Seeing Out of New Eyes

Since I was seven, my eyesight has been poor.

But I have somehow lived long enough to come to that time when sight changes.

And the changes have all been good. And now my eyesight is said to be
20/20. And now I am constantly and easily entertained, just
observing/seeing with new clarity, new focus and farsightedness - with
no need of corrective lenses (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com).

It is as if I have, not only new external eyes, I also have new powers
of contemplative vision.

And I contemplate the enhanced powers of seeing/observation that are
described in the only part of Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' that
occurs after the 'Pequod' has been staved in and sunk, after the
Pequod has gone down, and when Ishmael holds forth from the verenda of
the Golden Inn, Lima, Peru, sometime in the 1850's.

To the extent that a person is able to come into the further powers of
embracing dynamic uncertainty, a person comes into other enhanced
powers, powers of observing the world, of hearing the world, of
sensing the world, of resonating with the world.

Such is the case with Ishmael/Jonah in the play, The Righteous Mutiny,
which is based on the Town-Ho chapter of 'Moby Dick' and the Steelkilt
Mutiny.

In Richard Reeve's introduction to the play (see
www.libbyhome.blogspot.com) he writes: "Here is the only glimpse we
get of the post-apocalyptic Ishmael...

"Here is the storyteller, confident, in control of his material and
his audience, creating a transfixed atmosphere infused with an epic
stature. Here alone our minds eye is presented with the new man,
reborn through the maelstrom of apocalypse, living in a world of a
different order...

"... Out of Ishmael's recognition of the mythic depths that move
through himself and others develops the sanction to become a
mouthpiece of the living story, the story of the world. I go so far as
to make the claim that in Ishmael, Melville has defined a new order of
hero, the hero of observation.

"...In Steelkilt's story all the vague spiritual attributions
previously assigned to the whale get solidified into an omnipotent
avenging arm of justice. The tale of Steelkilt's mutiny shows that not
all men are the enemy of the white whale. In fact leviathan becomes
the avenger for Steelkilt, the whole man living in harmony with the
cosmos.

"...The Righteous Mutiny sets on stage a passageway to the
post-apocalyptic world...A man true to his higher Self, who gets
hauled up the mast himself a Christ in the face of infectious petty
tyranny that defines our warped social order, this man the Cosmos will
defend, preserve and set into a new world the rest of us are still
clamoring to reach.

"...Libby's rendering of the Golden Inn realizes more completely than
Melville's the new world...

"...It is here that the imaginative window broadens not for the sake
of Moby Dick, but for the life of the myth. Libby unlocks Melville's
hints. The result allows the play to carry on the myth autonomously,
into the new reality, as it must...

"...We are being swamped daily with the constellation of the archetype
of the apocalypse...

"...The seamless insertion of D. H. Lawrence's insights into Jonah's
ayahuasca vision puts on stage perhaps the most important question
America has faced since day one.

"...What happens when the Pequod goes down?

"It's a question we'd better start taking seriously...", Reeve writes.

And in the wrapping of the mind around this question is
post-apocalyptic awareness, (a knowing of what truly is important) an
experiencing of transcendent liberation from the business-as-usual
(b-a-u) of this world, a growing in the resonation with the universe.