moby dick

[note 2.15]

[The company of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus’s Moby Dick. Photo: Julieta Cervantes]

Friends,

I returned to Brooklyn a week ago, after another semester in Houston (for those few months it always feels like I’m living in airports). I won’t be going back to Texas next year (no, I didn’t get fired for refusing to comply with the proposed (inane) limits on what we could teach: I got a Cullman Fellowship, which means I’ll be based at the New York Public Library (the one with the lions) starting this September (scattered applause)).

The day I landed back in Brooklyn I went to Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at BAM, which moved me in ways I cannot fully articulate. As soon as it began I was deeply impressed, fully immersed, but at some point I noticed I wasn’t moved, beyond aesthetically, intellectually—do I need to be emotionally moved to deem something great?

It’s engine seemed to be repetition, which makes sense for a novel about the cost of obsession. Aside from the (famous) first line (Call me Ishmael), the first chapter is distilled down to this: That same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Near the end Ishmael sings the line, “If I dream it, maybe it will happen” over and over, and this song fills the whole stage, until eventually all his fellow whalers join in (music by Anna Calvi)