"A Calm Is No Joke"

Abstract

“A Calm Is No Joke” —Herman Melville, Mardi DAVID SALNER A calm is a state of being where being comes into doubt. There was such a calm in my life, enforced by lack of funds. I slept on a mattress in a room the size of a closet. On the shelf— a bag of rice, some pasta, five cans of sauce, a gallon of cheap red wine. I parceled it out one meal a day. Sometimes I’d check if my buddy was tending bar— a free drink here, a free drink there. I laughed myself to sleep each night, musing that according to string theory, a hamburger was under my nose. I was flaky as rust, going mad and loving it, just lying there, watching those cans of red sauce disappear. When I got to the last one, I relaxed and listened to the gray wings of a fly inside my head. I knew it was a fly— spiders are quiet as dust. So what, I thought, even when the wine ran out. One day, an envelope came in the mail— manila, I had to sign for it—calling me back to work, giving me just three days to report. I shaved with a rusty blade, begged a loan at the bar, ate a breakfast of steak and eggs, and began to forget my life without an edge, that blur, which Melville called a calm. It had lasted a month. C 2009 The Authors Journal compilation C 2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 84 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S ...