Moby Dick online reading group, Chapters 55–59

 

                                                    Octopus Stock photos by Vecteezy

This week: Chapters 55-59, “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” through “Squid”

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

The introduction to my Penguin Classics edition of Moby-Dick comes from Andrew Delbanco, or as I think of him, A.D. He professes at Columbia University and found time to write Melville: His World and Work (2005). An insightful comment from the “Introduction”:

“Deploying these kinds of images that collapse huge distances between worlds apart, Moby-Dick reveals itself as an instance of sheer literary virtuosity. It furnishes one dazzling solution after another to the persistent literary problem of conveying to an innocent reader the palpable reality of an unfamiliar world …”

I cut off his sentence there as it appears true in a general sense, but have no need to discuss A.D.’s specific example, the unfamiliar world of Ahab’s anguish. The palpable realities of unfamiliar worlds that interest me concerns the Bardo, a territory with strong correlations to the subconscious mind. We may access the subconscious mind directly when the conscious mind learns to shut up and be quiet, or temporarily “dies”, as it does when we go to sleep allowing it to communicate with us through dreams. To make the subconscious conscious seems one aim of the work of Gurdjieff and Crowley. This appears exemplified in the “stream of consciousness” technique found in Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Qabalistic analysis or gazing into a crystal ball can get you there too. How we choose to interpret an image reveals the subconscious mind. This mind, the Bardo in between conscious apprehension, opens the door to the area where meta-programming can potentially occur; the space where magick happens. It behooves anyone wishing to change themselves in any way to get to know their subconscious mind.

Coincidentally, after writing the above I encountered Ahab communicating his subconscious mind to Starbuck at the end of chapter 123. As Starbuck tries to awaken him, the captain cries out in his sleep: “Stern all! Oh Moby Dick. I clutch thy heart at last!” 

Melville writes a lot about death in Moby Dick, therefore a lot about the Bardo. A passage at the end of chapter 112, “The Blacksmith” reveals the novel as a book of the dead. He’s telling the story of Perth, the blacksmith, and his eventual wish for death:

“Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; . . .”

Which brings me to chapter 59, “Squid.” It gave me a sense of alien otherness completely outside the world of humans and their hunt for whales.  Melville sets up the mood and atmosphere exquisitely:

“But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on, in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.”

The whiteness and large mass deceives the look-out person and then the whole crew into thinking it could be Moby Dick so they set off in pursuit only to find that:

“. . .  we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomena which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its center, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.”

He’s describing what he calls a great live squid known these days as a Giant Squid. Melville says the sperm whales fed off them. Looking at the very last phrase, it could just as easily describe astral or extraterrestrial entities; perhaps what has been called “angels” or “archangels;” chance-like apparitions of life not from around here. David Jay Brown has a new book coming out, The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities, that’s essentially a taxonomy of alien life found under that influence: it “[e]xamines 25 of the most commonly encountered DMT entities, from machine elves and fairies to insectoids, Reptilians, and divine beings such as Grandmother Ayahuasca.” 

The leap from the strangeness of the Giant Squid to non-human astral entities does occur in Moby Dick, one example being in chapter 130, “The Hat”: “Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body.”

The first sentence in the quote suggests some kind of spirit began to take hold of Fedallah, a mysterious character with an odd close relationship of some unknown (to me) kind with Ahab. My impression is that Ahab has him along as a sort of magical helper, an assistant to help with the aim.

Encountering strange beings in literature inevitably brings comparisons with H. P. Lovecraft and his unique talent for otherworldly moods, atmospheres and gnarly life forms that can seem terrifying. I don’t know if Lovecraft read Moby Dick. He was encouraged to read classics of literature at an early age, but Moby Dick didn’t really start to get on anyone’s radar until the 1920s. Kenneth Grant famously incorporates Lovecraft’s fiction and mythos into his lexicon/toolbox for astral exploration. Grant’s name for the Bardo is the Tunnels of Set. In my opinion,  in the same way Grant works with Lovecraft’s literature, anyone could do/is doing (after a fashion) with Moby Dick – getting to know the palpable reality of an unfamiliar world.

The first three chapters in this week’s section comprises a survey of whales found in Art throughout history. Melville, or a very educated Ishmael, says he does this to give the reader the sense of having a whale moored beside the boat, though paradoxically describes visual depictions of whales in Art to demonstrate how they got it all wrong. He begins with the most fantastic representations then moves toward more authentic examples. His references appear all based on real paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures. Dr. Stuart M Frank, Senior Curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, helps out by putting together the lavishly illustrated, Herman Melville's Picture Gallery: Sources and Types of the Pictorial Chapters of Moby-Dick, published in 1986 by Mystic Seaport Museum Inc. It “includes the original or analogous representations to which Melville refers, and it is a delightful and instructive gloss on these chapters.” Used and new copies can still be found online. The least expensive I saw was $30 for a used soft cover edition

Chapter 54, “The Town-Ho’s Story” and chapter 55, “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” start reminding me of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos when Melville throws in some distant in time and space cultural referent to describe the current scene. As he goes into the “pictorial delusions” in 55, the next few paragraphs have a “Tales of the Tribe” kind of cultural mix.  

The quote above from A.D.: “Deploying these kinds of images that collapse huge distances between worlds apart,” also seem akin to Pound’s m.o.

Chapter 58, “Brit” starts by describing some kind of sea plant or fungus that Right Whales eat and transitions from the Art chapters with a beautiful visual image of this food spread across the sea. Later in the chapter, he switches into some deep philosophical considerations using the land and sea as metaphors before bringing this macrocosmic perspective into the microcosm of the individual reader:

“. . . consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?”  

Next week: Please read chapters 60-68, “The Line” through “The Blanket”