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A R T I S T S ’ F O R U M Inner Caveman ROBERT DEL TREDICI t is common in psychology to talk about getting in touch with your inner child. Herman Melville put me in touch with something I’d call my inner Icaveman. He lives in a cave with a large stone in front, and over the millennia , the rock has been transmuted into metal and the cave itself has become a stainless steel vault. The caveman has human needs; but he long ago stopped going out to hunt and eat. In his vault he is hungry for one thing only: he craves meaning. When I discovered Moby-Dick, shafts of meaning penetrated my stainless steel vault, and my caveman responded, “Yes,I understand. I get it!” What inspired me most about Melville was his capacity to awaken meaning in me. I had studied for some years to become a Catholic priest, and for a while there I thought I had a bead on the meaning of things from the standpoint of Eternity. That turned out not to be the case, and I quit, a ruined soul. My desire for meaning had been all but extinguished. So when I read in the opening of Moby-Dick, that we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head and sadly need mending, it struck a chord. What impressed me most about this insight was that its author did not refer back to Original Sin -like, this is why we’re cracked about the head - and he did not look forward to Salvation as in, “if you’re cracked in the head, say a hundred thousand Hail Mary’s,’’or something like that. Invoking neither Original Sin nor Salvation, Melville held our crack steady taking nothing for granted -which is why he’s a caveman kind of guy. And it’s why he managed to communicate to me a kind of meaning I thought wasn’t going to be available anymore. And across the gulf of time we can still understand him, as he no doubt would still understand us. Our Greek colleague Christodoulou sent this conference a message, which Beth Schultz just read, that said it clearly: Moby-Dick is about knowledge; it’s about perception; it’s about our modes of perception. Along with Melville’s ability to quicken meaning in readers is his tremendous graphic punch. Moby-Dick’s author communicates in a style that ranges from sophisticated, ambivalent, postmodern exhalations to primitive, rough-hewn, burlesque hieroglyphs. For Melville, art-forms high, low and in between hold energy,and he has the key to unlocking that energy and making it available in supremely visual ways, often with a roisterous sense of humor and a bitter dark edge, steadfastly avoiding anything like a happy ending. When you suspect that things are horrific, but it’s not politic to say so, then 5 8 L E v I A T H A N A R T I S T S ’ F O R U M you meet an artist like Melville who puts it right out there, with style -that was a vital discovery for me. I ended up packing around Moby-Dick with me like a Bible. For me, a Bible-like book is one you can open at any point, read at random, and find inspiration on every page. For five years I illustrated whatever passages from Moby-Dick hit home, doing about one hundred pen-and-ink designs. I took my cue from Melville’s own style - the rambunctious, headlong, inluitive approach. The author of Moby-Dick may have revised and revised, but more to the point was that Melville had found a primal mode of expression that cannot be faked or finessed. When I got bit in the ass by insights from the book, I had to do something about it. The opening to “The Hyena” (Ch. 49) - “there are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke” -hit me right between the chromosomes. It’s an elegant statement about a brutal reality- something both kind of fun...

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