare. There were four of us, 12 and 13 years of age, and we each made our own unique noises. Mike, the youngest, rapid fired the word “pow.” Tavis, the next lowest in seniority, shouted “nananana” for his machine gun’s killing power. I was a sergeant, second in command of our little squad, and I would flick my tongue against the roof of my mouth, creating a more violent version of the purring sounds I sometimes make these days to impersonate my cat. Jason, our lieutenant, carried only a fake pistol – it’s simplicity a symbol of his authority – and he made a complex noise for it by sucking in and then exhaling, creating a hybrid of the word “pow” and an exasperated sigh. If you stood close to any of us in combat, you’d likely be sprayed from the mist exiting our lips.
Those war-like sounds of ours erupted in the woods behind Jason’s house. We lived in Clarksville, Tenn., next-door neighbors to the Fort Campbell, Ky. Army Post, and occasionally a Blackhawk helicopter would fly over us, adding a touch of verisimilitude to our fantasies. The woods, thick with leaves and vines, morphed on those summer afternoons into the jungles of Vietnam. We walked into its shade with the swagger of hardened soldiers, moving branches aside with the barrels of our toy guns and cussing about the heat. It didn’t take long for someone to lift his fist in the air, motioning for us to be quiet.
“A machine gun nest,” the lieutenant would whisper. A machine gun nest hid behind almost every cluster of trees in those woods.
I didn’t live in the same neighborhood that this jungle surrounded. I grew up about a mile away, on a quiet suburban street without any kids my own age. I’d leave the house around 10 a.m. every morning that summer and hike across the golf course that separated me from my war buddies. Along the way, I snatched up golf balls for use as hand grenades against the enemy.
Our little squad met in the gray carpeted safety of Mike’s living room, where we spent the rest of the morning watching movies like “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” or “Hamburger Hill.” We were too young to understand the horrors of what we saw. Rather, all the blood and gore in those films looked like great fun.
When the movies ended, and our adrenaline was properly spiked, we armed ourselves with the toy guns stored on a shelf in Mike’s garage and then headed out into the sweaty heat of a Tennessee summer.
“Pow pow! Pow pow!”
“Nananananan!”
“BAM! BAM!”
Our artificial gunfire echoed through the woods. When the battle was over, we gathered in a circle and debated over who killed the most bad guys. The Lieutenant normally won these arguments. We respected his authority in all things. Mike, because he was the smallest, was often teased until his face turned red that he’d actually shot his own soldiers. But once the matter was settled, we hiked deeper into the woods and opened fire on yet another machine gun nest.
We only played war in the summer. The woods shriveled into a gray, bony mess in the winter. We could no longer pretend it was our patch of Vietnam. Nazi-occupied France, maybe, but that war was too distant and held little appeal to us. So we waited for June and another season of the joys of warfare.
We were the bored children of a peacetime era. The first Gulf War, two years later, lifted our spirits, but it was all over too quickly. Then came Somalia and Kosovo, but those didn’t seem like real wars to us. By the time I graduated college in 1999, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I was living at the end of history. There were no more wars to be fought.
These days, I don’t hear the sounds of boys imitating machine guns and bombs. The children living in our neighborhood in Nashville don’t come outside that often. I assume they’re too busy playing on their PlayStations or Wiis, or updating their statuses on Facebook. But I like to think the reason why I don’t hear them is because the children of today aren’t as naive as we were. They’ve grown up in a time of wars, have seen the graphic images on television and, possibly, know personally some of the soldiers who’ve died.
Perhaps when these children become adults, they’ll give us a few years of peace. And then those summer sounds of warfare I once made will again return, as their own bored children set out in search of a little innocent mischief and bloodshed.

Catching the White Whale: A Review of "Moby Dick"

            On an overcast day in late December, I stopped by a bookstore with the intention of buying a hot coffee and a book. The coffee was, as always, the simple purchase – black, no sugar, no cream. The book proved to be a little more difficult. I keep a running list of novels and short story collections I intend to read. As we speak, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” and Philip Roth’s “The Counterlife” are all competing to be the next book I open. In all honesty, those three books held the top spot last December, but I have bad habit of disrupting this schedule with works that either satisfy a sudden interest of mine, or were recently recommended by a friend, loved one, or NPR.

            I took my time perusing the shelves that day because, to my wife’s displeasure, I find peace and comfort in bookstores. If there was a Heaven, and if I was lucky enough to be admitted, I imagine it’d look something like the inside of a bookstore on a rainy, cold day – the light from the reading lamps warm and inviting, a fresh cup of coffee sending up steam, and the shelves upon shelves of books that could fascinate, touch and inspire me for the remainder of eternity.

            On this particular day, I instinctively headed toward the “M” section because, as far as author’s last names go, those beginning with the letter “M” seems to be particularly rich. I glanced at Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” Malamud’s “The Fixer,” Miller’s “Sexus,” all with equal, though not supreme, interest (those works all have places, though farther down, on my eternal reading list.). I think I knew going in what it was I planned to get. For years, I’d talked about reading the Great American novel, and for years, intimidated by what I’d heard, I’d always stalled. It might be said that book held the honor of holding the very last spot on my reading list. The work in question was Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

            My wife, Danica, persuaded me to go ahead and buy it. I’d avoided it long enough, stared at it long enough, obsessed over it long enough, she said. Time to seek out my own personal white whale, which was, in fact, a book about a man’s quest for the great white whale. I bought the book that day in December, brought it home and promptly put it on my book shelf, where it stayed, greedily eyeing me for months. Occasionally I’d pick up the book, thumb through the pages, look at the illustrations, feel the exhilaration of spending a few weeks at sea, but always the novel went back on the shelf.

            By that June, with the warm summer weather boosting my spirits, I finally decided to set sail. The voyage turned out to be beyond anything I’d ever expected. I had a certain prejudice towards the book. I expected it to be great, but in a traditional sort of way. “Moby Dick” is anything but traditional. I hesitate to speculate on alternate realities, but I can confidently say that had Melville lived in the 21^st Century, no publishing house would have touched the manuscript he submitted.

            The novel opens with those famous three words, “Call me Ishmael,” and the reader assumes he or she is going to read a straightforward narrative about a young sailor who goes out in search of sperm whales. The beginning of the novel sets up this belief, with Melville taking meticulous care to describe both the whaling culture in Nantucket and the deep, homoerotic relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. The two men, in those early passages, share a bed, interlock their legs together and are described as being “married.”

            The work then, oddly, turns its back on Ishmael. The main character becomes the second mate, Stubb, who slays several of the leviathans, eats a steak from the whale and provides a steady dose of comic relief to the proceedings. Stubb commands one of the three whaling boats that go off to hunt the whale. Ishmael, we are clearly told, belongs to the crew of the first mate’s boat, Starbuck. Yet the reader is treated to the conversations and personal thoughts of Stubb that our narrator could not possibly have heard. The work, at that point, has changed point of view, from first person to third person. But what exactly is the nature of this third person point of view? Is it an omniscient narrator, is it the imaginings of Ishmael, is it God himself listening to the prayers of his children, or is it perhaps Melville. The authorial intrusion isn’t so far fetched, given the long, encyclopedic descriptions of whaling life the narrator provides.

            This element of the work is key to its greatness, and the strangeness only increases as the narrative, if it can be called that, proceeds. Eventually, Stubb is replaced by Captain Ahab as the central character, and Ishmael is all but forgotten. The novel Moby Dick becomes Ahab’s story, and his monomaniacal pursuit of the whale. The omens of bad tidings, the foreshadowing of the tragedy to come, overflow through these sections, leaving the reader no doubt that The Pequod is fated for disaster. Particularly when the crew meets the ship the Rachel, a femininely named ship desperately searching for and mourning her lost sons. Ahab ignores her pleas, and continues on his mad journey, ultimately destroying himself and the crew.

            After The Pequod sank, I suddenly remembered Queequeg, the spouse of our sometime narrator. No significant mention was made of his death. I thought this was odd until I realized that no Ishmael himself had disappeared from the remainder of the book, only to resurface, like Queequeg’s coffin, in the novel’s brief coda. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I at first assumed to be mere sloppiness was in fact one of the book’s greatest strengths, and what marked it as a truly fascinating triumph in Romantic literature. There are several times when reading the novel that one can almost see Melville scribbling away frantically, trying to transcribe the fever dream that is plaguing him before it disappears forever. The novel is not the work of a writer’s mind, but rather of his soul. “Moby Dick” is a book to be felt, not necessarily read. Its plot doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but the emotion it conjures for the astute reader is beyond compare in world literature. It’s the work of a hungry soul, searching madly like Ahab, for the great white presence of God.

            Early in the novel, Melville takes a slight detour from the plot to present us with a unique story of Jonah and the Whale, as told by a mariner preacher to congregation of seamen and widows. It’s a long, elaborate story the minister tells about one sailor, Jonah, foolishly trying to run away from God. But the sermon isn’t simply filler. It’s the crux of the novel. For, the rest of Moby Dick is the inversion of that tale. It’s one man, blinded by rage, scouring the earth in search of God, if such a being does exist.

            “To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me,” Ahab says. “Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.”

            In the end, it is only nature that exists. Not a sentient God capable of vengeance or salvation. The whale is that nature. He isn’t interested in man’s worship or man’s scorn of him. It is only man who invests nature with the power of the almighty.

            "Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"