The Core Anagogical Allegory: Unpainted to the last

 

Extraordinary pictures show sperm whales hunting at the ocean surface off the coast of New Zealand.

It is perhaps tedious to beat a dead whale but Moby-Dick never ceases to fascinate me with the richness of its allegory. Essentially, I boil it down to these idiosyncratic axioms [all links, save one, go to the works of Charles "Bonesy" Jones on the Laughing Bone Website]: 

Moby-Dick is the Fugitive God, the ship is our system of belief that we use to find/hunt God, Ahab is the God-Haunted Man. And, as always for me, the Truth of Things is at the skeletal level. The Bone equals Reality. The Flesh is the Dream. We are all dreaming the Goddream.

With this in mind, here it is spun out before you as the Good News from the Master of All Who Hunt for God:

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full- grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.

But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any Leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens".

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.

- From Moby-Dick:  Chapter LV: Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

 

Extraordinary pictures show sperm whales hunting at the ocean surface off the coast of New Zealand.

Thanks to Dave Walsh for the link.

Jim Woodring: The Curled Tail of Conscience

From The Woodring Monitor

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

- Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), U.S. journalist. A Preface to Politics, ch. 6 (1914).

Amazon Links:
A Preface to Politics by Walter Lippmann
Seeing Things by Jim Woodring

From Wikipedia: Walter Lippmann:

It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. He argued that people—including journalists—are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than come to judgment by critical thinking. Humans condense ideas in to symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed "the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation." Citizens, he wrote, were too self-centered to care about public policy except as pertaining to pressing local issues.

[...] Lippmann came to be seen as Noam Chomsky's moral and intellectual antithesis. Chomsky used one of Lippmann's catch phrases for the title of his book about the media: Manufacturing Consent.

From Noam Chomsky Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley:

C: In fact, the structure of the news production system is, you can't produce evidence. There's even a name for it -- I learned it from the producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It's called "concision." He was asked in an interview somewhere why they didn't have me on Nightline, and his answer was -- two answers. First of all, he says, "Well, he talks Turkish, and nobody understands it." But the other answer was, "He lacks concision." Which is correct, I agree with him. The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can't say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you're expected to give evidence, and that you can't do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can't talk.

I think that's a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

Q: This is why so much of your work in the area of politics has been focused on what you call "manufacturing consent," meaning the framing of issues, the way topics are put off the table for discussion. So in the end, what your work suggests is that in coming to understand that, then there's hope for understanding the problems we confront.

C: Oh, yes. Actually, I should say, the term "manufacturing consent" is not mine, I took it from Walter Lippmann, the leading public intellectual and leading media figure of the twentieth century, who thought it was a great idea. He said we should manufacture consent, that's the way democracies should work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds. That's the leading idea of democratic theorists, and the public relations industry and so on, so I'm not making it up. In fact, I'm just borrowing their conception, and telling other people what they think.

Pig Tail Butt Plug