The Mast-Head; Queen Mab, Revisited; Warning: Here there be navel-gazing

I've been giving some thought to the dream I had the other day, and given the subtitle of this blog, it would feel like cheating, somehow, not to write up what I now think that dream means.

It's relevant, first, to comment on chapter 35, "The Mast-Head," which I had read the day before my dream. In this chapter, Ishmael describes the whaleman's duty, when his rotation comes around, to climb up to the mast-head and, for two hours at a stretch, search the horizon for any sign of a whale. Ishmael paints a tranquil picture of "the serenity of those seductive seas in which we Southern fishers mostly float." He then offers a confession:

"Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving around me, how could I -- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude, -- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships' standing orders, 'keep your weather-eye open, and sing out every time.'"

Ishmael concludes his confession by advising "ye ship-owners of Nantucket" to "beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness ..."

The mast-head, then, is a place of isolation and contemplation; a place where it is very easy for a person of "unseasonable metitativeness" to "but lightly hold [her] obligations."

So again to my dream: I was walking along a stereotyically suburban road in a stereotypically suburban neighborhood, with the full understanding upon me that neither the road nor the houses were "real" -- rather, they had been manufactured so that the souls entering the afterlife would not find the transition too shocking. I enter a house full of people (in my waking life I recognize them as current students and retired colleagues) who have died at sea, drowned on wrecked whaling ships. These people are all intently playing cards.

It is my job to tell them that they are dead, but I find it difficult to maintain their attention -- even more difficult to convince them that they have died. One girl (a student of mine ... call her Anne) seems to begin to catch on. I ask her, "Can you remember how you came here?" She describes the same road I took to reach the house. I shake my head and explain that road is not real: "What do you remember before that?" She suddenly remembers falling from the mast-head into the ocean, and it dawns on her that she must have died.

Almost immediately, she forgets this revelation and goes back to her card game. I have to start over, uneasily wondering if I am dead as well (after all, I took the same unreal road to get to the house).

In my waking life, Anne is a student who I have consciously thought is a lot like me when I was her age. So Anne who dies when she falls from the mast-head is me. Anne who is dead but thinks she isn't is me. Anne who eternally plays cards in a fake house on a fake street is me.

The house that isn't real and the people who aren't alive is a kind of mast-head itself. It is isolated and the only "obligation" is this meaningless card playing.

I think the mast-head Anne falls from is the life of contemplation and meditation that I so comfortably inhabit. I think the fake house is essentially my place of employment -- a place where I can comfortably teach the same classes and texts every year and feel useful, removed from "real life."

I think I had this dream when I did because I recently ended yet another relationship, and consequently have no other "obligations" outside of my job, which can't really provide all the meaning I need it to. So even at work I'm starting to "but lightly hold my obligations" because they feel increasingly meaningless and unreal, separated as they are from the "real life" that I can't seem to procure.

As grim (and admittedly melodramtic) as it is, I feel I really should conclude this entry with the paragraph that concludes "The Mast-Head":

"There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in a horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!"

Pantheists? Whew! For awhile there, I feared he was talking about me ...