. . . [This] will knit and break religions, bless th’ accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee, and approbation
With senators on the bench. This is it
That makes the wappened widow wed again;
She whom the spital house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To th’ April day again.
—Shakespeare, Timon of Athens 3.4
Paul Gauguin, Aha Oe Feii? / Eh quoi ! Tu es jaloux? / What! Are you jealous? Oil on canvas, 1892. Pushkin Museum, Moscow
“ . . . 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.”—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Ah, but that appalling ocean appalls as much as ever,
and Tahiti is not what it was when Bougainville arrived aboard the sulky Boudeuse,
en route to borrowed fame by way of Bougainvillea
(the thing for which he's now most remembered),*
followed in a while by whalers, missionaries,
venereal disease, Eugène Paul Gauguin, nuclear fallout,† and giant cruise
ships. Though life itself may be so,
Herman, you cannot credibly claim
that its horrors are half-known fears:
Ahab’s peg leg's sawn from whalebone,
and whales blubber train-oil tears.‡
That island paradise lives on in every mortal soul—
insularity may well be the great demonic goal.
Mercy, though, dim memory spares us there.
What we don't know we surely couldn't bear!
Whalers boiling blubber on a whaling ship (1874).
*Bougainvillea was likely first discovered by Europeans when collected in South America by the botanist Jeanne Baret, who circumnavigated the world with Bougainville disguised as a man. "The expedition reached Tahiti in April 1768. . . . on shore, Baret was immediately surrounded by Tahitians who cried out that she was a woman" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Baret).
†Between 1966 and 1996, France exploded 193 atomic devices on atolls in the South Pacific, including a hydrogen bomb. Britain detonated hydrogen bombs there too.
‡Whale oil, which before gaslighting illuminated the West, was called "train-oil"—from the Dutch traan, tear, or teardrop, because it dripped like tears from blubber (note the obvious relationship between English noun and verb). German for "tear" is Träne, and the German termTran renders the English noun "blubber." A whale like Moby Dick, Melville thought, was as intelligent as a human being.
Pierneef, 'n Somersmiddag, Bosveld / A Summer Midday, Bushveld (1928)
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Now silence is consent!
To which our hearts are bent.
Though it be heaven-sent,
It's never what we meant.
The past’s another country,
That rubric's famous too!
They do things different there—
The very things you rue.
We did what we were taught,
We bought the things we bought,
Our word was ever fraught.
We died for what we thought.
We feared what gave us fright
And hoped with all our might.
It didn’t help a bit.
We wore a cap; it fit.
Our grandkids think us fools,
They live by other rules.
We loved the life they spurn,
Which we aspired to earn.
They in their own turn
Will win their children’s scorn,
Long-lived, may live to mourn.
May wish they’d not been born.