Whales in the News

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; yes, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

-- Melville, Moby-Dick (Chapter 87: "The Grand Armada")

Zachary Williams, 9, a visitor on Sunday who claimed his father has been “obsessed” with the whales, seemed unimpressed. “I could be watching this on TV right now,” he said.

Courtney Williams, 11, Zachary’s sister, conceded that she might have made other plans for the day: “I could be shopping at the mall and getting my nails done.”

But their father, Greg Williams, 43, said, “They don’t know yet how cool this is. I told them it may seem boring now, but 20 years down the road, they’ll be able to say, ‘I saw the whales.’”

-- New York Times, 21 May 2007

Ishmael's meditation is prompted by the vision at the inner sanctum of The Grand Armada, a pod of whales by which the whale hunters have been encircled. The inner ring consists of what Ishmael calls "the women and children of this routed host," and the strange tranquility of the scene, amidst the carnage of the whale hunt, inspires a kind of wonder in the whaleman; and the chapter, placed as it is amidst the carnage of the novel, inspires a similar feeling in the reader.

Ishmael says, "Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond," and as they gaze into the pool they are themselves enchanted, stunned into an entirely unprofitable state of inaction. The whales approach the boat as if unafraid, entering into a relation uncommonly found between whales and whalers. Ishmael wonders at the causes of this domesticity, and records the unusual interaction of predator with prey:

Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles. At any rate- though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive- spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales- now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake- evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffing round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.

It is a rare moment in the novel, and in the "fishery" at large, when a whaleman refrains from "darting it." Indeed, a few chapters later, the second mate Stubb will abandon a human being overboard before giving up the chase. To the black deckhand Pip, who will, against explicit instructions, jump from the boat and be left behind, Stubb offers a business-minded warning:

Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command "Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

Among other things, Moby-Dick is an extended meditation on this "interference." In another scene, Melville turns himself up to eleven to paint a most horrifying picture of American capitalism, one which threatens to devour everything in its path, and, in the process, burn itself up from the inside. The chapter is called "The Try-Works," and the action is the burning of the body of the whale, boiling it down into oil. The scene condenses the multiple forms of violence in the novel into a single, all-consuming explosion, right in the center of the ship, which plows on indifferently into the “blackness." Before the fire dance the "Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers":

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

To emphasize the omnivorous consumption of the whale-ship, and the potentially autocannibalistic nature of imperial capitalism, Ishmael points that the whale burns by his own fuel, over a fire fed with the same body that boils in the pot:

Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

The body of the whale suffers the violence of the profit principle. Both pre- and post-mortem, the body is slashed and torn, dismembered and ultimately distilled to a liquid "to fill men's lamp feeders." I think of all this today, as currently dozens of human bodies a day are scorched and destroyed, and barrels of human blood poured into the desert for something that at least has something to do with the price of oil, because once again we are reminded of the blood behind the commodity by the wounds of a whale. For the second time in recent months, wayward whales have wandered up river: first, a lone whale in the East River, lingering near that putrid, festering wound in Long Island called the Gowanus Canal; and now, a cow and calf -- the women and children of a routed host -- ninety miles off course, swimming in the "fresh" water of the Sacramento River. These whales are wounded, gashed by propeller blades, which may have had something to do with their disorientation. Nobody knows, of course, what these whales may be thinking:

“We don’t know why they came up the river, or why they are moving down,” Ms. Fees said. She later added, “As you can see, they are making their own decisions, and we are just trying to keep up with them.”

Ishmael, in the course of his cetological investigations, speculates about the strange and unpredictable movements of traumatized whales:

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.

The whale is thus beset by two problems: the men who hunt her, and her eyes which do not allow her to see like a man. The whale, confronted with mankind -- that species, "Earthlings," that Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim called "the terrors of the Universe" -- is subject to "queer frights," a "helpless perplexity of volition," and thus "extraordinary vacillations of movement." The Grand Armada strikes wonder in the whalemen because they are not flailing in terror, they are not simply acting the prey to the predator, the product to the consumer. For a brief moment, these whales who sniff and touch the boats, who sort of look at but really look just beyond the men who look at them, force these men to see them as whales, not product, as awe-inspiring, inappropriable otherness, the secret of secrecy itself. This kind of wonder is often inspired by the appearance of the animal in our paths. In Michael Mann's incredible 2004 film Collateral, the entire absurd and bloody human project seems to come to a halt as a coyote, presumably chased from his habitat by human encroachment, encroaches on the human, crossing in front of the cab, which carries inside it a contract killer, and forcing its driver to slam on the brakes. In her poem "The Moose," Elizabeth Bishop distills what I think is the essence of these strange encounters:

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

But, as with The Grand Armada, this sensation is fleeting, transitory -- almost to the point of nonexistence. The bus drives on:

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

The animal out of place reminds us that it is really we who are out of place. The wounded body of the whale is the emblem of the wound we inflict on the world. And like the acrid smell of gasoline, the smell of the burning whale is horrifying because it is human. Like the mass burning of battle dead, "it is an argument for the pit."

I'll leave off with one last example of the otherworldly entrance of the animal into our world -- a fine poem by a regular reader, which surely will be forthcoming in a far more reputable publication than this one. The subject of the poem is the discovery in China, a year or two ago, of a fossilized winged dinosaur, which our poet rightly calls, the "Dinobird":

Mei long

1.

twenty inches of sleeping death
the dinobird belonged to
the Liaoning province
before it was empired
belonged
on the day it was burned

head under wing, a
goose spine in full repose
the figure wrought
persistent design
amid tumbling ashy folds

this piece to coal
this piece to bone

today the bird was found

2.

You ask me how it felt to uncover
the fantastic sleeping bird.

A great white shark
circled my boat once.

I could not shut my eyes.