Dialogues in Limbo by George Santayana

This was a tough read. Sometimes I like to challenge myself with philosophy, but I often find that the idea of the challenge is more satisfying than the challenge itself.

In this volume, Santayana explores several philosophical issues through imagined dialogues with the “shades” of several ancient philosophers. It’s a neat device (obviously copied from older philosophical traditions), and one often gets the sense that Santayana knows his shades quite well. The bickering and back-and-forths between Democritus, Alcibiades, et. al., demonstrate a tight understanding of each of the philosophical traditions and viewpoints.

Of course, Santayana is present himself in the guise of a spirit of “a stranger still living on Earth,” and he is the one who winds up bringing in the most challenging questions.

Frankly, most of it blew right past me, but I did get a sense of something useful in the dialogues around “Autologos,” a kind of avatar for the man who believes that he is the author of his own destiny, a concept that most of the ancient shades disagree with, preferring to see the hand of “the gods,” or at least the unknown, in the ultimate and proximate motive forces within us.

Democritus. You, silent Stranger, do not follow the others on their festive errand, and have not to-day opened your lips. Perhaps you are offended at our enlightened religion.

The Stranger. Not offended, but helpless and envious, like a boy admiring from afar the feats of an athlete or the gleaming armour of soldiers on the march. It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.

Democritus. Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things. In invoking the aid of the gods and in attributing all things to their providence and power, each of us shatters his greatest illusion and heals his most radical madness. What madness, you will ask, and what illusion? This: that his thoughts produce one another or produce his actions: the very illusion of Autologos. These young fops, dancing away to their mock mysteries, are ingenious sophists and pleasant companions, but they are utterly without religion; and if your heart held you back as if from sacrilege from following in their train, it did not deceive you. Autologos is the one perfect atheist: he is persuaded that he rules and creates himself. What madness! And yet how irresistible is the voice of sensation, and will, and thought, at every moment of animate existence! The open-mouthed rabble shouting in the agora suppose that nothing controls them but their pert feelings and imaginations, by miracle unanimous; and even the demagogue who is pulling the strings of their ignorance and cupidity facies that he is freely ruling the world, and forgets the cupidity and ignorance of his own soul which have put those empty catch-words into his bawling mouth. Miserable puppets! The most visionary of mystics is wise in comparison. He knows how invisibly fly the shafts of Apollo: let but the lightest of them cut the knot of the heart, and suddenly there is an end of eloquence and policy and mighty determination. He knows that it suffices for the wind to change and all the fleets of thought will forget their errand and sail for another haven. Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. Admonished by religion, he gives thanks, acknowledging his utter dependence on the unseen, in the past and in the present; and he prays, acknowledging his utter dependence on the unseen for the future. He sees that the issue of nothing is in his hands, seeing that he knows not whether at the next moment he will still be alive; nor what ambushed powers will traverse his path, or subtly undo the strength and the loves in his own bosom. But looking up at the broad heaven, at returning day and the revolving year, he humbly trusts the mute promises of the gods, and because of the favour they may have shown him, he may trust even himself. For what is the truth of the matter? That the atoms in their fatal courses bring all things about by necessity, and that men’s thoughts and efforts and tears are but signs and omens of the march of fate, prophetic here, and there deceptive, but always vain and impotent in themselves, never therefore wise save in confessing their own weakness, and in little things as in great, in their own motions as in those of heaven, saluting and honouring the gods.

The Stranger. But can the atoms be called gods?

Democritus. As the sun is called Phoebus and the sea Poseidon, and the heart’s warmth Love, and as this bundle of atoms is called Democritus. The name is a name, and the image imaginary, yet the truth of it is true.

The Stranger’s question is a sneaky one -- driving right at the heart of Democritus’s argument -- and he as much as admits the sophistry in his response. Autologos is wrong not because it is the gods that drive him. He is wrong because he does not know what drives him -- the gods, the atoms, or even, dare I say, himself, since everything seems to be only a name that is placed on the hidden and unknown truth.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

You Are Being Lied To: This Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths edited by Russ Kick

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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This is one of those books that I heard about on NPR. It’s a collection of essays, articles and interviews with a bunch of counterculture types that pretty much purports to tell you that everything you think or hear about in the mainstream media is a load of crap. And of course, it pretty much is.

One of the most interesting things about the collection is that it was assembled in the pre-9/11 world, and so mention of the most colossal conspiracy theory in the history of mankind is nowhere to be found. And yet, reading this, you can see how such ideas begin and flourish. There’s a lot of people out there who evidently think Skull and Bones controls the world, and that all institutions support some dark and sinister purpose, even those run by people who have no clue what they’re talking about, they still unconsciously serve the bidding of the master. The people in this book really don’t like the War on Drugs, and believe that the criminalization of opiates is nothing more than the State’s way on controlling and monitoring the society. The State wants the power to relieve pain to only reside with itself, so it can decide when to use it and, more importantly, when not to use it.

Every tyrant knows that a person in pain will also reliably respond to the ‘positive’ reinforcement of relief from pain. The ability to offer that -- an escape from agony -- is a power no amount of money can buy.

Guess we’re ruled by tyrants now. The logic they seem to use is as follows:

1. Here’s something that’s going on in our society.

2. Here’s one way of interpreting that something.

3. The way that we’ve interpreted it coincides with ways tyrants have oppressed people in the past.

4. Therefore, our society must be being oppressed by tyrants.

The stuff in this book reminds me a lot of Brother Hovind. Wouldn’t it be great if that many pieces of the puzzle actually fit together? Forgot what they fit together into and whether that’s good or bad, right or wrong. Just the fact that they fit together is enough. Fitting the pieces together is all any of us ever need.

In any event, here are some books from their suggested reading list that I wouldn’t mind checking out:

The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S

Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit by Garry Wills

Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl

The Myth of Human Races by Alain F. Corcos

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

It was still raining when my father, Gildegarde Brisbane II, arrived at the edge of the cliff that held Farchrist Castle above the city below, Raveltown. His career as a Farchrist Knight ended in disgrace, he felt his life and purpose crashing down all around him. He loved Amanda, my mother, and that might have been worth living for if he hadn’t loved his god more. He looked out over the rainy expanse of the Sea of Darkmarine and offered a little prayer up to Grecolus. He did not ask for forgiveness. He did not ask for mercy. All he asked for was for it to end when his body crashed into the rocks so far below. After a life lived in devotion to Grecolus, in his last moments, he wanted no part of the afterlife the god offered him. His body was found the next day by a pair of young boys who had come to dig for clams.

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During the march forced upon him for the rest of the day, Brisbane decided the rumors he had heard about orks may not have mentioned their use of magic, but they had hit the nail on the head when it came to their brutality and downright meanness.

It took them many hours to come to the end of the dark tunnel that started in the ettins’ cave and bored down into the earth, sometimes at unbelievable angles. Brisbane spent the whole time lost in the pitch that surrounded him, his eyes never adjusting to the point where he could see anything. At times, he wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or closed.

His constant companion in the blackness was the pain, the pain that seemed to have intensified with the deprivation of his sight. His chest still labored for breath from the abuse his lungs had sustained in his near-drowning in the Mystic River. The pain in his stomach was dull and constant, and the left side of his face felt like it had swelled up to epic proportions. He started to cough, his face and his abdomen competing to see which could hurt him more when he did so, and he brought up something behind his gag that could only be blood by the way it tasted. Unable to spit it out, he was forced to choke the fluid back down.

He was a mess. One ork always had his hand clamped on his wrists and every time he staggered or slowed his pace, the ork would give him a shove that hurt his arms and caused him to trip over his own feet. Three times, he actually fell to the ground and had to be hauled back to his feet amidst the echoing sounds of what he could only assume were orkish curses.

Besides these orations, the orks were mostly silent as they made their way through the rock of the mountain. He tried to carry on some sort of mental conversation with Angelika, who Snaggletooth still carried in the darkness, but his mind was too preoccupied with his pain and Angelika was too preoccupied with their inevitable vengeance. She seemed unable to tell him anything else, nothing except warnings to be strong and promises of revenge. She knew nothing specific about his fate or the fate of his friends, and these were the two subjects he was most concerned with.

First, he had no idea what was to become of him. Shortwhiskers had said orks captured people to be slaves, for food, or for both. He hated to think Snaggletooth was taking him back to his village, or clan, or tribe, or whatever it was, to roast him over a slow fire until his juicy meat fell right off his bones. He supposed that could be his eventual fate, but he thought they would want something else from him first. Snaggletooth had been ready to kill him when he had finally gotten him off their ex-leader, but the ork’s sword arm had been stayed by the sight of his medallion. Groo-mack, Snaggletooth had said to his goons, and they had quickly tied him up and gagged him. They gagged him. That was something they hadn’t done the first time he was captured. They did it the second time, though, and very effectively. A balled-up rag had been stuffed in his mouth and a second one tied around his face to keep the first one in place. He could make no articulate sounds and his screams were muffled into whimpers.

Why did they gag him? Who could he call out to for help? There was no one here in the wilderness or in this tunnel beneath the earth. They may just not want to hear him jabbering, but he had a hunch it was something more than that. Something much more than that.

Groo-mack. It kept coming back to that. What did it mean? If a pentacle meant the same thing to orks it meant to humans, groo-mack could mean any number of things, all of them in the same vein. Magic and magic-using. Did Snaggletooth think he was a wizard? That would explain the gag. If they thought he was a hostile wizard, a gag would effectively prohibit him from speaking the proper vocal tones to cast spells. And his hands being tied prevented him from making the right hand gestures.

That had to be it. The truth of it hit home for him. It made sense. They thought he was some kind of wizard so they had tied and gagged him so he couldn’t cast any spells against them.

But he did not consider himself anything but the most paltry kind of wizard. His talent was confined to a small amount of cantrips, and his one offensive spell, shocking grasp. He certainly hoped the situation never came about where he would have to prove his magical skill to the orks. He could only imagine the orks would be disappointed with his performance.

But these thoughts were secondary in his mind. Foremost was concern over his companions’ welfare since he had left them on that platform atop the peak overlooking the mountain lake. His heart still fluttered over what the absence of Roystnof’s light spell might mean for him, but Roystnof was not the only one on his mind. He felt concern for Shortwhiskers and especially Stargazer. Hopefully, they would, or had already, survived the attack of that strange bird-monster. He was sure they could, if things had gotten really nasty, have easily retreated back into the endless corridor and escaped the monster.

They would come looking for him, he was sure of that. If able, they would come looking for him. Dantrius might not like it, but that had never stopped the party’s actions before. They would come looking for him—but what would they find? Shortwhiskers might be able to find the spot on the bank of the Mystic where his scuffle and capture had taken place, but then what? A guess to look in the ettins’ cave and a lucky discovery of the secret door they could not open without the magic orkish word? He had to accept the fact that he could not count on a rescue by his friends. He was going to have to orchestrate that himself. He had been effectively separated from his friends and any reunion they were ever going to have would only result if he stayed on his toes and took advantage of the first and smallest opportunity to escape his captors.

Roystnof, Shortwhiskers, and Stargazer—their faces flashed before his blind eyes and he tried not to moan out in desperation. Other faces flashed before him, people who had passed out of his life for reasons as different as their individualities. Roundtower, his mother, even Otis seemed to hang in the air before him with the solidity of regret. They all seemed so far away now, almost as if they had never really been, and he wondered if he would live long enough to forget them entirely. He wondered if he could live long enough to forget them entirely.

Angelika, are you sure?

—Strength and patience, young Brisbane. Vengeance shall be ours.—

These are the thoughts that filled Brisbane’s head when the pain of his injuries allowed him to think as he marched down the steep grade of the dark tunnel. They were not unusual things for a young man in his situation to be thinking, but an objective observer privy to his thoughts might have found two thoughts missing from his concerns a bit unusual.

The first was that even though he was in a cramped, dark tunnel, lost impossibly far under the pressing weight of tons and tons of mountain rock, he had no traces of the claustrophobia clouding his thoughts like he had experienced in the meditation chamber. A sympathetic voice might be able to explain this away by saying he had much more realistic threats to his health to worry about than the thought-induced paralysis that seemed to seize claustrophobics, and there aren’t many who would argue against this being the case. But it was not so easy to explain his seeming unconcern for his near-lunatic behavior when the ex-leader of the orks had taken Angelika away from him. Granted, Angelika was no ordinary sword, but it might profit one to speculate on what kind of hold she must have had on him to illicit such a reaction.

The small group spent many hours in the dark tunnel, slowly making their way down and through it. Brisbane began to wonder—like he had done not long before in a different place and what already seemed like a different life—if it would ever come to an end. Like all things, however, the tunnel eventually did end and it surprised him as endings often do. The orks suddenly brought him to a halt with a rough jolt. He still had trouble seeing his surroundings, and for the past few hours he had begun to rely on his other senses. His strangely sensitive ears heard Snaggletooth’s voice mumble another ursh-low and suddenly bright light stabbed into his eyes like knives. He tried to bring his hands up to cover them but his hands were still tied behind his back and he could only shut his eyelids and try to turn his head away from the light.

For a moment, he wondered if this was how Roundtower felt when Roystnof had transformed him from stone back to flesh.

He was pushed forward again and with his eyes closed he tripped over his own feet and nearly fell to the ground for the fourth time. He tried to open his eyes a crack and the light wasn’t as bad so he opened them a little more. Another secret door had been opened before him and through his half-masted eyelids he could see the door opened onto the outside.

The sun was out, warming the late afternoon sky as if it had never been raining. His eyes were quickly getting used to the light as he stepped out into the sunshine behind Snaggletooth. He could see they had exited the mountain at its base and now stood upon a sparse and hilly plain. The Windcrest Hills, he realized. They had cut through the heart of the Crimson Mountains and now stood on the southern edge of the Windcrest Hills. He had traveled through the mountains before, but that had been along the bank of the Mystic, and that river must have been leagues to the west. The orks were going to take him into the heart of the hills, to their home, their campsite, their village.

Before they moved on, Snaggletooth came over to Brisbane and forced him down onto the earth. He was speaking to his men as he did this, and when he got him down he took out a sharp-looking knife and pressed it against Brisbane’s throat. It felt sharp, too.

Another ork, this one whose pig ears didn’t seem to stand up like those of his comrades and whom Brisbane mentally named Floppy, brought out a length of thick rope and began to tie each end of it around one of Brisbane’s ankles. When Floppy was finished, his feet were connected with a sturdy rope not much more than a foot in length.

He was hauled back up to his feet, Snaggletooth putting his sharp knife away, and the day’s forced march continued. The rope prevented him from taking a full step and he was forced to hobble along on little stutter-steps. He dismally realized the rope snuffed out his hope of running for it if the orks ever left him unguarded for so much as a second. He had a hard enough time just trying to keep up with Snaggletooth’s walking pace like this. He couldn’t beat a cripple in a foot race. And besides, Floppy had retaken his place behind Brisbane, holding onto his bound arms. These orks were determined not to let him escape, and he guessed Snaggletooth had a lot more experience at preventing an escape than he had at effecting one.

The pain of his injuries continued to plague him as he was pushed over and around the Windcrest Hills, but new aches began to sneak up on him as well. His hands had gone numb in their constraints and the aches developing in his contorted arms would have made an arthritic wince. His legs were suffering too, the strange pace and cadence forced upon him was taking its toll in muscle spasms and strains. He felt like he could not go on for much longer.

But overshadowing all of this was the growing pang of hunger that seemed to have taken over his abdomen, moving in without permission and taking up more space than it deserved. Brisbane realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning, a cheery little meal he had shared with his friends before the entrance of the forgotten temple. It had been some simple warmed-over stew, what had been the staple of their diet since they had left Queensburg, but now it seemed like it had been a gourmet feast. He could only hope the orks would take off his gag long enough to feed him, but guessing at how much they would mistrust him if he were indeed a powerful wizard, he doubted he would receive much nourishment. He bit angrily at his gag and wondered if he would ever eat again.

The late afternoon amidst the hills was warm and still, and his unusual effort was beginning to make him sweat heavily. He saw Snaggletooth had a canteen at his belt, surely filled with clean water and surely acquired from some poor merchant the orks had ransacked on the road between Queensburg and Scalt. The dirty rag stuffed in his mouth had become saturated with his own saliva, and he could get some meager relief by sucking on it, but it was nothing compared to what ten seconds with Snaggletooth’s canteen would bring.

Being forced through that dark tunnel had been a walk in the park compared to marching under the sun with his feet tied together. He began to watch the sun, begging for it to move faster across the sky. He was sure the orks would take a break at sundown, or maybe even camp for the night, but this certainly came out of desperation and not any visible evidence. The orks did not seem to tire and they looked as healthy now as they had at the beginning. He tried not to let his mind entertain surely mad notions that orks were indefatigable and never needed to sleep.

His body, in its pain and discomfort, reached a point of separation from his mind and he began to lose the image of his surroundings. They did not matter. He could be walking through scrub land, in a forest, down the main street of a city, or even across the surface of the Sea of Darkmarine. All that mattered was that he was walking, walking, walking until Snaggletooth said it was okay to stop. He just hoped he could understand the ork’s order when it came.

As it turned out, Brisbane had no trouble understanding Snaggletooth when he finally called the procession to a halt. The sun was dipping into the eastern horizon, and the party was following the curve of a large hill, when Snaggletooth stopped. Floppy let go of his wrists and Brisbane walked a few more steps until he almost collided with Snaggletooth. He looked up and around, seeing they had stopped and he was no longer being held onto, but instead of making a mad, hobbling dash for it—something he might have tried two long hours ago—he dropped to his knees and slowly put his forehead on the hard, compacted earth in front of him.

He heard Snaggletooth and his goons laugh at him. At that moment he felt so beaten, helpless, and pathetic that he would have sold his soul (assuming he had one to sell) to Damaleous himself just to be free of his gag. Not so he could cast a spell on them but just so he could stand up and spit in Snaggletooth’s face.

Go to the hells you pig-faced son of a bitch. Angelika says I’m going to stomp around in your intestines and I’m going to enjoy it.

The orks went about setting up a camp for the night, or what must pass for a camp in orkish circles. They had no mules to carry their gear and, as a result, they had no items of luxury such as tents, bedrolls, or cookware. An ork camp consisted mainly of a hastily made campfire around which they huddled for warmth. Brisbane should have expected this from the orkish campsite they had stumbled onto during their journey up the Mystic, but he wasn’t exactly thinking clearly. The orks had left him where he had collapsed and they built their campfire a little way off to his left.

When they had their fire going well and the sky had darkened enough to be called night, Brisbane looked around him and saw Floppy producing and handing out thin strips of preserved meat from a pack he had been carrying. Brisbane’s stomach growled at him and, even though he knew he had little hope of getting anything, he got to his knees and crawled over to where the orks were reclining on the ground.

He was nearly on top of them before anyone noticed him. They all turned to look at him and he stopped where he was, putting his best look of vacuous hunger on his face. The orks turned to look at their leader and Snaggletooth addressed them in curt tones.

They’re not going to feed me! The thought flashed across Brisbane’s mind like a brushfire. They’re too scared of my magic to take off my gag. The only spell I know requires the use of my hands, too. Please, please, I won’t try to do anything.

One of the orks got up and started coming over to him. This one, at close to six feet, was at least two inches shorter than any of his companions. Half-Pint had a canteen of water in one hand and two strips of the preserved meat in the other. He knelt down before Brisbane and began to growl at him in his harsh-sounding tongue. He put the canteen down on the ground and the strips of meat down on top of it. He took a sharp knife out of his belt, one much like Snaggletooth’s, and pressed the tip of the blade against Brisbane’s throat.

The ork put his finger across his lips and said, “Shhh…”

Brisbane got the point. If he made one sound, Half-Pint was going to stab the knife into his neck. No noise, Half-Pint, you can trust me, nothing but chewing and swallowing. He slowly nodded his head.

Half-Pint reached behind Brisbane’s head and untied the gag. He took the securing strap off and Brisbane let the wadded-up rag fall out of his mouth. He stretched his jaws and they popped painfully. Half-Pint picked up one of the strips of meat and stuffed it into Brisbane’s mouth, the dagger still pressed against his throat. He began to chew. He did not know what kind of meat it was, but it was delicious. Whatever had been used to preserve it had dried it out a little, but he was in no position to complain. It was soon gone and Half-Pint stuffed the second one in.

Half-Pint held the canteen while he waited for Brisbane to swallow his second strip of meat. Brisbane quickly did and opened his mouth to show he was finished. Half-Pint held the canteen up to Brisbane’s lips and began to pour waves of crystal-clear water down his throat. Brisbane gurgled noisily as he swallowed as much as he could before Half-Pint took the canteen away and closed it up. When the ork did, Brisbane felt like a puppy deprived of its favorite treat. He looked pleadingly into the ork’s eyes, but Half-Pint only stuffed the rag back into his mouth and retied the gag, tighter than it had been before.

The meal had lasted no more than a minute and Brisbane had done just what he had been told. He wished he did know some ultra-powerful spell so he could speak just one word and have Snaggletooth and his goons burst into never-ending flames. He bet himself Roystnof would know some kind of spell like that and he would have used it as soon as that spit-soaked rag had fallen from his mouth.

Half-Pint pushed Brisbane around and got him to lay face down on the ground. He offered up no resistance even though he did not know what the ork was going to do. Half-Pint sat on his back and began to undo the bonds that had held his hands behind his back all day. He couldn’t see, but he knew Half-Pint had his sharp knife in his teeth, ready to plunge it into his back if he even flinched the wrong way.

Soon his hands were free and they dropped numb to his sides. Half-Pint began to massage them roughly and the blood started to run back into them. It hurt, but he decided the pain was better than no feeling at all. He still ached all over and the side of his face felt swollen and tender. He tried to rest it against the ground, but it was too painful and he had to lay his head down with his nose pointed the other way.

All too soon, Half-Pint began to retie his hands together behind his back. He tried not to whimper as his bonds were returned to him and the ork got off his back and went back to the campfire, his duties completed. Brisbane rolled over onto his side and watched the orks finish their meal, seeming to gorge themselves, and chat in their strange language. He was still hungry, but at least he was no longer starving, and he tried to keep his mind off his stomach.

For quite some time, Brisbane tried to make some kind of sense out of what the orks were saying to each other, but it was impossible and eventually he had to give it up. It was hard for him to make out individual words, he was unfamiliar with the syntax of the language and it was a chore just to figure out where one word ended and the next one started. He heard the groo-mack word several times, and he could only assume they were talking about him, but what they were saying and what it meant for his future were as unknowable as the secrets of creation.

Eventually, the orks began to get ready for a night’s rest and Brisbane had a glimmer of hope that perhaps they would sleep without guarding him and he could slip away into the night. But this was not to be the case, as he saw Half-Pint preparing a spot where he could sit up and watch him. He didn’t know how many watches the orks were going to set, but he realized that with five of them, they could set enough so no one would be in danger of falling asleep while on duty.

He stayed just where he was, lying on his side, and let his head rest in the dirt. He watched Snaggletooth settle down to sleep with Angelika laying length-wise by his side.

He cursed the ork. Four, they only have four available for guard duty because Snaggletooth is the leader now and leaders don’t stand watch. Leaders get to sleep the night through and wake bright-eyed and fresh in the morning. Just ask the ork laying at the bottom of the Mystic River what it’s like. He knows. He used to be a leader. Leaders are special people with powers above the regular man, aren’t they, Snaggletooth? You’re the leader now and you’ve got the power, but let me ask you something. Why can’t you pull that sword out of her scabbard? Big strong leader like you should be able to do that. Why can’t you pull Angelika out of her scabbard? I can.

He began to drift off to sleep despite the hardness of the ground and his uncomfortable position. He had been walked to exhaustion, and his body just shut down for a night of much needed rest.

Sometime during the night Brisbane had a dream. In it, he and Stargazer were in the clearing where they had met Ellahannah. But they were not petting the unicorn, they were making love underneath a soft shower of pink flower petals. Ellahannah was there, but she was not alone. Dozens of unicorns were there, all running in a mad circle around the lovers in the center of the clearing. Stargazer was on top of him and as she quickened her pace, taking more and more of him inside her, the unicorns began to run faster and faster in an ever-tightening circle. His head reeled with sexual ecstasy, his hands cupped around Stargazer’s buttocks and his eyes fixed on her full and swinging breasts, and just as his dream-body thundered in climax, he jerked himself awake and found himself staring into the eyes of his guard. The ork was smiling at him and Brisbane was sure he somehow knew what he had been dreaming about. He rolled over onto his other side, turning his back on the ork, and tried to go back to sleep.

Eventually, he did. 

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (7)

This is the seventh time I’ve read Moby-Dick.

This time I picked up an old paperback version from Everyman Press at Keynote Used Records & Books in South Lake Tahoe, California. I was there on vacation with my family and I remember my daughter asking me why I was going to read it for the seventh time and whether or not she should read it. 

As to my reasons why, I told her about my frustrating experience with Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick?, a slim little tome in which the author, I thought, entirely missed the point. To Philbrick, the reason we keep reading Moby-Dick is because it is a great adventure story, realistically told. He goes out of his way to declare that the White Whale is NOT a symbol for anything else.

As I said in my post on Why Read Moby-Dick?

The White Whale IS a symbol. In fact, it is baffling to me that Philbrick could possibly say that it is not. The fundamental reason we continue to read Moby-Dick is not because it is a good adventure story, realistically told. We read it because it is BOTH an adventure story, realistically told, AND it is a symbolic quest for an understanding of man’s place in the cosmos.

And…

It is the blending of the adventure story with the symbols that makes Moby-Dick worth reading. The whole book, from start to finish, is a master class in this technique -- using the characters and plot to advance not just a story, but an exploration of symbolic and existential meaning. There, in fact, may be no finer example of this in all of literature. THAT is why I keep reading Moby-Dick.

My brush with Philbrick clearly got my hackles up, and it whetted my appetite to again dive into a novel I had said last time I didn’t think I would ever take the time to read again. Perhaps, like Ishmael deciding to go to sea in the opening chapter, Moby-Dick is the tonic I best need to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation.

And how satisfying was it to find the following excerpts in a section at the very end of my new used copy on the critical reception that Moby-Dick received at its time of publication?

Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life. Certain it is that the rapid, pointed hints which are often thrown out, with the keenness and velocity of a harpoon, penetrate deep into the heart of things, showing that the genius of the author for moral analysis is scarcely surpassed by his wizard power of description.

And…

But Moby-Dick, admirable as it is as a narrative of maritime adventure, is far more than that; it is, fundamentally, a parable of the mystery of evil and the accidental malice of the universe. The white whale stands for the brute energies of existence, blind, fatal, overpowering, while Ahab is the spirit of man, small and feeble, but purposive, that pits its puniness against this might, and its purpose against the blank senselessness of power.

Take that Philbrick!

As to whether or not my daughter should also read Moby-Dick, I told her, like I tell most people: life is far simpler if you don’t.

The Approach

But if I was going to dive beneath these waves again, I felt I needed a new kind of approach to the text -- something new to look for and think about. Otherwise, I knew I would find myself simply rushing forward to find my favorite excerpts. Thankfully, I found this new approach while reading the comprehensive introduction offered by Professor A. Robert Lee.

…Melville built Moby-Dick at a variety of interwoven and mutually reflective levels. Much as it tells of the gladiatorial combat of man against beast, or of a nineteenth-century American capitalist industry, his story also itself resembles ‘a Job’s whale’ whose inner meanings he took the most considerable pains to mask. To understand the enclosing design, the architecture of his ‘mighty theme,’ requires the reader’s patience and flexibility, no expectation of a single, mastering interpretation.

No single mastering interpretation. According to Lee, Melville reinforces this ‘mighty theme’ by constantly presenting facts and items in the story that are either open to multiple interpretations or which simply defy any kind of interpretation at all. Through this technique, the pre-ordained truth of Moby-Dick is as hidden from the reader as all the pre-ordained truths about whales and whaling are from the humble crew of the Pequod.

This, then, became my primary approach to this seventh reading of Moby-Dick. 

A Sort of Indefinite, Half-Attained, Unimaginable Sublimity

And Lee is right. Once you start looking for them, these “items” with no fixed meaning or interpretation are everywhere.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. -- It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. -- It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. -- It’s a blasted heath. -- It’s a Hyperborean winter scene. -- It’s the breaking up of the ice-bound stream of time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? Even the great leviathan himself?

This is Chapter 3. Ishmael is looking at the painting above and behind the bar in The Spouter-Inn. And already Melville is giving you these hints to his mighty theme. What is this thing? What does it mean? The questions are not just for the painting, of course, but for the whale. And for the novel.

His Own Inexorable Self

In Chapter 9 Father Mapple preaches The Sermon, choosing as his text the story of Jonah and the whale. And as he concludes the lessons we shipmates are to derive from it, he says:

‘But oh! Shipmates! On the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him -- a far, far upward, and inward delight -- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight, -- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath -- O Father! -- chiefly known to me by Thy rod -- mortal and immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?’

It is a bit of a muddled mess, but importantly it is an interpretation, a way of looking at the world around you. By my reading it is a bit of a blend, and perhaps a foreshadow of the coming clash between the Christian Starbuck and the Individualistic Ahab. Whether or not your feet are planted firmly on the Keel laid down by God, going forward into the world as your own inexorable self seems like the best way to delight and understanding.

Didn’t the People Laugh?

In Chapter 13, Ishmael struggles with a Wheelbarrow, and Queequeg tells a story.

Shifting the barrow from my hands to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing -- though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow -- Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?’

Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Kokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Kokovoko, and its commander -- from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain -- this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said, -- for those people have their grace as well as we -- though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts -- Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself -- being Captain of a ship -- as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own house -- the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch bowl; -- taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. ‘Now,’ said Queequeg, ‘what you tink now? -- Didn’t our people laugh?’

Melville is playing with meaning and custom here. The same thing -- wheelbarrows or punchbowls -- meaning different things in different contexts. Some frivolous and some serious.

Not Sick and Not Well

Quick one here. In Chapter 16, The Ship, Ishmael finds and is accepted as a member of the Pequod crew, but persists in asking about its infamous Captain.

‘And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art shipped.’

‘Yes, but I should like to see him.’

‘But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either.’

Delicious. Ahab is not sick. But he is not well, either. What is he? How are we supposed to know?

The Transition

On this read through Moby-Dick, it became abundantly clear to me that Chapter 24, The Advocate, is where the transition happens. Chapters 1-23 are, more or less, an allegorized story, where the forward momentum is the story, accentuated with allegorical elements. But starting with Chapter 24, as the Pequod ventures out into the open sea, things switch from an allegorized story to a storied allegory, where the forward momentum in the allegory, accentuated with storied elements. In a way, these are dangerous waters, and it is where many readers find themselves lost, as everything one tries to cling to as slick with multiple allegorical meanings. 

The Unreasoning Mask

Glad this one from Chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck, aligns with my theme, since it is one of my favorite passages in the entire novel.

‘All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.’

It is Ahab, talking to Starbuck, after Starbuck has chided him for seeking “vengeance on a dumb brute.” And here we can clearly see Ahab’s interpretation of the white whale as something much more, clearly separating the “unreasoning mask” that Starbuck sees from the “still reasoning thing” that exists behind it. Or does it? Even Ahab expresses some doubt in this passage, admitting that he is seeing through a glass darkly. But either way -- “be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal” -- Ahab will strike, strike out at what, as Father Mapple would say, his inexorable self sees and hates.

A Vacated Thing

Chapter 44, The Chart, follows Ahab down into his cabin after a squall, where he often sleeps the sleep of the tormented.

Often, when forced from his hammock, by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the vert creature he creates.

This is a great example of a passage I’ve now clearly read seven times, but never before remarked or even paused to reflect on it. Like a lot of Melville’s prose, it is dense and hard to penetrate, but it seems to be describing Ahab as Ahab has just described the white whale, as a unreasoning mask -- a vacated thing -- behind which is a “living principle or soul” that animates him and drives him ruthlessly in his quest against the white whale. 

Should I choose to read Moby-Dick for an eighth time, this may be an interesting approach to take to that reading. Where is Ahab agent and where is Ahab principal? It calls to mind the scene in The Symphony where Ahab reminisces about his youth and Starbuck sees through the pasteboard mask and is moved to deep emotion. But even on that scene -- is that Ahab agent or is that Ahab principal?

All Interweavingly Working Together

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still all subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor resolves into his own invisible self.

Chapter 47, The Mat-Maker, is a devilish chapter.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the thread, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as of this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meanwhile, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrats in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance -- aye, chance, free will, and necessity -- no wise incompatible -- all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course -- its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions modified by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at event.

Here are necessity, free will, and chance -- all working independently and in constrained concert with each other -- producing both actual fabric and the ultimate metaphor of existence. Or at least man’s view of it and his place within it.

And, then, the chapter shifts.

Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in the air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.

The shadows of Fate -- with wild cries announcing their coming.

‘There she blows! There! There! There! She blows! She blows!’

‘Where-away?’

‘On the lee-beam, about two miles off! A school of them!’

Instantly all was commotion.

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus.

‘There go flukes!’ was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.

‘Quick, steward!’ cried Ahab. ‘Time! Time!’

Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to Ahab.

The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter -- this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers -- that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on board on enemy’s ship.

And here, the free will of the men advancing forward towards the Fate of their necessity, haunted by the chance movements of the whales unseen and beneath the sea. In this short chapter, Melville first weaves his metaphor of fate, chance, and free will, each working together to create reality, and then he shows the same action in the plot and action of the story.

Devilish.

Any Way You Look At It

In Chapter 55, Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales, Ishmael tries to give an accurate depiction of the whale as he is seen in the sea by whalemen; bemoaning so many of the inaccurate descriptions that populate our minds and documents. He concludes:

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. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

The whale itself -- forever undescribed and open to interpretation.

Its Cunning Duplicate in Mind

In Chapter 70, The Sphynx, Ishmael (and Ahab) contemplate on the severed head of the Sperm Whale.

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. ‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head,’ muttered Ahab, ‘which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! Thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!’

‘Sail ho!’ cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.

‘Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,’ cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. ‘That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. -- Where away?’

‘Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!’

“Better and better, man. Would now St Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! How far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! Not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.’

There are so many chapters like this in Moby-Dick. Melville famously dissects the whale in these chapters, looking at every piece and part of the whale -- and each of them, like its black and hooded head, is an allegory for the philosophical mind to cogitate on and interpret as it sees fit. Like the Sphynx, it will never reveal its own secrets.

Read It If You Can

Chapter 79, The Prairie, is another example, this time looking at the broad and featureless “forehead” of the Sperm Whale.

But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed, its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark of genius.

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. Is it moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.

Read it if you can. It is unreadable, open to any interpretation that you might wish to give it -- or perhaps, in its expansiveness, imperious to interpretation entirely.

But An Empty Cipher

The gold doubloon that Ahab nails to the mast -- a reward to he who should first raise the White Whale -- is perhaps the clearest example of this narrative technique that allows for everything, literally everything, to be open to interpretation.

In Chapter 99, The Doubloon seems to beguile even Ahab, who looks at it in an attempt to decipher its true meaning.

But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.

For, of course, some certain significance lurks in all things -- but what is that significance, and can we ever know it for sure? One by one, Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, each look upon the doubloon and interpret what its markings might mean -- for them if not for the world entire.

On its round border it bore the letters, REPÚBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on a third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point in Libra.

In these figures Ahab sees the representation of his own quest against the White Whale, and the fortitude that one like himself must master if he is to be successful in that objective. But in them Starbuck sees the protection and benevolence of God, and Stubb sees all the things he can buy with the coin, and Flask sees nothing at all.

Which is the true interpretation? Is there one?

Some Invisible Power

And finally, with my approach to this seventh reading in mind, that Melville is purposely presenting character, plot and metaphor as things forever open to interpretation with no single meaning, it is, wonderfully, that iconic passage in Chapter 132, The Symphony, that now increases in its importance and indeliability.

‘What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all this time, lo! That smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!’

What is it, indeed? Melville is not going to tell you. You’ll have to come up with your own interpretation.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

A Holiday Break: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

Books are always the best holiday gift for me. The only thing I like better than the anticipation of reading a long sought after title is the fondness that comes with remembering the discovery of an unexpected treasure.

As I look back on all the books I've profiled here in 2025, the one I'd most like to revisit is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven, which I blogged about in February.

Here's how that post began: 

The only thing I knew about this book was that I liked the movie that John Huston made out of it in 1948. The movie has a different feel than most of what comes out of Hollywood, then and now: grittier, and a little subversive. Humphrey Bogart plays a delightful Dobbs -- a man who is neither hero nor villain, someone worth rooting for and against, a man who gets both a raw deal and what’s coming to him.

Little did I realize how subversive the movie’s source material actually was. And the mystery surrounding it and the identity of its author -- B. Traven, evidently a pseudonym for an author who managed to remain hidden for his entire career and, seemingly, to this day. 

The book, like the movie, is, at its core, a parable on the moral disintegration that accompanies greed. In its chosen idiom, the moral action of the narrative manifests in three people and their quest for gold in the mountains of the Sierra Madre.

It is, in my opinion, one of those rare books where plot and metaphor become one -- each serving the other in ways that are both recognizable and sublime. More than just greed, its parable on moral disintegration extends to market capitalism itself, and its final judgments indict more the system than the rugged individual.

Howard meditated for a while; then he said: “Come to think of it, you can’t blame him.”

“Meaning what?” Curtin asked, as though he had not heard right.

“Meaning that I think he’s not a real killer and robber, as killers go. It’s rather difficult to explain it to you, with the slugs in you. You see, I think at bottom he’s as honest as you and me. The mistake was that you two were left alone in the depths of the wilderness with almost fifty thousand clean cash between you two. That is a goddamned temptation, believe me, partner. Being day and night on lonely trails without ever meeting a human soul -- that gets on your mind, brother. That eats you up. I know it. Perhaps you felt it, too. Don’t deny it. You may have only forgotten how you felt at certain times. The wilderness, the desolate mountains, cry day and night in your ears: ‘We don’t talk. It will never come out. Do it. Do it right now. At that winding of the trail do it. Here’s the chance of your lifetime. Don’t miss it. You only have to grasp it and it is yours. No one will ever know. No one can ever find out. Take it, it’s yours for the taking. Don’t mind a life, the world is crowded with mugs like him.’ If you ask me, partner, I’d like to know the man on earth who could resist trying it without nearly going mad. If I were still young and I had been alone with you or with him, to tell you the truth, Curty, I might have been tempted too. And I wonder, if you search your mind very carefully, if you won’t find that you had similar ideas on this lonely march. That you didn’t act on them doesn’t mean that you felt no temptation. You may have got hold of yourself just before the most dangerous moment.”

“But he had no scruples, no conscience, I know. I knew it long before.”

“He had as much conscience as we would have had under similar circumstances. Where there is no prosecutor, there is no defendant. Don’t forget that. All we have to do now is to find that cheat and get our money.

Dobbs is not really to blame, for he is not the moral agent in this tragedy. He acts the way the system designed him to act; no more, no less.

As you enjoy your holiday break, I hope you find some time to curl up with a good book. I know I will.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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I’ve read some Hemingway before, but I don’t remember enjoying Hemingway as much as I enjoyed this one. Everyone talks about Hemingway’s terse prose style, but here it seems to be used to its best effect. Saying very little but saying volumes at the same time.

I turned her so I could see her face when I kissed her and I saw that her eyes were shut. I kissed both her shut eyes. I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with brother officers. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me.

This was one of the first signals that I was on to something good here, coming very early in the novel when Frederic Henry first meets Catherine Barkley. They would become important to each other. I knew that, not just because it would be the kind of things that happens in books, but because Hemingway telegraphed it in a way that was clear but at the same time subtle. If I had read this book ten years ago, I don’t think I would have stopped on this paragraph. I would’ve sailed past it.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

It’s philosophical. It’s simple, but philosophical at the same time. And it’s powerful. Life, love, war and death -- it’s all powerful stuff, but told simply and with smooth and easy transitions from one scene to the next and pages of nothing but dialogue. Why do I have so much trouble getting from place to place and allowing my characters to talk to each other? Next time I am, maybe I should pull this one down and read a few pages?

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The rain had just begun to fall when Sir Gildegarde Brisbane II fled from Farchrist Castle after his banishment and humiliation. He was lost, he knew that, and his decision had already been made, but before he went through with his desperate plans, he ran into the City Below the Castle for a final errand. He ran through the streets like a lost soul, tears mixing with the rainwater on his face. When he arrived at the house, he knocked and waited politely, feeling too ashamed and too filthy to go barging in anywhere. Amanda answered the door, and when Brisbane saw her, he almost forgot his plans and fell sobbing at her feet. But he steeled himself and kept his words short. He made only three statements. First, he said what the King had done to him. Second, he warned Amanda to flee the city before anyone caught wind of the scandal. Third, he told her he loved her. Brisbane then turned and fled into the night. It was the last time my mother ever saw my father.

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Brisbane regained consciousness face down on the north bank of the Mystic River. He sputtered some water out of his lungs, pain lancing through his chest, and tried to lift his face out of the river mud. A rough hand pushed his head back down into the wet earth and a croaking voice sounded out in a language he did not recognize. Somebody was perched on top of him, driving a heavy knee into the small of his back and furiously tying his wrists together with some kind of cord. Brisbane was too dazed to do much of anything, just beginning to remember his plunge from the stone hand of Grecolus, into the mountain lake, and over the waterfall. The person on top of him soon had his hands secured behind his back and cruelly dragged him to his feet by pulling up on his fastened arms.

Through the river mud that must have covered his face, Brisbane saw who his captors were and where it was he had been captured. They were orks, six of them, much like the eight he and his friends had killed so far down the river so long ago. They were rough and brutish-looking, all over six feet tall and all clad in mismatched sets of black chain and plate mail. Their pink pig-noses stuck out from their ugly faces like trophies and their small, up-thrusting tusks glistened with saliva. Each had a black shield decorated with a single red eye. Beyond them, Brisbane could see his surroundings and he recognized them. He must have floated unconscious down the river for quite some distance. They stood nearly in front of the cave where Brisbane and his companions had fought the ettins.

The ork holding him from behind pushed Brisbane down to his knees and stood painfully on the backs of his ankles. Brisbane cried out and, as he knelt there immobilized, the other five orks wrestled his chainmail poncho off over his head. He had lost his shield and his helmet somewhere in the river, but he was relieved to see Angelika was still strapped to his side.

His armor removed from him, the cutting of a few leather straps required to get it past his bound hands, one of the orks threw the heavy mesh over his shoulder like a blanket and another one, the largest one, stepped forward and began to undo the buckle that held Angelika to Brisbane’s belt. Brisbane fought to twist away from his captors, but the ork behind him stomped on his feet and lifted his arms to a painful elevation. Before he could do anything about it, the largest ork had taken Angelika from him and held her, still in her scabbard, out in front of himself.

For a moment, Brisbane was sure his brain was going to explode, sending gray shrapnel out of his ears and bursting his eyeballs. The sheer and utter rage he felt at having Angelika taken from him burned through him like fire and, with unknown and superhuman strength, he leapt up, throwing the ork who had been standing on his ankles back into the water, and snapped the cords holding his wrists behind his back like pieces of dry kindling.

His hands were around the throat of the ork who held Angelika in a flash and Brisbane drove him to the ground, choking off his air supply as Angelika fell unnoticed to the earth.

“She’s mine!” Brisbane screamed, his voice discordant to sane ears, as he dug his fingers deep into the ork’s neck until he was certain, with a kind of giddy glee, that the ork’s skin would break and he would be able to tear vein after vein out of his neck, snapping them like guitar strings tuned too tightly.

The other orks were upon him in a moment but combined they could not drag Brisbane off their leader, the ork who had dared to touch Angelika, the unholy beast who had tried to foul that enchanted blade.

Brisbane began to laugh as he watched the ork’s eyes roll back into his head, a sickening, wailing scream that only sounded like a laugh to his own ears. The other five orks were still struggling to pull Brisbane’s hands away from their leader’s throat. They had made little progress and Brisbane began to beat the back of the ork’s head against the hard earth along the river bank.

Suddenly, a great weight came down on the back of Brisbane’s neck and he collapsed onto his victim. He swam in and out of consciousness for a moment and then jerked back to reality when he was rolled over onto his back next to the ork he had attacked. The ork who had been standing on his ankles, the one Brisbane had thrown into the river, stood dripping over him with his short, thick sword raised over his head. Just as Brisbane was sure the ork was going to bring the blade down to finish him, the ork paused, the sword frozen over his head and his eyes wide in amazement. The fight had suddenly gone out of him, and Brisbane could not fathom why he was not being killed.

Sunlight winked at him from something on his chest. In the struggle, the small silver pentacle medallion he wore around his neck had worked its way out from underneath his tunic and now lay sparkling against his chest. This is what had transfixed the ork.

Brisbane did not have the chance to take advantage of the lull. Just as he realized the cause of the ork’s hesitance, the ork dropped his sword to his side and shouted out a single word to his companions. Brisbane did not understand the word, it must have been in the ork’s own twisted tongue, but it sounded like “groo-mack.”

The remaining orks were on him in an instant. They quickly flipped him over and began to retie his hands together at the wrists, this time much more tightly and restricting, and they violently stuffed an awful-tasting gag into his mouth.

Brisbane fought as much as he could, but there was something different now. The spirit that had possessed him had passed out of his body. The ork he had strangled lay unmoving beside him. If Brisbane had killed him, he might have been the last creature Brisbane would ever kill. Before long, Brisbane was tightly tied and gagged, and completely at the mercy of the orks.

Having incapacitated their prisoner again, the orks went over to check on their fallen leader. They crudely tested his vital signs and then stood up and moved away. It was obvious there was nothing to be done. The ork was dead.

The ork who had been standing on Brisbane’s ankles, the one who had recaptured Brisbane, went over to the fallen leader and began to remove any valuables the dead ork had carried. Brisbane watched him, still laying on his stomach beside the running Mystic, as the ork removed the leader’s sword and shield from the ork’s dead grasp. He also took a small sack that had been tied at his waist. He then stood up and nodded to his companions. The four of them came over and picked up the body, each grabbing a limb, and then carried him over to the river and threw him in. The armor-laden corpse sank quickly to the bottom.

The four orks came back to what Brisbane presumed was their new leader. He barked an order at them and they wrestled Brisbane roughly to his feet. They held him up in front of their leader, and he looked Brisbane over dubiously.

Brisbane looked the ork over in turn. He tried not to let his fear show in his eyes or in his posture, but it was not easy. Brisbane was terrified. He had been taken captive by a party of orks and any animosity they might have had for him certainly had not been lessened by his strangling one of their number. Brisbane reflected on that now and had a hard time believing he had actually done it. The memory of his rage was like a dream, quickly fading and soon forgotten. It was just that when the ork had touched Angelika—

The ork. He was still staring Brisbane up and down and Brisbane became acutely aware of his own presence and surroundings. His chest hurt—every time Brisbane took a breath it felt like he was fanning a fire—and his vision was still popping with black spots from the blow he had received on the back of the neck. For the first time since he had regained consciousness, he realized it had stopped raining. The ork facing him was a huge creature, an inch or two shorter than himself, but easily massing just as much. The face of an ork was so different from that of a human Brisbane could only guess at which facial expressions denoted with emotions, but he felt he could be sure that this evil, flesh-eating monster was horrifically mad at him. This knowledge did nothing to assuage his trepidation about the length of his future in the hands of these creatures.

But there was his medallion. It had given the ork pause and had kept him from killing Brisbane. And even now, Brisbane thought he saw, around the eyes, a latent measure of fear in the ork’s face. What did the pentacle symbol mean to these orks? Brisbane did not know. In human society, it was the mark of a wizard, a mystical force-shaper in some eyes, a servant of Damaleous in others. It obviously meant something to these orks as well, and that something, whatever it was, had kept Brisbane alive so far.

The ork said something in his own language and the others gave some short laughs. Brisbane kept his eyes on their new leader and, as he spoke, Brisbane saw his sharp teeth were a mass of twisted and overlapping ivories. A name came unbidden to Brisbane’s mind, Snaggletooth, and in his thoughts, that became how he began to refer to the new leader of the party of orks.

Snaggletooth said something else to the others and then went over to where Angelika lay on the river bank. Brisbane’s muscles tightened against the bonds that held him as the ork picked up his sword and examined the scabbard closely. The scabbard was an ordinary one, but the emerald in the base of Angelika’s pommel told any observer that the blade inside was something special. Snaggletooth returned to stand in front of Brisbane with Angelika in his claw-like hands. Brisbane felt the insane rage begin to build up inside him again, pushing his heart up into his throat.

—No, young Brisbane. They will kill you this time.—

It was Angelika. Her sweet and seductive voice quenched his fire immediately. Brisbane became strangely calm in the grasps of the other orks. He felt like he could melt right through them if he had to.

But Angelika, Brisbane thought, reaching out for his sword’s consciousness. I will not let them touch you. It’s wrong. It’s…it’s…

—Sacrilege. I know, Brisbane. But worry not. Their kind cannot use me. This one will not even be able to draw me from my scabbard.—

Indeed, Brisbane watched as Snaggletooth tugged on the hilt of the sword, trying to free it from the metal scabbard. The ork’s muscles were straining, but Angelika would not come loose.

Angelika! Brisbane’s thoughts were crying. I cannot bear this separation from you. Make him give you back to me. Do something!

—I cannot, Brisbane. I have no control over his kind. But neither do they have control over me. Be patient. I promise, our conquest of evil is not finished. Be strong and be true, and soon we will be rejoined.—

Angelika...

—Brisbane. Vengeance will be ours. They shall be vanquished.—

Angelika, I need you. I…I…

—I know, young Brisbane. I know. Keep me in your thoughts and I will never be far away.—

Snaggletooth snapped at Brisbane in an angry tone of voice. Brisbane shrugged his shoulders. He could not understand the ork’s language. Snaggletooth punched him suddenly in the solar plexus and Brisbane doubled over in pain. The orks holding him forcefully straightened him back up.

I can’t understand you, you stupid pighead bastard!

Snaggletooth barked another order at his subordinates and Brisbane was shoved off in the direction of the ettins’ cave. They started to move towards it, Snaggletooth leading, followed by Brisbane and the four orks, one of whom kept a firm grip on the bonds that held Brisbane’s wrists together. Snaggletooth still held onto the scabbarded Angelika, carrying her in his hand while his own sword was belted at his side. He had given the ex-leader’s sword and shield to his men, but had kept the sack to himself. Brisbane could only assume it contained some gold or something of some other value. All the orks had similar sacks, but the ex-leader’s was by far the fullest.

The procession entered the cave, losing the benefit of sunlight, and were swallowed by consuming darkness. Brisbane was instantly blinded and he unconsciously slowed his pace. He was rewarded with a shove from behind. Evidently, the orks had no trouble seeing in the dark.

Something nagged at Brisbane as they made their way deeper and deeper into the cave. Something was amiss. In a moment he had it. When he had been here last, in the battle with the ettins, Roystnof had lit the cave up with one of his light spells.

ROYSTNOF! The memory of his friend and the rest of his companions came flooding in on him like a deluge. Where were they now? Still at the top of that mountain? Fighting with that strange bird-monster? How much time had passed since he had fallen off that hand? Would his friends ever be able to find him?

Tears welled up in his eyes as he realized he didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. An unwanted feeling came up in his heart, a feeling he would never see any of them again, and as soon as it appeared, the feeling nestled into his heart like a certainty. He could logically argue against it, but it would never do any good. Down deep, he would always know better.

But he had to put it aside for the moment, lest he break down in front of Snaggletooth and his goons, and Brisbane swore to himself he would never let that happen. His eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness of the cave and he could now see they had entered the large chamber where the ettins had been sleeping. He could see their huge forms amidst the boulders that cluttered the floor, tacky with their own blood. The smell of their deaths hung heavy in the air and it made Brisbane sick to his stomach.

What happened to Roystnof’s light spell? The question nagged him like a shrewish wife. There were two possibilities, he knew, one of which he clung to like a life line and the other he tried to ignore like a punished child. His hope lay in the easy answer, that Roystnof had dispelled the magical luminance after they had left the cave and Brisbane had not noticed him do it. It was entirely possible. Brisbane had not been paying much attention and Roystnof was one of the last ones out of the cave. And it was logical, Roystnof would not have wanted to leave any evidence they had been there in case the ettins had any friends around. His fear, on the other hand, was that something had happened to Roystnof. He remembered Dantrius insisting that Roystnof’s magic lantern would cease to function after the wizard’s death. Suppose Roystnof had been killed in the inevitable battle with the bird-monster after Brisbane had taken his plunge? After all, Roystnof hadn’t dispelled his magic light in the basement of the shrine where Brisbane had killed the demon.

The orks brought Brisbane to a halt in the center of the slaughtered ettins. Snaggletooth came up to Brisbane, close enough so Brisbane could see his features in the dark cave. The ork surveyed the carnage around them and then returned his gaze to Brisbane.

Does he think I did this? Brisbane thought. Brisbane had done most of it, but that didn’t mean Snaggletooth had to know. Brisbane remembered Roystnof saying ettins were somehow related to orks. Suppose these ettins had been friends of these orks? Just another reason for them to hate him. Brisbane was not sure how much protection his medallion offered, but he wasn’t too interested in finding out.

Snaggletooth began to say something but cut himself off. He shook his head in frustration and Brisbane smiled inwardly at Snaggletooth’s language barrier. He was sure the ork wanted to question him about the death of the ettins, but was unable to because he could not make himself understandable to Brisbane.

Snaggletooth’s reaction to this realization was, again, to punch Brisbane in the gut. This one hurt much more than the first one had, and Brisbane screamed into his gag. The ork said something to his goons and Brisbane was dragged off to one side of the cavern.

Brisbane reached out to Angelika, who Snaggletooth still carried in his hand. Help me, Angelika. I need you.

Her voice answered immediately. —There is nothing I can do until I am once again in your hands. Be strong. That time will come.—

How do you know?

—I know.—

A light dawned in Brisbane’s head. Angelika, do you know if Roystnof is still alive?

—This I cannot say.—

Brisbane and the orks were tucked away in one of the rough corners of the ettins’ cave. Snaggletooth separated himself from the others and stood, with arms outstretched, in front of the rough stone wall. A silence fell among the other orks and Brisbane’s interest immediately perked up. Something was about to happen.

Snaggletooth, his arms still outstretched, beckoning to the stone wall, said one word in his strange orkish tongue. Ursh-low. Brisbane heard it distinctly. He had no idea what it meant, but he was sure that was what Snaggletooth had said.

There was a grinding noise in the cave, like stone being scraped against stone, and before Brisbane’s dark-adjusted eyes, the section of the wall Snaggletooth was standing before began to swing open like a door.

It was a door. A secret door like the one Shortwhiskers had found at the entrance of the temple or at the end of that endless tunnel. Except this door wasn’t opened by pushing on a certain spot slow, steady, and right into the wall. This secret door was opened with a word. A magic word. Ursh-low. Open sesame.

Magic? Did Snaggletooth and the orks have their own type of magic? What else could they do? In all the rumors Brisbane had heard about orks, none of them ever said anything about them having magical powers. They were reputed to be insanely evil, maliciously cruel monsters who attacked without fear or quarter, but they were not supposed to be wizards. Brisbane wondered if he shouldn’t try to forget everything he had ever heard about orks.

The section of wall had opened all the way to reveal a pitch black tunnel leading down into the very bowels of the Crimson Mountains. Snaggletooth turned to look at Brisbane and there was a definite smile on his lips. It spread out under his pig nose like a wound and revealed nearly all of his snaggled teeth. It made him look like a demon out of some hellish nightmare.

Brisbane decided he was not going to be taken into that dark tunnel. To hells with that idea. Once that door shut behind them—with a dull, hollow thump, like the dropping of a coffin lid, Brisbane was sure—the little light they received from the cave’s entrance would be gone and Brisbane would be lost in a world of darkness with only five angry orks as his guides. Well, he was not going to let that happen. Brisbane let his legs go slack and he sat down hard on the floor of the cave.

The orks bunched up around him, grumbling at him and poking him with their stiff fingers. Brisbane tried to ignore them. He crossed his legs and bowed his head. Snaggletooth broke his way through his men and stood in front of the sitting human.

Brisbane stared at the ork’s feet, housed in worn boots and blackly present in the darkness. Go to the hells, Snaggletooth. I’m not moving. Quicker than Brisbane would have thought possible, Snaggletooth’s right foot swung up and hit Brisbane right in the face. His head rocked and he rolled over onto his back. Pain lit up the area around him and Brisbane was sure the ork had caved his face in. The other orks brought Brisbane to his feet and he offered up no resistance.

Snaggletooth put his face back into Brisbane’s and shouted something, evidently not caring that Brisbane could not understand him. Brisbane knew the punch was coming before it landed, but somehow, it still took his internal organs by surprise. A broken face and now something ruptured in his gut. This rebellion tactic certainly had its attractions.

Brisbane was pushed, wheezing for breath and bleeding from the cheek, into the dark tunnel behind the advancing form of Snaggletooth. The four other orks followed behind, one with his hands clamped firmly on the bonds that secured Brisbane’s arms behind his back.

Brisbane cried out to Angelika, searching for any kind of solace she might be able to offer.

—Be strong, young Brisbane. Our time will come.—

The secret stone door shut behind them, dropping the small group into the gloom of utter blackness. Brisbane was wrong. When it shut, it sounded more like a prison door than a coffin lid.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.