Rejecting Ahab’s obsession
FOUNDED 50 years ago this month, and famous for their Save The Whales campaign, Greenpeace warns of “humanity on code red”, such is our failure to save the world.
DH Lawrence’s influential essay on Herman Melville’s great novel Moby Dick may yet offer us a way back from this perilous brink. Melville’s profound prophetic work is “surpassingly beautiful”. Set in “the oldest of the oceans, the Pacific”, we’re on board the Pequod, with a motley crew “of maniacs hunting down a lonely harmless white whale”. Our monomaniacal captain, Ahab, has an “ivory stump”, where Moby Dick severed his leg in a past encounter.
We experience electrical storms, and the “apparition” of a giant squid, having “innumerable long arms...like a nest of anacondas.” Harpoonist Starbuck finds his boat dragged through a huge “terrified herd” of sperm whales – a “howling Leviathan chaos”. Yet, within this “boiling surge of monsters”, a strange calm prevails. Through “exceedingly transparent” depths the seamen behold a vision – mother whales floating peacefully on their sides, nursing new-born calves in their secret “enchanted pond”.
The “horror of the last fight” approaches. Ahab spies Moby Dick “revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air”. He glides swiftly, with a “gentle joyeousness” and “a mighty mildness of repose”, set in “fleecy greenish foam” with “bright bubbles” dancing by his sides.
The struggle lasts three days before the “infuriated whale” turns and “smites” the vessel – “symbol of this civilised world of ours.” From “the last of the fighting whale-boats” erupts a cry. “The ship! Great God, where is the ship?” In a vortex, even “the smallest chip of The Pequod” disappears.
Sperm whales, in their moment of death, turn their heads towards the sun. Would that we could learn from Lawrence’s interpretation of Melville’s “epic of the sea” with its “esoteric symbolism”, cease our doomed quest to conquer nature, support Sea Shepherd, watch Seaspiracy, and turn once more to the source of life – before it’s too late!
100 years ago, on August 29, 1921, Lawrence tells Robert Mountsier he’s “feeling tired and seedy” in Florence”. He can’t “take in anything”. “Mary Cannan is coming tomorrow” – “cross because we wouldn’t go to Montecarlo”. He’s “writing a story about Venice,” he tells Nelly Morrison, on September 1 but he “smells”. It’s “crotter” [dirt]. Lawrence rejects the “creeping, itching, fingering, inferior being” as lacking “pride or clearness of the soul”.