Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 49-54

 

"A glass of chicha de jora, a type of corn beer." Via Wikipedia, public domain photo. 

This week: Chapters 49-54, "The Hyena" through "The Town-Ho's Story."

This section of the book was dominated, at least for me, by "The Town-Ho's Story," a narrative that includes another fateful encounter with Moby Dick.

I was intrigued by the passage which loops back to the main story: 

“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.

“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’

“‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but that would be too long a story.’

“‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.

“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, Sirs.’

That self-referential passage seemed rather modern to me.

I was also startled that in the same chapter, Melville suddenly writes about the part of the country where I live (I live in a suburb of Cleveland, which is in northern Ohio, on the Lake Erie shore): 

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. 

The Great Lakes state of Ohio was fully settled by 1850-51, when Melville wrote Moby Dick, but it was very much a frontier about 40 years before, when the War of 1812 was fought, as this passage suggests. The "fleet thunderings of naval victories" is surely a reference to the Battle of Lake Erie, a naval battle in Lake Erie near  Put-in-Bay, west of Cleveland and east of Toledo. It was arguably the most important battle of the War of 1812 and was a decisive American victory. Melville's readers would have been familiar with the famous message of Oliver Hazard Perry, the victorious American commander: "We have met the enemy and they are ours."

A couple of  other bits in the text:

As Ishmael is telling his story to his friends in Lima, they guzzle chicha. I  didn't know what that is, so I looked it up. Wikipedia helpfully explains that chicha is a drink native to Latin America, sometimes alcoholic and sometimes not, sometimes made with corn. I'm guessing Ishmael is fueled by the alcoholic version as he spins his yarn. 

In the "The Gam" chapter, Ishmael remarks that when whale boats meet in the ocean, they sometimes pass along letters. I wonder how often letters to seamen in whale ships were actually delivered? "At any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a  year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files." I took it that this passage referred to newspapers; imagine getting a newspaper, months out of date, and knowing it was the latest news available. This reads very strangely to the modern reader. 

Bonus blog post!

For his contribution to Maybe Night, Oz Fritz has posted a new essay at his "Oz Mix" blog, "Moby Dick and Finnegans Wake," which argues that there's a passage in Finnegans Wake which refers to Moby Dick. I think Oz makes a pretty case, although as he admits it's not ironclad. "Let's call this circumstantial evidence," Oz write. There are also some comparisons between the two classics. 

Next week: Please read Chapters 55-59, "Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales" through "The Squid.”

That's going to be covered by Oz, and apparently he's been waiting for weeks to write about the "Squid" chapter, so I'm looking forward to it. 

Lots of 'Maybe Night' work is available

 Above is a new "RAW Illumination" artwork Bobby created for Maybe Night, thank you, Bobby!

I spent Saturday night reading a chunk of Moby Dick for Monday's online reading group blog post, an ongoing activity Michael Johnson alludes to in the interview Bobby Campbell did with Michael for Maybe Night.  I've also read the BC interview with Eric Wagner. And Oz Fritz, who has been helping with the Moby Dick discussion over here, found time to write a piece at this own blog, "Moby Dick and Finnegans Wake."  The Maybe  Night panel discussion is available now at a YouTube recording. 

Lots of other stuff to get to when I can. Look at the Maybe Night page and scroll down to see what's there.  Lots of people showed up. Peter Quadrino has a new piece on "Living Inside the World of the Wake, Part Two." 

Bobby Campbell, in the Michael Johnson interview, offered some thoughts on what he is up to:

Given Joyce’s annoyance at WWII for distracting people from reading FW, I’d guess he hoped for a more immediate and large-scale recognition, but clearly he also built this thing to withstand centuries of scrutiny, and the long con has only barely kicked in.

Though, for the record, I see no imperative here! No need to evangelize. I wouldn’t bother recommending FW to the disinterested. It doesn’t need converts, or prominence, or success, it already exists! Fully accomplished and available for enjoyment by whomsoever wishes.

Simply finding the others, exchanging ideas with like-minded Wakeans, and making resources available for further edification seems like the name of the game to me.

FW entered the public domain in most of the world back in 2012, (natch!) and will do so here in the states in 2035. I know I have a vision for something I want to do with Finnegans Wake once the rights become free and clear, and probably others do as well!

Today is 'Maybe Night'

The second annual celebration of Maybe Night organized by Bobby Campbell is today. 

If you are just tuning in, Maybe Night is the winter solstice celebration  of  James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, particularly as it influenced the work of Robert Anton Wilson. Maybe Day is the July 23 celebration of the work of Robert Anton Wilson, which has gone on for several years now.

Finnegans Wake scholars will be participating in a live broadcast on YouTube at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Here is the link for the panel discussion livestream. 

For more Maybe Night material, from Bobby and others, please see the Maybe Night website

Joseph Matheny news for 2025

 Joseph Matheny's latest newsletter update reports that plans are shaping up for the release of Ong's Hat Compleat. :

"As it stands today, there will be three versions of this work.

"1. An audio work with accompanying digital notes to be experienced separately. This is to be considered the primary work.

"2. An audio-only version.

"3. A print/eBook version.

"The notes are not a transcription of the conversation. If I can suggest, the best way to experience this work is to listen to the conversations and then read the notes, which include links, so you may follow up with the ideas I’m trying to highlight. Think of it as a hybrid, extended storytelling session and accompanying research manual. The audio clocks in at over 14 hours, and the linked notes are over 28,000 words, so you will get your money’s worth."

More at the link, and he's also leaving social media next  year, but other ways to stay in touch are listed. More here.  Of course, I will try to report on any major news, God willing and the creek don't rise, as they says in parts of the country. 

'Tales of Illuminatus' first issue complete online, will go away soon

 

In the new Tales of Illuminatus email newsletter, Bobby Campbell reports that the online serialization of the first issue of Tales of Illuminatus has been completed. 

"The full issue will remain available for FREE on www.talesofilluminatus.com until the end of the year, and then we’ll clear it all away to make room for issue #2!" Bobby reports. 

Digital and print copies of the first issue remain available, and Bobby provides handy links. 

There's also a reminder that Maybe Night is in two days:

Joyce's 'Ulysses' and other public domain books

During 2024, James Joyce's Ulysses was the 1,000 book released by Standard Ebooks, which puts out carefully edited versions of the classics; it's my go-to source for public domain books. (I'm currently reading the Standard Ebooks version of Moby Dick; I can use my Kindle to make the type large enough for my old eyes to read easily. The type in my paperback copy turned out to be rather small).

Standard Ebooks has just published an essay discussing how Ulysses references another famous book, the Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (e.g., "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou"). Molly Bloom's famous "yes" at the beginning and end of the final section may have come from the poem, and the loaf and the jug are referenced in the section in which Stephen Dedalus goes to visit a brothel.

Books published in 1929 will go  into  the public domain on Jan. 1 in the U.S., and the Standard Ebooks folks already have announced some of the books they are working to publish soon. They include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck, Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge and Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis. (I'm a huge Sinclair Lewis fan, and Robert Anton Wilson apparently read a lot of Lewis when he was a teenager.)

At present, Standard Ebooks offers two books by Ernest Hemingway (including The Sun Also Rises), five books by James Joyce, four books by Sinclair Lewis and one by William Faulkner. 

My Beethoven synchronicity

Beethoven in 1813. (Source)

Monday was Beethoven's birthday and Eric Wagner wished me a "happy Beethoven's birthday." I didn't blog about him Monday as I try to follow the schedule for online reading groups, but I can write about him today. 

I have been a Beethoven fan for much of my life, and as I've written before, Robert Anton Wilson had a particular love of Beethoven. The essay about Beethoven in The Illuminati Papers, "Beethoven As Information," is my favorite short piece about Beethoven written by anyone, anywhere. 

Sunday I went to see a local community orchestra, the CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, give a concert at a local Catholic church. The orchestra played Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, along with a piece by composer Leó Weiner that I wasn't familiar with,  the Serenade for Small Orchestra. 

The Beethoven and the Mozart made the concert an ideal bill for me. Although I've listened to a lot of Mozart, I am not particularly familiar with that work. Here is an article about the soloist, Sibbi Bernhardssohn, talking about  how "it’s probably the most perfect out of all the perfect violin concertos that Mozart wrote."

It certainly won me over. Later Sunday after I got home, I listened to a recording of it. My wife thought I was crazy to listen to a recording of something I had just heard. I thought it was crazy she would not want to hear it again.

The Seventh is perhaps the Beethoven symphony I have listened to the most. The second movement is particularly famous; when the symphony was first performed in 1813, it caused such a sensation that it was played twice. The movement is used to good effect in Zardoz, a 1974 science fiction movie that starred Sean Connery.  I saw it in high school, and it was an early example of a Beethoven piece making an impression on me. 

Late at night before I go to sleep, I often listen to the late night classical music program hosted by Peter Van de Graaff (it's very good). When I tuned in, the radio was playing a solo piano piece. To my amazement, I realized that the piece used the melody from the second movement of the Seventh. It turned out to be an obscure but interesting piece by Robert Schumann, WoO 31, "Studies in the Form of Free Variations on a Theme by Beethoven (1831–32)," played by Peter Frankl. Van de Graaff of course plays many famous pieces, but he's also good at discovering obscure but interesting ones. 

Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 43-48

Public domain image, information. 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

This week: Chapters 43-48, "Hark" through "The First Lowering."

I had forgotten that Ahab’s father died before Ahab’s birth and his mother died around his first birthday. 

This novel seems ahead of its time with its truly multi-cultural cast of characters, although the power resides with white men from New England. Of course, the book contains few women. 

The film Jaws comes to mind reading about this sea hunt. I also think about a scene from Citizen Kane. When preparing his declaration of principles, Kane says he wants his newspaper to become as important to the city as the oil in the lamp that lights the room. I suspect at that time in history this meant whale oil.  

I wonder how long after the end of the novel Ishmael began to write the story of this voyage. I think he took other whaling voyages after the one recounted in the novel. 

The novel gives a snapshot of the nature of early nineteenth century capitalism in the contrast between Starbuck’s sense of the economic purpose of the voyage and Ahab’s quest for revenge. I find it interesting how Ishmael reflects on how he joined in the enthusiasm for the reward Ahab offered for the sighting of Moby Dick. 

Once again I ask, is Moby Dick a yacht rock novel? 

Next week: Please read Chapters 49-54, "The Hyena" through "The Town-Ho's Story."

Maybe NIght reminder and classical Christmas music

 

A reminder from Brian Dean of the RAW Semantics blog that Maybe Night is coming on Dec. 21 for all you Finnegans Wake/Robert Anton Wilson fans. Maybe Night information here, and also see my interview with Bobby Campbell.  Brian says, "Btw, if anyone wants a hi-res version (eg to print a greetings card for your grandma or local church): [see this link].  (Use your browser's controls to zoom & pan)."

Also, my latest Substack newsletter has a few music recommendations, for those of you who like the kind of old-fashioned Christmas music I like. (I listen every year to Handel's "Messiah," Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," Renaissance Christmas music, Christmas carols from English cathedrals, etc.) My rationale for linking to it here is that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both loved classical music, so perhaps some of their fans might be  interested. 

Wayne Benner update

Former California prison inmate Wayne Benner is listed as a co-author of Timothy Leary's Terra II (which I will read soon) and was interviewed in the last Hilaritas Press podcast. 

Back in 2013, I reviewed his memoir Seven Shadows, and I expressed some skepticism about one of the incidents in the book. Here is part of what I wrote:

"The centerpiece of the book is an account of how he escaped from Folson Prison when he was being driven from the prison to a court date. In Benner's account, he overpowered the guard, took the guard's gun and drove the car away despite being in chains. He then evaded a police chase despite having to drive the car while still in chains and took a family hostage. The next day, he forced the family to drive him to an airport, where he planned to hijack an airplane but was surrounded and captured by police. He doesn't give a date for any of this, but the book says he was sentenced to an isolation cell as punishment in spring 1971, so it would have to be early 1971 or sometime in 1970.

"I could not find any articles about this when I searched Google News. The Wikipedia article on Folsom prison mentions several escapes, but not Benner's. Did it really happen? Maybe."

Via an anonymous comment posted this week at that original blog post, I now have a link to a newspaper article that confirms Benner's account.  I have updated the original blog post, but I thought a follow-up here would be a good idea, too. 

John Wisniewski interviews Nick Herbert

Nick Herbert 

Many Robert Anton Wilson fans will know about Nick Herbert, the physicist and author who is mentioned in the first Cosmic Trigger book and who wrote a popular introduction to quantum mechanics, Quantum Reality.  I have mentioned him many times at this blog. Herbert's own blog is called Quantum Tantra. 

John Wisniewski has done a number of interviews that have been published here. You can read interviews with David Halperin, Tea Krulos, Adam Gorightly and John Higgs. 

Mr. Wisniewski is a freelance writer who has written for L.A. Review of Books, AMFM magazine and Cultured Focus, among other publications. 

John Wisniewski: Nick, what did Robert Anton Wilson "steal" from you?

Nick Herbert: Writers like Bob are always searching for new ideas. And they will take them wherever they can get them. Hang out with a writer long enough and he/she will get them from you. When I heard that RAW had worked for Playboy in Chicago I asked him this question. Every month Playboy conducts an unprecedented massive experiment in sexual telepathy. For a whole month the centerfold gal has a million men masturbating to her image. As far as you know, does she experience anything different during Masturbation Month? Bob answered not that he was aware of.

A while later I was reading RAW's Schrǒdinger's Cat hot off the presses and ran across his character Carol Christmas who was a centerfold for Pussycat, a men's magazine like Playboy. During her month, she became sexually voracious and irresistible to men, a veritable sex goddess with all the complications that entailed. Ha, I thought, Bob stole my idea. And invented the Carol Christmas Effect.

JW: When and how did you meet Robert?

NH: I've already described how I met Bob thru an introduction in Berkeley from mathematician Saul-Paul Sirag from the Center for Study of Consciousness on Benvenue St. Saul-Paul had contributed a chapter to RAW's Cosmic Trigger and knew him pretty well.

JW: When you were searching for what quantum physics really was, were there those who suggested that you don't look into this?

NH: When Einstein came up with Special Relativity, it was said that only six people understood it. Certainly an underestimate. When the Irishman John Stewart Bell came up with his now famous quantum nonlocality theory in 1964, only SIX PEOPLE CARED. I was one of them. Most physicists who had heard of Bell's Theorem because it was a theorem about “reality” not about Theory and Experiment which are the meat and potatoes of “real physics”. Bell's Theorem was generally dismissed by everyone as “mere philosophy”. When my friend, physicist Heinz Pagels, showed me BT, published in an obscure new journal, I was fascinated and decided that Bell must be wrong. In my efforts to disprove him I managed to come up with the world's shortest proof of Bell's Theorem. My efforts in this direction also put me in touch with the other 5 people who cared about BT including physicist John Clauser whose efforts in doing and encouraging others to experiments inspired by BT led eventually to his receiving the 2002 Nobel Physics Prize along with Zeilinger and Aspect. By that time the number of people who cared about Bell's Theorem had immensely increased. Much of this story is related in David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics.

JW: Did you begin to experiment with mind altering substances during the 1960s? Did you see anything in this?

NH:  I first took acid in 1962 while a physics graduate student at Stanford. I was impressed with the sheer number of different states of consciousness I could intensely access without dying. Also that experience convinced me that consciousness was a much more fundamental mystery than physics and that conviction shaped the rest of my life. LSD was for me a gateway drug to several other mind-altering substances such as marijuana.

JW: How can we determine what Quantum Reality is?

NH: Quantum Reality is the ability to tell a plausible story about what is really happening in the world consistent with the highly accurate quantum mathematical formalism.

Quantum theory seems to describe the world in two different ways: a wave of possibility until it's measured and a particle when it's measured. The biggest problem in quantum physics is what is a measurement? What does it take to “collapse the wave function”?

Not all interactions achieve a collapse. A beam of light can bounce off mirrors, be divided in two by beam splitters, pass through a lens consisting of zillions of atoms and still remain a wave of possibility. But when it hits the back of your eye, it acts like a particle (photon). Lots of people have tried to investigate what it takes to make a measurement but so far no one has quite succeeded. Anyone who can solve “the measurement problem” will take a big step towards describing quantum reality.

JW: How did you feel about experimentation during the 1960's as far as opening the doors of consciousness?

NH: Ever eloquent Terence McKenna said it best: “Now even bad people can see God.”

For me these substances inspired a search for what I call quantum tantra, an intimate new connection with Nature accomplished not by chemistry but by (quantum) physics. 

This search inspired 50 years of poetry about what that connection might feel like but (so far) no hint of how to accomplish such a marvelous new union. Many of these poems have been published on my quantum tantra blog (under the “quantum tantra” tag). The two closest approximations to this vision might be “Opening Night” and “Elements of Tantra”  Much of my blog is focused on this search for a new way to connect with Nature.

JW: Are there any prominent figures that you met during the 60s and maybe 70s that you felt you learned something from?

NH:  I will stretch out that time span a bit to fit in a few people who were especially important in my life. Meeting and working with physicist John Clauser, who was certainly the most important moving force in exploring Bell's Theorem. Then meeting Greek-American physicist Demetrios Kalamadis who proposed a very clever faster-than-light signaling scheme that took a team of us months to refute was a very exciting time in my life.

I first met Sasha and Ann Shulgin at one of Bob Wilson's salons in Santa Cruz and subsequently attended many of their parties in Lafayette with my partner August O'Connor. Pihkal and Tihkal are certainly landmark books in any psychedelic library.

But as far as those who are exploring a really exciting edge, I would cite my friendship with Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston, who has made a career of studying the Impossible: events both in the past and present that violate our sense of what can physically happen. Kripal (“Mutants and Mystics”) is interested in SuperNature, what we might call miracles. The best example of such impossibilities is the behavior of Saint Joseph of Copertino whose life is chronicled in detail by Michael Grosso in The Man Who Could Fly and other works. How impossible is this? A man who could consistently levitate over a period of 35 years.

Coincidentally, near the end of his life Joseph the gravity defier lived in a monastery not more than 100 miles from Galileo who was busy formulating the physics of gravity. Both men had been examined by the Inquisition, Galileo sentenced to house arrest and Joseph sent to obscure monasteries where his impossible antics would not attract public attention.

JW: Has your book  Quantum Reality become outdated?

NH: I think QR is still an accessible introduction to quantum theory and to the big problem of fashioning a quantum reality which gives us some story we can tell our kids about “what is really happening in the quantum world “, some sort of picture about what is really going on behind the mathematics.

Forty years since the publication of QR the quantum reality question remains conspicuously unsolved but there has been some progress.

First of all John Clauser and two of his colleagues received the Physics Nobel Prize in 2022 for their experimental work on Bell's Theorem.

Then there were a few more attempts (besides the eight I listed in QR) to solve the measurement problem (how quantum possibility turns into actuality) most notably the works of  Wojciech Zurek at Los Alamos and Oxford's Roger Penrose.

Zurek has carried out a long and ambitious study of realistic models of wave functions losing their coherence when interacting with complex environments. However, even though these scrambled waves can no longer interfere, they still remain mere possibilities and never collapse into actualities.

Penrose has speculated that Gravity collapses the wavefunction, that when a quantum system gets big enough it essentially collapses “under its own weight” but so far there exists no experimental evidence for this conjecture.

On a lighter tone, on the last page of Quantum Reality, I append a song “Bell's Theorem Blues”. Not so long ago I persuaded a local jazz group to perform BTB and it became part of a celebration in Belfast, Ireland (Bell's birthplace) to honor the fiftieth anniversary of his creation of this now famous theorem. Since Belfast has a law against naming streets after people they named a street after his theorem, probably the only street in the world so named. 

Yes, I believe that Quantum Reality is still a valuable introduction to quantum theory and to the difficulties we still face in trying to describe exactly what is going on in even the simplest of quantum measurements.

Maybe Night will be here soon!

In the latest Tales of Illuminatus newsletter, Bobby Campbell reminds Finnegans Wake fans  that Maybe Night is coming on Dec. 21, includng the live broadcast, above. 

More on Maybe Night here, and you can also see my recent  interview with Bobby. 

Other news and great art at the first link. 

A Google announcement mentions parallel universes

Many of you will be familiar with the concept of parallel worlds, from science fiction or perhaps from Robert Anton Wilson's  Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy.

Google put out an announcement this week on its new quantum computing chip,  Willow. I've  linked to it, including the discussion of Google's plans for a large scale quantum computer,  but here is the bit catching everyone's attention, particularly the last sentence:

"Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch."