A Multifarious Maelstrom
The immersive weirdness of Moby-Dick’s queer, spell-spiraled, whale-haunted pages
I’ve been encouraged to share some of the mania that seized me while reading Moby-Dick earlier this year — so here’s an assemblage of musings on the novel, whales, and other miscellanea which I wrote while “under the influence” of this bizarre book.
A “gateway drug”:
Growing up along central, coastal California, with a childhood half spent in the surf and creatured tidepools, eyes to the sea for fleeting annual glimpses of cetacean migrations, the sporadic melancholic marvel of varied species beached, dead or dying... and even occasionally saved! — returned through the surf by the diligent hands of a caring community of volunteers and biologists; sand-boarding down golden dunes to walk the secret stretch of beach with ancient whale vertebrae fossilized in slabs of diatomaceous shale, which I ran my hands along hundreds of times, finger-tips caressing millennia... and growing up through the success of the Save the Whales movement’s global moratorium on whaling; breathtaking images from Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough documentaries beamed to the comfort of my couch... All of this steeped my young mind and heart in some searching cetacean soul song... but the sperm whale was the most remote, mysteriously monstrous, a toothed leviathan that I knew foremost from Golden Guides and picture book illustrations showing them tossing whalers, destroying ships and “battling” Cthulhu-like giant squids in the abyss... and then, of course, there was the tail/tale of Moby-Dick breaching above it all — the bare bones of the adventure-story part of the “Greatest American Novel” was in the very air of USan culture in the ‘80s, something every kid knew without ever touching the book, the white-whale appearing in endless puerile variations on TV and film, probably most often in cartoons...
Really, these particular childhood marvels have been rather distant through adulthood, so it was more than a shock to finally experience the charm-churned vortex that is Melville’s Moby-Dick for the first time and to discover much of it is as humorous as it is moving, and to find it not only a “gateway drug” to whales, to the sperm whale, but to experience the novel as if it’s fucking haunted with some cetacean sentience!
I came to finally read Moby-Dick; or, The Whale earlier this year when my compadre Erik Davis invited me to join an online “course” he was co-teaching via the Weirdosphere with his friend JF Martel — basically everyone read set chapters of the book each week, with Erik and JF each riffing/lecturing once a week. JF’s reading was more focused on semiotics, supernatural and religious themes, from a Western philosophy perspective; as a counterculture historian, Erik brought his own keen insights, but he endeavored to counterbalance with more of a naturalist’s perspective (as in nature science, not naturalism philosophy) — which is part of why he invited me along.
Moby-Dick is book to be savored, wandered through, wondered over, read in sublime silence, shared aloud in delight and awe... but be warned, this is a book brimming with obsessions and is well know to induce them! The prose can produce altered-states in sensitive readers... I found it more of an experience, like a strange psychoactive drug, than a normal novel...
Moby-Dick is so many things, a multifarious maelstrom of a novel... perhaps this is why so many people like certain sections of it, yet not others, or why endless religious signs and occult meanings are found in the passages and pages by seekers of esoteric secrets. Personally, as an ethnobiologist, conservationist, and skeptical-animist of sorts, I’m most interested in material alliances, practicable and applicable intimacies, over the transcendental or abstract... In many ways, in addition to the astonishing prose and queerly potent characters, what fascinates me in Moby-Dick is the historical material reality which is immanent in the novel (most commonly considered the “boring” parts), which personally, is where some of the greatest wonders lay... in my own experience, natural is supernatural... I’m less interested in the religiosity and metaphysics of the novel (though they are certainly evocative and affecting), except where such cultural narratives have a visible ecological agency (i.e. inform human interactions with the world and the ecology this contributes towards creating) — either within the time period of the novel or on through to today... but diving into that is for another day.
It seems to me that, if not careful, some of the semiotic reading potentially distances, obfuscates or erases facets of the very material, factual matters Melville describes — such as the “queer” male dynamics, ocean ecology, and beings other than human. This is a disastrous handicap of modernity — that we’ve largely become deaf to the living world and profoundly ecologically illiterate. I sense a grasping prescience of this awareness in Melville, but it’s a large, slippery fish for him. I read him striving for some narrative that honors rather than negates... nurtures rather than slays... recursive eubiotic currents rather than unraveling spirals of dysbiotic entropy... He is already haunted and burdened with a male-death-trip and an overly mythologized reading also runs the risk of further distancing us from Melville’s wrestling with the human trauma and cost of engaging in industrialized killing, especially of another highly sentient and social mammal — an experience which was already disowned or subverted by “The Glory of Whaling” cultural narratives and entirely negated by the extreme abstraction of product demand from product production that’s at the heart of global capitalist industry, of which whaling was tops at the time... etc., etc.
Yet, in pondering one of JF’s lectures, where he pointed out that “the face” has largely been key to personhood for Western Philosophy, I found myself thinking how (without getting into all the multitudes of variation, complexity and specificity) that from the “indigenous”/animist perspective, personhood is relational... the “face” emerges from socio-cultural interactions with any given “thing”... at least this is the case in my ethno-historical studies of ancient Andean cultures and the Chumash, Pomo, and Cherokee; this is certainly still true today among the Quechua and Aymara of the Andes I’ve spent time with... this “all my relations” orientation posits the human as a coemergent and cocreative member of the weft and weave of the world — the ecology of the planet. It gives “voice” and social agency to the other than human, while reciprocally recognizing the ecological agency of all our actions, even our narratives... And so, if self is relational, an assemblage, a coextensive porous constituent — perhaps we can experience the book as not just the work of a singular man, but we can listen for the “ecology” from which this work emerged — we’re not just hearing Melville, or witnessing his imagination, but all he’s channeling, all that speaks through him — the age he lived in, its technology, sociocultural/religious epistemes, the humanity, the sea, the whales...
Wondrous whale mania!:
In the right mood, I can think of novels as psycho-physical artifacts coemergent with their times — they are potentially “magical” artifacts to me, word enchanted engines, spell spiraled seashells that when put to the eye’s ear sing the songs of their time and maker...
Having just had my first experience of the gorgeous, charm-churned prose and immersive weirdness of the oft-celebrated (but unacknowledged as uncannily trippy) novel, Moby-Dick, and sailing for a moment on Melville’s appropriately deific awe, not to mention whales suddenly breaching my dreams... has me enamored and pondering a few of the natural wonders of sperm whales in the world. I’ve begun delving the current sperm whale research and sorting through the past twenty years of documentaries. Come along with me and consider the following:
Sperm whales are eubiotic species which help co-create not just ocean biodiversity through their life-ways, but they help bioengineer the very atmosphere of our planet! They’ve likely been a keystone species to planetary life for many millions of years. Their feeding circuits have them churning the fertility of the depths as no other species, acting as leviathanic biopumps: they daily circulate the nutrients phytoplankton require to photosynthesize — diving deeper than any other whale to feed on the cephalopods of the bathypelagic, surfacing to release “plumes” of feces and urine into the upper currents — fertilizing the phytoplankton and thus the entire ocean ecosystem with essential nutrients, such as nitrogen and soluble iron (which otherwise remains bound up in the sunless abyss). Phytoplankton are not only the foundation of all ocean life, but are estimated to generate half the oxygen on earth and sequester a vital amount of atmospheric carbon annually. In death, sperm whales help fructify the depths which feed them — life blossoms from their fallen corpses (Melville’s “Death trellised Life”) — studies show a single whale carcass can nourish an entire deep sea ecosystem for up to 100 years... It’s thought a single pod of sperm whales can influence climate cycles, where an entire population has global agency...
If one was inclined towards hierarchical diversions and divisions — it could readily be argued that sperm whales are the most intelligent beings around — I mean, they not only have the largest brain on earth, but they nurture and nourish ecological efflorescence on a planetary scale — harnessing their own lives, plankton, the very oceans, as a technology to engineer a riotously prosperous biosphere!
For an intimate glimpse of these exceptional beings, I recommend you check out the recent documentary: Titans of the Sea: A family Affair (it’s listed on Youtube as Ocean Giants: The Secret Lives of Sperm Whales) — the result of a decade long project following a pod of sperm whales near Mauritius — by far the best doc I’ve seen of the social and family lives of their matriarchal clan*... mind-blowing! While it suffers from some of the same sentimental narrative cliches and over-personification as too many nature documentaries, I can excuse some of it here in that the French filmmakers, including one of Jacques Cousteau’s proteges, spent so much time in the water with this family of whales, directly observing and interacting, building relationships and attachments to the whales over a ten year span (in an earlier documentary about their work, French scientist, Francois Sarano, fresh from the water and deeply moved by his interactions with the whales calls them “fifty tons of tenderness”). We can’t forget that one of science’s failings has been its affectation of objective detachment, mentophobia and a fear of anthropomorphizing contributing to anthropodenial — denying that a species shares human like traits and behavior. There’s a lot that could be said, but ultimately, the incredible film footage speaks for itself, showing us the once feared leviathans to be astonishingly affectionate creatures with deep familial bonds.
* Matriarchal familial pods of up to a dozen pair bonded “lesbian” whales (who are undeniably highly sexual, though hilariously, researchers stumble to acknowledge what they’ve seen and filmed — vagina to vagina and vagina to dorsal fin grinding!) and their offspring. While the pair bonded females typically co-nurse their young (females lactate their entire lives), the babies are watched after and raised by the entire pod, youngsters and a designated adult (+ dozens of mutualistic Remora fish) baby-sit while the mothers make their hour dives into the abyss to feed. Males leave their natal families in their teens, often following the lone elder males (who periodically drift through the region with great fanfare — all the neighborhood pods come to greet them) to the colder bio-rich waters near the Antarctic. There they form bonded pods with other young males for a decade or two, before dispersing to wander the oceans as loners for the rest of their lives — only visiting the warm water matriarchal pods to mate and socialize for a bit (to gossip and tell their wandering adventurer’s tales?), or briefly hang with the cool water bro-pods... At least that’s what the more limited observation of male behavior suggests...
There’s a couple earlier documentaries about this pod of whales and the scientists studying them — which are interesting to watch for the human/whale interface:
Giants of the Seas: The Mystery of Sperm Whales and Sperm Whales: Unexpected Social Skills
If you’re short on time, this second is the one to watch, especially from the 32 minute mark to hear scientist Francois Sarano wax poetic -- “when we enter their world, we discover their incredible fluidity. They are like elves underwater.” — and see the sublime glimmer in his eyes, his beaming beatific face... a man whale-touched! He’s also published a whole slew of scientific studies: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francois-Sarano
In terms of better understanding sperm whales, and further exploring the embodied, kinship based approach to human-animal communication, the other film to watch is Patrick and the Whale on PBS. Former corporate lawyer turned nature photographer and conservationist, Patrick Dykstra has been diving, interacting with, and learning from the matriarchal sperm-whales pods near Dominica for over a dozen years. Through stunning cinematography, the film captures Patrick in playful, open-heart effort to comprehend and connect with the whales, and the sensitive bonds with individuals that do form. It offers us a critical counterbalance to the all too pervasive scientific approach to animal studies (& beyond) which values gathering data over building connection, information over relationship. While these are not mutually exclusive things, it’s telling that we witness how the trust Patrick has built with the whales is eventually threatened by a series of attempts he makes to attach cameras to them, in the hope of gathering data about their time spent in the depths... and how Patrick’s sensitivity and emotional awareness of the whales eventually allows for ameliorating interactions and continued relations.
You can also watch an interesting interview with Patrick (it occasionally starts to come across as an ad for his eco-tours — for those with $$, he does take very small groups to meet the whales).
While she discusses human relations to a different whale species, the bowhead, eco-historian Bathsheba Demuth’s work is deeply insightful and added further dimension to my reading Moby-Dick. Her book, Floating Coast, covers the history of whaling around the Bering Strait, contrasting the intimate perspectives and practices of the indigenous Yupik and Inupiat whalers with the abstract orientation of capitalist American whalers of the 19th century and the disastrous practices of Soviet communist whalers of the 20th century (these two both saw whales in tellingly similar “economic” terms that eclipsed any chance for meaningful, let alone sustainable, relations between humans and the natural world — with tragic results). You can get a brief taste of her work in the article here: https://news.vcu.edu/article/2023/05/what-the-life-and-death-of-a-whale-can-tell-us-about-our-ties-to-the-natural-world
or the longer article here: https://aeon.co/essays/the-act-of-giving-and-the-chance-of-life-on-a-finite-planet
and I strongly recommend watching this 40 minute presentation:
Well, now (whale now?)...
I’ve completely marked up my copy of Moby-Dick (a rare act for a bibliophile). It will take me a bit to integrate my experience of what is unquestionably one of the queerest damn books I’ve experienced! (in every sense of the word), but I already have a dozen or so pages of impressions and thoughts which poured out while reading it. Everything from the psychoactivity of the prose; to my WTF? at Melville’s vaginal description of the ship, The Pequod (“Her venerable bows looked bearded.”... “Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled...”) and that she’s been tricked out with whale teeth makes the “one continuous jaw” of her a vagina-dentata, “a cannibal of a craft” (that ultimately consumes the crew) — in which the emasculated Captain Ahab sails the seas in his monomania for the sperm whale, Moby Dick... really?!?; ...to the novel’s strange agency and co-emergent animism; to Melville’s sundered “orthodoxy”, the “tornadoed Atlantic” of his being and his grasping prescience of the existential and ontological crises, the ecological crisis, at the dark heart of industrialism; to the book as almost an act of “whale necromancy”; to the doomed Ahab representing the inexorable fealty of industrial modern man to forces of entropy and death, the purblind suicidal monomania of “progress”... etc., etc.
I hope to organize these and create some coherent whole downstream... if life allows.
Again, you can partially blame Erik Davis for my mania here, as he’s the one who nudged me to read Melville’s whale-smacked prose. See Erik’s own Moby-Dick musings:
Holy Fuck, Whales!!
One of the queerest damn books I’ve experienced!:
I’m still rather astounded and can’t quite get over how unexpectedly funny, diverse and deeply strange the greatest American novel is... QUEER in all its meanings really is the word that fits Moby-Dick best. The book is riddled with more “dick” jokes than I could count, just a few pages in we have Ishmael sharing a bed with the pagan “harpooner”, Queeqeg, describing their budding bro-mance, “a cosy, loving pair” sharing their “hearts’ honeymoon” with hours of pillow talk in bed... and c’mon, the boat, The Pequod, is quite literally described as a vagina-dentata... and in the toothed maw of this crew-gravid ship the emasculated Captain Ahab sails the seas in his monomaniacal longing for the inescapably phalliodal sperm whale Moby Dick...!?!?!
It is an intensely male novel, especially its existentialism, but in uncanny and fluid ways, queering rules and standards, in the thrusting desire to pierce “the mysteries” and be pierced by them... a lot could be said about all this, though I feel somewhat limited as a hetero-male. I’m curious what has been written about the book from a queer studies angle. (A friend who’s a best-selling author mentioned that Chip [Samuel] Delany had written a series of micro-essays on this very topic, but I’ve not been able to locate them; though I’ve exchanged friendly emails with Chip in the past, he’s 84 now and I’ve received no response to my inquiries this year... Delany is an absolutely phenomenal writer himself, winner of multiple awards across genres; he’s a must-read — his work is vibrant, a uniquely brilliant counterculture voice, especially as a queer African-American. His massive, unclassifiable 1975 novel, Dhalgren, [often listed as Sci-fi] is another example of prose that produced a remarkable, rather eerie, “psychoactive” effect in me! For more about him, see: https://www.samueldelany.com)
On “squeezing sperm”:
While I’ll leave it to those more qualified to comment on the many queer scenes, symbols and passages that percolate and permeate Moby-Dick, I do want to touch on one extraordinary and deeply affecting scene...
First, I should note that whale sonar is astonishing, they are able to “see” through sound, touch and experience the world with it. Sonar is most profound in sperm whales thanks to their size, bizarre skulls, internalized nostril and the acoustic properties of the massive quantity of oil (spermaceti) within their foreheads (up to 500 gallons in one whale! It was this highly valuable oil, used to light the lamps and illuminate the nights of the 19th century, that made sperm whales the most heavily hunted species by whalers). While sonar was not comprehended in the mid 19th century when Moby-Dick was written, the spermaceti is the subject of one of the queerest (in every sense) chapters in the book — chapter 94, A Squeeze of a Hand [see excerpt below], where Melville shares with us the wondrous psychoactive effects of “squeezing sperm”! Again, here we encounter the whale in the most unexpected way — within the enveloping, euphoric inebriation the spermaceti** induces in Ishmael... huffing its “uncontaminated aroma”, his hands immersed, fingers that “serpentine and spiralise” in the very singular substance through which the sentience of sperm whales’ experience the world! Whatever the whales’ consciousness is, this unctuous substance of their echolocating “third-eye” is as key to mediating it as their massive brains... so is it any wonder that the profound entactogenic, empathogenic experience which Melville describes evokes the stunning reports and films we only now have of pods of sperm whales bathing each other in sound, blissfully rubbing their heads together, caressing and rolling their bodies in communal “dalliance and delight”?
** While spermaceti is chiefly comprised of waxy esters like cetyl palmitate and a bit of triglycerides, none of which are known to be psychoactive per se, but who knows what ephemeral, ethereal compounds may be present in the “sperm” fresh from the whales’ heads? Melville describes snuffing up an “uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets”...
Here’s Herman Melville as Ishmael ‘trippin’ homoerotic on spermaceti:
“It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.”
!!?!!
The entirety of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale can be found online at the Melville Electronic Library:
https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-moby-dick/front-matter
With the exception of the Herman Melville quotes, all material © 2026 Ben Kamm