On October 15th 1851,
a Wednesday, in Hyde Park, London,
the Great Exhibition – official sponsor
Schweppes – closed. In Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace
of glass and wood and cast iron – incorporating
untouched the park’s trees, and itself perhaps
the chief exhibit – amid the palms and the lamps
and the rest of the world’s ingenuity,
the best of Britain’s design, engineering,
and manufacture had been displayed:
for example, Minton’s majolica
from Stoke, a papier maché piano
from Birmingham. Among the visitors
were Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson
and Lewis Carroll. Enclosing the park’s trees
had a cost. Sparrows flew as freely
as ever, despoiling all stands equally:
from Samuel Colt’s breech-loading revolvers
to Mathew Brady’s daguerreotypes.
Queen Victoria was concerned. ‘Sparrow Hawks,
Ma’am!’ advised the Duke of Wellington,
the veteran of diverse battlefields.
In London, three days later, the Saturday,
Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick or The Whale’
was published: that Odyssean tale
of an illimitable zealotry
and self-hatred, and of optimism.
‘I thought I would sail about a little
and see the watery part of the world.
It is a way I have to drive off the spleen…’
Is the closeness of significant events
zeitgeist, or merely haphazard happenstance –
human affairs, like leaves, falling where they may?
Making connections (as the Iron Duke did
and Schweppes), like the making of metaphors,
has made us even more successful than rats.
Here is a tale of the technology
of conjunctions: somewhere south of the Azores
the only sounds are the lap of the swell
on the clinkers, and the shearwaters mewing,
circling above…the harpoon readied…
the rope’s end lashed tight to the foot of the mast…
the men still, their breaths long, slow, pulses high…
waiting for the leviathan to rise
with its capitalist bounty – the oil
rendered from its blubber – the carcass
becoming noisome jetsam, brief pickings
for frenzies of seabirds…
By David Selzer