…those futures in science fiction are simply, in a sense, models modeling for what works and what doesn't. I think. You know, Melville said reality outruns apprehension. I'm not sure he meant what I think he means, but certainly in the 20th century reality…

…really cognize notions like the future, the past, where I've been, what I want? I mean, you know, it's in Moby Dick. Melville says, if you would strike, strike through the mask, everything is a mask. And just behind that mask lurks. Well, what? That's…

…about a quest and it's about an unrelenting devotion to a certain kind of truth and it's a tremendous allegory. I mean Melville was no fool and he was perfectly aware of the osirian religion that James Frazier was sketching out and of the comparative…

…underworld trying to reconstruct osiris. And in this chapter the quarter deck, the philosophy of American Transcendentalism, which is what Melville was operating under and which we know too little of. I often think how much deeper and richer American…

…and richer American Environmentalism would be if people would read their Emerson I mean Emerson is the American Blake in a sense, and Melville comes out of that. But there is a moment in which the first mate I'm sorry, the yes the first mate starbuck,…

…it will be both it will be good for really good for somebody and really bad for somebody else. Because you know there's a, as Melville says in moby dick there's ever a sort of fair play. Can you rattle off a couple of us dates there? What do you…

…Ralph that that's actually a kind of amnesia? It's not that they're illiterate. Illiterate is when you don't know the difference between Melville and Hawthorne. Amnesia is when you don't know whether the thirty years war came before or after the war of the…

…do you really cognize notions like the future, the past, where I've been, what I want? I mean, you know, in moby dick, Melville says if you would strike, strike through the mask. Everything is a mask and just behind that mask lurks well what? That's the…

…logos and that's the way I've always gone at it. I figure that's the way the really smart money gets at it. The Melville, the Joyce, these voices that you find are somehow channeling closer to that from a position closer to that matrix or whatever and…

…and uncle pop. And yet you rarely hear it invoked by our people. And yet it's where our roots go deepest and thoroughest. Melville, Hawthorne I mean my god these are the people who put together the 19th century American model. I think it's important to…

…evolved in these species, which have this weirdly quasi symbiotic relationship to our species, you punch through the veil. You know Melville said if you would strike, strike through the mask and that's what's done you strike through the mask of the…

…so what we are passing through here in the now, in this lecture, in the 20th century, is a moment of community, a gam, as Melville would say. A gam is where two sailing ships, two whaling ships meet at sea. That's what we have here: a gam, a moment…

…own an ordinary person, to a place that verrucchio never saw Michelangelo Didn't anticipate it yates didn't know, Blake Hadn't a clue, Melville Wasn't briefed. And yet there it is. You know and this is to me as an intellectual it was very confusing…