Which dragon I maintain to have been a whale

Good evening, whenever you are. My name is John Hodgman and I am reading Moby-Dick to you in a bad Maine accent.

Today’s chapter is called THE HONOR AND GLORY OF WHALING. Which feels like a joke following the last chapter, in which they mercilessly hunt down a blind, elderly deformed whale, and murder it by stabbing it in the putrid ulcer that has grown up around an old wound, which ulcer then explodes, spattering them all with blood and gore.

They find a stone lance head embedded in its body as they butcher it, suggesting the Old Sperm may have survived almost a hundred years of hunting before the Pequod finally got killed it dead to light lamps somewhere in Europe.

But then the whale’s body start to sink the ship, so they cut it overboard and let it’s corpse fall down to the bottom depths, its life cut short for nothing. The honor and glory of whaling.

It feels like a joke because it is a joke. Melville knows what he’s doing when he steers the novel 180 into this chapter, in which he has narrator Ishmael try VERY HARD to connect whaling to the gods and heroes of myth, to Perseus and Hercules and Davy Crockett, to Dagon, the fish, flesh, and fowl god of ancient Syria…

….to Vishnu diving below the ocean to collect the Vedas and reboot Creation, and to St George slaying the Dragon—which dragon, per the title of today, Ishmael maintains might actually have been a whale.

That’s obviously not true. Look at it: it’s a fucking dragon. But Ishmael isn’t dumb either. He knows he’s making an absurd reach, I think. Just as absurd as all the ways we try to label violence as heroic and brutishness as virtue whenever brutality and violence need to be justified for some reason or another.

As whales dive deep and then surface, Moby-Dick also swims back and forth between the low and the high, from the comic to the profound, from high seas adventure to punishing, industrial butchery. And this chapter’s blunt stone point is always: the highs and lows are the same.

Speaking of reaches, here is a whale diving deep and surfacing last Sunday. It’s a humpback that wandered into the Reach up here where I am in Maine.

(Don’t worry: this video is super zoomed in. We kept our distance.)

It was miraculous to see, and I didn’t for one moment want to kill it, even though arguably, thanks to M Dick, I now know more or less how to do it.

We weren’t the only ones to ride out to see the whale. Because shouldn’t be here. Humpbacks are supposed to be in open water, not the sheltered, shore-close shallows of the Reach.

Here it is again. I kept the camera running because I hoped it would come back up for air, but it didn’t.

As I say, it felt like a miracle, and it’s tempting to take that humpback as a sign: a gesture of nature’s support for my own mythic quest to read Moby-Dick to you in a bad Maine accent, chapter by chapter.

But that’s not true. Anymore than it’s true that the great white sharks are in Scarborough in honor of the fact that David Rees watched JAWS for the VERY FIRST time when he visited me here some weeks ago.

They are all just following the food. The Reach is brimming with pogies this year. If you don’t know what pogies are, they are also called menhaden, and that’s about all I can tell you about that. Except the whales are swimming in to eat them in great numbers. And the seals also swarm in to eat them, and the sharks swarm in to eat the seals.

There’s no story to it, no omens or signs: just the honor and glory of uncaring nature. And probably a bunch of whales and seals and sharks and humans will end up bloodied and mained by inevitable dumb, confused, collision.

Anyway, it’s a great chapter, another banger from the M dash D. I won’t tell you what number chapter it is, tho, because then you might not listen to me read it. Worried that you’re too far behind to join the journey. But that’s not true. If you’re just joining us, it’s easy to catch up, and truly every chapter is its own thing.

But before ascending the stairs to listen in the Secret Room, I will remind you of one more dishonorable and unglorious: ICE is still hunting humans for sport here in Maine, and throughout the country.

I hope you will consider supporting organizations like Project Relief Maine or similar in your state. I thank you in advance.