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from Book Reading/2026
from Moby Dick
from EM Cioran
  • JFM sent this quote around to MDC
    • However close we may be to paradise, irony bars our way. 'Ineptitudes—' it chides us, 'your ideas of an immemorial or future felicity. Cure yourself of your nostalgia, of the childish obsession with the beginning and the end of time. Eternity, that dead duration—only the weak are concerned with such things. Let the moment do its work, let it reabsorb your dreams.
    • And if we turn our eyes toward knowledge? Irony shows us its inanity, its absurdity. 'What is the good of degrading things into problems? Your learning is constantly cancelling itself out, so that the latest item shows no advance whatever over the first. Confined in the déjà su, you have no other substance but that of words: thought does not adhere to being.
    • And when, dazed, we think of some Hindu monk who, for nine years, stood against a wall in paralyzed meditation, irony intervenes once more to inform us that he discovered, at the end of so many sufferings, the nothingness by which he had begun! 'You see,' it insinuates, 'how comical the mind's adventures are. Sacrifice them for appearances. But do not seek some reality behind them, some secret: nothing has a reality or a secret. Forbear searching the illusion, forbear destroying the unique reality.
    • By persisting in this language, irony accustoms us to it, compromising both our metaphysical experiments and the models which invited us to make them. And when it is darkened by humour, irony excludes us forever from that future outside of time which is the absolute.
from mysterianism
  • In his intro to Weird Studies/Courses/Moby Dick JFM said something along the lines that the work was a "singularity", as was each of the people involved. Something deep and inherently inexplicable in our being.

Weird Studies/Courses/Moby Dick

22 Jan 2026 - 03 Oct 2026
Open in Logseq

    • Intro

      • Why I'm here: my hypos are getting the upper hand What I hope to get: control of my hypos? Um, insight? What draws me: the great theme of nihilism, rage, god vs the human ego, agency...man this has it all and in a much richer form than philosophy.

    • L1

      • JF: Moby Dick as a singularity
      • ED: nsturalism Coleridge quote. Whaling industry was biggest in US. Quaker spiritual ruthlessness. Mentions weird naturalism: allows for mystery and the liminal, no greater example than Moby Dick. Anticipates Lovecraft
      • JF: novel (Cervantes) follows closely on Descartes
      • the novel is always at war with language (Deleuzian). A divinatory approach to the text. The imperative mood of the first sentance. Metaphor books::whales.

    • O1

      • Singularities.
        • Interesting that the term in tech circles means something quite different, almost the opposite
      • Weird naturalism vs supernaturalism
      • Genius and its attractions. Related to singularity? Everyone is singular, not everyone is a genius...but we all gotta try? Something Hegelian. You, JFM, are attracted to certain artistic figures of genius, as am I. What's the nature?
      • The actual thing
        • French book on MD/cabala. Deleuze mathesis. New language / new people
        • Shakespear – King Lear a source for Ahab
        • ED: Norman O Brown Metamorphosis etc
        • ontological co-dependency (Ahab/whale). Enantiodromia a huge theme.
        • Pynchon's V and the Doubloon. Tone, paranois, human, encyclopedia angle (link M and P), Also the science stuff.
        • Ishmael as father of Arabs – just outside Western civ.
        • Matt Holmes – Dead Sea Scrolls - was an actual commercial fisherman! Whale as Event. Monastic analog.
        • Robert - the quote mines. Squid shirt! An overture. ED – book is about the archives, discusses sub-sub-librarian. His peacock project. Hunting through the archives...
        • Jasper - too babbly – weird naturalism –Pequod as steampunk (a bit)
        • Arthur - McKenna praised Ahab? the gnostic twist – ED: we are all going to encounter Ahab where we are – its a good opporunity to work through? something. CLR James book – Ahab is a quaker, but got to the end of the line. He's a rebel, a promethean, wants to break through the mask – echoes of Trump – esp in how the mates give into him – and the emptiness at the heart. Lear. JF: Camus has a text on Moby Dick (praises Ahab as a rebel).
        • Matt Prinke - Beaver book explores homoerotic aspect
        • Lucas ED Melville might be like PKD, writing to fight off his own madness. One layer is icelandic sagas, alliterive language is nod to that (did not know that).
        • Kim Barke – dialog with Elijah – is it a trope – example of Ulysses, myth shines forth in everyday life. ED – this is explictly mentioned in the book, stay tuned.
        • Jonathan – Father Mapple sermon. Jonah, water as sheol. Payment vs being paid. Jonah and Ishmael have a lot in common, but former pays and latter is paid.

    • L2

      • Prerecorded JFM lecture. Ch 7-10 or so. Reinvention of Christianity. Melville's struggles with nihilism + xianity. "the mythologcal humus of the xian condition" (like). New Bedford as Mos Eisley. Chapel is real but Melville changed the name – part of "whaling the world". The two paintings, contrasting. Churches designed to make people feel alone – attention focused on the central altar which is presumable a reflection of the divine.
      • Can the resurrection work on those lost at sea? But faith like a jackal feeds amongst the tombs. We may completely misunderstand the cosmos. The sun (transcendence) is visible but blurred. Ishmael's strange moment of piety.
      • Pulpit chapter. Pulpit actually exists.
      • Sermon chapter. Reads like Dostevsky, in its portrait of a sinner (Jonah). Theme of money is important throughout the novel. Money as sin. Doubloon as join between two worlds. How did God convey commands to Jonah? It's an inner call, the voice of conscience... what was the command? To preach the truth in the face of falsehood. That's it! "your own inexorable self" (? am i misquoting)
      • "But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own **inexorable self**. ... Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. (ch9)
      • emph added. Isn't Ahab a negative example of an "inexorable self"?
      • No metaphysical explanation of the universe is acceptable if it denies the validity of the "inexorable self." And in a universe which is forever resistent to final explanation, which is forever unknowable, the self is forever inviolate. It is because Melville believed ? as Father Mapple believes? that the individual self is the unquestionable fact of existence that Ishmael survives to tell of the adventure of the Pequod
      • But what is worship?—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must thesn unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. (ch10)
        • this had a very Tiantai feel to me.

    • O2

      • ED on opening chapters. Ishmael is depressed, poor, restless, and funny. Doesn't stay in 1st person. He's very open and that makes the text work. But costly in terms of will (agency). Where does this come from, its even before Whitman (romanticism maybe? ). He's a hipster – up for experience, but melancholy,, refusal to buy in, drift. "an itch for things remote". Can be on friendly terms with a horror.
      • Always keep a tahiti in your mind. Ch 23 Lee Shorre
      • An ironical tone (light, not bitter)
      • Pythagorean fart joke in first ch.
      • Fates in ch1, looking forward to Pynchon, Dick. Gnosticism, Calvinism
        • depravity and predestination
        • I Kings has story of Ahab – lied to by spirits (devil). Monster god. resonates with gnosticism. "two by two"
      • JFM: calvinism ≡ nominalism, as opposed to catholic tradition. quakers v calvinism
      • Nathan S: its a tantric work, trying to get beyond distinctions without erasing them

    • L3

      • ED
        • Chs 28-30 Book is very moody. Sartre: moods build worlds. Ishmael knows how to live with his moods. "Reality outruns apprehension"
        • Phallic imagery and jokes – very important. A-wake-ning.
        • Metals. Am I a cannonball? Machines, magnetism. Tubalcaine, the first blacksmith and a descendent of Caine.
        • Ahab notices he isn't getting pleasure from smoking. "I'll smoke no more" --> Lear storm scene: "I will weep no more". The slouched hat suggests Odin. Queen Mab chapter dream. Ahab as pyramid.
        • Masthead chapter. The Wake of the Gods – Egypt is really important to Melville (Ahab as Osiris, who battles see monsters, is dismembered...other parallels) layered psychedelic imagery
        • pantheism mode.
        • "come back to oneself in horror" Over cartesian vortices... (it me)
        • Emerson (established by Melville's time, but he hadn't read). Merging with the all (but prior to Nature). The all-feeling. Collective oneness as in sperm cell. Melville had to have had the experience.
        • Melville not a nihilist, people are wrong, its much more complicated than that.
        • The all includes evil. The all + the challenge of the situation
        • Cartesian vortices. Ether (? he might have that wrong). Cosmos as spiraling stew...A key image of the book (hurricanes, vortices).
        • Ahab as gnostic hero. "A vibe inside spirituality" - gurdjieff, existentialism
        • Ahab Trumpian in his rhetorical manipulation.
      • JFM
        • Moby-dick ch: here the real weird horror begins. Moby/Ahab each becoming the other (Deleuzian).
        • Moby Dick based on real whale. Dick is devil, Moby is no place. Monsters are singular. (weirdly not in dnd which he mentions?). No lineage, spawned by other monsters, Sloterdijk (chaotic singularities). Echidna in mythology. This is very interesting trope to me.
        • Whales as singularities. Cetology chapter, "the consituents of a chaos". Are all whales monsters? Not sure I'd make that interp.
        • In these chapters, only singualiries exist. A seethe of monsters.
        • The whale as the monstrous substrate, hidden by our categories.
        • No reliable data can be had about monsters, just rumors. Which are philosophically interesting (underexplored). A story that circulates, carries a possibility. Rumors have autonomy, a memetic quality. rumors are part of dick. their factuality isn't that important. A cloud of imaginal possibility. That makes him an agent, a worthy target.
        • Intangible malignity. All that is wrong, evil in the world is incarnate in the whale (for Ahab). The ship's crew "picked and packed by some infernal... ".
        • Whiteness chapter: "the invisible spheres were formed in fright" whiteness
        • Hark chapter: letter h is a motif or something. white whale, "hw" the subtle work of the h. whirl, and questioning, turning within, who, what...circularity, recursion.
        • Chart: Ahab is functional, his reason is subserved to madness, bad combo. Everything in the physical world has resonances in metaphysical. Atom reflected in the soul. Ishmael becomes spectral (omniscient).
        • In the zone of monsters, no objective viewpoint, everything inscribing itself on everything else. The light is no longer stable (as it was in earlier chapter), a godless world where the light is destabilized like everything else.
        • ED Lower spiritual expectations, find solace in wife and hearth.
        • JFM nihilsm tedst. Even if sci materialism is true, maybe we need something else.

    • O3

      • Nathan: Ahab's leg. He's literally becoming whale. Auger-hole/augery pun (from Macbeth). Erik: Lacan (oy) Real/Symbolic/Imaginary. Symbolic is consensus reality, more or less. Imaginal is private. The Real is inaccessible. What's on the other side of the mask? You only can get power in the symbolic by castration (??) and assuming the false phallic authority.
      • JFM: Lacan defined the real as “the impasse of all formalization.”
      • Ahab as holding the chaos together.
      • Stacia: Ahab emasculation is real; when seamen enter the Pequod, they are already in the whale.
      • Kevin: Ahab as a machine (Leyden jar) Deleuzian Erik: there's a train, industrialism just taking off.
      • Ned: Eliade’s “The Forge & The Crucible” is an essential read for this re: blacksmiths. Coincidentally it came out on the WS book club call earlier
      • B: Relevant to Ahab as machine question is Ahab’s description to the Carpenter of his “perfect man” in chapter 108: “Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a desir- able pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the ames Tunnel
      • Jasper: I believe Jeffrey Ford’s Ahabs Return is at least, in part, constructed as Ahab’s response and take on Ishmael
      • Erik: Melville as monist (nondualist)
      • JFM: spectral dimension. theory that Ishmael actually died
      • Hist/tish ≡ shit, kabalah malkut, alchemical monism
      • david: Something crazy is that at the beginning of the original edition in the etymology section Melville says that whale in Hebrew is חן — which doesn’t mean whale at all! It means GRACE or CHARM. But the literal meaning of the letter ח (Chet) is FISH. And the literal meaning of ן (final nun) is TARGET. What is Moby-Dick but a fish target that supposedly brings grace? I’ve been going way too deep on this…
      • nathanseckinger (Feb 8, 2026, 1:03 PM): YHWH is also a nondual/tantric vajra-yoni impregnation symbol in Kabbalistic gematria. The “Yod” letter (“Y”) signifies the embryonic pre-birth force of pre-becoming. In tantra, the corresponding Sanskrit term for this is “bija” = sperm or “seed.” It is perhaps significant that these are “sperm” whales, specifically.
      • Ahab practicing black magic, inverts some xian symbols.
      • Delezue, crown of anarchy, in difference and repetition

    • L4

      • JFM - the spectral chapters (first lowering to albatross)

      • monstrosity – singularity – we reduce the world to the human, Melville trying to undo that. If you have no essences, you are left in a sea of images (phantasms). Strike through the mask. phenomena – fantasma.
      • three responses: Ahab wants to break through, Starbuck accepts world of appearances (?where) contract with creator. Ishmael: sympathize with the phantoms. Narcissus in opening chapter,
      • The first lowering. language of Magic and enchantment. Deleuze. BwO.
      • Sailors as already dead. Lazarus, necromancy, all limits are erased including life and death. Sailor is privy to that collapse. You can find yourself inbetween (undead).
      • ch 51, spirit-spout, ahab 2 things warring – (1 live, 1 dead leg). The first cybord (not the first I'm sure).
      • Ahab's "private measures" – what if his crew is not, in fact, human? Charles Olsen, Call me Ishmael, Ahab is a practioner of goetian black magic.
      • Whalers get very accustomed to the weird. But Fedallah is beyond that, even beyond Ismael's sympathy. "real phantoms". Genesis 6 – the sons of god and the nephilim. Something lunar, but also fire-worshipper.
      • Spirit-spout luring them into this nether world. The birds roosting on the ship as if it was a ghost. "Guilty beings transformed..." Lost souls, in a limbic realm.
      • 52: Albatross, other ship (end of ghostly mood).
      • The roundness of the world as a kind of evil trap, suggsting souls whirling in limbo.

      • ED

        • The form of the spiral. JFM horrot/phatasmic, ED is going to look at the naturalist side.
        • sea ravens, coromorants. Albatrosses do circle the earth. Down into the 40s, run into planetary vortex winds (is that true? probably).
        • "the problematic" I need to learn to use that.
        • why the boring naturalist detail chgapters? They don't seem necessary. 2 Moby Dicks – a travelogue. There were no documentaries and not much travel back then...so textual detail was socially important.
        • whats the relationship between imagination and naturalism?
          • the cunning mateial logic of whaling, the clever engineering of it. And an appreciation of nature, esp the nonuman aspects of it.
          • Romantic and also post-romantic...recognition that the human self is no longer the center, and science can push us out betyond our stupid mental-symbolic-narrative worlds.
        • Melville s non-dualist. Not flat but interconnected.
        • Concrete situations/examples, rooted in nature, which he then turns around from different perspectives. The Conceit in metaphysical poetery, squeexing the meaning out of it. More than a metaphor.
        • Squid (I haven't read these so missing out). Serpent images.
        • Importance of gallows humor in Melville.
        • The Masthead scene. Heed this well pantheists, including cartesian votrtices
        • Stubb kills a whale . Tiger used as symbol for both nature and man. "the boat churned through both opposing elements at once". Humans not outside nature.
        • Shark massacre so gnarly.
          • If you are attracted to a nondualist view – hard part is the sharks (aka Nazis). The circulating cannibal flux of natural reality. A real problem.
          • the undead shark, patheistic gore.
          • Melville very modern, unlike Poe, stuck in 19th century
        • The blanket Is nature signing (here I go into cyber-asshole mode).
        • Invokrd Aggasiz, starting to understand glacial carving.
        • Melville as darker version of Emerson. O nature your linked analogies ... a cunning duplicate in mind.
        • the connection between mind and matter is unavailable to language...

    • O4

      • ED" tjere os narrative but also questioning of narrative. Weaving.
      • Nathan: Nephilim and giants in the bible. Criticism against societies that are overtechnologized and urbanized.
      • "We treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities" (ATP153).
        • – from ED
      • Nathan: arks, floating boxes that take us across death (Noah/Moses/Ishmael)
      • Ben Kamm: naturalist, ethnobotanist, animist
      • JFM: 777th lay, number occurs in Revelations (opposite of 666).
      • ED cosmic horror and infections. Gallows humor,.
      • ED: pantheistic view, one consequence is that terrror-anxiety of the automaton.
        • 2 mentions: masthead, and dead shark biting queequeg

    • L5

      • ED

        • Melville and altered states. Emersonian oversoul.
        • Honey head
        • Pip chapter. Transformation into Fool. Novel representsd consciousness...modern, Melville is a bit premodern but trying to depict different forms of c (protomodern).
        • Melville's constant ironic reframing (YES)
          • the underlying abstract source of reality () but inimical to normal human interests, it makes you a fool.
          • Ambiguity of line: man comes at last to that celestial though which to reason is absurd and .... indifference. But different registers. Meaninglessness or cruel, but not the whole picture. But indifference is also a form of strength...a way of being. (ch 93 has Thelemic meaning)
        • Squeeze chapter
          • Mystical experience. Very related to previous ch (solitude to togetherness).,
          • Melville focus on friendship, relationship (with a democratic cast)
          • squeeze party vs masthead chapter.
          • Was Melville mocking idealism, transcendentialism? Not really. Ego dissolution. Melville knows experientially. So is he skeptical, cynical, no its time. Nay-sayers vs yea-sayers. The latter have baggage, the former, nah. A model of the good, not just negative.
          • We can't keep squeezing the sperm forever.
          • 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.
          • I feel like he is just doing Buddhism, is this really in Melville? A shift rather than a lowering of sites (surfaces vs depths).
        • Try-works, another trance but this one hellish. He wakes up turned around and almost capsizes the ship.
        • Doubloon ch – Nietzsche mobile army of metaphors. Is there a truth or does everybody see their own thing. But Ahab says this.
          • Erik says, more than just about multiplicity, but he will attack laterl.

        • JFM

          • All chs are about the whale, particularly the face, particularly relation between whale and human. Doesn't get there and admits its impossible. Chs ask metaphyssical question which remains unanswered. Face as icon of personhood. The transcendent other. Whose existence makes ethical demand (Levinas). Secularized transcendent. Ethical demand (seems lIike need to read him before Crichly).
          • Ugh he used word contingency. I actually think he is all wrong here. Maybe not. The faceless wall of the whale. There may be nothing there.
          • Battering ram
            • Ahab as fire giant
          • Prarie
            • brow ass mark of genius, genius of silence
            • Deleuze Ch on Year Zero Faciality (1000 plateuas)
              • Crit Lacan Sartre, and indirectly Levinas, who say subjectivity is given, then expressed or contained by the face. Countenance (container). D&G invert this – face is not a function of subjectivity, but it "machinically produces" subjectivity...hm. White wall. Abstract machine? OK there is a version of this I believe...
            • Every human face is a while wall opening ointo something either terrible or nothing at all (Ahab's wager). D&G deterritorialiation (never understood that). Creating world. Then face is a further deterritorialiation (≡? abstraction?).
            • What if God has no face (no personhood, no subjectivity).
            • Roger Scruton, against new atheists (The Face of God). Hm gives me an opening....
            • This really has implications for Minsky thing doesn't it.
            • Nietzschean approach, it is entirely beyond human concerns (not the Abrahmic)
          • Tale
            • Breaks forth wall when the whales are diving. "The grandest site in all of animated nature".
          • Grand Armada
            • In Starbuck's boat, in a huge school of whales. A sweet and peacful chapter. In this scene, whales do seem to have face (subjectivity, interiority, consciousness)
          • Deleuze heavily Melvillian. Book challenges the very idea of metaphysics. Bartleby essay.Secondary and primary natures (Ishmael/Ahab). In What is Philosophy
          • We need to find the something in ticks. Becoming-tick.

      • O5

        • Elin: JFM: fundamental ambiguity and unknowability god/demonic . Ambivalence light/food. Ophites (gnostic serpent worshippers). Double-sided christ/satan jung talks a lot about this, Lord Dunsany, fate/chance casting lots.
        • Haeckle's eugenecist, social darwinism. Book Magnificent Decay (ED rec)
        • Karen: Ahab's leg (OK I was gonna ask this). Becoming-machine. End of chart chapter. Darth Vader – more machine than man.
        • God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
        • Try-works chapter has that recursive self-eating quality (they use the whale to fuel its own reduction). Fire symbolism (the parsees, etc)
        • Ishmael spacing out at the fire on the try-forge: "the fiend shapes before me"..."these at last begat kindred spirits in my soul"
        • JFM: Ahab solar, Pip lunar. Like David in OT.
        • Ben Kamm: big riff on agency of ecology but I missed the detials: 1:05 more or less
        • Owen Summerscales: Chladni stuff. N Seckinger Faraday

    • L6

      • JFM
        • Ahab made to look silly (human)
        • supernatural: (1) of or related to an exitence beyond the visible universe, esp related to god (2) departing from the normal, transcending the laws of nature. "the supernaturalism of this hue (white)". The h in whale, in white. Fedallah (h again). Fedallah might be demon or eidolon.
        • Naturalism always has an outside (according to JFM, I want to argue as usual). Excess of nature (Wm James). The usual mysterianism, yadda yadda. Radical mystery. Well OK.
        • The way of Starbuck: faith in transcendence. Traditionalist, Aristotelian. No longer tenable, and he can't take action.
        • Ahab rejecrion, Whats to own (know) the unnameable. Inverts Starbuck xianity, blasphemous (deliberately). Worships through defiance. "in the midst of the personified impersonal, a perionablity stands there" A kind of black mass (quarterdeck inverts communon, forge baptism in blood, candles he seals fate rh winnick article)
        • Ishmael immanence with transcendence.
        • Corpusents (St Elms fire, holy body)
        • Steven Lindstrom: Ziporyn Experiments in Mystical Atheism
        • Naturalist morality argument.
        • In the final scene, the doubloon reappears. Ishmael a true christian, holding to the good while befriending monsters. The good as transcendent center in spite of imminent whirlpool world.
      • ED
        • Back to nature(ism). naturalism a hinky term, but absorbs materialism, rationalism, causality. Another mode: the naturalist observer. "you make a pact" with causal explanation. not to fight a battle with theists (?). An ethical affirmation of causality (science). Avoid easxy projection of human values onto nature. Science not as a way of fighting against theism, but a way to relate to the world...MD is an ecological book...open.
        • Charles Stang neoplatonism - nonhuman others – entngled in relations – ontologies – but then only a hiopskip from spirits (OK yes this is what. Ifigured out for myself). From western nerdism to inidgious cosmologies.
        • ED NOT a platonist (too static).
        • Forest: Anthropologist Joanna Steinhardt has a great 2017 paper called Psychedelic Naturalism: psilocybin and the evolution of amateur applied mycology
        • Ahab head as a bubble – symbol of transience
        • cotkscrew. of lines (driven with will). Ahab killed by a line.
        • Ahab as centipede (!)
        • Dreyfus and Kelly book – Ahab wants a unifying somethiung, but gets the indifference of nature (Alfred Kazin - Melville portrays the struggle from the side of nature itself). Indifference is just not true, that's where indigenity (Queequeg) comes in. And we are embedded, in kinship with nature.

    • O6

      • Alembic event: conv with Jeremy Crawford (D&D guy). On my bday so can't make it
      • Wish I could think of something to say:
      • Anna Wilson: childhood story of death.
      • JFM: singlular characters. So 1D they become 3D.
      • Melanie: 3 candles --> Shekinah, mene mene tekel ...
        • Winnick, JSTOR, Candles, Easeter
      • Nathan S – namecheks me (I beat him to white whale photo thing) Deism. We are now in complexity, nonlineary materiality.
      • Oh well I got off a comment but didn't get any decent response...oh well I feel embarassed. JFM at least knows who I am.

    • Not(e)s

    • This passage from Father Mapple's sermon caught my eye:
    • Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own **inexorable self**.

    • Ahab as Cyborg blyg

      • Ahab as Urizen | Claude Urizen
        • Ask Claude
          • The Urizenic Structure of Ahab's Mind
          • Blake's Urizen is the fallen faculty of Reason — not reason as liberation but reason as enclosure. He is the measurer, the lawgiver, the one who imposes geometric order on the infinite and calls that order truth. His defining gesture in The Book of Urizen is the act of separation: he divides himself from the other Zoas, creates a bounded cosmos, and then chains himself within it. His books of brass and iron are attempts to fix the infinite into law: "One command, one joy, one desire, / One curse, one weight, one measure." The horror of Urizen isn't that he's evil — it's that he means well. He wants to impose order because chaos terrifies him.
          • Ahab maps onto this almost point for point. His monomania is precisely the imposition of a single interpretive law onto the infinite illegibility of the world. The whale must mean malice — this is Ahab's "one command." The famous quadrant scene enacts a perfectly Urizenic moment: Ahab smashes the instrument of celestial measurement because it can't tell him why, only where. He destroys scientific rationality not because he rejects reason, but because reason has failed to deliver the totalized meaning he demands. The measuring faculty turns on itself.