The Half-Known Life

. . . in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.—Melville, Moby Dick

Ah, but that appalling ocean more than ever appalls,

and Tahiti is not what it was when Bougainville arrived aboard the sulky Boudeuse,

en route to fame by way of Bougainvillea,*

followed presently by Yankee whalers, missionaries,

venereal disease, Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, and nuclear fallout—

France exploded 193 atomic devices on atolls there between 1966 and 1996;

290 warheads being the Fifth Republic’s harvest for its Force de Frappe . . .

Of course that’s nothing compared to what we Americans got up to!

Though life itself may be,

you can’t really say, Herman, that its horrors are half-known:

Ahab’s peg leg was sawed from whalebone.

That ruined paradise lives on in every soul.

Belial set it there—it is, maybe, a kind of demigoal.

*Bougainvillea was actually discovered in South America, very likely by Jeanne Baret, who circumnavigated the world with Bougainville’s expedition disguised as a man. It should perhaps rather have been called Baretia! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Baret.

Tuesday, August 4, 2026—but this was written years ago!