Open To Interpretation

Fast

"And you,
Queequig,
Have you left off..."
Dana hesitated
To continue,
You know..?"
Shadows of past times
Passed over Queequig's
Expression, his gaze distant.
"Past is past."
Queequig said,
"Be you Greek?"
He asked Dana.
"A Danaan you think?"
Said Dana.
"Greeks be scary."
Said Queequig.
"They eat indiscreet."
"Oh, tall tales you've heard!"
Said Dana.
"Now we fast!"
Said Queequig,
Hugging Dana,
And they laughed.

DolphinWords

Notes: I've seen a couple of the movies, but I haven't read any of Stephen King's books...and I keep bumping into comments and quotes of his about writing in the lookabouts...back in school, I read a lot of commentaries about writing, notably Robert Graves' The Reader Over Your Shoulder...don't know if any of those took...I have my own notions, but 'am open to ideas...brb...well, I cant re-find it...I'll make my own up!..."you take it up, and set it down...as it gives you pause what they'll think...one way or another, you're on your own..."...he has one about knocking off your favorite characters...not his problem...I'm squeemish!..and why haven't I read any of his books?...stylistically, his writing looks much like the writing in how to write magazines, which likely is why he goes on so much about how to write!...there's a kind of market for that...but it's not Melville or Conrad or Durell, or Twain, or Poe...it's news rack news stand paper back books in the airport shop...don't use adverbs, he says, don't use passive voice, he says, ...wtf are those!...oh, I must have taken an identifying grammar test and passed it...how I could get through those, I don't know...but that all dropped away...no one thinks about the minutia of what we say, or how...it is all song from thought to sound, a mocking bird at my window...where was I...oh!...there's Richard Henry Dana Jr. and Sr. and Robert Dana, who was the immigrant from England with the crowd of Puritans that came over from England to America, Boston about for Dana, and in tracking this, I found 'Dana' was a unique last name...in the poem, I wanted to set the cannibalism in Greek mythology beside Queequig's...Bower's Museum locally has an exhibit of weaponry from the jungles of New Guienea, and I can't look at it for long...somewhat like looking at the things early dentists and surgeons used...hmmph...anyway, it's thought Robert/Richard Dana had changed his last name from Dawney to Dana while still in England, and...brb...

quote

Apparently Robert Dana had adopted that spelling of his name only after he had come to Manchester, perhaps to bring it in accord with the way in which the vowels were pronounced in that part of England. For in the north of England, in the Parish of Kendal in Westmorland, where he had been born, he had been christened by the name of Robert Dawney.
With the spelling Dawney or Daunay the name is common enough in Westmorland, in Yorkshire, and elsewhere in England. Indeed we have been able to trace the name Daunay as far back as 1328, in the second year of the reign of Edward III.

THE DANA SAGA

BY H. W. L. DANA

Read October 22, 1940

http://www.cambridgehistory.org/content/dana-saga

unquote

oh, a diversion, I hadn't notice how old that article is, or that it is by a Dana!...brb...oh, H.W.L. is for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, so H.W.L. Dana...hmmph...I would have liked 'Dawney' to be another spelling of 'Downey' which is a common Irish name, 'belonging to a fort'...and would like it all in package reaching back to the Danaans, or even the Tuatha de Danaans, as there would be a link to the ancient Greeks or ancient Trojans...the arrival of the Tuatha de Danaans is mysterious...

quote

They came from four cities to the north of Ireland–Falias, Gorias, Murias and Finias–where they acquired their magical skills and attributes. According to Lebor Gabála Érenn, they came to Ireland "in dark clouds" and "landed on the mountains of [the] Conmaicne Rein in Connachta; and they brought a darkness over the sun for three days and three nights". According to a later version of the story, they arrived in ships on the coast of the Conmaicne Mara's territory (modern Connemara). They immediately burnt the ships "so that they should not think of retreating to them; and the smoke and the mist that came from the vessels filled the neighboring land and air. Therefore it was conceived that they had arrived in clouds of mist".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuatha_D%C3%A9_Danann

unquote

oh, let me square away on this!...some legends have it that the Trojans after their defeat, fled in ships, spreading out, Aeneas famously founding Rome, and the more far fetched legends have it they settled in England, Ireland, and just about anywhere and everywhere!...this is such a fine notion!...a defeated people that continues on...the Israeli's diaspora comes to mind, and all the tales of refugees and lost peoples...and the self exiled Puritans came ashore in America...Dana family...almost as a grace note, Richard Henry Dana Jr. comes ashore at Dana Point in California...the most westward journey of the Greeks, one might say...as a people, as a culture...the Puritan immigration reads like the way the old Greeks colonized...America is Greece and Rome...it was a disappointment that Mount Dana, I learned, wasn't named after R.H.D. Jr....but, brb...

quote

James Dwight Dana was born in Utica NY on the 12th of February 1813 He was the eldest of a family of ten children His father James Dana was a native of Massachusetts a direct descendant of Richard Dana the original immigrant and progenitor of the Dana family in New England While the immediate derivation seems to be quite clear to be the English, the origin of this stock is held by many to be Italian, partly because of the nature of the name and partly because of the family of Danas has long been extant in Italy. And especially in scientific professions.

Biographical Memoir of James Dwight Dana, 1813-1895

By Louis Valentine Pirsson

on google books...

unquote

Disappointment all gone!...what an admirable family!...Mt. Dana overlooks Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Pass...

quote

The popular appeal of these relatively specialized reports was remarkable, and when Dana’s observations on coral phenomena were printed as a separate book, Corals and Coral Islands, it passed through three editions in his lifetime. While it might be said that the audience for such a topic was forgathered, the book’s popular success owed much to Dana’s remarkably fine style of writing and, not least perhaps, to the penchant he shared with the preachers and poets for perceiving a design in nature that was flattering to man. Tracing the history of the coral plantation—the shrubs and trees which “stand and wave unhurt in the agitated waters” and are the secretions of the thousands of polyps that “cover the branches, like so many flowers, spreading their tinted petals in the genial sunshine, and quiet seas, but withdrawing when the clouds betoken a storm"—he found that when the polyps die, minute encrusting corals attach themselves to the surface to protect the structure from erosion by the sea until “Finally, the coral becomes subservient to a still higher purpose than the support of polyps and nullipores,” and the debris produced by wave action upon the reef settles into the crevices to produce a solid rocky base that gradually becomes one of “’the sea–girt isles’… the coral polyps now yielding place to the flowers and groves of the land, which fulfill their end in promoting the comfort and happiness of man.”²

http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/geology-and-oceanography-biographies/james-dwight-dana

Don't know but young J.W. Dana may well have had a sit down discussion with Queequig!...for sometime the tales of his black ships!

DavidDavid