Moby-Dick is About UFOs

On Cormac McCarthy's "Whales and Men"

“When the whales are no more, where is it they will have gone? What is a nothingness so vast as to contain them?”

“If we kill off the whales then all questions of mind will have been answered and we will know once and for all that there is no intelligent life on this planet.”

-Cormac McCarthy

Ishmael does not sign on with any mere whaling ship. The Pequod is a UFO. The ocean’s surface is her night sky. She skims a world she cannot penetrate without being destroyed. If she cannot dive into the watery world below, then she will just have to bring the ocean to her, one whale at a time, the harpoon as her tractor beam, for what is the alien¹ within the UFO if not the ultimate observer, the conceptualizer of the world who longs to become its participant? To that end, the alien abducts, and probes, slices up cattle, and tears up cornfields. Those they abduct are taken and studied, but they are only vessels, middle men. What the alien seeks is that connection in itself.

Enter Ahab.

Ahab doesn’t wish to kill Moby, but to enter into that direct whale connection with the earth; to pull that great whiteness out of the water and find within it a pearl of meaning he can understand. In saying so, I am really only paraphrasing Cormac McCarthy.

“There’s nothing outside of the world except our idea of the world and that’s what makes us alien.”

Of Whales and Men

The above quote is taken from McCarthy’s once legendarily elusive screenplay, Whales and Men. It is now easy to find a pdf online, but once upon a time, and not all that long ago, it could only be read in the Wittliff Collection on the top floor of Alkek Library, lovingly nicknamed The Walrus by the students of Texas State University for its tusk-like pair of pillars, which I know because that just so happens to be my alma mater.

It always seemed weird (fortunate, for me, but strange nonetheless) that my humble school should be the home to the Cormac McCarthy papers. We have never had the best of reputations. In fact, it is often cited as Texas’ premier party school, but that seems dated. College, once a means by which to produce well-rounded human beings, became a jobs program, and now has further devolved into the necessary nexus at the center of a real estate scam that rents faux luxury apartments to young people who float the bill with federal loans that are becoming increasingly impossible to pay back. These places are no longer producing well-rounded human beings. Hell, they are hardly providing jobs. They function as four + year sleep away camps for the children of the fading middle class. One is tempted to invoke Lisa Simpson here in saying the whole damn system is now a party school, but I digress.

The archive is a serious place and I was a slacker undergrad who just wanted to read some unpublished work from one of my (then) favorite writers. I took the elevator up to the seventh floor, turned off my phone as instructed, left my bag behind, and entered with nothing in hand. An archivist provided me with a few sheets of blank paper and a pencil, then asked me what I wanted to see. I uttered something about “the whale manuscript”, my voice all but shaking with reverence. She nodded and went into a back room, returning a few minutes later with several large boxes which she set on the table before me. She then went off to sit in a corner where she could keep an eye on me.

I was intimidated, okay? There were a lot of folders in those boxes and a lot of pages within each folder, and I was like twenty years old. I had no idea how to navigate an archive. Plus I was scared of the archivist in the corner watching me. I moved with an over abundance of caution, and yes, I ended up spending the entire afternoon reading and transcribing what turned out to be a rough draft².

It was quite fascinating to flip through a work in progress and find notes such as “Evil is a manmade creation, like argyle socks and hydro electric dams” penciled into the margins in Cormac’s hand. Once I settled in, I found the whole experience riveting, but, still, I remember thinking after finishing my read through, This would not be a very good movie.

Even the Coen Brothers would have their work cut out for them with this one. There’s almost no narrative. It’s just cetacean pontification. I mean, I’d go see it, of course, but it’s not going to make much money at the box office. Maybe it could work better as a play, or, better yet, be reconstructed into an essay because the screenplay reads, more than anything, like a free-ranging review of Moby-Dick.

The whale about whom John and Guy and the gang talk at such length is not really a whale. It is the whaleness of the whale that above all things concerns them, and as McCarthy writes,

“the whaleness of the whale is not the whale’s idea, but ours—that whale is the whale who strings together universes on the vector of its breathing and I know that I will never know in this world where that whale will have gone when the last whale is hauled from the sea.”

We are profoundly guilty of treating animals as symbols, no doubt about it, but it seems we do need a living, breathing being in order to give the symbol its charge. The dinosaur holds no deep stores of meaning for us, despite its extreme bizarreness as a building-sized lizard, not, at least, in comparison to the whale or the crow. These symbols are charged by living blood.

The whale earns a long entry in Jack Tresidder’s Dictionary of Symbols. The animal has garnered legends worldwide, not only as an image of the colossal in nature, but also as a “womb symbol of generation, most clearly expressed in the biblical story of the prophet Jonah” (224). There are also ties to the moon, especially its dark side, initiation, the underworld, and, of course, Moby-Dick has about as many interpretations as it has readers.

But what would happen to this powerful image if there were no more living whales to tie it to? We might just be finding out. A recent report shows a drastic decrease in whale song off the coast of California in the years following a marine heat wave, particularly among blue whales. The diet of this creature, the largest to ever exist on our planet, is made up almost entirely of krill, an animal particularly vulnerable to increased temperatures. The heat wave might not have killed off the whales directly, but it did eliminate their food source, so the silence of the whales must mean either these whales are too hungry to sing, or else their singing is a form of cooperative hunting, like coyotes calling out to the pack when finding food, and there have simply been no hunts to announce.

McCarthy fixates on the point of ecological destruction, even tying our own fate to the fate of the whale, writing: “I don’t know if the whales can be saved. I don’t know if man can be saved. Ultimately it is a single question.”

He goes on to write that “man and whale are [the] arks of the covenant and the covenant is mind and mind’s true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.” That longing can be felt rather inherently in the song of whales, and perhaps emanates throughout their entire bodies, as Dan Beachy-Quick writes in A Whaler’s Dictionary:

“the [sperm whale’s] spinal cord maintains an astonishing girth for almost the entire length of the whale’s body . . . so, the intelligence of the whale may not be located within its forehead but expressed by its entire material existence. The sperm whale’s motion is likewise its thinking, as if its whole physical being embodied thoughtfulness—as if to dive down were its philosophy, to breach its ethics, to flee its will, to attack its justice” (20).

In us, intelligence is thought to be stayed by the thick bone of the skull. It paces within its cage like a trapped animal, growing agitated, apt to play out its dramas of longing violently, such as in a mad errand to hunt an animal to the edges of the earth in hopes that it will bring some purpose, some meaning, some escape from this thick-skulled prison.

Ahab lost his leg in his first encounter with the white whale and had it replaced with a leg made of whale bone. The man is part whale, and yet he still hunts his prize with a longing that is inextinguishable.

Similarly, the Pequod pursues whales while, herself, being pursued by pirates.

Why hunt whales? Simple. It’s for the same reason the pirates hunt whalers: money. But why hunt The Whale, this image, this idea, that is manifested in Moby Dick?

“The whale lives the way the world lives and the world is our enemy. The world is in league with death and lets in rot…The whale makes no attempt to save anything. No office, no plans, no archives. He has no life elsewhere.”

This both offends our self-importance and invokes our jealousy. The whale is effortlessly enmeshed in the world while we feel ourselves at once above it, and desperately locked outside of it.

“We’ve labeled everything. We’ve even named God, but God doesn’t have a name,” McCarthy writes.

As they say, we have mistaken the map for the territory. Ahab realizes this mistake. The whale bone in his leg is akin to the divine spark in Gnosticsm, that tiny fraction of God that resides within all of us. It gnaws at him and he longs to merge with that feeling fully. We emerged from the ocean, but we have forgotten its language, so long and far have we traveled. We can only gaze upon our old home with longing, but we can no longer dwell there³. Still, it beckons to us, to that divine spark we harbor within. It is our beginning as well as our end. How often is the vision of rising tides used as shorthand for complete ecological catastrophe?

The ocean as alpha and omega.

You cannot find yourself by gazing into its waters. Your reflection is a veneer projected atop miles-deep chaos and void, dive towards it in an attempt at integration and the image disappears. Only slow death awaits underneath.

“Why do we feel so alien in this world? Isn’t it because in a very real sense we are no longer here? Haven’t we moved out? Language, among other things, is a way of containing the world.”

In some ways, it is as if Ahab understands he is a character in a book, that we all are. We project lifeworlds against pure immanence, but what is a lifeworld besides a charmed fiction in which to dwell? The whiteness of the whale is the whiteness of the page beyond the ink in which Ahab is trapped, but it is only in that ink he has his existence. Impossibly, he yearns to escape, to punch through the whiteness at the edges and into the world outside the page, into a fuller reality, even if doing so will destroy him.

Magonia

To bring this back to UFOs we’re going to have to get a little weird.

The popular concept of UFOs as spacecraft containing extraterrestrial lifeforms contradicts the very first letter of the acronym we use to refer to such phenomena: Unidentified. By saying it’s aliens, even if we do not know where they come from, is to identify, it is to make up a fiction in which to contain the unknown.

Let’s take a quick step back and examine alternative possibilities.

Jacques Vallee does exactly this in his book, Passport to Magonia. Vallee catalogs nearly a thousand encounters people reported in what he calls the Century of UFO Landings (1868-1968).

Returning to the reality-as-a-book metaphor for a moment: practically anything can be depicted in a work of fiction, but it must first be transcribed in language. The reader will then decipher this message and it will conjure a certain image which will necessarily be understood in relation to the reader’s past experiences, meaning a single passage can be interpreted in countless ways.

Likewise, an unknown phenomena entering our reality field must be read and interpreted in relation to past experiences. In this way, we sort, categorize, and make sense of our world. The more familiar we become with something, the less we have to analyze it. The territory becomes mapped over, so to speak. A recognizable symbol comes forward to stand in The Thing’s place. The yawning maw of pure immanence is pushed aside. An everyday example might be driving a familiar route, such as the commute to work. Large swaths of it may pass without imprinting much of anything on our memory. Only something new and novel is truly seen, but even this only for a moment. How quick we are to fall upon it with our comparisons, tying it in a neat knot of relations, metabolizing it into something easily digestible within our existing lifeworld, or else banishing it altogether.

The contactee experiences cataloged in the back half of Vallee’s book follow a similar pattern, but on a cultural level. In the early years, they are wide-ranging. The phenomena in the sky are variously described as large birds, blue flames, haystacks, strange balloons, and boats, but as the years pass and the stories accumulate, and influence each other, and become influenced by their representations in media, such as science fiction, the objects are more and more often reported as either saucer- or cigar-shaped.

Vallee works to return a sense of Radical Mystery to the UFO. In doing so, he can come to no ultimate conclusions, but he does make connections that shake up the calcified image of extraterrestrial beings visiting us in their high tech spacecraft. He dips into the ancient past to find similar stories buried within folklore and legend, stories of angels and visiting gods.

One of his most intriguing theories is the similarities he uncovers between stories of encounters with the fae and those told by modern day alien contactees. But before you jump to any conclusions and rejoice that the problem is solved, aliens are just fairies, we must ask ourselves, what are fairies? Did the same process of synthesization not occur amongst the proponents of the Good Folk as has taken place with our UFOs?

But even without asking what entity it is that ultimately hides behind the mask of alien and fairy, we can list a few common attributes. They are seen as superhuman, whether in their beauty, technology, or mental and physical capacities. They behave in ways that make no sense to us. Their priorities and activities are often quite baffling. They seem to hail from a realm outside of our natural world, and we are quite powerless to resist when they get it in their mind to bring us there.

From that perspective, it does not sound all too different from how we must appear to animals, how whalers might appear to a whale. At the same time we, ourselves, are still animals. Like the Pequod chasing while being chased, like Ahab and his whale bone leg, we are severed by contradictions. Some of our behaviors baffle even ourselves. Sometimes it is as if we are involved in an interior civil war: conscious and unconscious, mind and body, angel and ape. Whaler and whale, UFO and ourselves, totally intertwined.

Does this make UFOs some kind of projection or tulpa derived from our own longing to return to the state of nature we understand the whale to be living in, life not at a remove, but life as it is? What is Object Oriented Ontology but the sound of a tractor beam hauling in its prey (OOO)?

The inhabitants onboard slice and probe, squeeze spermaceti between their fingers, try desperately to locate an essence.

A bit of nondual insight might bring some relief to all this tension, such as Gary Snyder’s line about how the “hawk, the swoop, and the hare are one” (92)⁴ but who is going to be the one to suggest Ahab try a bit of zazen? He is overwhelmed by his longing, consumed by the idea that only death can bring the integration he seeks. He believes his and Moby’s mutual destruction will leave behind only one soul and one body to hold it:

“In death a sailor loses all proof of corporeality, and his soul seems to disperse through the whole watery element into which it’s freed. A whale loses all proof of soul, all proof of the immaterial force that through its limbs drove its leviathanic wanderings, and all that remains is body. A sailor drowns and in diving down becomes soul; a whale rises and becomes body. From far away, the waves that crash against the carcass cast a white spray, and a captain sets down in his log, ‘shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!’ For years afterwards, ‘ships shun the place’ so as not to be wrecked by a danger that doesn’t exist. A human ghost haunts because the soul has retained its human guise when no body remains to shape it. A whale haunts because its ghost becomes a solid mountain, and when the mountain sinks, the mark on the map still says ‘mountain’” (302).⁵

[Exit Music]

1. Good question. We will be returning to it later on.

2. I am electing to choose to see this as an act of fate and will be consulting my scribbled, thirteen year old notes rather than seeking out the final draft online.

3. Score one Thomas Wolfe.

4. Snyder, Gary. Earth House Hold. New Directions, 1969.

5. Beachy-Quick, Dan. A Whaler’s Dictionary. Milkweed Editions, 2008.