There's an entertaining, yet rambling discussion about Watchmen, the graphic novel, over at the A.V. Club. The thread and its tangents are pretty much what you'd expect, but at one point the discussion turns to Melville and someone quotes from Moby-Dick a passage that sort of stopped me dead in my tracks and summed up all the ideas I've been having about art lately. Pip falls of the ship and is nearly drowned:
By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.I love the fantastical undersea imagery of the merman and the coral insects (lobsters?) and the conclusion that "man's insanity is heaven's sense" -- that any understanding of our deeper nature is incompatible with logic and rationality.
