Our first song begins with the foreboding Ahab sharing his life story and his current quest for revenge.  His “walled-town of a captain’s exclusiveness” has kept him alone.  Alone without an intimate connection with his crew and solitary within himself.  Ahab is carrying the piled centuries of woe on his shoulders with a stunning backdrop of nature and all its beauty.  The lightness and brilliance of the day is contrasted with the heaviness and death spiral that Ahab chooses for himself and by extension those around him.  “I widowed that poor girl the day I married her”.

Near the end of the novel, just before the final chase is the marvelous chapter titled, The Symphony. Here Melville seems to extract elements of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony with its Marche Funèbre and with added elements of his Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral with its ode to nature.  We are in high company.  Melville must have been communing with Beethoven’s music the way trees connect with each other.  That same sort of symbiosis of neural networks that transmit information molecules across synapses.  It is taking place here in Melville’s mighty Ninth Symphony of a chapter.

The title of this song is of course the famous first line in the novel.  When I was fishing (sorry) for a title for the musical, many folks suggested this line.  I didn’t bite.  But I felt the omage tug and use it as the title and first line to this song.

Call Me Ishmael was created out of the first chapter of the book titled “Loomings”.  Here, Melville is grooming us for looming’s – things to come of a portentous nature.  He was right about that!  I put a dance number mid-song, a Charleston. Here my intent is to capture the movement of people, the inhabitants of this “insular city of the Manhattoes,” who are attracted to the edges of the island,” to the extremist limit of the land” by the magnetic water that surrounds them.

It should be noted that Ishmael is the narrator of the story and also a character in the story.  You might say he is of two minds.

Ishmael is in his search for lodgings, having just arrived in New Bedford.  He enters “a negro church, a hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer”.  He, Ishmael, backs away.  Not the lodgings he was in search of. I use this dramatic moment as the setting for “The Sermon”, a later chapter about the biblical tale of Jonah and the Whale that takes place in the whaleman’s chapel.  Switching the setting from the whaleman’s chapel to the above-described encounter is what would be called artistic license.   Of course, I’ve never applied for this license.  I’m sure there are those that would say, stick to your own kind or play by the rules. Enough of that!  I’m going a whaling, not literally of course, but with my harpoon of a quill, thrust into the black dye of my ink stand I harpoon myself into the telling of this story.

Ishmael meets Queequeg at the Spouter Inn where they share the same bed out of necessity and smoke Queequeg’s pipe, soon to become fast friends.  Although, their initial meeting was somewhat unnerving for Ishmael, when Queequeg returned from selling his shrunken heads only to climb into bed with a tomahawk.  Realizing the tomahawk doubled as a pipe smoothed things out immediately and they were soon at peace.

I think Melville was having fun here with the diametrically opposite pairing of Queequeg and Ishmael.  Ishmael desperately trying to break out of the societal cage he felt trapped in and Queequeg without the social encumbrances, “that doth make cowards of us all,” felt no shame as to his picturesque peculiarities.

There was supreme appreciation, each-to-each, as each possessed qualities the other had not.  But what they shared in common was their human equanimity, that innate knowledge that all men are equally human.  No one superior – all unique in their way.

I call this chapter Queequeg’s Sermon.  Queequeg had his own way of doing things.  They may have seemed strange to Christian sensibilities, but they were just as heartfelt and meaningful to him.  And to Ishmael, those new ways were a window to a new world.  Queequeg’s honesty and bravery and naïve curiosity became a bond of brotherhood that would be a means of support to them both and help lead them through their epic journey to come.

Ishmael and Queequeg find a ship, the Pequod.  As they go aboard to make inquiries, they meet captain’s Bildad and Peleg, colorful and retired Quaker sailors.  They are eager to have Ishmael join and sign up for the whaling voyage.  They are not so sure about Queequeg and his tattoos.  But Queequeg demonstrates his skill with the harpoon with a test toss and they are both signed on for the voyage.  Ishmael loves the idea of traveling and seeing the world and getting paid to do it.

It is Ishmael and Queequeg’s last night on land.  Their room at the Spouter Inn is freezing.  Under the blanket only their extremities feel the crisp cold snap of air.  A sensation that makes one feel all the more snug, like two “warm sparks in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

There are three harpooneers aboard the Pequod.  Daggoo, a giant man that stands six foot five in his stocking feet is from Africa.  Tashtego with shoulder length black hair is a native American from Massachusetts.  And Queequeg whom you have met.  They are expert at throwing their harpoons and also some not-so-subtle shade with their indigenous genius and curious courage on the white and titled crew.  With their undeniably burnished skin that embers in Melville’s flaming language, and with the remainder of the crew from the four corners of the globe, we have a ship of notable ethnic diversity.

The crew above deck seem to sense a presence below deck.  A ghost crew.  There is all manner of talk and thought – mystery mounts in other languages, Portuguese, Tahitian, Gaelic, the Manx man, and the Azorean tongue.  Does Ahab dream of Moby?  Me thinks he does.  Does Moby dream of Ahab?  Me things he might.  And yet here, they dream together of their lives prior to the great battle where Ahab lost his leg and Moby his innocence… in the sense that Moby now knows that mankind is inherently unkind with their burning desire for Moby’s very bodily fluid to light their lamps and make their candles.

Ahab and his fixity of purpose is “laid with iron rails”.  Not much of anything will knock him off his mission.  Only calamity will claim his attention – but not for long enough to truly understand what is happening.  Ahab is condemned to his own thoughts; he has no way out.  The locomotive has left the station, and the brakes have been replaced with delusion.  “The delusion is contagious.  The perverse spiritual blindness of Ahab has infected his men.” *  This quote (by Howard Vincent) sums up this situation and all situations where a man of immeasurable need and unquenchable loss lures in unsuspecting lambs to assist in the roughshod slaughter of humanity and nature.  It is a doomsday scenario and to some extent all know it, but the catastrophe has begun and to turn back now would be to call into question delusion itself.

*Howard P. Vincent (1904 – 1985), Epic Melville scholar who led the Melville revival

More of an introduction of the song to come, Call Me Moby.  Here we see Moby for the first time.  Daggoo describes this stunning spectacle.  A monument to nature in fleeting glimpses.  This is a time when things are still seen as they are without the intrusion of any photographic device.  Only the human eye can capture and frame the moment, “like a snow-hill” from out the water.

“There Leviathan,

Hugest of living creatures, in the deep

Stretch’d like a promontory sleeps or swims,

And seems a moving land; and at his gills

Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.”

Paradise Lost

What with all of the drama bursting from the ship – here is a lilting interlude between Starbuck the first mate and his wife Mary.  Using a bit of stagecraft, we imagine them singing to each other across the ocean.  The voice can carry quite a distance across water.  So why not an ocean?  Getting back to that idea of symbiosis of neural networks connecting across synapses.

Nature’s own method of Morse Code – pulses of electric current like the hidden communication network among trees.  The first cable line across the Atlantic Ocean was laid in 1858, not long after this novel was written.

Starbuck has been trying to divert Ahab’s attention away from Moby Dick and follow a course back to Nantucket.  A course that would fill the bowels of the Pequod with whale oil, the oil that would make the voyage an economic success.  For Ahab did not let on at the outset of the voyage that the economics of the voyage was of secondary concern.  At the top of the list was to hunt and kill Moby Dick, the notorious and legendary White Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity.

Starbuck was in the fight of his life and for his life.  It was not a great fish at the end of his line that he was reeling in, but an ageing ship’s captain. And as if playing the Fool to his King Lear, Starbuck, the first mate, found himself in check, and could only think on his captain, “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

There are those times on land when one comes upon a promontory that affords the vast spectacle of a majestic view of some hundred or more miles.  Such was the case here when at last encountering the Pacific; “that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.”  Between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, it “rolls the mid-most waters of the world and makes all coasts one bay to it.”

Fedallah is a kind of mystery character in the novel.  He says very little if anything at all.  He is an observer.  He watches Ahab and looks for signs.  He looks for Moby.  He seems to have unsaid authority over Ahab.  But let us leave it to Melville, “Fadallah remained a muffled mystery to the last.  He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, …”  The sentence continues for another 117 words.  One of the countless wonderfully descriptive moments in the novel.

Ahab takes a moment in suspended time to have a reckoning with the world.  He is preparing perhaps for his last rites.  For where else would august Ahab want to be buried but in the deep watery womb from where he was born.  His rite of passage unto the sea of eternity.

Starbuck is at it again, desperate to get Ahab to change course.  But now Moby has been spotted, and Ahab is alive with malice and maneuvers to finally conquer the white whale.  Ahab has by now already conquered the crew – they are “one man, not thirty,” “timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison.”  “All directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.”

Ahab ends the conversation with Starbuck, “this whole act’s immutably decreed.  ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.  Fool!  I am the Fate’s lieutenant; I act under orders.  Look thou, underling!  That thou obeyest mine.”

Only Ishmael can say goodbye as he is the only one to survive to tell the story of his Captain and his crew.  Ishmael our narrator and Ishmael the character now become one.  And what happens to our Ishmael as time passes after the sinking of the ship?  Well, that is another story for another time.  For our story is now over, although great tales of magic and romance never truly end, but are sustained by the beating hearts, the fluttering wings, the North Wind, the celestial moonlit nights where the whispers of lovers masquerade their dreams under the watchful eyes of ancient oaks, “and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

Daggoo proudly sings cast and crew back on stage.  There are no doubt some not so politically correct monikers and phrases from the time this book was written around 1850.  And we no doubt have new names and phrases today that will be looked at askance tomorrow.  So be it.

Ishmael did not judge a person by their skin color and because of that he was a wonderful judge of character.  Once Ishmael understands Queequeg’s honesty, bravery, and kindness, and as we, the audience get to know Queequeg we come to the realization that he is one of the most delightful characters in all of literature.  And we have Ishmael to thank for that.  For if he had not ventured to the Spouter Inn, we would not have met Queequeg!  And had we not opened this book of wonders, what horizons would have been left unseen.