In the novel Moby Dick, as the ship Pequod got closer to the seas where the white whale was known to haunt, things got strange. Very strange. It was a night of corpusants or St. Elmo’s fire. According to Professor Google, that is a lightning charge surrounded by an ionization of the surrounding atmosphere. The three tall masts of the ship were hit by lightning and were “silently burning in that sulphurous, air like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.” What an incredible image!

The men are naturally fearful and for good reason.  Ishmael described the scene as if the book of Daniel from the Bible was transformed to a 19^th century whaling ship:

“To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of the calm, and the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin’ has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.”

Those words of course come from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. King Belshazzar held a great feast where drinks were drunk from vessels looted in the destruction of the First Temple. A hand appeared and wrote those words on the wall. King Belshazzar called wise men to read the writing to him,  but they could not read them. The Queen advised him to call Daniel instead. Daniel reminded King Belshazzar that his father Nebuchadnezzar was thrown down when he became arrogant and until he learned to submit to God. Daniel said Belshazzar failed and his kingdom would be given to the Medes and the Persians. That very night Belshazzar was killed as prophesied. The lesson Belshazzar had to learn was humility. That was the very same lesson Captain Ahab had to learn and also failed.

The pagan harpooneers in particular were wildly affected by the strange candles. For example, “Queequeg tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on this body.”

Ishmael said that on the Pequod, “every soul on her decks was wrapped in a pall.” Starbuck, one of the 3 mates on the ship, slowly saw the face of Stubb’s, another mate, “glimmer into sight,” as “the high tapering flames were beheld with redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor” and “the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.” They were like a trinity in hell.

At the same time, Parsee, who was not a Christian, like Ahab supposedly was, but a Zoroastrian said that at one time he worshipped the clear spirit of clear fire in the sacramental act that so burned him that he was left with a huge gash of fire spent on his face. Ahab had a face scarred by lightning. Ahab said that he knew the Parsee’s

“right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill: and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me…but war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.

Ahab comes from a place of fire and knows what it feels like to have lightning flash through his brain.:

“the lightning flashes though my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling in some stunned ground… Oh, oh,! Yet blindfold Yet I will talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness: but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee… There burned the flames! Oh magnanimous now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother I know not…oh thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all they eternity to whom all they eternity is but time, all they creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, though hermit memorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my fire. Leap! Leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee, would fain be wedded with thee; defyingly I worship thee.”

I confess I don’t know exactly what is going on here, but it seems to me I would not want to worship some clear spirit of foundling fire which my scorched eyes somehow dimly saw. It seems to me that would be worshipping something from hell. Ahab was prepared to do it. Not I.

Starbuck, a good Christian, who hears Ahab say this is fearful for the voyage he is on. He pleads with Ahab to forgo the pursuit of the whale. “God, God is against thee, old man forbear! ‘tis an ill voyage ill begun, ill continued.” Starbuck knows it is madness and sinful. Of course, the pleas go unheard. Ahab cannot end the murderous quest so close to its goal. Starbuck considers mutinously killing Ahab to end it but he does not do it. He wrestles with an angel, but lays down his musket which had been shaking in his hand like a drunkard’s arm. He does not do it even though he thinks “this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him.” Instead Starbuck cries, echoing the words of Christ on the cross, “Great God, where art thou?”

And that is the question. You tell me. That is what the quest is all about. Where is God?

There were many quests on the Pequod. It is like the 8 million stories in the naked city. Everyone has a story and each story is different. So it was on the Pequod.

Perth, the blacksmith was an old man of 60 said Ishmael. Though I don’t consider that so old. At that age he “postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow’s technical called ruin.” Until then he had been a famous artisan with ample work thanks to his reputation for fine work. He owned a house and garden, “embraced a youthful daughter-like, loving wife, and three ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove.” Life was perfect.

Yet “one night under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home and robbed them all of everything.” But this was no ordinary burglar that ruined the lives of the family, it was actually the blacksmith himself. He was drawn on a quest not unlike that of Captain Ahab. Perth was not satisfied with his idyllic life and instead “the houseless, familyless staggered off a vagabond in crape, his every woe unreverenced; his gray head a scorn to flaxen curls.” Perth could not resist the call of the sea; he went a-whaling.” He was almost as mad as Captain Ahab. Why would he do that?

For some reason his perfect life, to Perth seemed like death, so he sold everything, leading his family to ruin, and went to sea.  Melville described Perth’s seduction this way:

“Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunction against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! Bury thyself in a life which, to your equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! Put up thy gravestone, too within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee.

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.”

 

Perth left his perfect wife an d family only because he wanted more. Why? What drove him to do that? But how many of us have done the same thing? And his family went a dying! He let his family die and chased after the thousand mermaids that were calling him to sea. One more insane quest.

I actually knew a person who gave up his professional practice, sold his lovely house, bought a sailboat, and eventually abandoned his family so he could sail the south seas. He did not go a-whaling, but he had the same idea and frankly, in my opinion ruined his life and wrecked his family.

It was an obsessive quest. These things actually happen.

I know that not many of us are likely to go a-whaling, so our spouses need not fear the specific fate of Perth’s wife and children.  But there is more than one kind of obsessive quest. The quests need not be religious either to be obsessive. It also need not be “successful,” Some people (not just men either) at the expense of ruining important relationships, excessively seek career advancement, business enhancement, wealth, fame, fortune, the attraction of an alluring partner, and many other pursuits. Ahab is not the only irrational quester. All of us need to be careful out there. One can pursue one’s bliss, but that pursuit may have immense hidden costs. We must be careful out there.

Don’t expect wonders supernatural, and above all don’t make gods of our pursuits.

I am not quite finished with Moby Dick. That might disappoint some of you, but so be it. This book is a classic. It really does repay attention.

Ishmael, the narrator of the novel, pointed out that when a whale is boiled it delivers an awful sight and an even worse smell. Wood is only needed to ignite the flames under the huge pots called “try-works.” “Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.”

But like I said the smell of the burning whale was worse. “…for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funeral pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.” Again he suggests that this religious quest is not a holy one. We must remember as well that the whale in the novel stands in for God.  So in a sense, the whalers have killed god.

The work was done at night when the “wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.” It was indeed the ship for a captain driven by revenge lust. It was the ship in hell.

The “pagan harpooneers” use huge, pronged poles to pitch hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.”

Men stood around watching,

“looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads.  Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. 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 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 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 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.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire ship on the sea. Wrapped for that interval, in darkness, myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul.”

 

Have you ever read a more profound description of hell than that? Do you want to? Can there be any doubt that this was a quest for hell not heaven? Yet the ship finds both heaven and hell. “Whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.”

Yet though Ishmael says in the light of day, the only true light, “those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in the far other, at least gentler relief; the glorious golden sun, the only true lamp—others but liars.”

Maybe this hell at night on the dark sea is only an illusion. Maybe heaven will be found in the morning. Or is heaven an illusion? And in a way it was found. The heaven of Tahiti! I will explain more about this later.

As I said earlier, many members of the Pequod crew were on religious quests. One of those was Pip. An astonishing incident occurred to a little negro boy, Pip, “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew.” After all he was a mere boy and a black one at that. Except that Pip was very bright, we are told.

When one of the men who was scheduled to go  the small whaling boats pursuing  a whale that had  harpooned, sprained his hand little Pip was put in the boat to temporarily replace him. Ordinarily he would have stayed with the mother ship.  He was really too young and small. When the boat approach the harpooned the tail of the whale whipped at the small boat and it came right under Pip’s boat  and he veritably leaped out of the small boat and then was dragged by the whale as it fled. The men had to cut Pip free,  but that meant losing the whale. The first time it happened he got a stern lecture from Stubb, one of the mates. He was reminded that “a whale would sell for 30 times what he would sell for.”  Being a black boy in slavery he was worth a lot less than the whale and next time he would not be saved. Stubb told him men loved money more than their fellow men.

Well, sure enough it happened again and this time Stubb was true to his word and the boat in hot pursuit of the whale did not stop to pick up Pip when he was cut loose, although Stubb thought the next whaling boat would pick him up. There were two behind him. After all the ocean was dead calm that day. Unfortunately, the next two boats did not pick him up.  Alas poor Pip was lost at sea. Eventually the mother ship found and rescued Pip, but by then he had suffered such terrible loneliness in the ocean the experience  damaged his mind. In an astonishing but mysterious passage As Ishmael described it this way:

“from that day the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

What is God doing with his foot on the treadle of a loom?  What is miser-merman wisdom? This abandonment of Pip presaged another abandonment later—that of Ishmael himself.  We will talk about that later. When one feels abandoned by fellows or God, or worse both, one believes one’s God is “indifferent” and madness is apt to follow. I think frequently slaves felt that God had abandoned them. Can you really blame them?  If he did not abandon them, where was he? He was supposed to be omni-present.

In Moby Dick we come to realize Captain Ahab is mad in his monomaniacal quest.  “He was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end.” Yet there was an amazing chance for him to change course. A chance to turn the quest from the malign to the benign.

An amazing encounter is experienced in the Pacific Ocean when the Pequod, of Nantucket,  captained by a madman meets the Samuel Enderby, of London. The captain of that English ship could not have been more different than Captain Ahab. The English captain lost an arm and leg to Moby Dick. He should have been twice as enraged as Ahab. But he saw the whale as noble. It had a tale “like a marble steeple” he said. The English ship and crew escaped with their lives, but had no thought of revenge. Unlike Ahab the captain of the English ship knew resentment was a poison. He thought Moby Dick doesn’t bite as much as he swallows, and he was lucky to have escaped. At sea, he crossed the white whale twice again but gave him a wide birth. He decided not to fight nature. The opposite of Ahab. The English captain said whales could not really eat humans and told Ahab “what you took for the White Whales malice was only awkwardness.”

So, the English ship returned home filled with all she needed. The captain and crew were content. They saw no need for a mad quest. “He’s best left alone, don’t you think” he asked Ahab. Ahab had a surprising admission. “He is, but he will still be hunted for all that. What is best left alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet.” Sometimes the mad quest attracts.

The English mate gave Ahab a wide birth when he walked around him. He could tell that Ahab’s blood “was at the boiling point!—his pulse makes these planks beat!” So it is with the Ahabs of the world. They are cursed by their quests. The quests drive them mad.

In the novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab persuaded the crew of the ship to join him in the “quenchless feud” seeking revenge against the whale. The whale was “a Sperm whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity” according to Ahab, though there is absolutely no reason to believe that. All the whale had done was to try to defend himself from attack by Ahab and his crew and in the process chewed off one of Ahab’s legs. Yet Ahab convinced the men that there was “great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked.”He persuaded them that  the whale was “so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.” Ahab believed the whale had “intelligent malignity” which he showed over and over again in his assaults. And remember the whale is god! What kind of a god is that?

The narrator, Ishmael described the white whale this way:

“…such seemed the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.

Judge then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on as if at a birth or a bridal.”

 

Ahab was consumed by a mad desire for revenge. As Ishmael described it Ahab was taken over by a unholy hatred:

“…ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness, he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;–Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst  his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

No wonder Ishmael called Ahab’s condition “monomania.” That is precisely what it was. And that made the quest monomaniacal too. After that initial encounter with Moby Dick that left Ahab with an ivory leg, sailing for home with “his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so infusing, made him mad.” That is where the thirst for vengeance leads—to madness. And this a major theme of the book. Ahab “was intent on an audacious, unmitigable, and supernatural revenge.” As Ishmael described Ahab,

“Gnawed within and scorched without, with the fixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of brutes.”

What he sought was “monomaniac revenge.” The whale was in his eyes “the gliding great demon of the seas of life.” What turned a religious quest into a religious evil quest was Ahab’s monomania. By ignoring everything else the quest became evil. And that is true of all quests. If they are pursued with monomaniacal passion, the quest becomes evil, whether it is a pursuit of money, love, prestige, golf, causes such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, a life without taxes, or, even, God. Any quest can become evil. Such causes can drag the innocent and the guilty to their doom.

If a person refuses to believe a cop no matter how credible his claims that he is innocent, or if a person follows his leader to Capitol Hill to rampage Congress to protest a claim that an election has been stolen no matter how much evidence to the contrary, the beliefs have gone beyond all reason and are maniacal.

The mania makes it evil. When the quest goes beyond all reason it has turned to evil. That is what we learn from Moby Dick and why it is still relevant 150 years after it was written. We learn from Moby Dick that one can lose one’s soul by pursuing God.

That was what Ahab’s religious quest was all about: it was “monomaniac,” and that made it evil.

It used to be said that there are 8 million cities in the Naked City (New York).  That was when New York had 8 million people living there.  They could just as well have said, there are 8 million religious quests in the Naked City and each of them is different. Most of us were brought up to think there was only one. In the small city in which I was raised and still live, this view is still pretty common, but I think many of us now realize that is too narrow a view. There are many religious quests and many of them are worth looking at. But some of them are maniacal, like that of Captain Ahab’s mad pursuit around the world for vengeance on a white whale.

In this blog I want to share some of the more interesting ones that I have found. I am not trying to convert anyone, or persuade them to abandon the one they are on.

This idea of mine, as I have mentioned was inspired by a Religious Studies Professor in the 1970s at the University of Winnipeg. Some of my friends were lucky enough to take that course. I had to be satisfied with hearing a lecture or two on television without an opportunity to ask questions. Now I have decided to go on this quest on my own.  I hope to learn a thing or two. And I hope to share of my thoughts along the way.

Moby Dick, the second book, I have considered on this voyage, actually considered a few different quests.  The one that stuck out was of course the one by its Captain. It was not only his quest, but he actually persuaded the members of his crew to join him, even though it was pretty clear that his quest turned mad.  What makes people follow such a leader like Ahab?  That is a puzzle. Many of us think we have seen such blind allegiance in the United States recently, where people were led to the Capitol in Washington to participate in a rampage, solely because their leader, I would say their spiritual leader, called them to do so.  What makes people heed the call? I think Herman Melville has some important things to say on the subject, and even though the book was written more than 150 years ago, those thoughts can help us understand this phenomenon better. For example, It can help us to understand what happened in Washington on January 6, 2021.

Some of you may think I am seeing things when I say the whale being pursued by Ahab and his crew in the novel Moby Dick is God.  Perhaps you think I have been on the deck of the ship in the hot sun for too long. Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Here is what the narrator of the novel, Ishmael had to say. The men on the voyage are pursuing the white whale, but he  described this as “on the road to heaven.” In fact, if there was any doubt about this, the whale is described as “thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness.”  ?

Ishmael describes the whale in clearly religious terms. He says the head of the whale is “sublime.” He says, in the brow of the whale “this high and mighty and god-like dignity inherent in the brow so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.” Ishmael also says the people of the Orient would have recognized a god in the whale. “Had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts.” In other words just as in the Magi’s account of meeting Jesus,  they fell down and worshipped him, Ishmael says the people of the orient would have worshipped the white whale. They “were now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute.” He says the whale is “both ponderous and profound.”

Yet,  the pursuit of God, at times  becomes a Satanic . How is that possible?  This is to me is the most interesting question  in the novel. What brings about this transformation

It is not clear whether what is being faithfully pursued by the 30 men in the boat is God or the devil.  Ishmael describes the whale rising from the deep and breaching above the surface of the sea this way:

“…this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his colossal claw from the flame of Baltic Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the masthead of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.”

Therefore, it is up to the pursuer whether he or she is pursuing God or Satan. The seekers determine whether they are on a voyage of the damned or a voyage of the saved. I think that is profoundly true. Melville expands upon that in the novel.