Today we are learning about Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish with Herman Melville!

Today marks the second week of work on Herman Melville's leviathan (he-he!) classic about sperm whale hunting: Moby-Dick. This story is about more than Man vs Nature, or Adventure on the High Seas or Avenging a Lost Leg. It's also about freedom. It's about the Law: of God, Nature, and Man. Even in International Waters, Ishmael and the gang of the Pequod are bound by the invisible (velvet) manacles of the social contract.

In Chapter 89, Melville tells one of those jokes that an old man probably once told you; There are two kinds of fish in this world: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish. A Fast-Fish is bound to a vessel somehow--"a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same." It becomes the property of that which binds it. A Loose-Fish, on the other hand, is free--as much free to roam the waters as free to be pursued and caught by a band of swarthy sea-fellows.

"What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is the ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular £100,000 but a Fast-Fish?"

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"What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish."

Melville's words remind us that ties as seemingly insignificant or delicate as a strand of cobweb make all the difference in the construction of possession, property, and right. So close to America's Birthday, it's fascinating to be reminded that as Fast-Fish, citizens are bound to written law as well as social contract in ways that are both liberating and obfuscating. What are the Loose-Fish in your life, your city, your world? Are you gonna catch 'em? Are you gonna use them for oil lamps, so to speak?