On Mist & Mystery

Featuring Hazlitt, Austen, Melville, baby whales, & a ghost

Photo by Rebecca Prest on Unsplash

Lately I’ve been very drawn to works of art I’d call ‘misty’. Something like what William Hazlitt described in his essay ‘Why Distant Objects Please’ (1822):

In looking at the misty mountain-tops that bound the horizon, the mind is as it were conscious of all the conceivable objects and interests that lie between; we imagine all sort of adventures in the interim; strain our hopes and wishes to reach the air-drawn circle, or to "descry new lands, rivers, and mountains," stretching far beyond it: our feelings, carried out of themselves, lose their grossness and their husk, are rarefied, expanded, melt into softness and brighten into beauty, turning to ethereal mould, sky-tinctured. We drink the air before us, and borrow a more refined existence from objects that hover on the brink of nothing.

Hazlitt describes the imaginative activity that’s freed by an indistinct, misty horizon and its mirage-like possibilities. His raptures are also a bit annoying, trying to cast off from the dirty earth (‘We[…] borrow a more refined existence from objects that hover on the brink of nothing’). He reminds me of Jane Austen’s biggest Romantic, Marianne Dashwood, who uses a similar sort of misty, imaginative/idealistic streak to escape the constraints of her life in Sense & Sensibility. When she falls in love with John Willoughby, Austen makes clear that he is partly created through Marianne’s own fantasy:

Marianne herself had seen less of his person than the rest, for the confusion which crimsoned over her face, on his lifting her up, had robbed her of the power of regarding him after their entering the house. But she had seen enough of him to join in all the admiration of the others, and with an energy which always adorned her praise. His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story (Ch. 9)

Willoughby is too close to Marianne for her to see him fully - rather than too distant - but her lack of clear vision similarly liberates her imagination, letting her project what she wants in the space between them. Marianne is a musician, and Austen generally writes musicians as more caught up in their internal world; her sister Elinor is an artist, who works from external observation, and sees Willoughby’s flaws more quickly.

One way of thinking of Marianne’s sort of imaginative activity is that it’s purely delusional, but both Hazlitt and Marianne are also responding to something that really exists: in Hazlitt’s case, the sky which ‘tinctures’ (dyes) the horizon with possibility; in Marianne’s case, her own physical desire, which rises off her like steam until everyone, even sensible Elinor, is affected by it. Sense and Sensibility is one of the sexiest of Austen’s books because even when Willoughby is lying to Marianne’s face, their attraction is obvious and mutual. Austen’s wiser and better matches often feel less physically convincing; we see Marianne and Willoughby running around like foxes in heat for half the book, and Marianne nearly killing herself out of frustrated desire when he leaves. Their relationship also reveals her inchoate ambition, misdirected energy, and imaginative depression, which Austen can’t solve, only dissipate through her illness.

The ‘Grand Armada’ chapter of Melville’s Moby-Dick is also, I think, very misty. Ishmael, Queequeg and Starbuck, in the midst of a whale hunt, lance a male whale who drags them into the heart of an enormous pod; then he escapes, leaving them adrift. There, in a protected ring at the heart of the pod, they meet the pregnant and nursing mother whales, ‘small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host’, who approach their boat innocently, without fear:

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.

The misty gaze of the newborn whale, unable to focus on Ishmael directly, opens up, briefly, another world between them. Ishmael and the crew are there to hunt and kill; then suddenly, the massacre stops, in a strange spell of wonder. The newborn whale looks out at them, and beyond them, as though ‘leading two different lives at the same time’, and the whalers become fully passive in response, like ‘Gulfweed’, watching the newborn feed from its mother, ‘spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence’. Surrounded by bloodshed, they find a moment of peaceful co-existence that returns Ishmael to his own childhood innocence:

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Something about the ‘inscrutable’ gaze of the young whales and the mist of milk in the water enables Ishmael to take refuge in these ‘peaceful concernments’. We could also say that he’s completely in denial, dissociating from the bloody horrors of the business he’s really engaged in, and that the two worlds (of aggression and protection) cannot really coexist - one will destroy the other. It’s obscene to me that, following this profound connection with the mother and her calf, Ishmael simply returns to the hunt rather than, for example, throwing himself into the sea.

I’m probably attracted to misty things right now because the world at large feels bad and chaotic (War). A friend also died at the end of January - one of my husband’s best friends, after a long illness. He was a good man.

The day before he died was the first truly sunny day of the year, with lots of sunlit mist rising off the bright green grass in the park. I noticed the first crocuses popping up like golden trumpets.

That night, just before 1am, we heard a knock at the door, a distinct rat-tat-tat, which woke me up. Dark and cold out, the street was still full of mist, which now looked very spooky. The knock came three times.

It was so late that we were too afraid to answer the door or see who was there. We later found out that the knock had come exactly when Nathaniel died.

The jury is out amongst Nathaniel’s friends whether it was his ghost, running one last marathon (one of his passions), or a coincidental (psychic?) drifter. I’m not generally superstitious, but for a good few minutes I was half-convinced that ghosts really existed, like a mist rising off the earth, and I’m grateful for the fantasy.

The recent drama Small Prophets, by MacKenzie Crook, is full of this misty feeling, a mystical sensibility. It follows a man named Michael Sleep searching for answers about his girlfriend, Clea, who has gone missing several years before. He summons small prophetic demons to try to find out whether she is still alive or not (it’s a weird show in the best way). Small Prophets feels like distinctly post-pandemic art, suffused with the yearning of grief and loss, without death ever directly making an appearance. Michael captures the prophets to get answers from them and there’s an uneasy feeling that, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, he’s trespassing, and cannot keep them prisoner for long. The show allows its prisoners to escape. Maybe the misty feeling is just longing for a world that still has some hinterland of possibility to it, curious and hopeful, that could still glimmer when we’re gone.

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