Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.
The chase is on, and it is not long before the whale is overtaken and then captured with a well-aimed harpoon hurled by Tashtego, the harpooner. But it is Stubb, the second mate, who actually kills the whale. Melville's description of the death of the whale is vivid and in sharp contrast with the tranquility of the opening scene. There can be little doubt that, with a few elaborations to fit it into his novel, he is describing an event that he had actually seen while he was whaling.
"Haul in, haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another fling.
The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.
"Pull up, pull up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath. "Pull up! close to!" and the boat ranged along the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his "flurry," the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperiled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
"He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.
"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
In this scene with the whale, Melville shows us how our modern civilization approaches a living system. It could just as well be a cow in a meat factory, or a less powerful culture, or a pristine ecological system. Modern technological civilization approaches every living system with an eye to what it can exploit from that system, and with a blind eye to that system as a living entity with its own feelings and wishes and needs. The moderns arrive with their analytical tools and their harpoons and knives, and, with a few "primitives" that are brought along to carry out some of the more menial or grisly tasks, they turn the living whale, or whatever other living system they encounter, into useful, marketable products. But the living whale that enormous bundle of experiences is no more. It can be argued, of course, that we harvest knowledge along with our meat and oil. We do learn what is inside the whale -- its digestive system, the size of its brain, the chemicals that somehow facilitate its life process. But again, it must be noted: the living whale is no more. Through chopping whales into chunks and carefully examining and measuring each piece we learn only about dead whales.
Materialism
Science did not have to start with materialism. That decision was not forced on it by reason or evidence. It was a political decision. Humanity was weary of the repressions, inequities and holy wars of God, and rightly so. Humanity was also unhappy with the church authorities hiding knowledge in a tangle of Latin that was beyond the reach of ordinary people. It was good that the corner that the church had on the God-market was broken up, but then they replaced God with Matter, Latin with Math, and Purpose with Accident. In excluding any hint of "mind" as a fundamental category of reality, the door was closed to the possibility of God sneaking back in under a different name.
To live in a world without God was either a gain or a loss, depending on one's perspective. But a materialist perspective clearly left modern people with a problem. How was one chunk of matter going to communicate with another? Material bodies are experientially impenetrable. If my experience is a product of, and contained in, my brain, then there is no way of directly sharing it with any other brain. So solipsism raised its ugly head. (By solipsism I mean the idea that the mind is so wrapped up in itself that it cannot communicate directly with another mind. This does not necessarily entail doubting the actual existence of the other mind.) On the most basic level we are totally alone. As Jean James, the renowned physicist and mathematician, described our dilemma, "We each live in a prison-house from which there is no escape. It is our body: and its only communication with the outer world is through our sense organs--eyes, ears etc. These form the windows through which we can look out into the world and gain knowledge of it." Although he tried to open our minds to the possibility of a broader view of reality than was provided by the materialist view of things of his day -- one grounded in an idealist view of things -- the view of the body as a prison house from which we cannot escape seems to me to be a very materialist one. Also James believed that what knowledge we could glean from thinking logically about our sense data was limited to mathematical equations that actually provided us with no clear picture or understanding of reality. As he said about four-dimensional space, "the highly trained mathematician may visualize it partially and vaguely, others not at all." Once again, despite James' good intentions, ordinary people are barred from true knowledge. In the middle ages Latin was the barrier. Today it is math. It's an unfortunate situation. Most of us are too busy feeding our kids to learn math on a graduate-school level. So according to this view, we are doomed to a life of almost compete ignorance that is alleviated only to a limited extent as the mathematically trained physicists drop a few crumbs to the floor. It's a spiritual cul-de-sac for us ordinary people.
So is there something wrong with this picture that Jean James paints?
Two things, really. Materialism, and an impoverished way of opening oneself to reality.
We have all noticed that there are two ways of experiencing things, which are most frequently call "mind" and "matter." I prefer the term "experience" to "mind." Materialism is the view that somehow our material brain cranks out experience, sort of like a liver cranks out bile. It's too silly for words. We can assume, as materialism does, that there is only one basic substance. But it makes more sense to affirm that, seen from the outside, it is "matter," but from the inside it is experience. From a philosophical point of view, it is far easier to understand how matter might arise from mind, rather than the reverse. As mind becomes more and more rigid in its habits as on the levels described by physics and astronomy it takes on the attributes that one associates with "matter."
It might be noted in passing that a pan-experiential view of reality delivers us from the kind of almost total ignorance James talks about. If experience is the basic stuff of reality, then knowing my experience of myself and of my relationships is a more profound knowledge about myself than any set of formula about physical brain waves could provide.
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