Lessnessness in Moby-Dick: The Apophatic Way
Almost all italics are mine.
-Mark
Let’s start with what we know for sure, move to what we don’t know, and then return to what we know, enlightened by our unknowing. What we know is that Melville used a large number of words ending in “less,” lessness,” and “lessly” in Moby-Dick. Here is a partial list:
| dauntlessness endlessness landlessness fearlessness listlessness recklessness spotlessness tearlessness sleeplessness noiselessness breezelessness thoughtlessness joy-childlessness heartlessness passionlessness carelessness hopeless thankless bottomless restless doubtless trackless boundless |
nameless endless cheerless remorseless sashless placelessly speechlessly masterless motionless lifeless landless fatherless senseless needlessly stoneless succourless (empty-handedness) numberless noiseless speechless harbourless lawless |
marketless butterless purposeless measureless quenchless limitless countless eyeless changeless heartless colourless breathless formless homeless wordless fathomless numberless powerless breezeless headless boneless tideless tongueless |
waterless odorless scentless shoreless shoeless spotless life-restless sourceless pauselessly dinnerless tearless houseless familyless seamless cloudless placeless fadeless pointless soulless lipless bodiless voicelessly |
One day my brother brought my attention to The Lee Shore when I hadn’t read Moby-Dick in years. Well, OK, I hadn’t ever read it. So what? Here is a fine passage from that chapter with two of the “lessnessness” words:
But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis! (Italics mine. Reference Melville, one page or another, MLA formatting and all that stuff).
Many of these words are common and might be found in any writing. But some are unusual (familyless), hard to understand (life-restless, joy-childlessness), or just weird (eyeless, lipless, and tongueless). Moreover, some of them are repeated many times making them difficult to regard as an unimportant or incidental aspect of Melville’s intention. What was his intention with Moby-Dick, and how might this “Lessnessness” have helped him realize it?
Here, I believe, is the passage that tells us what Melville was up to. It’s Ahab speaking to Starbuck. What do you think?
“Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. (Italics all mine again. The “unsays” will become more clear later, as will “naught.” Melville this or that pages again. If you need to know, please look it up, Dear Reader. Just type in the phrase and “Moby-Dick” and you (ye?) shall have it. Will it set you free? I don’t know.)
Melville is after truth, which “has no confines.” He wants Ahab, “the prisoner,” freed from the illusory prison we call reality. Truth and freedom are at least identical twins, if not identical. Get one and you get the other. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” As a bonus I might add, “And may the free set others free.” This, though, is a forlorn hope, as Melville knew: “But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.” Give up any idea of setting anyone free. We are all imprisoned! And if you are in prison, you cannot be of any help to any of the other prisoners in the getting of freedom. Get free yourself, and then see if you can be of any use! You’ll discover there is no one to free, and no one to do any freeing.
There are two ways to get at the truth: one is affirmative and the other negative, also known as the cataphatic and the apophatic. The cataphatic is a way of saying the truth in a positive, this-is-it! happy kind of way. These attempts are always failures, but are sometimes glorious and even helpful failures. They are failures because the ineffable (that which cannot be described) cannot be, um, described, and truth is ineffable. It cannot be “effed.” One of my favorite attempts, nonetheless, is by Thomas Merton, who described truth as “the inner and ultimate divine ground beyond all articulated differences.” (Merton used the word “god” instead of truth. Is there a difference you can articulate?) Still, he hints at the impossibility of using affirmative language in describing ultimate truth, diluting his expression with the phrase “beyond all articulated differences.” What do you have then? Truth. What is it? Something that cannot be articulated, something that does not have “differences,” something “as indifferent as his God,” to refer to Moby-Dick again.
Well, what the hell does that leave us with, then, if truth is beyond articulation and distinction? The cataphatic way failing us, we are stuck with the apophatic way, also known by the mystics as the “via negativa.” How does it work? Here’s a nice description that leads you to think it’s a pleasant thing you do with words, rather than a process of flaying the skin off your body like the blubber off a whale: The via negativa resolves all subject/object and self/other dualities in a profound void or a transcendent emptiness. Ahab himself is apophatic when he says truth has no confines.
But calling it “void,” “emptiness,” or “unconfined” immediately creates another duality in the mind, “void” and “not void,” which is no longer true. Therefore, each negation immediately calls for another negation or, to use Ahab’s word, an unsaying.
What now? The Voidless? Emptinesslessness? Awkward, huh? Since each unsaying only recreates the duality which it initially resolved, the unsaying must be repeated over and over again in the vain attempt to annihilate anything that is not true, including the previous unsaying. The unsaying only ceases when the traveler on the negating way gives up in the knowledge there was never any traveler or way in the first place. Surrender and laugh!
Sometimes, apophatic language provokes paradoxical expressions out of a kind of desperation. It slams the literal world against the actual world, which doesn’t exist, and leaves an ironical gap between the two: you are reading this, but there is nothing to read and no one to read it. This makes no logical sense, so you might ask, “How can my mind be opened to understand this, the only truth? It’s so weird!”
I can only answer, “There is no mind to open, and no truth to be learned.
You then say, of course, “If there is no truth to be learned, why do you post these articles on your website?”
To which I reply, “I have not a bit of space nor bits of cyberspace. How could I post any articles?”
Now you’re pretty god-damned mad. “How can you lie to me like that while I’m sitting here reading your stupid article?”
“But how can I tell a lie when I have no voice with which to speak, nor means with which to write?”
You might then reply, “I can’t understand a single thing you’re saying!”
To which I can only respond, “Nor can I understand myself.”
How does all of this relate to you? (Who cares about Moby-Dick?) You think you are this, that, or the other? That you are a person, adult, employee, student, or a sports fan? Of course you do! You always have. Everyone else on the planet believes it too. But one blinding flash of truth from your lonely exile and you’ll ask yourself, “What the hell have I been smoking?” You are not a human being on the planet earth. There is no you and there are no planets. You will no longer say, “I am this,” nor will you say, “I am not this,” nor will you say, “I am both this and not this,” nor will you say, “I am neither this nor not this.” There is only truth, and truth has no confines that can be limited by any such statements, nor anything else.
You are Narcissus gazing into the fountain. The great whaling captain and medieval scholastic Meister Eckhart said, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Everything you see is merely a reflection of yourself in the fountain of consciousness. The self and the universe are inseparable mirror images of nothing. Eckhart restates the truth in his Sermon 87, a riff on the beatitude “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:3). He writes that a poor person is one who wills nothing and knows nothing and has nothing. “Poor in spirit” means having no place for you, the world, god, or truth to abide. Abidelessness. You are not to abide within yourself, outside yourself, above, behind, below, or on one side or the other.
Like Melville, Meister Eckhart is funny too. He says if a flea could reason and intellectually plumb the vast abyss of truth from which it came, truth with all that makes it “truth” wouldn’t satisfy that flea. It wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than nothing. It could only be satisfied by what it willed, knew, and had when it was not. How’s that for apophatic? Eckhart’s also a bad boy, declaring that anyone who clings to outward shows of penance rather than understanding the truth of what he says is an ass.
Ultimately, Truth cannot be stated either in positive or in negative terms, because it cannot be stated. It’s beyond words and words, like the universe, are a prison. You might even say words are the prison. Still, the prison can be escaped. There can be a death of the self after which the no-self is free to wander in the realm of a dream-world, content, free, grateful, and never taking anything seriously again. Your very identity, the various roles you play, man, woman, parent, child, citizen, employee, teacher, student, westerner, easterner, human being, and self, are only costumes veiling you from truth. Once you realize the costumes are not you, you are free to put a costume back on and return to the drama. But now you know the drama need not be taken seriously.
Surrender everywhere and everything for nowhere and nothing. You are profoundly changed in the experience of this nothing when it is realized nowhere. Being nowhere as matter is being everywhere that matters. But it’s not easy. Sometimes, it will seem as though you are staring into hell.
–The Cloud of Unknowing
I guess I should call all this back to Moby-Dick. Melville is saying the exact same thing as all these sages, but he is funny too, and literate, Shakespearean, and Miltonic, and Biblical, and Cervanteic, and Vedantic, and entertaining, and unsanctimonious. And did I say funny?
Ishmael says, “Nothing exists in itself.” This is both literally true: “nothing” actually does exist in itself, and is also metaphysically true: there is no thing that actually exists in any sense that we think of existence or itself. How are you feeling so far?
When Melville uses apophatic language to describe the whale – lipless and tongueless – whether he knew it or not he was using the same language as that great apophatic declaration, the Heart Sutra. In an effort not to leave anything out, or rather, not to leave anything in, it makes an exhaustive attempt to include anything you can think of, including you. All things are of the Void. There is no birth, no death; no right, no wrong; no pure nor impure. In the Void, there are no things, no perceptions, no words, no thoughts. Nor are there eyes, ears, a nose, a tongue, a body, or a mind. Nothing to hear, nothing to smell, nothing to taste, nothing to touch, nothing to know, nothing to not know, nothing to do.
At the heart of the Heart Sutra is “sunyata.” “Sunya” means “empty,” and “ta” is an abstract suffix meaning “ness.” Emptiness. In a nice expression of the perennial philosophy, the sutra says, “the world is Emptiness; Emptiness is the world. Emptiness is precisely the world; the world is precisely Emptiness.” What is the cure for our attachment to things? Emptiness. But then we get attached to emptiness! What is the cure for our attachment to emptiness? Sunyata! First, we must empty the self of all things, including the self. Then we must empty the emptiness that remains of emptiness. Simple?
John Dunne (not that John Donne!) in a great series of talks on Nagarjuna and the Heart Sutra, suggests this summary of the sutra: “No, no, NO, no, no, no, and no.” The well-known Sanskrit apophatic expression in the Upanishads is “neti, neti,” usually translated as “not this, not this,” or “not this, not that” with regard to anything you can sense, feel, label, or think. Nagarjuna helpfully explains, “It is neither Void nor not-Void, but in order to point to it, it is called Void.” Clear? Clear void!
Ahab, in his soliloquy above, says, “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.” Of course there’s naught beyond! Apophatically, there is only Everythinglessness. What did you expect? A celestial choir or the voice of god? But that “Naught!” how it terrifies us: how rich, how pregnant, how empty, how vast, how misunderstood! The very thing we fear is what we are. Sail into the inward sea, look into the internal, infinite abyss of your own non-existence, Narcissus. Fall into the spaceless, timeless void and find the truth. It will set you free.
Shall I conclude? I know you hope so. This is disturbing, no doubt, but much less so than Melville’s book. I have been gentle with you, citing the gentlest of sages. They love you and have nothing in mind but your well-being.
What we know: “lessness” is used frequently in Moby-Dick.
What we don’t know: we don’t know anything. “Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.” What, if anything, is left after the dream of “something” ends? It can only be stated apophatically, as an “unknowing.” Once all things are annihilated, there is nothing to know and no one to know it – and there never was. “Brahman (Truth) only is real,” said Ramana Maharshi. What is Brahman? It can’t be said, though many have failed in the trying, giving rise to some of the world’s greatest spiritual, liturgical, and poetic writing.
What then, finally, do we once again know after our unknowing? The dream we call “reality” can still be dreamed, but now the hero is awake within it. He has returned from his exile. He lives on land, knowing it is really landlessness. He wears the costume of his “self” knowing there is nothing underneath. There is no actor. Many of the topics that might be discussed in a class on Moby-Dick are really aspects of the dream-world: whales, ships, Native Americans, Christians, injustice, colonialism, cannibals, environmentalism, Ishmael, Ahab, and the “selves” of you and me. In the context of the dream world, they are important, and they are important in Ishmael’s dream world. In the dream world, Ishmael likes some things and doesn’t like others. Having a coherent dream world matters on some level. But taken altogether, the elements of the dream world have left Ishmael unsatisfied and cranky. On the other hand, as Ishmael matures, he has the opportunity to transcend the dream-world. The hero (Ishmael, Ahab, Melville, you?) can “strike through the mask” of his roles, costumes, props, cast, and set. He can know the truth and be liberated, and so can we.