Moby-Dick is About UFOs

On Cormac McCarthy's "Whales and Men"

A quick announcement: There will be a slight adjustment to Gnostic Pulp’s production schedule. That is, I am taking my foot off the gas just slightly. Posts are returning to an every other week basis. This is to help ensure quality and keep things fun for myself. The majority (2 out of 3) posts will remain available for free, but I do hope to now have the time to bring up the quality of that third Paid Subscriber post. In the past, it has been treated some what as a bonus, just something to show my gratitude for those who support me monetarily, but going forward I’d like to bring it up to full post quality, as a show of thanks for my patrons, and perhaps to ensnare a few more of yous.

Hey, it’s getting expensive out there. Can’t blame a boy for trying.

“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.”