Herman Melville's Moby Dick

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 6 of 13

Melville’s Moby Dick
Pursuit of Nature as a Journey through Evil
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 8, 1985

Transcript:
The date is August the 8th, 1985. This is the sixth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Transformational America. Tonight’s lecture is entitled Melville’s Moby Dick Pursuit of Nature As A Journey Through Evil.
In classical times a great distinction was made in human nature and was made with such force that we’ve had to live with it ever since. The distinction that was made was the difference between human nature in a legal sense and human nature in a religious sense. The core of the distinction rested on the way in which we live in the legal sense. And the key to it is the Greek word Lego, which is the origin of our legal. Meant to gather up. Originally it meant to pick up and hold together. It meant to gather up. And it meant to say that human nature watched itself by gathering up all of the basic elements into a single area, single handhold, single code of laws. And this held in the classical world until the turn of the millennium. And at the turn of the millennium this legal understanding of human nature was radically challenged. And a new word, a new term, came into use. Again, it was a Greek term. But instead of Lego, it was logos. And the logos meant that we do not just gather up, but that we transform and intermix and interpenetrate. That instead of a bundle of laws we have a fabric of laws that are interwoven and make an integrated life.
This difference reflects a development of psychological profundity. It puts the emphasis, not on the exterior world, what we can do, what we could pick up, but upon our essential integrative relationship. Stressing the fact, we have within us a world also that needs to be interpenetrated with the world outside. That’s the logos’ creative. Where legality is impersonal. So that the structure became psychologically profound.
In early United States history, the genius of our founders was largely in the legal sense. Largely a gathering up of traditions. There was a profound development of the individual, but it was never given to the larger structures, to society, to politics. And in the United States in the middle of the 19th century there was a crisis of consciousness over this lack. And Herman Melville was the sage poet who took the brunt of this realization. For Melville the profundity of the inner world opened up in such a tremendously abysmal sense that he nearly frightened himself to death with the realization.
When individuals who are trained critically to read literature, to teach it, read Moby Dick, very often they come across this experience of tremendous fearfulness in themselves. They have no place to put this. In fact, many critics have stated. This is from a University of California Press book, 1973, A Criticism of Moby Dick [The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick].
This book was written in sheer self-defense. I have always found Moby Dick and utterly compelling novel, like nothing else in American literature. Other novels engaged me. Interest me. Absorb me. Divert me. Move me. Only Moby Dick frightens me.
And there’s something in Moby Dick which brings out this oceanic world that is within inside of us. And the only way to live with this world once exposed is to find some way to interpenetrate it with the world of nature, with the world that we actually live in. And the problem that comes to the fore is that there is an indigestible element in the world out there that will not integrate with this inner world. It is the world of sociological perspective, of political structure. It doesn’t integrate. It’s like the chafe. It’s not alive. It’s a mental phenomenon. And the mental structures do not integrate with the inner world. They dissolve. If we try to strengthen them, they bend. They crush. They collapse.
One of the most frequent images of a nervous breakdown is the dream image of a ruined house or a ruined castle. In our civilization the great image of the breakdown, which we have been reminded of this week, is the ghost like shredded shell of Hiroshima. It is a mental breakdown of the civilization. It is the very archetypal image of the crucifixion of the city. The police.
Melville is one of those great courageous souls like Shakespeare, who exposed himself to these absolute zero-degree winds from the unconscious.
In Moby Dick we have the record of a human being trying everything in his power to try to mitigate and soften the blow. He in fact takes the deck of arcane imagery, an archetypal major arcana of human horror, and tries to mix it and water it down with a deck that we would label a fact. Whaling facts. Facts about ships. Facts about whales. Facts about the sea. Pedestrian information that you would find in almanacs. And he tries to fold this in and water it down. And so, about half of Moby Dick is on purpose distraction for the reader and for the author to try and keep our mind off the intensity. To try and distract us for a moment. Commercials if you will. To try and soften the blow of the tragedy. To soften the blow of a recognition, which permeates the entire work. That there is something horrific within ourselves that we have defended ourselves against by making this exterior world. That everything in the exterior world is in fact a defense against ourselves in some very primordial arcane sense.
But in Moby Dick Melville makes the point that these defenses were made on land. All the great kingdoms of man have been made on land. They don’t apply on the ocean. The sense of God seems to blow away in the winds finally out on the ocean vastness’s. And man comes face to face with the fact that he doesn’t know at all. The only people who have an experience with this oceanic discovery of the inner world of the unconscious, where the Polynesians. They are the only people who were at home on the ocean. Who were able to not only navigate the vast waters, but to build an inner psychic equilibrium based on the ocean.
Queequeg in Moby Dick is that mysterious Prince from these Polynesian people. Who when he signs his name draws the infinity sign. He can’t write any European language. He can only make his mark. He is the blood brother of Ishmael, who is the only man who survives. And he survives by floating upon the coffin of Queequeg.
There is a very interesting way that Melville has of bridging this tremendous gulf. The gulf between the laws and the security that we have from having gathered up our experience, gathered up our culture and our civilization and the tremendous realization that now we have to let go of it all in order to weave it together into a whole. And as we let go, we find ourselves adrift in a most frighteningly permanent way. Because he makes the case that there is not simply a sense of vast depths beneath us, which we have no sense of whatsoever. But that moving in these depths are other creatures who are at home there. Who are intelligent in terms of the unconscious of the world. And who have now been bothered by man in such a primordial way that they have risen against him. And that man finds himself face to face with the terror of the deep, which he himself is called forth by his arrogance. His impunity.
In Moby Dick when he is laying out the beginnings of the voyage he talks about Nantucket. He talks about the way in which the American Yankee seamen of Nantucket have become the sole owners of this oceanic empire. That the American spirit not only went West to develop the prairies and the mountains but also went into the ocean and wrapped themselves around the world. And that almost all of the seamen on whalers that live on the ocean are Americans from New Bedford and Nantucket. Almost all of the crews. He says, “Other nations have crews, which sail over the oceans from land point to land point, but only the Yankee Mariners live for years out of sight of land on the ocean.” And he says, when the sun goes down and the sea birds that are at home, not on land, but on the ocean bed down in the waves, he says also Yankee seaman bed down in the billows of those ocean waves world round. He says the very peculiar race of persons who have been born and who’ve come here.
And he says,
What they are doing, these Nantucketers, are hunting the most monstrous, the most mountainous being, the most mightiest animated mass that survived the flood, the salt sea mastodons. Clothed with such pretentiousness of unconscious power that the very panics are more to be dreaded than the most fearless and malicious assaults.
It is not the mighty viciousness of the actual physical confrontation so much, though that itself is dangerous. Broken limbs. Drownings deaths. But it is the pervasive accumulating release of this unconscious power of the deep which has come to haunt the American consciousness. Alone. And now it’s there and won’t go away. And that it has now embodied itself. It increased its focus so that all that unconscious energy from all the whales has focused into one, a white whale.
And at the very beginning of Moby Dick at the end of the very first chapter Loomings, he has an interesting description, archetypical description of a vision, which will not go away, which cannot go away. He writes,
By reason of these things, then the whaling voyage was welcomed. The great flood gates of the wonder world swung open. And in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose two and two they’re floated into my inner most soul. Endless processions of the whale. And mid most of them all one grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air.
This specter, which has now seized the collective American psyche in a way which no other people have actually ever experienced for the Polynesians were at home on the sea, like the American Indians in the wilderness. But the American whalers have gone to kill whales, to kill the spirits of the deep. And now their great mighty focus and protector has risen and has in a psychological way and a massive archetypal unconscious way garroted a man named Ahab so that he is now magnetized to Moby Dick’s fearsomeness, panic and terror. He has used up crews in pursuit of this. Many of them are dead. Some of them wandering like wraiths. And in chapter 19, still near the beginning of the book, they run across one. Queequeg and Ishmael had just come down from the Pequod and they run across this wild-eyed man. And we recognize in his physique, in his language, in his very manner, someone who has been electrocuted by the archetypes. For those who come to the Tuesday night lecture, I showed you a sculpture of Augustus, the age of 30 with the eyes bugging out. Like that. Completely hypothesized by the unconscious energies
Ship mates, have you shipped in that ship? Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod and were sauntering away from the water. For the moment each occupied with his own thoughts when the above words were put to us by a stranger. Who pausing before us leveled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily appareled in faded jacket and faded trousers. A rag of a black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent smallpox had in all directions flowed over his face and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent when the rushing waters had been dried up. Have you shipped in her? He repeated, you mean the ship peek what I suppose said, I. Trying to gain a little more time for an uninterrupted look at him. I, the Pequod that ship there. He said drawing back his whole arm and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him with a fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object. Yes, said I, we have just signed the articles. Anything down there about your souls? About what? Oh, perhaps you haven’t got any, he said quickly. No matter though, I know many chaps haven’t got any. Good luck to all. They’re all the better off for it. A soul is a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon. What are your jabbering about shipmates? Said I. He’s got enough though to make up for all the deficiencies of the sort of other chaps, abruptly said the stranger placing a nervous emphasis upon the word heat. Queequeg, said I, let’s go. This fellow has broken loose from somewhere. He’s talking about something and somebody we don’t know. Stop cried the stranger. Ye said true. You haven’t seen no thunder Have you yet? Whose old thunder said, I, again, remedy with the, riveted with the insane earnestness of his manner. Captain Ahab. What? The captain of the ship, the Pequod? Aye. Among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. You haven’t seen him yet have ye? No, we haven’t. He’s sick they say, but he’s getting better. And we’ll be all right before long. All right before long laughed the stranger with a solemn derisive sort of laugh. Look ye when Captain Ahab is all right this left arm of mine will be all right not before.
You see the exterior world is just takes the confluence of what the inner drama takes on that scale.
What do you know about him? What did they tell you about him? Say that. Well, they didn’t tell much about him. I’ve only heard that he’s a good whale hunter and a good Captain to his crew. Aye, that’s true. That’s true. Both true enough. And you must jump when he gives an order. Ah, but that leg. A [inaudible] took the other off. My friends what is this gibberish about? I don’t know, and I don’t much care. For it seems to me you must be a little damaged in the head. For if you’re speaking of Captain of that that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, I know all about the loss of his leg. All about it. You sure you know it all? Pretty sure. With finger pointed and eye leveled at the Pequod the beggar like stranger stood a moment as if in a troubled reverie. Then starting a little turned and said, ye [inaudible] names down on papers. Well, well, what’s signed to signed and what’s to be will be. And then again, perhaps it won’t be after all. Anyhow, it’s all fixed and arranged already. And some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose. As well as these other men. God pity em. Mornin’ to ye shipmates. Mornin’ the ineffable heavens bless you. I’m sorry I stopped ye. Look here friend, said, I, if you have anything important to tell us out with it. But if you’re only trying to bamboozle us, you’re mistaken in your game. That’s all I have just say.
And then he goes on a little bit more. And they say, “Well, what’s your name?” And he looks at him and he says, “Elijah. Elijah thought I. We walked away both commenting after each other’s fashion.” And they decided that he must be a humbug, and they go on. And they go onboard the ship.
Ahab of course, has been completely seized and is now a conduit of this unconscious energy. So that his will is much stronger than any of the crew in fact, stronger than the whole crew put together. And he slowly sends out his feelers because what he is trying to do is he is trying to transform. He is trying to transform in this situation. He can’t just pick it up. He can’t just put it together. He has to somehow interpenetrate with that whale and that’s the problem. And in the section called Moby Dick, we find out that it was in fact Moby Dick that took off his leg, but in a very weird way. He had been harpooned by Ahab and the blood of Moby Dick was coming out. And Ahab then had leapt out onto Moby Dick with the harpoon and his leg was bitten off. And the bloody stump of his leg touch the wound of Moby Dick and their blood flow together. And they were welded together in this way. So that the physical sense of Ahab was completely changed and bore then an interesting scar, which whitened the hair and left a scar all the way down through his inner meridian. This acupuncture meridian that runs down the center of the body. Completely scarred by this. Completely fused by the blood of Moby Dick.
This baptism in blood is the beginning of Ahab’s overwhelming absorption in primitive ritual. In some ritual that will counter balance this poisonous situation that has developed in him. And he finally will bring the three harpoons together in a section of Moby Dick. And each of the harpooners will bleed into a cup and there will be a satanic ceremony held with this blood of putting the three harpoons together to make the six-pointed star. And the three harpoons where they meet will be baptized in the blood of the three harpooners. And this image they have will use to bring all of the crew together to his will.

There is a development in Moby Dick where Ishmael is leaning over the railing. And all of these events are beginning to swirl around in a great pattern. And he’s beginning to realize now that they are caught in some gigantic wheel, which we would call a karmic wheel now. That some great pattern has been put into motion staring out. And he writes in the section called The Spirit Spout, “Days, weeks pass and under easy sail the ivory Pequod had slowly crept across four several cruising grounds that off the Azores, that off Cape Verdes being near the mouth of the Rio Del Plateau and southernly down by St. Helena.” And they had passed all these whaling grounds that not stopped.

It was while gliding through these latter waters, that one serene and moonlit night, when all the waves roll by like scrolls of silver and by their soft suffusing seething’s made what seemed to silvery silence, not as solitude. On such a night silent night, a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow let up by the moon. It looked celestial. Seemed like some plumed and glistening God uprising from the sea. For of these moonlit nights, it was the want of this mysterious character Fedallah to look out from the bow sprit and silently went to report to Ahab what had been seen.

The spirit spout is like the angel of the sea that has come to warn them that this is the drawing line that after this point if they do not withdraw they will be subjected to the full brunt, the full force of this pattern. That it will unfold regardless of who they are. Regardless of their personal qualities. Regardless of whatever beliefs their mind might have. Because all of the picked up and gathered legalities of human nature are now null and void. And that only a complete radical transformation of self will save them. That the secure world built on mental structures, on externalities, on traditions is now negated. Null and void.

Ishmael has alone this vision. He is the only one. They bring in a whale and they’re boiling down the whale and he’s describing this. And then there is a huge vat where the sperm is setting. The sperm from the testes of the whale have been dumped into this vat, and they are supposed to make, squeeze this and make this a smooth so that it can be processed for some chemical. And he writes,
Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze all morning long. I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it. I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me. And I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labors hands in it mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget that at last I was continually squeezing their hands and looking into their eyes sentimentally so much just to say my dear fellow beings why should we any longer cherish any social acerbities or know the slightest ill humor to [inaudible]. Come without envy. Let us squeeze hands all round. Nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other. Let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm forever. For now, since many prolonged and repeated experience I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower or at least shift his conceit of attainable felicity. Not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy, but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country. Now that I have perceived this, I am ready to squeeze sperm eternally. In visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise each with his hands in the jar of [inaudible].

This image blends and folds into the image of the whales two by two and Moby Dick inner most like a snow hill in the air. And Ishmael in this communion with the deep has been taken in to the unity of the sea and does now immune. And he is the only one because he has changed. He has made the transformation, which was absolutely essential. The transformation of giving up his egotistical self to the universal interpenetration. Because the logos is universal. It does not apply on any scale except the whole, except the all. It is only there that that transformation is effective. If there is anything less than they all it’s just gathering up more legalities, more straws that are going to break. And break they will. Man is safe as long as he lives humbly. As long as he does not evoke these great Titanic energies. But in his hubris he always collects himself in his self-esteem strength and eventually transgresses and the energies rise. And the oceans, the flooding of consciousness by the unconscious imagery grabs hold of him.

Exactly in the middle of the Moby Dick the symbol of this world that is going to crack takes the shape of a Spanish doubloon. In fact, it is a doubloon from Ecuador. It bears Republica Dell Ecuador Quito. And over this are three Peruvian Andes mountains. But on the edge of this doubloon running all around the edge is the Zodiac. The 12 signs of the Zodiac. And Ahab takes a hammer to penny nail, and he pounds this doubloon to the mast facing so that it faces out over the bow of the Pequod. The first to site Moby Dick will get this doubloon worth a lot of money.

“Before this equatorial coin,” because [inaudible] is right on the equator of the world.
Before this equatorial coin Ahab now had observed by others was now pausing. There’s something ever egotistical in mountain tops and towers and all other grand and lofty things. Look here, three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower that is Ahab. The volcano that is Ahab. The courageous undaunted and victorious fowl, that too is Ahab.

There was a tower, a volcano and an Eagle. They are all now aspects of this demonic Ahab who, because he is magnetizing and garroted by this archetypal power now in his turn magnetizes everything that he comes into contact with. And the power, the magnetic power by which this is conveyed is through money. Through geed. Through lust. Through terror. All the avaricious powers are folded in and carried by money.

Like a magician’s glass to each and every man in turn, but mirrors back his own mysterious self this doubloon mirrors Ahab’s essential character. It’s a coin to sun wearing a ruddy face. Aye, but see, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox. But after six months, he wheeled out of the equinox at Aries.

The crew begins thinking about the chart of the voyage of the Pequod and they say we are following the zodiacal scheme almost exactly perfect. We have fallen into an archetypal maelstrom, and we are not going anywhere, but round and round, closer to some horrific center.

And the doubloon enters,
Hark he’s muttering. Voice like an old worn-out coffee mill. Prick ears and listen. If the white whale be raised it must be in a month and in the day when the sun sinks in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs and know their marks. They were taught me two score years ago by an old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun be? The horse shoe sign for their it is right opposite the gold. And what’s the horse shoe sign? The lion is in the horse shoe sign. The roaring devouring line. Ship oh ship my old head shakes to think of thee. There was another rendering now, but one still text all sorts of men in one kind of world do you see? Dodge again. Here comes Queequeg all tattooed looks like the signs of Zodiac himself.

But you see Queequeg is not tattooed with the Zodiac that is on the doubloon. He’s tattooed with the signs from the South Pacific from a different civilization. He is covered with the constellations that are not equatorial does need it but that follow a mystical path that no one can decipher. And has put not on money, but upon the body of the man himself. He is the zodiacal man for that integration.

“Ah, what says the cannibal? As I live, he’s comparing notes. He’s looking at his thighbone.” He’s looking at the doubloon too, you see. He’s correlating. And when he fishes his correlation, finishes his correlation Queequeg loses energy and goes into a trance. And then he calls the ship’s carpenter and tells him that he wants a coffin built. A special coffin in the shape of an ancestral canoe. And he wants it watertight because he knows that his death is looming. That the death for all except one is looming. Because he can see by the correlation that this is it. This is as far as he is concerned the end of the world.

Well, let’s take a little break. And then after your break, we’re going to go downstairs. I have to go and sell cassettes on the sidewalk. They won’t let me sell on here. So, if you got any extra money, I need to buy my daughter some clothes come down and buy some cassettes.

I think we need to understand that Melville was completely transformed himself. And after he wrote Moby Dick he could never again write in any other way. The work that he wrote after this was called Pierre and the Ambiguities [Pierre; or The Ambiguities]. And it’s the world’s first great psychological novel about a man falling into himself and realizing that in the world of psychic polarities he has no certainty whatsoever. Because any realization that you have has an opposite realization which has just as much validity. And so, you are caught. Not on the horns of a dilemma, but on the horns of all the dilemmas that there are at the same time. And the only possible resolution is to bring them all together into a unity. That is the only possible resolution. But to bring them all together into a unity means that you have to change the polarized energy to a complimentary energy. And that takes courage because the only way to make a complementation is to get rid of the author that’s polarizing it and that’s the egotistical self. You’ve got to give that self-up. And that’s all that impossible because when the mind thinks that it is that self, it says this suicide. This is death. And of course we were told he who would gain his life, has to lose it. It’s as simple as that. It’s as difficult as that. And what makes it more difficult is that we don’t want to even think about that. And anytime that realization begins to come up into us we defend against it by creating oblique labyrinths of ossification. So, we don’t think about it. We don’t have to. And this, of course, when it happens in a polarized element creates not on the barriers that we thought we were making, but the polarity barriers that we didn’t even know we were making. And so, we sew ourselves into an impossible bind, which gets worse and worse. And every move that we make exacerbates the issue. And that exacerbation the ego thinks that it is more and more trapped. And more and more the only thing that it wants to do desperately is to get out of the situation. Anything to get out of it. And eventually even death is all right, because one fears that something even worse than that is happening. Transpiring. This is a form of madness. Of divine madness.

He writes in chapter 110 Queequeg in His Coffin,
Poor Queequeg. When the ship was about half disemboweled you should have seen stooped over the hatchway and peered down upon him there, where stripped to his ruined drawers the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness and slime like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well or an ice house it somehow proved to him, poor pagan. Where strange to say for all the heat of his sweatings he caught a terrible chill, which lapsed into a fever. And it lasts after some days suffering laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the doors of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few long lingering days till they’re seen but little left of him but his frame and tattooing.

This is like Odysseus in the Odyssey having lost his men, having had his ship smashed. And the only thing he’s left with is the keel and the master of the ship.

END OF SIDE ONE

And the only way to seal him together as by as arms. Queequeg is left with only his skeleton in his tattoo skin. The mystical interior exteriorized and the natural interior now exteriorized. The bones and the tattooing.

But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek bones grew sharper. His eyes nevertheless seemed growing fuller and fuller, and they became a strange softness of luster. And mildly but deeply looking out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immoral health in him, which could not die or be weakened. And like circles on the water which as they grew fainter expand. So, his eyes seemed rounding and rounding like the rings of eternity.

That is an extraordinary image because of the prejudice of the materialistic empirical English-speaking world was founded upon an image that the eyes were windows of the soul. This is an image in John Locke on which most governments at that time were founded. It’s an image which reoccurs again and again in the empirical materialistic philosophers. The notion in that, that the eyes of the windows of the soul is that the soul is trapped inside or that its place is inside. And that whatever’s in the exterior world comes in to the soul through the senses. This is the epitome of the trap of the ego, because then the ego says, and I control the senses. I’ve got the patent and the copyright in the crossroads of this world, and you better pay attention to me. This is the way it tyrannizes. It blackmails us in just this way. You got to go through me.

Ahab is a very interesting cosmology. He thinks that the world out there is in fact nothing but images of his own mind. He’s thought this through long bitter nights and years. And he’s convinced that all of this is just some fantastic psychological drama going on in his mind. And that’s what, what is real out there doesn’t have any color. It doesn’t have any shape or form. It’s only his own mind that puts it there. And that’s why Moby Dick terrifies him so much because he’s a white whale. He’s like a blank nothingness that reminds Ahab that there might be something outside of his mind that he can’t control. And it’s got a hold of him. And what bothers Ahab is that this cosmological realization is that what in the world would there be outside of the mind that would be more real than the mind. It must be nothingness itself. Moby Dick is a negative space in the world haunting the oceans of this planet and is the very image of nothingness. He’s a negativity. He’s on a not. And Ahab fears that he’s going to be pulled into that not and sucked out of his mind. Sucked out of his world. Sucked out of his soul into oblivion. Death is nothing compared to that threat. And he’s hoping that there must be some magical ritual, some arcane religion deeper than the traditional religions of men that will allow him to puncture that negative with his power. Hasn’t it touched him with its power. He must have some way then to touch it with his power and thus kill it. Or as we would say, short it out. And this is what drives him is that he’s got to do this because the anxiety level is rising oceanically and he’s running out of time. And he’s realizing that his mind by now is so wrapped up in this, that he can think of nothing else. That he is completely caught in this hypnotized choreography of his own mind, his own fearfulness. And he has to pull the plug on nothingness before it sucks him in and swallows him. And we think right away of the Biblical story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale. And that’s in Moby Dick too.

But someone who’s immune to this is Queequeg. “And his eyes grow softer and softer and fainter and fainter. Rounding and rounding like the rings of eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of the waning savage.” You see he’s primordial man. He’s man before any civilization has touched him. [inaudible] dying.
And saw as strange things in his face is ever any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing near of death which alike levels all. Alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell. So that, let us say it again, no dying [inaudible] or Greek had higher or holier thoughts than those whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg as he quietly lay in his swing hammock in the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest. And the oceans invisible flood tide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven.

But Ishmael is a blood brother of Queequeg and he’s a blood brother of the sea. And he’s the only one that can see this. And as he see this, he recognizes more and more that he has been abstracted from this horrific involvement so that he becomes increasingly omniscient. He hears conversations that there’s no way physically he could hear. And Melville just puts it in without saying anything. One of the world’s great authors. There was conversations between Ahab and Starbuck. Or between Stubb and somebody else that Ishmael is nowhere near, but he hears those conversations exactly. And he hears them in a way in which the reader realizes that he has been absorbed into this omniscient narrator who has now exchanged himself with Queequeg and been initiated into the totality of the community of the planet, of the sea.
Near the end. And right at the very end of Moby Dick is a three-day chase. A passion story of death, of disfigurement, of madness, of suffering. And just before it is a short section called The Symphony, the music of the spheres. And Melville who has been there, anybody who’s been there can see it here. Here’s how he begins it.
It was a clear steel blue day. The firmament of air and sea were hardly separable in that all pervading azure. Only the pencive air was transparently pure and soft with a woman’s look. The robust and man-like sea heaved with long strong lingering swells as Sampson’s chest might have in his sleep. Hither and further on high glided the snow-white wings of small unspeckled birds.
The Holy spirit you see. And they were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air. Sophia has come for one last look at mankind before she withdraws and leaves them to power awakened without any softening whatsoever. The sleeping sea. But more than the sleeping, see it’s demonic negative self in Moby Dick who no longer is hunted, but now as hunting the men.

“But to and fro in the deeps far down in the bottomless blue rushed, mighty leviathans, swordfish and sharks. And these were the strong troubled murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.” He’s talked in Moby Dick about how the ocean is really mysterious. And how Moby Dick has been cited simultaneously at opposite ends of the Earth from time to time. And how maybe the ocean goes down completely and their subterranean passages through the Earth connecting. And how Moby Dick might be able to plunge and go through the Earth and miraculously appear in the same day on opposite sides of the world. Because he’s by now become the phantasmal projected and transferred demonic self of every unknown.

So, The Symphony ends, Starbuck and Ahab the first mate. Starbuck is almost like star struck. “Oh, my captain, my captain. Noble soul. Grand old heart. After all, why should anyone give chase to that hated fish? Away with me. Let us fly from these deadly waters. Let us go home. The day is beautiful.” The external world is absolutely paradoxical, but the tone of panic and fear is rising in the day as Sophia leaves the scene. The feminine graces leaves the sea. And the oceans beginning to wake up. And Starbuck who’s attentive to this like a sensitive barometer is saying, it’s not too late. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get out.
“Away. Let us away this instant. Let me alter the course. How cheerfully, how hilariously, oh, my captain, we should bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again. I think sir, they might have some mild blue days even as this in Nantucket.” But Ahab does not move. He’s long burnt out. He has no mobility left. “They have, they have, I have seen them some summer days in the morning about this time. Yes, it is new naptime. The boy vivaciously wakes up in bed and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me. How I am abroad upon the deep. Yet will come back to dance him again.” He’s talking of his own son and his own wife.

Tis Mary, tis Mary herself. She promised that my boy every morning should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail. Yes, yes, no more. It is done. We head for Nantucket. Come my captain study out the coarse and let us away. [inaudible] the boy’s face from the window, the hand on the hill.
But Ahab’s glance was averted. You see, he can’t see the real world anymore at all. He’s become completely wraith like. He sees only the archetypal energy electrocuting him. He has fallen through the real world into this abyss where the only real thing now is this collective unconscious energy unleashed out of its context. Like a snow hill in the air, it’s no longer in the sea. It’s like this spirit spout that’s risen out of the sea.

He ends it,
Sleep aye and rust amid greenness at last years [inaudible] flung down and left in the half-cut [inaudible] Starbuck, but blanched to a corpse’s hew with despair the mate had stolen away. Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over the other side but started at two reflected fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionless leaning over the same rail.
This is Zoroastrian priest whom he imported secretly on the voyage to make sure that the consecration of these pagan rituals was just right. This fire blood ritual to baptize the harpoons so as to be able to stab nothingness and short circuit.


And then the chase begins the first day.
All sail being set. He now cast loose the lifeline reserved for swaying him to the main royal masthead. In a few moments they were hoisting him thither when but two thirds of the way aloft while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main top sail and the top Gallant sail, he raised a gull like cry in the air. That lonely solitary bleeding [inaudible] cry. Thar she blows. Thar she blows. The hump like a snow hill it is Moby Dick.
And then like some glacial tragedy the whole thing just moves with slow and [inaudible] force and its [inaudible] again, the complete population of the Pequod.

This is the end of Moby Dick, “From the ship’s bowels nearly all the semen now hung inactive. Hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons mechanically retained in their hands just as they darted from the various employments. All their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale.” You see, they’ve all been co-opted into this electrocuting archetypal seizure. And it’s happened in history many times. It’s happened in our time in living memory. They couldn’t see the real world anymore. All they could see were these phantasmal images haunting them.

Which from side to side, strangely vibrating his predestinating head sent a broad band of over spreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution. Swift vengeance. Eternal malice were in his whole aspect. In spite of all that mortal men could do the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ships starboard bow till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces like dislodge trucks. The heads of the harpooners shook aloft on their bowlike necks. Through the breach they heard the waters pour as mountain torrents drown a flume. The ship a hearse. The second hearse, cried Ahab from the boat. Its wood could only be American. Diving beneath the settling ship the rail ran quivering along its keel, but turning underwater swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow and within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where for a time he laid quiescent. I turn my body from the sun. What [inaudible] attached to go. Let me hear thy hammer. Oh, you three unsurrendered spires of mine, thou uncracked keel, and only God bullied hall. Thou firm deck and mighty helm. Haughty pole pointing prow. Death glorious ship must ye then perish. And without me. Am I cut off from the last fount pride of Minas shipwrecked captains. Oh, lonely death. Oh, lonely life. Oh, now I feel my top most greatness lies in my top most grief. Oh, ho from all your farthest bounds poor ye now in. You bold billows of my whole foregone life. And top this one piled comber of my life. Towards thee I roll thou. All destroying but unconquering whale to the last I grapple with thee. From hell’s heart I stab at thee. For hates sake I spit my last breath that thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool. And since neither can be mine let me then tow to pieces while still chasing thee. Though tied to thee though damaged whale. Thus, I give up the spear.

The harpoon was darted.
The stricken whale flew forward with igniting velocity. The line ran through the groove. Ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it. He did clear it, but the flying turn caught him round the neck and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bow string their victim he was shot out of the boat. Eire the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, heavy eye splice in the ropes final and flew in out of the stark empty tub knocked down an oarsman and smiting the sea disappeared into its depths for an instant. The tranced boats crew stood still then turned. The ship! Great God, where is the ship? Soon they through dim bewildered mediums saw her side lying fading phantom as in the gaseous, Fata Morgana. Only the upper most mass out of the water while fixed by infatuation or fidelity or fate to their once lofty purchase the pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea.
Three and three masts.

And now concentric circles sees the lone boat itself and all its crew and each floating or every lance pole. And spinning animate and inanimate all round and round in one vortex carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight. But as the last [inaudible] intermixedly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the masthead,
the main mast
leaving a few inches of erect spar yet visible together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly un-dilated with ironical coincidence things over the destroying billows, they almost touch. At that instant a red arm and a hammer [inaudible] backwards, uplifted in the open air and an act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky Tomahawk that tauntingly had followed the main truck downwards from its natural home among the stars pecking at the flag an accommodating test to go there, this bird now chance to intercept it’s broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood and simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerge savage beneath in his death grasp kept his hammer frozen there. And so, the bird of heaven with arc angelic shrieks and its imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab went down with his ship, which like Satan would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her and helmeted herself with it. Now, small follow-ups flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf, a sudden white surf beat against steep sides then all collapsed. And the great shroud of the sea rolled on it as it had rolled 5,000 years ago.

And out of that the coffin of Queequeg is the only thing, which is watertight which bobs to the surface. And Ishmael bobs to the surface because he’s Hermetically sealed. He’s been sealed by the grace of the sea. He’s been baptized by the sperm of the whale into the wholeness of the ocean and cannot die. And he floats in the coffin. Not wild-eyed, but someone whose has been told something that is almost impossible to tell. And he sees another ship coming and he says of it. It was a ship Rachel searching for its lost sea members. And they see him floating. “I floated on a soft dirge like main. The unharming sharks they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths. The savage seahawks sailed with sheath beaks.” You see nothing will harm him. “On the second day a sail drew near and near and picked me up at last. It was the devious cruising Rachel that in her retracting search after her missing children only found another orphan.”

It’s unbelievable writing. But more than unbelievable writing, it was a sign that the American consciousness had come to a high watermark of realization. But it come to a realization in the midst of a Pell Mell scramble for exterior wealth. For power. And people read it to try and have an adventure story. And somehow it just wouldn’t be an adventure story. So, they dropped Melville like a hot potato. We didn’t want to hear it.

But Melville couldn’t drop it. You see, because [inaudible]. So, he wrote Pierre and The Ambiguities [Pierre; or, The Ambiguities] and it felt like a lead weight. Nobody bought it. No one would read it. The man is crazy. [inaudible]

And so finally about five years after Moby Dick, he wrote The Confidence Man to have his final say. And of course, was never read in his time. Nobody read it. And so, Melville ceased to be an author. He seized to be read. He seized to be talked to. He bummed around. Finally became a customs inspector for the port of New York. But he couldn’t get rid of it. He couldn’t forget what he had learned. And everyone worried about Melville. About his health because it started to show in him. Not just the lines. Not just the hair turning steel white. But that kind of uncompromising leveling look that seemed to penetrate through people. The actions of life that seemed to make mincemeat out of any kind of ordinary order.

So, they got together money, a lot of friends and family, and they sent Melville to England. And Melville in England, went to Liverpool where at the American Consulate was his good friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne. And we have the surviving letter Hawthorne’s which I’ll read you a portion next week. And he said, Melville literally looked like hell warmed over when he came in, because Hawthorne was very sensitive to dark powers. And he could see that the man was completely consumed by this. And he told Melville, he said the only thing a man like you can do the only place in this world in this time for you to go is you’ve got to go to the Holy Land. You’ve got to go to Jerusalem. You’ve got to go to the core of religious realization because that’s the only place that you can unburden yourself of what has got a hold of you.

And so, Melville took himself to Jerusalem. And he also took himself to the great pyramids at the same time. I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he climbed the great pyramid, and he sat on the very top of it and watched the sunset. And he said, the oceanic rising of anxiety became pure terror after a while because he realized that this was the best that man could do. And it wasn’t anything. It was nothing. It was an exteriorization of the mind. It wouldn’t protect anybody kind of this abyss that’s inside once it’s woke up. It’s of no use at all. And so, he went back to Jerusalem to try to find some religious vision that he could believe in.

And he came back to the United States, took his job at the port of New York. And for 10 years, tried to hammer out some perspective for himself. And he worked in an Epic poem called Clarel. And he finished it on the hundredth anniversary of the signing of The Declaration of Independence, 1876. And no one would touch it. No one would publish it. Because Melville by now had become taboo. Because everyone who was addicted to the external civilization felt uncomfortable around him. He was somebody you couldn’t be around. He had to sleep by himself in a little room. His family, his wife loving him but couldn’t be around him. He was like somebody who was filled with this divine energy that would not go away day or night.

And Clarel is the great epic vision of the Holy land and how it wouldn’t do anything at all. And the realization that there was no Holy land anymore for man. And of course, this is a shattering realization.

And this is the quality of consciousness that was there underneath the surface in the United States a hundred years after The Declaration of Independence. And American culture tried to cover it up and say no, no, no, no. It must be, these are mad people. These are artists. This is nothing to do with the real world. And yet again and again it started to break through because it was volcanic. Because once awakened it doesn’t subside.

So, with our lecture on Melville next week we’ll end a whole era of American history, and we’ll see the beginnings of a profound transformation. And after Melville, the only person that we can go to is William James, because the birth of modern psychology is not a European phenomenon. It’s an American phenomenon. And William James is the very first man to ever write a complete psychology of the human being. His Principles of Psychology and two huge fat volumes are the first time in any language at any civilization that a complete psychological overview of man, including the unknown areas.

And James of course went through all this experience himself just like Melville. Instead of writing Moby Dick or Clarel, he had to get it out some way and he would write The Principles of Psychology. And he would follow it up by his own Pierre and The Ambiguities. That’s when he wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience, but God has innumerable paths. And who says, what path won’t get you there? Who is that that says that?

So, we’ll see all that and it actually happened in this country. And that realization is still alive. That energy is still there, and we ignore it at our peril. Archetypal energies will electric us if we don’t integrate them into our lives. Absolute Bonafide truth.

Well, let’s go gentle into this Los Angeles night.

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