Ahab's brow
Nothing is more astonishing about being 30 than my newfound understanding of myself at 17
The last essay, The Long Argument, concluded the series, Footnotes. This one begins a new series, integrating experiences and lessons on addiction recovery, trauma, shame, separation and individuality, time and the desire for escape and/or fusion, meditation, and practice.
⩩ 51
A few years ago, Moby-Dick became my personal Bible. I was dropping out of a PhD program in philosophy when a friend came to visit me in Chicago and gave me a copy as a gift. I read the book with total abandon. I dove into it; I swam through its pages. As soon as I got done reading it, I started again. I was intoxicated.
If you haven’t read Moby-Dick, there are two main characters. On one side, there’s Ishmael, the narrator of the novel, a sailor who tells the story of his adventures on a whaling ship. Ishmael is characteristically equanimous. He observes; he witnesses. As mindfulness encourages, he participates in everything without getting caught in it. He enjoys the freedom of a balanced mind and good spirits.
Then, there’s Ahab. Ahab is the mad captain, locked into unwavering conflict with a mysterious white whale, Moby-Dick. Ahab is angry, vengeful, determined to wreak havoc on the whale, himself, and anything that gets in his way. Ahab is bitter vengeance personified. Alone on the deck, with just his own thoughts, he cries out, “I am madness maddened!” Clouds are piled up on his furrowed brow.
As I read Moby-Dick, I didn’t just read about Ishmael and Ahab. I became them. I didn’t just read about Ishmael, for example, climbing to the top of the mast, standing in the crow’s nest, ship swaying beneath him, looking out at the waves rippling infinitely into the horizon, one with it all. With sweet relief I became Ishmael in the crow’s nest, one with it all.
And I didn’t just read about Ahab, pacing the deck of the ship, tormented, gripped by rage and single-mindedly determined to take revenge, to destroy. I became Ahab. Or rather something in me became expressed and articulated in him. Ahab wants to break something, no matter whose or what. He is set on destruction, with a unified will and with perfect self-knowledge. “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run,” he says, and I said it with him.
My understanding of Moby-Dick has evolved over the last few years, a process that has really accelerated as I’ve become comfortable in the concepts and terminology of addiction. Participating in a 12-step recovery program, listening to people in recovery, and reading around addiction and recovery have given me a whole new lens on emotional health. I have come to see addiction, i.e. compulsive dependence, in many areas of my life, and now I will go through a few of these insights, some of the harvest, let’s say, from my first season of recovery.
The first insight is that Ahab is a paradigmatic addict. He chases his revenge on the whale despite its adverse effect on himself, his family, the crew, the ship, i.e. all the other things in his life. The whole premise of Ahab’s character is that he obsessively pursues one thing at the expense of everything else. That is addiction.
And this points to a fundamental fact about addiction. Because, why would anyone sacrifice all other goods in their life for one thing? They wouldn’t. For the addict, there are no other goods. For the addict, the one thing doesn’t come at the cost of everything else. That is its purpose. For the addict life is stressful and unpleasant; the addict is actively seeking escape and oblivion and destruction in their addiction. In this way, the addiction is not the problem but a symptom of the problem, a response to it, a failed solution.
In Moby-Dick this truth is represented by Ahab’s woundedness. Within the story of the novel, Ahab’s physical wound stems from his first encounter with the white whale, when it snatched away one of his legs from the knee down. It’s obvious, however, that this is not the true root of Ahab’s obsession. Rather the fact that he’s missing his leg stands in symbolically for a deeper, existential pain we can all touch.
For a long time, I lived there. It is not that surprising then that I have also come to see how addiction has been operative in many areas of my life, from alcohol and weed to emotional and romantic dependence to minor physical compulsions i.e. self-soothing ticks to food to the study of philosophy and my inclination to reading and writing. This is the second insight. I can identify addictive patterns across my life.
Addiction 101 involves the understanding that the object, the “drug,” is irrelevant; what matters is how it is used, and I am beginning to see how even literature can function as an escape, how it has functioned as an escape in my life.
One expert on addiction I’ve learned a lot from is Stanton Peele, who writes, “Addiction takes place with an experience sufficiently safe, predictable, and repetitive to serve as a bulwark for a person's consciousness, allowing him an ever-present opportunity for escape and reassurance." What environment could be safe or more predictable than the one a book, the written word, offers to its reader?
Obviously, it is possible to read in a perfectly healthy fashion, where the reading enriches and is enriched by other rewarding points of contact with life. However, it is also possible to read compulsively, to want to climb into the book, to evaporate into a fantasy, a character, or the black letters of printed page.
From this perspective, in hindsight, the intensity I read Moby-Dick with, my gift for absorptive reading, appears differently. I seem to have been all too eager to abandon myself to the text of Moby-Dick, to flee the concrete present. To an extent I turn with a new eye on the abstraction inherent in philosophy, language, and literary life as I have pursued them.
Or consider the phrase I started with. A few years ago Moby-Dick became my personal “Bible.” I played with the idea that Moby-Dick was not a book but the book, and asked myself what that would mean. I read the book from a place of extreme precarity, making great demands on it, looking to be saved. But it is the desperation of addiction that makes such great demands on a single text.
Besides, I now see that as a “bible” or guide to health Moby-Dick has a serious limitation, that there was therefore a flaw in my plan. The novel presents a compelling depiction of these two archetypes: Ishmael, the free and easy, balanced, and healthy spirit, and Ahab, the uneasy, obsessed, rigid and defiant soul. It clearly asserts that the Ishmael-type is desirable and it also clearly suggests that transformation is possible, that there is a road from the Ahab-type to the Ishmael-type.
However, it doesn’t describe that road beyond pointing out a few landmarks, such as saving experiences of divine union and rebirth. It doesn’t provide clear descriptions of conditions, or a vocabulary, or a tradition, or practical advice about concrete steps, or a living supportive community. For these resources, and the awareness that Moby-Dick lacks them, that I had previous lacked them, I had to wait until this year and this first season of recovery. You don’t know what you don’t know.
This brings me to the third insight, which is the touchiest one to state. I am amazed at the way things are recycled and how understanding unfolds and accumulates across time. As time goes on and I better understand myself, Ahab, and my relation to him, I release my simple identification with him, and the parts of myself his character spoke to. But I don’t release him. I don’t move on from him, or the pursuit of the whale, or Moby-Dick. Ahab is a part of my story, a firm point of reference, a chapter I carry with me.
Similarly with the image that hung above my series Footnotes, “in the middle of the play a stranger wanders onto the stage...” Its significance is changing, growing. At the time I introduced it, it represented the unusual, the unexpected, the abnormal or extraordinary, the strange. I also spoke of breakage, or the breakdown of order. I talked about the link between “starting” and being “startled.” I emphasized the idea of rupture, whether of disruption, interruption, or eruption. I even said, “It is a wound, a puncture, and the stagestranger stands for it, the break in, the out of place.”
I realize now, however, that I didn’t go far enough, that the image has more significance. I was speaking in abstractions, with my head, not yet able to reconnect my head with my heart. To speak with the heart requires first knowing your heart, which means being vulnerable. To speak from there for me is to talk not just abstractly about the “unusual” but to talk from my own pain, grief, and trauma, which the stagestranger has also come to represent. In short, both Ahab and my image of the stranger have taken on new dimensions of meaning in my encounter with addiction recovery.
So let the image also mean this. We have to remain radically open to the new. As Wittgenstein was fond of saying, light dawns gradually over the whole. This means that things are interconnected, and you can’t understand something new without it shifting your understanding of what you already knew.
Nothing is more astonishing to me about being 30 than my newfound understanding of myself at 17. We think we know who we are and what we are saying, but we are mistaken. Understanding awaits us. We sail perpetually also into the past, into a new whole.
Thanks for reading and, if you have a comment, I’d love to hear from you.
I am not usually a movie-quoter. And I don't know if I've ever seen "Men In Black" in its entirety. But Dad quoted this line Agent K says, and it's stuck with me. And I thought of it after reading this essay: "Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." Proud of you, Garrett. Excited for this next chapter.