Call me horny. Herman Melville’s 1851 American renaissance classic, Moby Dick, is truly one of the most fantastic pieces of literature ever written, enticing every human emotion while leaving little to the imagination. This novel serves as a sensory wrecking ball, knocking down every wall; crossing every line; and penetrating every boundary in the body and soul.
I will be honest; the mental bar in my head was set quite low due to Moby Dick’s reputation as being unfathomably slow and down right boring. It did not help that the particular copy I was reading was printed in 1952 with that distinctive smell that only comes with experience. Little did I know that within those dry, yellowed pages held what would become wettest, most transformative experience of my professional reading career.
It starts like any other book, scene setting and character introductions: Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, Ahab, and the rest of the motley Pequod crew. It all reads very smoothly. Smooth sailing if I may. Nothing about the early chapters gave any inclination about visceral imagery or guttural syntax that lied in wait for me. The tides truly changed once the Pequod set sail on its confounded whaling voyage.
I felt the heat radiating from the sun; I heard the wind rushing in the sails over head; I tasted the salt of the glorious sea. Everything Melville described, I felt in real time. I experienced severe fatigue and found it difficult to walk due to the rocking of my room. With little fresh water around me, dehydration struck early and often. Needless to say, seasickness set in within seconds leading to profuse vomiting and the drive to read on.
I experienced these, and many other, bodily symptoms whenever I began to read. Responses like this are what one looks for in a good novel, true spatial displacement, something that was very familiar to me being a professional reader. This made reading in a library, on a bus, or in any public place nearly impossible, but I did it anyway. These typical feelings and symptoms however, became much more real and much more intense like I had never before experienced upon the introduction of what would soon consume my mind. The Whales.
Something about their immense girth turned me all around. The idea of such a weight crushing down on my chest aroused me like no man or woman had ever done before. Being tossed in in their bubbly wake, feeling the ebb and flow of the sea. Ebb and flow. Ebb and flow. The barnacles, the baleen, the blowhole! It all excited me. Moby Dick was my sexual awakening. I am a whale.
At this point I had all but lost track of the storyline and the passage of time itself as I became wrapped up in my reinvention. This culminated in me renting a car (I do not own a car), driving to the ocean in search of my new mate and ended with my being arrested for public indecency (forgot about my moby penis) and being taken to the emergency room to get my stomach pumped after swallowing gallons of saltwater. It was at this low point of life when I realized it wasn’t meant to be. A forbidden love, if you will. My story isn’t totally a sad one however, like the old adage goes, if you love something, set it free. All I can hope for now is to be, like Jonah, swallowed whole by a whale. Only then will my love find its way back home.
-Alex Nusstein, Contributor