clifford ross I found this stamp when I was cleaning
       out my loft. 

       laurie anderson A stamp, embossed on an
       envelopea white whale in a blue oval, and it says "six
       cents," "Herman Melville," "Moby-Dick," and then under
       that "United States." What was it filed under?

       cr Well, it wasnt exactly filed. It was sandwiched
       between a bunch of other Melville papers and it
       seemed like a good start for this interview.

       la Its fantastic. If I were to use that envelopelets
       say we can write to those beyond the graveId write
       to Herman. And the first thing I would say would be,
       "Excuse me, I live in the late 20th century. Who am I
       to read your book and think this book would need to
       be a multimedia show?"

       cr How did a mid-19th-century novel become the
       impetus for a late-20th-century electronic opera?

       la More than anything, I love words. They animate
       everything Ive done. No matter how many times
       somebody asks me, "Where do you start, with the
       word or the image or the music?" I come back to the
       fact that what really moves me about other peoples
       work is their language. Whether its a piece of music, a
       computer thing, or even something that doesnt
       contain normal language, I put it into language,
       somehow. If I can put a painting into language, I like it
       better.

       cr In an early sketch for your opera there was a
       passage, "Make me a mechanical man, 50 feet high in
       socks. A quarter acre of brains and eyes, no eyes, but
       put a skylight in and . . ."

       la He was a Buddhist. Only a Buddhist would say that.

       cr Hes speaking for you?

       la Well, yes.

       cr Im curious about the lack of eyes.

       la Lets say I walk into a new place thats
       architecturally incredible. Thats not the first thing I
       notice. The first thing I notice is air pressure. Just the
       way my dog sticks her nose into a hole to explore:
       How big is it? And what is it? How it sounds, how it
       feels. Only then do my eyes roam, but theyre more
       directly wired to my brain; sound is wired to my heart.
       In Moby-Dick, you have a book that has very few
       descriptions of how things sound. Isnt that strange
       for a novel? Theres nothing about how somebodys
       voice sounded. But there are many discussions about
       peoples faces and how they looked against the sky.
       Its so visual.

       cr But the book itself has a sound.

       la The book is totally musical. The words themselves
       are the sounds and they have to be read aloud to be
       heard. All of that rollicking stuff. You know, a
       paragraph of 18 "s" words: "So one silent and
       suffusive evening, stars are strolling by."

       cr You said that you would start out your imaginary
       letter to Melville with an apology: "Who am I to raid
       your work to make mine?" But a lot of his sounds, and
       his literary sources, were raided from the Bibleand
       Shakespeare, Pope, Milton and Dante. Doesnt your
       method echo his method?

       la I would change the word "sounds" to "voices,"
       because in many books it takes a while to learn the
       authors voice. Who is this person writing? Whats
       their point of view? The biggest phony bait in the book
       is the first three words, "Call me Ishmael." After that
       you dont know who the narrator is because hes
       hundreds of people: a historian, an accountant, a
       preacher, dreamer, observer, naturalist or scientist.
       You cannot find Melvilles voice in there because hes
       just hundreds of different voices.

       cr Its cubist.

       la Its the most modern kind of narrative style. You
       will not get to know this author through this book. No
       way. There is no one Herman Melville for me to write
       to.

       cr Youre in a long line of people who have taken
       Moby-Dick as the basis for new work.

       la Thats the great thing about the book. Theres
       room for Patrick Stewart to star in a TV movie as
       Ahab, and theres room for William Burroughs. I was
       talking to someone yesterday about this and they told
       me to look at Naked Lunch.

       cr Did Burroughs quote Melville, or take off from him
       and head in his own direction?

       la Both of them were ultimately fascinated with
       authority. They would have plenty to say to each
       other. (Flipping through pages of Naked Lunch) Oh!
       Look at this: "Gentle reader, we see God through our
       assholes in a flash bulb of orgasm."

       cr Its a direct quote from Melville. (laughter) At least
       the "gentle reader" part.

       la You see? Research is never done. I started by
       reading Moby-Dick five times and that was just so
       much fun, pure pleasure.

       cr When was that?

       la Three years ago. A TV producer was going to do a
       CD-ROM for high school kids, a kind of literacy
       program. On an impulse I said, "Let me give
       Moby-Dick a shot." He asked each person to write a
       monologue about his choice. Supposedly our
       enthusiasm for a book would inspire kids to read.
       Robin Williams was doing Dickens; Anna Deveare
       Smith, Huckleberry Finn; Spalding Gray, Catcher in
       the Rye. The project never happened, but by the time
       I read it again I thought, "Wait a second, this is one of
       the most bizarre things Ive ever read." All those long
       passages about whiteness and rage"Nobodys up
       there!" We know that in the late 20th century. That
       theres no one in charge. That there is no plan. Were
       on our own. These things are ingrained in us as
       late-20th-century Americans.

       cr What about that last passage, where the hawks
       wing gets caught and its dragged down to the depths
       of the sea? Its hard to believe its a random event. Is
       it orchestrated from the heavens? Does God show his
       hand at that moment?

       la The biggest question for Melville was, "What if a
       man outlives the lifetime of his God?" Once you pass
       beyond the point of thinking that there is anyone up
       there, well then, how did we get here? Why are we
       here? And where are we going? What I love is that he
       has no conclusions, which is the most satisfying
       conclusion. This scene that were talking aboutthe
       whale has just smashed the ship, which has sunk with
       everybody on it. Ahab has wrapped himself around the
       whale and the whale has escaped. The last thing you
       see is the top of the mainsail and an arm, nailing a flag
       onto the mast. Then a birdand birds, particularly
       hawks, are messengers in Moby Dickflies down in
       between the hammer and the mast. The birds wing
       gets caught and its pulled screaming down into the
       vortex. What an end. Its a heroic last act: Geronimo,
       down with the ship. And then theres this incredible
       peacefulness.

       cr "The great shroud of the sea rolled on . . . "

       la The magic of the book is that you look for
       something your whole life, and it represents all sorts
       of things to you. For Ahab it was the whale, or why
       the whale took his leg. It took Melville the whole book
       to say that. But it was summed up in the "Whiteness
       of the Whale" chapter. Many of the images in the
       chapter are of absolute beauty, some are of absolute
       death. Its a catalog, an encyclopedia of everything.
       The whale is everything. And so we can read whatever
       we want into his quest.

       cr It makes me think of a wonderful comment of de
       Koonings, when he was describing himself and his
       work. He called himself a "slipping glimpser."

       la Nice phrase.

       cr Earlier I said Melvilles book was like a cubist
       construction. He was grappling with this enormous
       subject, with all these different facets from different
       points of view. It was so big there couldnt be a neat
       conclusion. Your opera has a cubist construction too.
       You could call it . . .

       la Performance art!

       cr Oh, thats it. (laughter)

       la Multimedia, multimedia!

       cr In the latest version, you present scenes from the
       book, as well as scenes that are your ironic take on
       Melvilleyour own riff; you, sitting in an armchair in the
       British Library, discussing the project. How did you go
       about constructing your opera?

       la Its an impossible thing to do, to try to make a
       book into something like this. Failure is built into the
       project in a big way because you cant really represent
       the book on stage without making it 50 hours long.
       Then youd just numb everyone into submission.
       There were so many heartbreaking decisions to make.
       I thought, "Well, I have to do the greatest scene,
       Queequeg and Ishmael in bed." All the wonderful
       things in that scene would take at least an hour to do
       well. And maybe thats how to present the book: just
       do one chapter, to really get the flavor of that
       encounter. It would make a beautiful two-hour play.
       There are so many great and colorful characters in the
       book. I decided to throw up a white flag and say, "Im
       just going to touch on some of the things that I love
       and not try to tell the whole story because its too
       long." I thought I would begin to do it justice if I could
       just get some of the feel of it across.

       cr Were there many changes from two or three years
       ago when you started to work on the project? Melville
       apparently wrote a terrific potboiler the first go
       around, discovered a bigger ambition after meeting
       Hawthorne and basically rewrote the whole book. Were
       you wrenching things apart and putting the opera
       back together like Melville?

       la I would rewrite the whole thing if I could, to tell you
       the truth. I cant afford to, time- and money-wise.
       Because in a complicated show like this, to get all of
       the production systems reworked would be like
       starting from scratch.

       cr I was rather amazed at how fluid the process was,
       given the large scale at which youre working. It has
       changed enormously over timewith all the actors,
       musicians and technicians pulled along as part of the
       process. Its sort of astonishing. Its not like youre
       just sitting at a desk writing a book.

       la I wanted a chance to play with it once Id seen the
       whole thing. Ive done a lot of big shows that involve a
       lot of equipment and a lot of people, and as much as
       you try to predict what its going to be, you will be
       wrong. Thats the certainty. What was supposed to be
       beautiful doesnt work, so what goes in its place?
       Youre working with a big palette in a show like this. It
       involves working really quickly with 25 people and
       saying, "Were going to change all of that. Let me
       show you what my new vision is. Here we go!" Talk
       about being a captain! Youve got to get all these
       people to believe you, because its a lot of work even
       to make one little change.

       cr Id like to read from a letter that Melville wrote to
       Sarah Moorewood, dated September 19th, 1851.
       "Concerning my own forthcoming book. Dont you buy
       itdont you read it, when it does comes out, because
       it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a
       piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silkbut it is of the
       horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of
       ships cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through
       it, and birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle
       fastidious people from so much as peeping into the
       bookon risk of a lumbago and sciatics."

       la What a thing to say about your own book! Can you
       imagine what he would think about this Xerox were
       looking at? And that were just rifling through pages
       of his personal letters. I wonder if he thought of that,
       of people 150 years later reading his words.

       cr When he was a young man, Ill bet he had the
       optimism to think in terms of posterity. But by the
       end of his life, as he was so beaten down, I wonder if
       he was thinking that way.

       la You think Billy Budd wasnt for the ages?

       cr I feel that the late work was really personal for him.
       That he just had to cope with certain issues by
       writing. Although I guess just by committing his
       thoughts to paper he was thinking of posterity. But I
       dont see how he could have held out any hope that
       his work would be remembered. He was completely
       forgotten as a literary figure by the end of his life.

       la As a late-20th-century-American, I think about how
       much we have in common with Moby- Dick, in terms of
       obsession, love of work, love of details. The concept
       of the crazy captain is not an unfamiliar one to
       Americans.

       cr You mean Richard Nixon?

       la Yes. And Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton.
       These guys are out of their minds, and were traveling
       along thinking, "Yes, the guy in charge is out of his
       mind." And if hes not out of his mind by the time hes
       in office, he is going to be in short order, believe me. I
       think Melville always questioned authority. But the
       biggest thing that links us to him is our being naive
       enough to ask, What are we doing here? Thats really
       what Melville was asking. If you dont believe in
       authority, like Ahab, then you are your own authority.
       You make your own rules. What does nature mean
       without God? Will life crush you like a bug, or do you
       stand up and say, "I will not be crushed. I believe in
       nothing, but I wont be crushed." People are
       disillusioned by the speed revolution. Were moving
       faster and have access to everything, but spend all
       our time running. Everybody I know works harder now
       than they used to, and longer hours. I chalk up some
       of my view to nostalgia for the good old days when I
       sat around and dreamed. In the 50s, a guy who sold
       insurance sold insurance his whole life. He died selling
       insuranceand that was his job. Now people do that
       for three years and then they go and do something
       else and then they dont know what theyre going to
       do. I dont look around me and see happy, contented
       people. I look around and see anxious workaholics.
       Many spiritual movements in this country are growing
       in response to that. Theres so much longing for the
       ideas of our transcendental ancestors, like Emerson or
       Thoreau. Its the new land for Buddhism. Maybe there
       is an invisible world we cant see. You ask a French
       person, "Why do you live?" and he answers, "To drink
       wine and eat cheese and make love and have fun. Why
       would you ask a stupid question like that?" I bet
       theres something else out there that gives us
       meaning.

       cr Do you think people were in the same state in
       1850?

       la Melville was.

       cr That reinforces the idea that Moby-Dick is 19th
       century hi-tech. All that whaling paraphernalia was
       their hardware and software. Do you think they had
       the same feelingthat things were going faster and
       faster and leading nowhere? Is whaling just a chase
       without end?

       la Its a job. Its a workingmans book, starring guys
       who are working. Its not Goethe, where a hero goes
       out, is challenged and learns things. These men work
       hard, and they sail, and they drown. And its not just
       that theyre going to drown, its that theyre being led
       by a madman who they dont understand and they
       follow him because he has unbelievable charisma. He
       knows what hes looking for. How do you drive men to
       action? You get some really good bait and dangle it in
       front of their eyes. Ahab did not have great respect
       for his crew; he thought theyd only respond to
       money. Now that is the great American story.

       cr The only explanation that I found in the book for
       why they kept going was the golden Spanish coin. Of
       course its a ridiculous incentive. Were Tashtego,
       Queequeg or Stubb after that gold coin? Or were they
       swept up by something exciting and abstract? Did the
       whale become their goal, too, by proximity to Ahabs
       crazed, infectious drive?

       la They basically forgot what they were doing for
       several hundred pages. Time and place are gone in
       this book, theyre lost from the first minute they get
       out of Nantucket.

       cr What keeps them going?

       la What keeps anyone going? When your alarm clock
       rings, you dont get up and say, Why am I in the
       world? You get up because you have to be at your job
       on time. Its simpler to think of small things.

       cr When Melville was writing, do you think that he
       wanted the reader to experience the book through
       Ahab, or Ishmael? Whose journey is it?

       la I think were meant to be omniscient in ways that
       many readers would never want to be. You only see
       from Ishmaels point of view initially. Around page 100,
       when they ship out, it becomes a collection of essays
       and the thread is Ahab, but its no longer really a
       story. Its an adventure on a certain level, but raising
       and lowering sails doesnt advance a story. In fact, the
       story itself is rather static. Ahab is crazy from the
       beginning and he doesnt really change, except a tiny
       bit at the end.

       cr Did the lack of a traditional narrative make this
       book more interesting to you? Or did it create a
       problem? Or both?

       la That was the biggest problem for me. I initially
       wanted my piece to be a dream about the booka
       dream dealing with some of the ways it made me feel.
       But, once you bring in actors, they ask, "Who am I?"
       And there is no single answer. Anyway, I dont really
       know what the book means.

       cr Did you start your project thinking you knew?

       la I went into it thinking that I could find a way to
       express Ahabs anger, the kind of fury Ive never felt
       myself. Thats why Ive had such a hard time, because
       I dont feel the anger that drives it. Without anger a
       lot of the story isnt there. Theres a lot thats
       incredibly beautiful. The writing, the ideas and
       colorfulness. But until I find the anger in myself that
       connects to the anger in the book, Ill never finish the
       project. But then Ive never finished anything.

       cr To me, one of the strangest aftereffects of reading
       the book is that my memory of it centers on beauty,
       not anger and darkness. The beauty of the language
       and the images. And your opera is filled with
       extraordinarily beautiful sections, and funny, ironic
       passages, all wrapping up Ahabs anger in a cocoon.
       My memory of your Moby-Dick is also centered on
       beauty.

       la I reacted to the beauty of the book, Melvilles crazy
       way of looking at the world. Its made up of these
       fabulous short stories that are full of images and ideas
       that are so crazy and beautifulpolar bears walking on
       ice floes, tiptoeing across them, tilting them as they
       walk. Somebody canoeing through the Everglades . . .
       I fell in love with the book, but the big questionwhat
       the whale means, all that anger and revengeleads us
       back to the Bible. Its the core of the puzzle. His own
       Bible is a beautiful, stamped leather booklooking at it
       sends a chill up my spine. He wrote his name on the
       second page. And then halfway through the book,
       right before the New Testament, are the birth dates of
       his wife, his daughter and his boys.

       cr He had purchased it a week or two before he
       started work on Moby-Dick. He clearly bought it to
       gird himself, arm himself for what he was about to do.

       la More startling than anything were his pencil marks
       in the margins. When I saw them, thats when I really
       lost it. What about this myth that his wife erased
       some of the marks?

       cr Its not really clear what happened. Its established
       that he was a pretty bad husband and not a very nice
       guy. There is some thought that out of either
       embarrassment over the things he wrote, or perhaps
       as vengeance, his wife may have erased some of his
       notations.

       la Ive never had a feeling like this about an object. I
       got out my magnifying glass and just opened every
       page of that book to look for little marks and
       notations. And of course Im looking for any reference
       to the word "whale." So Im looking for a whale with a
       magnifying glass. And I found it. I found it, except it
       was not a whale. "Very like a whale," as he says in the
       beginning of Moby-Dick, but not quite a whale. He
       marked a passage in Isaiah 27, verse one. "In that day
       the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword
       shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even
       Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the
       dragon that is in the sea." And I just completely
       flipped out. You know sometimes you wish you could
       sort of stand aside and just look at yourself screaming
       at the top of your lungs. Suddenly it was totally
       apparent to me what the whole book was about. The
       whale was a snake and the ocean was his garden.
       Thats how Melville was working out good and evil.
       Through a whale which, if you take all the blubber
       offreally stripped things downis a snake. (Turning
       pages) Here is another part he liked, Isaiah, its all
       marked with underlining and checks and Xs. Quite a lot
       of vipers and fiery, flying serpents. What incredibly
       brutal language. Melville was writing about Jehovah,
       Yahweh. He was not writing about Jesus. I think in
       Billy Budd he wrote about Jesus and his suffering, but
       his references in Moby- Dick dig deep into the
       pyramids. And there is the kernel of Jehovah, the
       righteous, the angry one. Punishment is a pretty big
       theme.

       cr How about the markings in Isaiah 34, verse 14?

       la "The wild beasts of the desert shall also move with
       the wild beasts of the island and the satyr will cry to
       its fellow. This creature will also rest here and find for
       herself a place of rest." I used part of that text a few
       years ago in the object I made called Tilt. Its a music
       box that was originally going to be a duet between a
       man and a woman. I love using preexisting tools, and
       in this case it was a carpenters level. I was originally a
       sculptor. But I thought, There are enough forms in
       the world. Everyone wanted to make more shapes and
       I thought there were enough shapes; I figured, Lets
       take existing forms and make them mean something
       else. So in Tilt, the carpenters level becomes a music
       box. It tilts one way and the man sings, it tilts the
       other way and the woman sings. When its level they
       sing together.

       cr So in Tilt you recycled the object and gave it a new
       purpose and a new meaning. Was your use of
       Moby-Dick another form of recycling? As Melville
       recycled the Bible to create Moby-Dick?

       la I dont think of it as recycling at all. Everything for
       me is new. A tool that sings to me when I pick it up is
       different from a tool I use to build my desk. They
       happen to look the same. But people look the same.
       We have two eyes, a nose and a mouth. We couldnt
       be more different.

       ?But back to the Bible: the Sermon on the Mount.
       "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they
       toil not, neither do they spin: What shall we eat? or,
       What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be
       clothed? . . But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and
       his righteousness; and all these things shall be added
       unto you." I think Richard Nonas was thinking of the
       Sermon on the Mount when he told me it was okay to
       be an artist. I was out of art school and I was
       complaining all the time about paying my rent: How am
       I going to eat? How am I going to go on? He said,
       "Youve got it all wrong. First you have to say, What
       do I want to make as an artist? What do I want to do
       as an artist? These other things are
       unimportanttheyll happen anyway. Once you get
       your priorities straight, youll be surprised what
       happens."

       cr Was Nonas your teacher?

       la No, he was a friend, an older artist that I respected.
       I was afraid to call myself an artist. And he said,
       "Thats ridiculous. What do you want to do? Lets talk
       about that." What a fabulous guy. Its wonderful
       advice.

       Anyway, lets go back to the lilies of the field. When
       Melville writes, "consider the subtleness of the sea," he
       goes into a very dark world about the invention of
       sharks. How these dreaded creatures glide underwater
       and how they will eat you alive. Who made these
       man-eating engines? All they do is rip flesh apart. As
       Queequeg said, "What devil god invented that? Are
       you worshipping that god?" And when Melville wrote,
       "Consider the subtleness of the sea," his 19th-century
       readers, who were familiar with the Bible, got his
       subtle reference to "consider the lilies of the field."
       This is not just a God who created good things. This
       is a God who created good and evil and gave you a
       choice.

       I wanted to get in another idea that fascinated me, of
       when I first saw what I would call the Southern Jesus,
       the painted Jesus. Like most Protestants I grew up
       with the Northern Jesus who would teach you things
       about how to be kind to your neighbor. Things that
       were really in your self interestgood citizen kinds of
       things: help other people, do unto other people as
       you would have them do unto you. Be kind. It was not
       so much hellfire as advice on how to live a good life,
       and be fair. And hed do a few magic tricks once in
       awhile, (laughter) like raising the dead, things like
       thatto add credibility to his advice.

       When I was terrified as a child, it was by a God who
       was really scary, my grandmothers God. She was a
       holy roller Baptist who talked in tongues. And her God
       was Jehovah. Anyone who didnt think the way she did
       was going to fry in hell. She was obsessed with sin,
       obsessed with evil, and saw them everywhere.

       ?But when I went to Europe the first time, I saw
       another Jesus entirely. This Jesus was not talking. He
       was either a little boy in his mothers arms, or he was
       dead. Either way, he wasnt giving you any advice
       whatsoever. He was giving his life for you on the
       cross, or being held. Or both, as in the Pieta. A man of
       sorrow and pity being held by his mother. Dead.
       Speechless. And this is how the arc of Melvilles work
       from Moby-Dick to Billy Budd follows a course that I
       can relate to. From this terrifying man who would be
       God, Ahabto a man, Billy, who would die for you.

       cr A man of supreme arrogance who would bring you
       to your death in the service of his obsession, to a man
       who is totally humble and giving.

       la Billy Budd was about sweetness.

       cr Given how bitter Melville became, and how isolated,
       its kind of amazing that Billy Budd was his final
       testament. Its a triumph of the spirit to have viewed
       things that way at the end of his hard life.

       la I like to think of it that way.
       Who knows how it was, really?
       Perhaps it was just a mean
       man scribbling a beautiful
       story. There certainly is a
       sweetness in his writing and a
       longing, an incredible longing.
       Melvilles last character was
       Billyone who would absorb all
       pain, take the blame for
       everything, sacrifice himself . .
       . But the whale. There was even selflessness in the
       whale. Melville says, "Lets all try to be more like a
       whale. Be cool at the equator, be warm at the poles.
       Keep your own council. Dont be affected by stuff."
       Its like some Buddhist master was writing part of
       Moby- Dick. So even though hes talking about the
       giant force of nature, it is one that is beyond good
       and evil. Its a force of nature, period. It was Ahab
       that made the whale into evil. The question is: Why do
       we create monsters? When we finally find them, what
       do we do with them? In most monster movies, they
       kill the monster. Monster movies are medieval tales:
       the hero slays the dragon from the sea.

       cr Are there any stories, other than Moby-Dick, where
       the monster wins the battle?

       la Lets see. I think in some Japanese King Kong
       movies. Doesnt the monster win there?

       cr That might be a great place to end this interview.

       la Yes, its always good to end with a question.

       Photographs and interview ) Clifford Ross, July 1999