Steemit is full of whales, dolphins and minnows ?
That sounds like a familiar setting.
I'm writing about:
I can't make a deep interpretation on how Melville's masterpiece is relevant for steemit.
I don't know enough about steem and I am not a native speaker of english.
I will not experiment with wild meta-references.
Let's keep it simple
My simple interpretation is that Ishmail, the protagonist, is a highly educated, ignorant individual.
He can see everything going on arround him clearly.
He knows what tragedy will unfold, once he realizes what quest Ahab is on.
In their blind rage to hunt down the White Whale, the crew of the Pequod slaughters countless whales.
Ishmail sees the fatality in all that; he even theorizes about the extinction of the whale.
Yet he uses his intellect only to come up with excuses, lost in abstraction.
Ishmail's interpretations are amazingly creative in their desctructiveness.
He's looking at the most microscopic detail and builds his argumentation on that, while completely denying any of the established theorists, who are not sailors.
How can this be relevant today ?
In the hunt for the whale, to gain steem and $, ignorance can change the whole ocean.
The whaling industry was a huge economic booster at that time, but also immensely destructive to our environment.
The people of Nantucket were radical indiviualists. They were very succesful, but had no sense for the beauty of nature left. They had their own priests and customs and were alien to the rest of the world. Without diving deep into the context, their point of view seems absurd.
Melvilles book is giving an insight in a progressive, yet backwards subculture of his time.
It's about ignorance and self-destruction.
It's not offering a solution, but it's a cry for help and still relevant today.
I hope i didn't get lost in abstract symbolism too much.
There she blows!-there she blows!
#mobydick #starbuck #ishmail #whalecall #steem #steemit #life #book #money #economy
