On Whales: Watching Memory, Watching the Future

Volume 1, Issue 4, April 30, 2022.

There was a humpback whale in the street. It was, as I remember, the mid-1970s, and I was a child. Memory claims first that it was in the Cotswold town of Stroud, Gloucestershire, in the West Country of England. A fiberglass simulacrum of this whale rode on a flatbed truck, stopped there in the midday of the high street for us to see—uncanny whale, immense—music and narration issuing from a loudspeaker. It was an exhibit by Greenpeace, or Friends of the Earth, a massive blue stillness that imposed upon the psyche, a Leviathan replica between the shops and houses—Perhaps, it was not in Stroud, but outside what had been the Regal Cinema in Gloucester. I’m not certain, but one could approach this heavy whale. My mother held my hand. She helped my sister and I understand it. And there, beside it, on the truck bed was a white metal harpoon—a real harpoon that might be fired from a cannon into the flesh of a whale. The harpoon was five feet long and looked like an evil missile. It possessed some satanic weight. I remember that the whale was accompanied by an exhibit of photographs of bloody killings and the processing of carcasses on factory ships.

There was another exhibit that I did not see. By the time of the Save the Whales campaigns of the mid-70s, three formaldehyde-preserved whale carcasses had been touring the UK on custom built trucks for more than 20 years—attractions that exerted a perverse fascination. People paid to climb inside the whale. They crawled through the eviscerated bodies of these decaying creatures named Jonah, Goliath, and Hercules; grotesque advertisements for remorseless northern whaling¹. Looking at photographs, I am put in mind of the vision of the mariner Anarcharsis seeing the Olympians in Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis “Immobile every one, they were staring fixedly into he tormented sky, frozen in a horrible despair. ‘Corpses!’ he sobbed. ‘Corpses the size of mountains!’”²

Soon afterwards, my family moved to the Isle of Wight, off the South coast of England. One of the places we loved to visit was an amusement park called Blackgang Chine, evocative of the smuggling past (and present) of the island. The park consolidated in the 1840s around the exhibit of a whale skeleton—a fin whale—about 90 feet long that had beached along the coast, toward the Needles Lighthouse. One could walk between the great bleached ribs, and beneath the vertebrae along the tail. “How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton,” (Melville, Moby Dick, p. 405)³. I was too young for such thoughts. There was also a concrete whale (or perhaps it was still more fiberglass?) to walk through and play Jonah, with synthesized loops of whale song emitting from speakers in the red-painted stomach. These whales were like Melville’s account of “A Bower in the Arsacides,” Chapter 102 of Moby Dick, the whale corpse as temple, now gift shop.

The walk-through whale was not far from an exhibit called ‘The Mouth of Hell’ (est. 1972), a satanic head with a small hole to crawl through, a trial to test a child’s readiness for Hell, or Heaven. The hole reeked of urine. There was a fiberglass priest one could sit with, if things didn’t work out. With its life-sized model dinosaurs (the 1972 fiberglass dinosaurs of my childhood have been replaced with animatronics), cowboy saloon and old west street, Blackgang Chine was a low-budget anticipation of Michael Crichton’s greatest hits. Many years have passed, but the memories of these childhood whales, surfacing in the street or reified as cosmogonic and moral images are insistent. For most of us, it is not easy to see whales in open water. I was in my forties when I saw beautiful humpbacks off the Nā Pali Coast of Kaua’i, along the Hawaiian archipelago—Breaking the waves—There was the sublime.

D. H. Lawrence began work on the first (re)appraisal of the then-obscure Herman Melville—and of Moby Dick—in 1917, when he lived in Cornwall. Interruptions, revisions, and Lawrence’s own tempestuous being meant that he completed the final revisions in 1922. The first draft of Studies in Classic American Literature was visionary, the last more pugnacious. As Anthony Burgess says, Lawrence’s analysis “changed America’s attitude to its own literature.”⁴ Frances Wilson writes in her excellent Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence:

“No one before Lawrence had suggested that American literature was anything other than a roughly textured collection of adventure stories, let alone that these tales might contain their own classics, and Lawrence—with the supreme confidence later shown by F. R. Leavis and Harold Bloom—drew up his own canon.”⁵

By this time, in 1922, Lawrence was in New Mexico, where his ashes are, and where I am now.

Not without his doubts about Melville, Lawrence was still enormously impressed by Moby Dick, the white sperm whale, haunting and “hunted by monomaniacs of the idea.”⁶ With a little reluctance, he admits that Moby Dick is in its flights “almost over the border: psychiatry.”⁷ That ‘almost’ is a pulled punch, a spasm of amazed resentment: Moby Dick is psychiatry, and Lawrence knew it. Yet, Lawrence, that most Freudian of writers, had set himself against Freud, and developed his own esoteric system as a reaction.

The wound to the whale is a wound to the psyche. Lawrence’s esoteric psychology ran in the blood, in embodiment, and it emerged at the time when he was finalizing his polemic in support of Melville. His theories are elucidated in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922)⁸. What Lawrence described as blood-consciousness is not at all an idea of nationalism (which he despised), but his intuition that psychological processes are based in physiology.⁹ The atavistic enigma of the whale spoke to Lawrence of doom. It was an extraordinary, disturbing vision in which he indicts a range of abstract projections from the Neoplatonic and Christian, to the modern European and American at once.

Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The spirit doomed.
The reversion. “Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.”
That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.
The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.
What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood nature.
And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly animal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.
The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the depths of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.
Hot-blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea.¹⁰

One finds Lawrence’s admiration of Melville intact in “Whales Weep Not!” published posthumously in Last Poems (1933). This beautiful poem begins: “They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains / the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.” The third and fourth stanzas are:

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale’s fathomless
body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.¹¹

And surely this is taken up by Heathcote Williams in a section of his epic Whale Nation:

Mutual attraction is an elaborate, thoughtful process:
In whales the male member is erected voluntarily,
Unsheathed from within deep abdominal folds,
Erected, and then collapsed and concealed again, by an act of
will—
Unlike in man,
Where it has an unseasonal, disconnected life of its own.
…And the Blue whale’s penis is nine feet long,
Which may require additional self-control.

The two whales draw closer,
Fanning each other,
Then stroking each other with their pectoral fins.
Giant pink genital lips roll back underneath the water.
They join forces. Embrace.
Mating face to face, like man.

Stirring their huge tail-flukes,
Their heads emerge slowly above the water.
The clutch each other, their long flippers around each other,
The accordion pleats of their grooved bellies interleave,
They move their flukes backwards and forwards beneath them,
Their bodies are pressed closer and closer,
As they drive themselves upwards,
Rising out of the sea,
Out of the shimmering green shadows below,
Into the exhilarating glare of the sky.
With a last movement,
Powerfully churning their flukes in unison, fifty feet below,
They propel themselves upwards,
Gallons of water sluicing down their sides,
They both jump clear,
Held together in mid-air, for their massive climax.¹²

Heathcote Williams’ Whale Nation was published in 1988, and a filmed production of the poem—the book is lavish with photographs—was broadcast by the BBC. It is one of the most extraordinary works of art of the 1980s and powerfully influential in terms of drawing attention to the beauty and plight of threatened whales. Ted Hughes, whose shamanic gifts for describing the environment are themselves legendary, said of it: “It’s a breakthrough of some sort—that cosmic scope and arena, and that remorseless deployment of poetry and fact, and the overall beauty of it…I really treasure it.”¹³ In 1989, Whale Nation—with Moby Dick—featured in the promotional video for singer and animal rights advocate Morrissey’s “Interesting Drug” along with other anti-cruelty, and anti-fur trade imagery. A schoolboy places it on top of Melville, advancing the canon with it, as it were. Williams’ work has reach and profundity. He applied his gifts to raising consciousness about elephants (Sacred Elephant, 1989), dolphins (Falling for a Dolphin, 1991), dodos, and bees (The Last Dodo and Dreams of Flying, 2016), as well as following up on J. G. Ballard’s apocalyptic vision of “autogeddon” in Crash (1973) with his own Autogeddon (1992).

Williams describes the horrors of industrial-scale whaling, the explosive harpoon tips, the hinged barbs detonating into the flesh, the twenty minutes of suffocation, and the secondary harpoon with its air line to inflate the body with compressed gas, keeping it afloat while it is drawn to the ramp of the whaling ship, the men climbing on the carcass with spiked boots, the stripping, flaying, boiling—all the machineries of murder. We are given the commercial products derived from the whale, from the trivial and cosmetic, to oils for arms manufacture. Like Melville and Lawrence, Williams makes eloquent the imprint of whales upon the psyche. Regarding the Rorqual whale—the kind exhibited as a corpse on a touring truck—he describes:

Memories of loss;
Memories of ideal love;
Memories of meetings…

For the Rorqual whales,
Into whose mouths fourteen people could be placed with
headroom,
Hold meetings,
In certain places, set aside, near the breeding lagoons.
Evenly spaced, in a watery stadium,
They stand, vertically, like megaliths.
A third of their bodies above the surface,
Rhythmically threshing the water beneath them;
Breathing in unison;
Cliffs of flesh, their heads quite still,
Talking in ultrasound,
Followed by long, superhuman silences
As if in a collective reverie; their brains off-line, dating their
programmes;
Their brains six times the size of man’s,
With a large area of silent partial and frontal lobe,
Like a man’s,
For assessing the past
And forecasting the future.¹⁴

And what can we say of memories and the future?

We cannot doubt that the seas and oceans are in crisis, and that this is a result of our wanton exploitation and pollution, and that this is at least as threatening as the loss of forestry.

An essay that I have returned to often in my teaching is George Orwell’s “Inside the Whale” (1940). Ostensibly, the essay concerns Orwell’s meeting with Henry Miller in Paris, 1936, after reading Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and en route to Spain to fight against Franco’s Nationalist insurgency—the conflict where Orwell was hit in throat by a sniper’s bullet in 1937, and where he may have contracted the tuberculosis that ended his life in 1950. Orwell uses the metaphor of being inside the whale to stand for complacency, or the laissez-faire acceptance he sees in Henry Miller. However brilliant he might find him, Orwell’s conscientiousness is pricked by Miller’s acceptance of what he sees as the nightmares of the century. Here is what Orwell says, and here we might think of the people who paid to climb through the bodies of those dead whales:

Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco’s pictures always look as though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find something peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a ‘visceral prison’. Miller retorts that, on the contrary, there are many worse things than being swallowed by whales and the passage [Miller’s comparison of Anaïs Nin’s introversion to Jonah inside the whale] makes it clear that he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is touching upon what is probably a very widespread fantasy. […] For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale’s own movements would probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.¹⁵

We have come to it, then: just short of death, but at the unsurpassable height of irresponsibility. Having paid our way inside the whale, do we have the imagination or the will to escape?

For the moment, I leave you with the filmed version Heathcote Williams’ poem.

Thank you for reading. I hope this gives you some ideas.
James Reich

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35891577

2. Ray, Jean. Malpertuis. Iain White (trans.). London, UK: @las Press 1998, p. 19

3. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Oxford, UK: 2008.

4. Burgess, Anthony. Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge, UK: Galileo Publishers, 2019 p. 86

5. Wilson, Francis. Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021 p. 121

6. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York, NY: Viking, 1971 p. 160

7. ibid. p. 146

8. Lawrence, D. H. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Bruce Steele (ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014

9. From this, attempts have been made to align him with Wilhelm Reich, with mixed results. Reich certainly read some Lawrence.

10. Studies in Classic American Literature p. 160

11. Lawrence, D. H. “Whales Weep Not!” In Complete Poems. London, UK: Penguin, 1993 pp. 694-695

12. Williams, Heathcote. Whale Nation. New York, NY: Harmony Books pp. 40-42

13. ibid. Back matter.

14. ibid. pp. 22-23

15. Orwell, George. “Inside the Whale” pp. 95-140 In All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays. New York, NY: Mariner p. 132