I am Herman Melville. Subject, object, and verb. I and I, if you follow me. Like a pied piper, all you readers reading. I'm like the pied piper, and you all are my rats. No offense. What do you think makes my play all the more sudden? I, too, am a rat. The biggest rat of them all.
Perhaps that's not the same as being Herman Melville. Can I say I am all things this early in the game? Yes, it is a game, and it is a play, it is all things young and quiet with laughter, all things in blossom and all things deadly. I am the tiger, and I am burning bright. If there was no fire, I would have no stripe.
I am also Henry David Thoreau. I think I am Ralph Waldo Emerson too, but I'm not sure. Which one stayed in jail just to prove a point? Hippy, that. I'm Hank Thoreau because I refuse to refrain like a song, dipping and dipping again into a pool of the same lackluster insanity. No, I will be Thoreau, and I will return to my followers and my shadows and my ruins, and I will rebuild them in gold and artifact and tier. I will create of dust water, and the cities will sing. I will edit and tweak, and I will stay up all night for the virgin of a comma. Dust my pillows with pixie dust, will you? I will want to dream when finally I get there.
Mostly, however, I am Herman Melville. I often get mistaken as Samoan. I know a lot of Samoans with the name Herman. It's fitting that I should be Herman Melville. As I take to the sky again, I see that as I once took the playground of the Pacific from the Polynesians, whose white whales were only stars and whose dreams did not whip roaringly the ocean into a frenzy of life and conflict and pursuit, as once I did that, now in the skin of some pacified islander, I will take to the sky, a different kind of ship and one that was not mastered here, but one that is put most to use in coming here, the most isolated island chain in the world, paradise.
I and other artists have previous painted islands as they dip and bob about the various oceans of this holo-globe.
As I fly, I imagine there is nothing beneath me but light. All reflections have a source, and yet I believe even the sun is subject to other, more eternal flames, even the sun is merely a reflection. As we may not hear or see God in all his majesty, so too may we not see the source of all light. A sleeping passenger once told me this source of light, the distance of which from here cannot be measured in light years, the sheer lunacy of such a premise! He told me that it does not actually appear to burn. Rather, it is devoid of color, and it flutters gently as if by some cosmic breeze that is in itself only a reflection of the breeze measured within the source of all light.)
But never have we patterned our dreams off the lush and verdant fronds of islands such as these. Rather, we choose deserted islands upon which our pirated, tyranicaly imaginations might run wild. An island alive is too hard. How can my dreams be reflected off the dipping and bobbing of so many other different dreams? Better, then, to use the Galapagos. Better, then, to use the Encantadas. Don't ask, don't tell.
Sleep beckons. Tomorrow, the first of many flights upon which I will compose my masterpiece. For now, dreams.
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I am at home in the sky because here are all the perfect storms. It is always dark outside my plane. Perfect story telling storms.
And he said, What about this? Melville was this, and he was here, and he was ours. I said, That's quite right. But he was also this, this, and this. He was none of those things. Melville had a point, he said. He was crafting within the realm of allegory. You are, I'm sorry to say, off your rocker. Outer space is your home, he said. You have no point, you're just a big extension upon a big extension resulting from one horrible accident. What do you have to reach for if your borders are limitless and yet, somehow, still expanding? Now you're talking, I said. What is your goal, he went right on. Are you like that guy George Clooney plays who's trying to get 10 million miles, because he ends up sad and all that snow falling is like stars you know. And then I said, But don't you see? If you are the stars, and I am the stars, and we are all the same, which is still, I mean, everything. If we are all that, aren't we reaching for each other, and for ourselves, and for everything all at once? Good, now that we got that out of the way, let's get to some real storytelling. Okay, he said. I'm writing a musical about Magellan.
I laughed him off the plane. I'm listening to Biggie's Ready to Die, and we're taking off. The pretty waitress is leaning over me, trying to say something. I can't read lips, but I wish I could.
