We Need To Take Care Of Ourselves

Somewhere there's a part of us that we need to contact. Have you ever searched for Hobbes? I do. I'm split...

The Oceanic Feeling or How To Loose Yourself

Jackson Pollock

Blue (Moby Dick)

c. 1943

Gouache and ink on composition board,

18 3/4 x 23 7/8 in.

Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki

*

Herman Melville starts his Moby Dick this way:

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

Here we have a clear reference for a method, a method of living, that the author compares to Cato's suicidal attitude, that is, to his Aesthetics of Existence, his Souci de Soi. The modern version of it, being fed by romanticism, can be approximated to what Freud calls, in Civilization and its Discontents, the "Oceanic Feeling".

Says Melville again in his beautiful and deep Moby Dick:

"Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."

I add:

Do you ever feel the need to loose yourself? I feel from times to times a strong need to get loose. Why is it so? In order to find myself I need first to loose myself...

Come, Ocean, Come to me!

Come as just you can

Come as I need

Before I start to bleed...