Satisfaction Abbigail Smith

Satisfaction

by Abbigail Smith

@wintersblossoms

The following correspondence has been edited for privacy and compliance as deemed neccassary by the Western Australian Prison Board - ref# 1851

Hello Troy ¹ ,

Thank you for your reply.

Though I spent many years at sea as a young man, I have not read the novel, and sadly, it is not in the prison’s library. I wanted to be able to help you with your book report, so I asked if anyone in L-block had read it. No one has, but Levi ² mentioned a band who recorded an album based on the book. I borrowed the CD and listened to it during free time. Free time is sixty minutes, so I could only listen once. It isn’t to my tastes.

I wrote down the lyrics as best I could and have summarised each track. I’ve included my own experience on fishing vessels where possible, though keep reading the book just in case.

Track One

The album starts with a nameless character. We’ll call him Ishmael because that’s what the singer screams in track five.

Ishmael is being driven mad and fears for his life. He insists that ‘no man of flesh’ would ever be able to stop him, which implies his fear is something that’s not a man. He says the fight with the fish will be to the death. Fish are trying to kill Ishmael, but this is likely a metaphor. Consider researching the author and if he was inclined to drink. See lyrics:

The fight for this fish is a fight to the death ³

Track Two

Ishmael joins a ship in search of a lost whale. Someone is referred to as a ‘Hab’, apparently, the person who lost the whale in the first place. ‘Hab’ might have been a title or position of power on the ship, though not one I’m familiar with. The Hab talks of his reverence of a nearby ocean and its magic, which attracts all men. Thirteen years ago, something happened to the Hab, and now his leg is rotten or atrophied and is the ‘colour of ivy’, and his whale is gone.

Track Three

The Hab and Ishmael meet a man named Key Keg in Nantucket. People think Key Keg is a savage, possibly because he carries a harpoon. The lyrics call it ‘Grungir’, which I believe was the spear of Odin, but if the savage uses it to fish, it is technically a harpoon.

Precision of Grungir

Spear of the Norse God Odin ⁴

Track Four

Ishmael, the Hab, and Key Keg with Grungir set out to hunt the fish (singular) or fish (plural), which threaten Ishmael’s life. They are soon caught in lava.

The lyrics mention volcanic eruptions in Iceland, something that Brent ⁵ says happened in the 1970s. This places the album’s novel in the postmodernist period.

Track Five

The Hab remains untouched by the lava of the 70s but swears to get revenge on the volcano, until ‘she spills her black blood’, likely meaning igneous rock. The implication is that the volcano contributed to the Hab losing his whale. He takes a huge breath and spits it at the volcano, which has a ‘vast head, body and tail’. Next, a ‘straight-line is cast’, which continues the fishing metaphor, though technically fishing vessels use slacklines made of polyvinylidene fluoride.

Track Six

The ship is destroyed, and everyone is bleeding in the water. The smell of their blood attracts regular/lava sharks, the latter revealing this to be a work of fiction. Ishamael fears his watery grave but is saved along with Key Keg and Grungir by a mermaid. The Hab, suspicious of the mermaid and its role in the stealing of his whale, perishes.

The Fiji mermaid

She will let it know ⁶

¹ Indicates redaction – WACCP, Melville, W.A ² Confidential ³ Non-contextual lyrics redacted WACCP – Lyrics © 2004 Relapse Records, Inc. ⁴ See footnote three, page one ⁵ Confidential ⁶ See footnote four

Track Seven

The surviving men call upon God, likely meaning Odin, who shows them a woman who births a giant Nephilim. A ship arrives, and everyone, including the Nephilim, sails into the weather, away from the sharks and volcano. This song reminds the reader that God and/or Odin are all-powerful, which is essential exposition. See track eight.

Track Eight

With God watching, the men and the Nephilim and the mermaid start to boil the water that the fish lives in. The fish appears and spews fire at them. This destroys their boat. The fish is resistant to boiling water because it is a metaphor for Satan who takes the form of a hydra:

Boiling the water where the hydras were crawling ⁷

Everyone but Ishmael is drowned and burned. Ishmael floats to safety on a coffin made by Mr Keg.

Track Nine

Everyone sinks deeper and deeper ‘into the sea’.

From my memory of maps, I think this is incorrect as the nearest sea to Nantucket is the North Atlantic, which is not a sea but an ocean.

It’s quiet and lonely at the bottom of the sea/ocean, and everyone sinks like ‘buckets of lead’. The lyrics reveal that the fish was never to be defeated:

Battle is she ⁸

Not for defeat

All the characters are dead except for Ishmael, who has already paddled back to Nantucket. The ship, which set sail in track seven, left from the area which is today known as Nantucket Children’s beach: Childfriendly sandy beach and park ⁹ (I was permitted to look up the island as part of my geography ¹⁰ assignment).

⁷ See footnote six ⁸ Removed – Possible negative influences/connotations ⁹ Non-approved words redacted WACCP ¹⁰ Confidential Ishmael, paddling as the crow flies from the middle of the North Atlantic Sea toward Nantucket, would have arrived at Siasconset on the southeastern shoulder of the island. From here, he may have returned to Nantucket (the city) by way of the Milestone road bus leaving Siasconset.

If the bus route was not established in the era of 1973 in which the album and novel take place, he may have walked, which would have taken two hours and thirty eight minutes for a total of 7.9 miles.

This is all conjecture as we never learn what happens to Ishmael, but this is, to me, the most likely sequence of events he would have taken in those days.

Track Ten - Instrumental

This track is purely instrumental. To me, it’s a melancholic reflection of how far the characters travelled and their battle with nature, God, the devil-hydra, and the volcano/ocean. The Hab never found his whale, but searching for it led to him being killed by sharks. This could be another metaphor for functional alcoholism.

It sounds like the sort of thing that would play over the closing credits if the album’s novel was a film. In the film, the camera would pan across the volcano, which has cooled and is covered in igneous rock, and the instrumental would play with all the reverb you’d expect from something set in the same era as Electric Warrior by T. Rex.

I only ever saw one whale during my years on fishing vessels, and it was a white beluga.

Keep writing!

Noah Merrick

DIRECT REPLIES C/O WACCP@GMAIL.COM ¹²

¹¹ Confidential ¹² REMOVED – Corresepondence to WACCP@GMAIL.COM to be sent c/o the ‘Write a prisoner’ program

Isolation Book Recommendations

Stephanie Adamopoulos recommends:

The Lunar Chronicles series by Marissa Meyer. I absolutely loved these retellings of fairy tales in a modern Earth, including Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, and Red Riding Hood. Each book focuses on one fairy tale, but they are all connected to one massive story of love, revolution, and war.

Jess Ali recommends:

Cherry Beach by Laura McPhee-Browne. Browne is a Melbourne author, and she has crafted a beautiful, vibrant novel about two young women—Hetty and Ness— who move from Melbourne to Toronto. It focuses on themes of friendship and selfdiscovery, following their stories as they split apart and twine back together again. Such breathtaking and sharp prose.

Becky Croy recommends:

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a collection of short stories, all with philosophical ponderings about life and the universe. A particular favourite is ‘The Library of Babel’ in which the library has an infinite number of books and infinite potential knowledge. Although Borges can be quite a challenge to read at times—he loves to pack in as much information as possible into each story—you are left with someone very interesting questions and explorations of philosophical ideas. Definitely a great distraction read!

Daniel Matters recommends:

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. A classic book on writing that is excellent for beginning writers and old hats. A wonderful assortment of advice as well as an entertaining personal retelling of Stephen King’s life. Every time I go back to it, it makes me laugh, feel sad, and then it gives me a kick up the backside to put words on my own page.

Jessica Wartski recommends:

Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks. It’s easily the most eye-opening thing I’ve come across on the cost of being deaf in our society (and how the deaf community is rallying against that cost!). The book goes from asking you to imagine how one forms language and contextualises the world when they’ve never been able to experience language through sound, to teaching a recent history of the treatment, othering, and education of the deaf. By the end, I was ready to learn sign, and it’s given me a greater appreciation and understanding of what language is and why we need it.

Jason Winn recommends:

Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. It’s a French classic that has no plot besides a single neurotic French Aristocrat who surrounds himself with decadence while loathing humankind. It was a heavy inspiration for The Picture of Dorian Gray and, as the name suggests, broke off from Naturalism and became Symbolist literature. While it can be hard to digest with the character’s pursuit of aesthetics, it’s a great commentary on the pretensions of nineteenth-century French Bourgeois.