My wife is reading Moby-Dick again. The last time was on our honeymoon—or, more properly, she listened to it while we zoomed all over New England as Ahab and the Pequod got down to business. The plummy narrator’s delivery at the beginning of each chapter—“Mowby-Dick, or, tha Hwale”—remains a private joke in the Russo household.
I do wonder whether I’ve been a little haunted or obsessed by tha Hwale. This sounds paranoid, but it is a gentle thing, a recurring motif in the wallpaper. It’s not just Moby-Dick, which is the first instantiation of the Great American Novel and so casts a bit of a permanent shadow over your humble correspondent; it’s small things. One of the few books for children I really remember is Joan Aiken’s charming Nightbirds Over Nantucket, which has a giant pink whale instead of Melville’s white beast; when we returned from the honeymoon, my wife unprompted decorated our bathroom with balaenid patterns on the shower curtain, shower curtain rings, bath mat, all of which remain there today. The small chamber pots we use for potty-training our children are, inscrutably, shaped like whales, the tail curving up to support the micturating tyke’s back. Our splendid minivan is large, flat-nosed, and gray—what would we call it but the Whale?
I have never actually seen an actual whale, of course, despite having spent nearly my entire life within a hundred miles of the Atlantic coast, and most of it within ten. (Another reason Nic must take me out on his sailboat.) I have, however, seen their bones; I worked in a laboratory at a decommissioned missile silo where my college kept its collection of whale skeletons. It was the only structure large enough for them. (Unbidden comes to mind “that species of extinct giants whose bones fill the Mounds of America.”) We kept a colony of flesh-eating beetles in a hole in a field, happily nourished with chuck steaks, against the day that it was our turn to have a whale carcass—while there is a public organ responsible for allotting beached whales, it is left to the recipient institution to process them, and the job is too horrible and too vast for mere human butchers.
A tour of the whale bones inevitably led to discussions of the 1970 dynamiting of a whale carcass in Oregon, which pretty much rendered the nearby neighborhoods of Portland into a horrorshow of atomized whale guts and blubber chunks (including one that flattened the new car bought by the project’s explosives consultant). It was never pointed out to me then that this was how the psalmist conceived of the feeding of the Israelites in the desert. (“Thou brakest the heads of leviathan. . . .”)
“Leviathan”—what name is more evocative? A simple bigness that makes human systems look frail before it, the creature in the secret places of the earth, an angel is the moaning deep. Of course Leviathan was the name for Hobbes’s heroic, morality-transcending state—although there is more to the title than meets the eye. In the thirteenth chapter of the Praises of the Laws of England, John Fortescue, Hobbes’s greatest predecessor as a legal historian and theorist, describes the kingdom as a “mystical body” under the single head of the king, bound together and animated by the Law, “under which a group of men is transformed into a people.” This is a familiar image from Hobbes’s frontispiece, but it is the name that is striking. Fortescue used the common late medieval orthography, and for “group of men,” instead of our prissy modern coetus hominum, he writes cetus hominum—that is, a whale of men. Hobbes, dour as he is, is having himself a little pun.
Benedicite, cete et omnia quae moventur in aquis, Domino. So the canticle goes. Whale songs (which I listen to in times of distress, such as when I am writing to a deadline and my children are screaming) are not elegant, but they may be sublime. The mix of the ponderous and the humorous, the out-of-placeness of these beasts in the middle zones of the world that men occupy, the really and truly monstrous scale of the animal, its undoubted wisdom and power—who could not be awed and charmed by the whale? Who cannot echo his solitary warble of joy and praise? Even Hobbes must smile.
