QUIXOTE & AHAB

Don Quixote struggled against the rising tide of rationality, believing a world seen through the lens of myth to be more coherent and beautiful. Off he went, heroically, gracefully even, a living myth himself, an ancient human intelligence asserting order on an ever-shifting unknowable. Living life mythically, as rationally, entails many difficulties. After all, humanity turned to rationality after finding critical fissures in mythical world-coverings. Smaller, more arcane fissures are the death of rational frameworks. Nothing is ever simple, and before long, no matter what we do, we are caught in countless ambiguities and distractions. To save face, we must continually project our myth, or our rational framework, on a sometimes uncooperative universe.

A sort of "postmodernist" irony results from Quixote's attempts to live mythically, wherein images of grace and beauty in the world are revealed to be layers of artifice and self-deceit above an abyss of chaos and absurdity.

The postmodern mindset, then, is really not so new. Mankind has always found absurdity (the close-up view of vast incomprehensibility) lurking around the edges of its systems of explanation, whether they be mythical, rational, or otherwise. It sometimes seems that all of mankind throughout time is massed together in one eternal flaring of spirit, one atemporal drama of understanding.

~

Ahab's is a violent conquest of truth. He attempts to barbarically drag one of the great, inscrutable constructs of the otherworld down to human understanding. It is a kind of glorious blasphemy, to hunt the whale. Starbuck may be right that we should turn back before falling headlong into the abyss, head back to the small comforts of land.

On the other hand, how could we turn away from such a heroic quest into immensity? On land, among whatever reassuring material extensions we can scratch together, we will still feel a gnawing sense of loss, of absurdity. We feel we are ignoring all the ineffably vast workings of the life engine that cranks beneath the bland appearances of sheltered life. Ahab finds a primitive channel into immensity, or the beyond-man, and throws himself audaciously into it. In this action, he almost deifies himself; he towers beautifully against infinity, a savage, brilliant

animal.

~

These two fight the epistemological battle alike and together.