Emile Durkheim, Herman Melville, and The Bab: Some Reflections

[RonPrice]

The following is a revision of some thoughts on Herman Melville after watching Moby Dick on ABC1(8 and 15 May, 8:35 to 10:00 p.m.). Kerry Saunders, a Peabody Journalism Award winner, was interviewed by Alan Saunders back on 30 June 2007 and he stated in that interview that Moby Dick(1851) was a metaphor for the American ship of state which was driving toward destruction, the destruction seen a decade later in the Civil War(1861-1865).

The book was also a metaphor for the emptiness of reality, part of what came to be called existentialist philosophy, a philosophy that was emerging and would emerge in the 19^th century with the two philosophers Nietzsche(1844-1900) and Kierkegaard(1813-1855).-Ron Price, 15 May 2011.

THE HEALING ROAD

I first came across the ideas of sociologist Emile Durkheim while studying sociology at university from 1963 to 1967. Many of his ideas I have always thought were relevant to a Baha'i perspective, a perspective I have entertained and that has evolved since the 1950s. This French sociologist’s ideas certainly reflect my experience of intellectual, artistic and literary pursuits, what 'Abdu'l-Baha called "learning and the cultural attainments of the mind."[1]

Just as Baha'i administration was taking its first form under the guidance of Shoghi Effendi in the 1920s, Durkheim wrote that "the love of art, the predilection for artistic joys, is accompanied by a certain aptitude for getting outside ourselves, a certain detachment or disinterestedness. We lose sight of our surroundings, our ordinary cares, our immediate interests. Indeed, this is the essence of the healing power of art. Art consoles us because it turns us away from ourselves."[2]

After forty years of travelling-

pioneering, I find here peace

and supper, as if after a very

long day's work. Yes, Herman, this

is its own reward.[3] Just a simple artistry

in these poems, part of my search for the

right idiom and the best ways of meet life's

lot. I do not feel like Frost, stricken as he was

and intensely conscious, suspicious of my

struggle……A healing came, to me, at last,

Herman, at long last……And all that gloom,

and obsession, temper, rage, depression—it

softened with the years and at last an easy

sleep without the pain—dulled it was, life's

sharp-ragged edges…../ And my style could

lighten and take an easier road without that

heat and load; it could brighten, that road.[4]

Ron Price

22 September 2002

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ONE HAD TINTED CRIMSON

In the year after the Bab was martyred Herman Melville published Moby Dick. Some have regarded this book as the greatest work in American fiction. Melville began writing this book in the late 1840s, perhaps 1849 at the earliest. He said he loved all men who dived. Any fish could swim near the surface, but it took a great whale to go down five miles. Melville also thought that comfortable beliefs needed to be discarded. He could not himself believe and he was uncomfortable in his disbelief.-Ron Price, a summary of an essay and an encyclopaedia article on Melville.

Melville must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius.....Melville has succeeded in investing objects.....with an absorbing fascination...Moby Dick is not a mere tale of adventure, but a whole philosophy of life, that it unfolds.---Henry F. Chorley, in London Athenaeum, 25 October 1851; and London John Bull, 25 October 1851.

My Revelation is indeed far more bewildering than that of Muhammad....how strange that a person brought up among the people of Persia should be empowered by God....and be enabled to spontaneously reveal verses far more rapidly than anyone….-The Bab in Selections from the Writings of the Bab, Haifa, 1976, p.139.

They both went down deep

into the ocean of mystery,

a mystic intercourse had

possessed them with some

subtle-penetrating grandeurs,

intensities, strangenesses,

absorbing fascination,

profound reflections,

a whole way of life in

their words, a certain

eccentricity of style,

an object of ridicule,

a kind of old extravagance,

bewildering, and that very

transcendental tendency of

the age, that 19^th century age.

But One had musk-scented breaths...

written beyond the impenetrable

veil of concealment...oceans of divine

elixir, tinted crimson with the essence

of existence…..Arks of ruby, tender....

wherein none shall sail but the people

of Baha...¹

Ron Price

18 February 1999

¹ The Bab, Selections from the Writings of the Bab, Haifa, 1976, pp.57-8.

[1] 'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.35.

[2] Emile Durkheim, Moral Education, Free Press, 1961(1925), p.268.

[3] Herman Melville, Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851. Melville wrote that after a hard day's work it was enough of a reward to sit down in peace and enjoy one's supper. This could also be true of hardship, if some anxiety prevailed over something over which one did not seem to have any control. It was, indeed, reward enough just to sit and enjoy some peace and something to eat. Amen, Herman, amen.

[4] While I wrote these last two stanzas I was thinking of: (a) the heat in Robert Frost's poetry and the inner battles he had to fight. See Selected Letters of Robert Frost, editor, Lawrence Thompson, Jonathan Cape, London, 1965, Introduction; and ( the healing I received in 1980 and 2002 from two different medications for my bi-polar tendency.