What does it say, for a man to look on this, he only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself, there is a sun on the coin. The sun he wheels among them, has marked the coin, and on the coin he crosses the threshold in a ring. All ye mast-headers holding up a coin to the sun, they ring every coin to find a counterfeit. Time was when the sunrise nobly spurred and the sunset soothed, but no more, this lovely light, it lights not, all loveliness is anguish. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven abiding summits that almost seem the trinity in some faint earthly symbol. So in this veil of death, God over all gloom the sun of righteousness still shines a beacon, and the dark vale shows soil. Yet, O, the sun is no fixture, and if at midnight any would fain snatch some sweet solace, all gaze for it in vain. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may hear such words with eyes of red murder and foam-glued lips as they leap after their prey. The brilliance and beauty, as the embellished shape of many species of sharks, the same as on land, with many of the most remorseless tribes. Yet the carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man. But it may be well believed that since they have such a ravenous bite it is deemed but wise to look sharp at them. Keep a poor fellow from too close a vicinity to what seemed a ferocious shark. As he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood muddied waters, that unsounded ocean that he gasped in, life, those sharks. Twin brother, are you not the precious image of each and all men in this world? When in the Fishery, the captured sperm whales, after weary toil, were brought alongside, and as it was customary, they begin to cutting it in. Unapplied by the massacre the sharks were freshly and more allured than ever before to the scent of pent blood which flowed from the carcass. Thousands of thousands of sharks swarmed round the dead leviathan and feasted on its fatness. You could see them wallowing in the black waters and turning over on their backs as they bit out whole scooped pieces of the whale. This feat of the sharks seemed all but miraculous, how at such an inaccessible surface they gorged out such systematic mouthfuls, and were part of the universal problem of all things. And although sharks are the out-runners of all ships crossing the sea they also trot along side, and on the ship, the sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers hearts. After the cutting and the cooking of one whale, while the sailors were carving their meat with carving knives, the sharks also were eating away at the dead meat, and though, were you to turn the whole thing upside down, it would still be the same thing. Though their murdering of the whales was a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks, that wild of a thousand perils, and yet men are tossed like something vile to the death devouring sharks. Loveliness unfathomable as ever lover saw in his love’s eye, tell of thy teeth tired sharks and thy cannibal ways. As sharks do eat men and the killer is never hunted. And when sharks gather on the moored carcass little more than a skeleton would be visible in six hours. Sharks do gather and feast and do feast most hilariously. Never in such countless numbers and in more jovial spirits than around a dead whale. The water round it torn and slashed by the insatiate sharks and the above air vexed by the rapacious flights of screaming birds, yet even few of those escaped the dreaded jaws of the shark. All sharks by nature very warious, yet to the fellow creatures, they are sharks to be certain but if they are gorging then there be shark in them and then they be angel, for angel is nothing more then the shark. And none of them had right to that whale, that whale belonged to God, but some had bigger mouths than the others, so that the biggest of the mouth is to bite off the blubber for the small of the sharks, that’s Christianity. Yet they will keep scouring each other, until their bellies are full and their bellies are bottomless, they do not hear one word, it is no use preaching to them, cursed fellow creatures, ye heathens and ye gluttons. A whale, thou art as a lion of the waters and the sea, saith Ezekiel. This elusive quality of whiteness when divorced from more kindly sentiments and coupled with any object more terrible, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. The white shark of the poles and of the tropics, what but their whiteness makes them the transcendent horror they are, even more loathsome than terrific, so that not even the fierce fanged tiger can so stagger courage as the white shark. Whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread in which that white phantom sails in all seas, none but God’s great laureate nature, that the terrible ferociousness of the creature stands in the fleece of celestial innocence and love. The French name they bestow upon that fish, the Roman mass for the dead, Requiem eternam, eternal rest, whence Requiem denominating the mass itself and any funeral music, and so as to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, the French call him Requiem. In the Antarctic seas, like on the snowy land, the Polar bear, that the white coat that covers him is associated with purity, like the secrets of God, Abraham before the angels, that the white thing was so white, wings so wide, and in those forever exiled waters the albatross is not worthy of it. With the same marvelous patience and with the single shark tooth, he would carve bone, not as manlike, but as close in its design to the Greek savage, and full of barbaric spirit. And in the Greek mythologies being made incarnate in the winter sacrifice of the sacred. Proud as Greek god, standing debater with bone to stand on. The old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, was a blacksmith and made them with fire, for what’s made in fire must belong to fire, just as hell for them would have been probable. Caesarian heir to over lording Rome, the imperial hue applies to the human race itself. With the same marvelous patience and with the single shark tooth, he would carve bone, not as manlike, but as close in its design to the Greek savage, and full of barbaric spirit. The Persian fire worshipers, the flame being the holiest on the alter.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 07:43:50 +0000
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