I have to write an essay and the teacher said we couldn’t write about sex or drugs.
– Overheard in the hallway between classes
OK, now you’re screwed.
In its Infinite, Soul-crushing Wisdom, whether you believe in a Grand Plan or an Accident, the Universe has arranged a concatenation of synchronous events wrapped in a bewildering blizzard of circumstances all stuffed into a context in which you find yourself in a very unhappy situation. You now have to read
Moby-Dick.
Being assigned Moby-Dick is like being Job in the Bible. There you sit on your ash-heap of suffering, covered with academic boils, expressing your displeasure to God in grand Biblical style with gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and don’t forget the whaling and lamentation. You are utterly devastated and you demand an answer to your questions. How can this happen to you? Why do bad things happen to good people? What did you do to deserve this? You’ve been studying hard, taking all kinds of distribution requirements you don’t care about, but keeping your grade-point average at a decent three-point-zero something on the road to getting your urban planning degree. You’re up to your neck in student loans and you’re not sure how you’re going to pay the rent next month, but you’re hanging on. All you want is to get the degree, get out, get a decent job, and get a life!
But now, the dark night of the soul is upon you: Moby-Dick is required to graduate, or it’s the only class that fits your schedule, or it’s the only open class (big surprise!), or you didn’t notice it on the reading list, or there’s been an irreversible computer glitch. And so here you are. You need at least a C in order to move on to your critical Core College Curriculum in marketing or real estate development.
You pick up a used copy of the book. It looks brand new: another surprise! You are shocked to find that it weighs more than your Mickey D’s lunch and abnormal psych text combined. Gamely, after prudently thumbing past Etymology and Extracts, you start in. “Call me Ishmael.” You recognize the first line like coming across an old friend in the middle of a natural disaster. That’s good, isn’t it? Things seem kind of OK. You connect with Ishmael’s weariness of the everyday world and won’t mind going on an ocean cruise with him. He’s like your best friend stuck in the same class reading Moby-Dick with you. It’s a little draggy on the way to New Bedford, but then perks up a bit when Ishmael enjoys brotherly love or something more with a tattooed cannibal. That’s a little strange and interesting, isn’t it?
Around chapter 3 you start thinking of food. It occurs to you that the big game is on TV, or you start to have fantasies about one of the forbidden essay topics. Despite these distractions, you make it all the way through Chapter 31, suffering a bit, but making progress. Though your sails are tattered, you sail on.
But just as you think you might be able to struggle through to the end, POW! You hit chapter 32, Cetology! The chapter is a ridiculous and monotonous catalog of types of whales, oddly declared to be fish by the author despite the wrong kind of tail and the detailed descriptions of mammalian anatomy. Then the most pompous member of your class (“I’m a literature major, not an English major.”) starts listing the zillions of themes in the book: masts, amputations, pulpits, colors, whiteness, reflections, land, ocean, air, and on and on. The word “kitchen” occurs 3 times in the book and “sink” 21 times, although, surprisingly, never “kitchen sink.” Then there are all the signs and symbols – symbols on Queequeg’s skin, she reminds you, which he copies onto his coffin, and symbols on doubloons. Symbols on pyramids and ships. And don’t forget that other symbol in Moby-Dick, the word! There are over 200,000 words, for God’s sake! What’s with all these catalogs, lists, signs, symbols, and freaking words? You’re completely unmasted. There’s just no way. That’s it. Even Spark Notes can’t save you now. What’s to be done?
Your salvation lies in the central theme of Moby-Dick. Of all the themes in that sea beast, only one matters for our purposes. The central theme of the book, the Theme of themes, is that there are no themes. Themelessness. But it doesn’t stop there. While it seems like there are an infinite number of meanings in the many signs and symbols in the book, the book is really about the fact that there is no meaning! Now, you may be confused about this because Herman seems to insist on the importance of meaning in Moby-Dick:
Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
All these things are not without their meanings.
What could be more full of meaning? For the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.
And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.
Melville is using a kind of irony[1] with these statements. It is a form of irony that consists of stating a belief in order to emphasize the opposite belief, expressed to a knowing audience. Irony is also useful if the opposite belief being oppositely emphasized is unbelievable, crazy, or dangerous. You can say you were supporting the original and acceptable position, meanwhile feeling confident that “anyone who has ears to hear” will “get” you. Get it? Having thus safely emphasized your main point, you might risk stating it directly by using plagiarism to make it look like it is someone else saying it, not you. Just transfer the blame to someone else! In this case, Melville blames Macbeth as this passage straight from that same insufferable chapter Cetology shows:
But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.
Contrast with:
MACBETH
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
When Ishmael/Melville/Macbeth says “surely all this is not without meaning,” he really means that indeed it is all without meaning. It’s all meaningless. Do you get my meaning? It signifies nothing. And when Father Mapple says, “And taken with the context, this is full of meaning,” he really means, not only that there is no meaning, but there is no context either. You might try applying that to your academic context and see if there is any meaning in it.
In stating a belief in meaning and meanings, Melville is not only emphasizing the meaninglessness of meaning, but even disbelief in any beliefs. No belief is true. I believe this to be true.
It gets even better (or worse, if you don’t like the direction we’re headed). Moby Dick, the whale, doesn’t exist of course. Nor, in any meaningful way, does Moby-Dick, the book! It’s a book that effectively destroys itself and everything it touches. How can you read a book that doesn’t exist? You can’t.
Let’s be clear about this: Moby-Dick is fiction. What is the one universal truth about all fiction? It’s not true. If you want truth, you have to read non-fiction, don’t you? Unfortunately, it’s not possible to read non-fiction. Let’s take a line from a supposedly non-fiction geometry textbook: “Let a point be a location in space that has no dimensions.” What a “let” that is! All of geometry and trigonometry, not to mention the bridge you crossed to get to school today and the building sitting precariously over your head right now all rest on this crazy-ass assumption of a point, which is? Nothing! Pointlessness! (If there is a point to Moby-Dick, it is also pointlessness.) And we haven’t even started on the really wild ideas of space, dimensions, and time yet.
As soon as you speak, hear or read a single word, it’s fiction, it’s not real. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That is a nearly perfect explanation of how things work, courtesy of John, whoever he was. From the first word “in” you are dealing with the beginning of a huge fiction, for there is only (pick your own fictitious word here) God, or Brahman, or Truth, or Consciousness. Consciousness is, without any words or things – even “consciousness.” Anything more is fiction. Got it?
Don’t quit on me now: Everything is fiction! The book seems to celebrate the ability to have multiple perspectives, but – fooled ya! – it’s really about not having any perspective whatsoever. No perspective, perspectivelessness, aperspectival. What is it that is aperspectival? You. Not the you that you think of as you, but the youless you: youlessness. Reduce everything to nothing, and then empty the nothing of nothingness. Empty everything of everything, including yourself, and then empty the emptiness that’s left. What can you call what’s left? You can’t call it anything, remember? That would be a fiction.
Boom! No religion, no science, no philosophy. No Moby-Dick, no teacher, no student, no school, no self, no other, no planet, no universe, and no you! Only the Void. But wait: as a conceptual thought, the Void is also a fiction:
It cannot be called void or not void,
Or both or neither;
But in order to point it out,
It is called “the Void.”
-Madhyamika Sastra XV.3 (also known as the Sunyavada), by Nagarjuna (The Way of Zen, p. 63)
So no Void either, but let that go; the Void’s a scary thing to lose, if that’s all you’ve got. At least it’s something, isn’t it?
As miserable as things seem to you in your moaning Moby-Dick infected and leprous world, this nihilism seems much, much worse and the world of visible things seems much, much better, no matter how painful it becomes, and even if one of the visible things is Moby-Dick, the source of your current misery. But really, if we’re trying to chase down reality, there’s no real freedom in the world of visible things. There’s no Truth, for God’s sake! Who wants that? Well, most people do, but I don’t see why. Well, yes I do. Most people are crazy. They’re concrete operationalists. They’re materiality-asserting materialists. A world without Moby-Dick or the self is not for everyone. Or not everyone is for it. Or is it for not-anyone?
On the other hand, in the no-Moby-Dick world, there is complete Truth and utter Freedom – and, for a bonus, no Moby-Dick! That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? A Moby-Dickless world. If nothing is real, why take any of it too seriously? Don’t be one of the materialists! The youless you might then even have fun reading a book that doesn’t exist, now that you’re free. You might try reading it as though it is telling you that nothing in it is true: it’s all a dream or a movie – a fiction. Then look up and see if you are not also a fictional character in a fictional movie. Then go have pizza and a cold one.
If you think this is all a kind of reverse psychology to get you to read Moby-Dick, forget it. I never use reverse psychology and I recommend that you never use it either. Heck, didn’t I just say there isn’t any Moby-Dick nor any “you” to read it? Besides, two bad things can happen if you use reverse psychology: people will either do what you want or they will do what you don’t want. But what we really want them to do is to do what they want. So do what I want and don’t use reverse psychology.
As to what happens at the end of the Moby-Dick: spoiler alert! No it’s not a spoiler. There’s nothing to spoil and I already told you there’s no Moby-Dick to have an end or beginning to begin with.
I know you don’t want to go back to that insufferable chapter Cetology, but it is one of the many places that the non-existent Ishmael points to the truth in Moby-Dick, using the word “Leviathanism.” What is Leviathanism? It is anything you believe. Your beliefs are a prison, symbolized by a White Whale. Do you believe there is a book named Moby-Dick? Do you believe you are a parent, child, man, woman, teacher or student? Do you believe you are a human being on a planet spinning through a universe? It all signifies nothing.
In the East, there is an idea called prapancha, which is the tendency of mind to proliferate thoughts, ideas, concepts, and beliefs. Pull one thing out of the Void, and you get two: thing and not-thing, or perhaps a Suessian Thing One and Thing Two. Out of the two come, as they say in the Tao, “the ten thousand things.” In the chapter called The Crotch, Ishmael describes the notched stick that holds the harpoon in readiness. The idea is then used to explain how the chapters of Moby-Dick grew like the branching of a tree: “Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.” But this is also an explanation for the creation of the world: pull any one thing out of the Void, and the rest propagate. Whether from infinite bifurcations, evolution, the branching trunk of a tree, the Big Bang, or, not to be too delicate, crotches themselves.
And though it may seem a logical fallacy or happy contradiction[2] to say so, if the you who doesn’t exist does happen to read a nonexistent Moby-Dick, be sure to look for instances of sex – with self:
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought.
With others:
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the 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-laborers’ 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 up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, – Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; 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.
Or with whales:
Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.
And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely reveled in dalliance and delight.
And while we’re at it, since we’ve already violated the sex proscription, consider the possibility that Melville, like many of his contemporaries and influences, probably did drugs. Indeed, S. T. Coleridge, from whom Melville plagiarized shamelessly, wrote this after an opium dream:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Did you think Melville would skip that kind of voyage? I don’t think so!
So sex and drugs would be fine topics for an essay, if the you that isn’t you has to write one to graduate. May the gods bestow honor upon your head.
[1] I refer you to 2 excellent resources on irony: Toynbee, Polly, The Final Irony, in The Guardian, 6/27/2003, and Winokur, Jon, The Big Book of Irony. When I went to the bookstore to see if I could find a book on irony, the clerk found Winokur’s book in the bookstore computer inventory and was surprised to find it was located in the kids’ section. Even so she couldn’t find it right away. Then, finally pulling it off the shelf, she laughed and said, “I get it! It’s a little book.” Read these two items, and then try to believe anything at all.
[2] “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. (R. W. Emerson, Self-Reliance).” “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass).”