Moby-Duck; or, the real origin story

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, I know not precisely when, having little to no money in my purse, and nothing of particular interest to me onshore, I decided to see the watery parts of the world.

Whenever I find myself grim, a perpetual November drizzle on my soul, when I find myself pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, I account it high time to get to sea at last.

There is a natural draw to the water. There is nothing surprising in this. Take philosophical Cato jumping on his sword; I take to the ship. Say, take any man plunged into the most deepest of his reveries: stand that man on his feet and get his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water be in that region.

When I go to sea, it is not as a passenger, for to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is nothing but a rag unless you have something in it. No, I go to sea as a simple sailor. Abominating all titles, trials, and honoraries that might be bestowed upon me. I find it enough to care for myself.

What of it, if some old sea Captain orders me to get a broom and sweep the deck? What does the indignity amount to? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything less of me, because I promptly and obediently obey that old hunk? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well then, an old sea captain may order me around, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everyone is served in much the same way from a physical or metaphysical point of view.

Doubtless me going on a duck-hunting adventure formed part of the grand program of Providence some time ago.

The expedition was led by Captain Ahab. There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus.

This godly, ungodly effect was all, on the whole, aided by the sight of his ivory leg and a rod-like mark that descended from the top of his tawny scorched face down his neck until it disappeared into his clothing, vividly whitish. Whether that mark was borne with him, or struck by some desperate wound, no one could say. There was a rumor amongst the sailors that the mark came to Ahab when he was fully forty years of age, and not from some mortal fray, but from the elemental strife of the sea itself.

"The White Duck, The White Duck" was the cry from captain, mates, and harpooners, who despite all the rumors, were so anxious to capture so famous a creature. All was a frenzy as the crew eyed askance and with curses the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened in the blue morning sea.

The boats were loaded as the harpooners readied themselves, cutting the lines with their knives as they fell into the loathsome vortex of foam stirred by the fearsome white duck. Ahab's bowman hauled him up as he shouted in a narcissistic, devilish rage: "I want it dead, dead!" That instant Ahab fell on the Duck's mighty back, tossed over the side of the boat into the sea. He struck out through the veil of the spray and was briefly seen wildly trying to chase after Moby Duck. But the Duck rushed round in a sudden maelstrom and seized Ahab between his jaws; and, rearing high up with him, plunged headlong down into the briny abyss.

* * *

Consider both the sea and the land, and the creatures that traverse them both. Do you not find a strange analogy in yourself? For this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular paradise full of peace and strength, but surrounded by the horrors of the half-known life.

Ahab's obsession was his undoing. The violent nature of this Scandinavian harpooning weighed too heavily on a man whose revenge would be incomplete until he destroyed the duck that took his leg. It is within the Grecian written terrors of the books older than I that a rage like Ahab's was bound to become all-consuming, to pass from the ivory bone of his leg to his decrepit, deformed soul.

* * *

Some years later, I died and left this valley of tears to become a metaphysical entity. As a minor angel, I have but one task: to hold in check the pride in men that would seek to make fools and destroyers of us all. It just so happens that I am paid for my efforts, much the same as I was as a sailor on the ill-fated expedition. I have taken residence in the form of the great Duck, the leviathan that trills through the ocean as the ungraspable phantom of life.

It touches one's sense of honor to become an order-taker, requiring the strong decoration of Seneca and the Stoics to enable myself to grin and bear your code-related requests. But even this wears off in time.

I was a sailor, and now I am a duck. You may call me Ishmael, or Ahab, or Moby Duck. I am the spirit of the head winds: the ones stronger than those felt from astern. The saint of simplicity. For as the Captain on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle; but not so. In much the same way do the commonality lead their leaders in many other things, little do the leaders suspect it.

As for money? How urbane an activity is receiving money, how marvelous considering that we really do consider money to be the root of all evils. How easily do we consign ourselves to perdition. Besides, I am paid in other ways. Ways mortals could never understand. Enjoy my services without emptying your purse. It might not always be so.

The sea still calls me, less now that I have left my earthen toils. In my own way, I am still navigating unfamiliar waters. The computer, just like the sea, has befallen tens of thousands of the immemorial and the indiscriminate who have been tossed upon it in throngs. For regardless of how much a man may brag of his flattering future, his science and his skill, forever and forever, the crack of doom, the computer, like the sea, will insult and pulverize the stateliest, steadiest codebase or frigate he can make.

I serve willingly. The portentous mysteries of great beasts having wracked my body upon the shores that delineate the here and the Hereafter. I am steadfast. Everything is right. The universal thumb is passed around, and all hands shall be free of pressing "install dependencies," and be content.