It
is generally acknowledged that to explain a joke is to ruin it; but
in the expectation that you have looked at the cartoon and already
gotten the joke, I feel free to expatiate upon it. We laugh at
Captain Ahab in the cartoon because in his fervent quest for revenge
upon the creature that has cost him his leg he registers only
disappointment in not seeing the white whale--when he should be
staring with wild surmise at A RED WHALE! As we move out from the
joke itself, we should recognize that this discovery of such an
anomalous creature offers Ahab the opportunity for a positive fame
above that of most men; but he cannot see beyond his
obsession—the desire to destroy the white whale. And so he
ends up destroying himself and his fellow men.
*
W.
H. Auden's poem “Musee de Beaux Arts” concerns another watery
death, that of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and had the wax
of his fabricated wings melt away, and so plunged to his demise in
the sea. Auden focuses on the painting “Landscape With the Fall of
Icarus” by the 16th
Century Flemish master Pieter Breughel.
He observes that people who could have witnessed “Something amazing” were too absorbed in their mundane tasks to turn away from them:
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
And
so death occurs (in the lower right hand part of the painting)
without acknowledgment.
*
But
we need not talk just about death and destruction here. The
singlemindedness of obsession or the narrowly-focused pursuit of
one's everyday tasks can also lead one to miss the exceptional which is also the beautiful and the sublime. On January 12, 2007, the great American violinist
Joshua Bell undertook an experiment (arranged by the Washington
Post) to play works by Bach
and other masters during the morning rush hour at a location in a
Washington metro station. A few months later the British newspaper
the Independent
decided to replicate the D. C. experiment in London with the help
of one of Britain's foremost violinists Tasmin Little. In the
paper's words, “The Independent
decided to give Little one of the more difficult challenges of her
career - to test how people would react to a great artist giving a
performance in a totally unexpected setting,” in her case the
tunnel under the railway bridge by Waterloo station.
The
Post
clocked 1,097
people passing by
Bell during the three-quarters of an hour he played, while the
Independent estimated
900 to 1,000 passers-by
in the London tunnel during the same amount of time. With some of
the world's greatest music being played by great artists how many
people were not absorbed in the singleminded purpose that
they had “somewhere
to get to and [so] sailed calmly on”? In Little's case, eight
people, “of
whom one was under the age of three.” For Bell, seven stopped.
Little
summed up the experiment astutely:
"Sometimes we're guilty of giving ourselves a goal, even if it's only catching a train, and leaving very little room for spontaneity in our lives. We don't deviate from our pattern. People forget to take into account that something different might happen."
They
might even discover a red whale!
***
For
Bell:
Story--http://www.jessicaduchen.co.uk/pdfs/indi-2007/tasmin-20apr.pdf |
For Auden (full text of "Musee des Beaux Arts"):
http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html
http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html
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