On Whales and Other Unwieldy Metaphors

Hey fellow bloggers!  Sorry I'm running behind, my internet access at home has been sporadic.  As a result, expect some more saved up posts from me coming soon, and I am excited to read your wonderful words and leave comments!

In de Botton’s second chapter, he writes extensively about transitory experiences and airports. Personally, I felt a lot of anxiety leading up to leaving for Paris, all the way to the flight itself. I don’t think I wear my religion on my sleeve too much, but there are two times which, regardless of my company or circumstances, that I cross myself. The first, which happens more frequently, is whenever I see an ambulance go by with its siren on. There’s something mystical and eerie about ambulances – conversations stop, cars pull over, everyone looks. It’s this public acknowledgement – one of us, no one knows who, might leave soon. Who are we loosing? How might the world change because of it? This is the sort of thing that, for me, just instinctively calls for prayer.

The second is whenever I see a plane take off. Especially so if I’m in it, or if someone I know is in it, but I often feel the impulse to do so even if I have no personal investment in the flight. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of flying – I’ve never had a panic attack or hyperventilated or had to be removed from a plane, it’s never been a serious problem for me the way it is for some people. And besides, I wouldn’t describe it as a fear. I would say that a fear is generally against something that isn’t a real threat, (like spiders,) and that it’s against something avoidable that you can actually control (again, like spiders.) This I would describe as a terror, which I see as something different altogether. A terror I would define as a sort of transcendence, when something occurs that makes you register, in a very direct way, your own mortality. You’re not afraid of whatever the basic occurrence is, (in my case, the ambulance going by or the plane taking off,) but what suggest, what they point to.

Joseph Campbell, (author of Hero with a Thousand Faces, among other excellent works,) theorizes that all narratives have at their core The Hero’s Journey, a basic narrative that he believes describes the emotional process of making a major life change. That is not an excellent summary of his work, and I highly suggest you read his books if you haven’t yet had the opportunity, but my poor approximation will have to do for now. I tend to agree with Campbell, and I have always been especially drawn to his conceit of the Whale. Campbell states that all journeys, or life changes, require one to destroy a part of one’s self that is no longer useful, sort of like shedding your skin, in order to reach the next phase of life. The most obvious application here would be that, in world views which believe in an after life, one must shed one’s earthly existence when one dies in order to pass into the next life. But Campbell also suggests that one must, for example, sacrifice a certain amount of innocence and dependence on others in order to achieve adulthood, and in a deeper way, any change – quitting a job, moving away from home, getting married or divorced, becoming a parent – requires us to descend into a deeper part of ourselves, sacrifice an aspect of lives that we no longer consider essential, and, freed from our previous limitations, move more confidently forward to face the trials this change has wrought for us.

Campbell says that within our narratives, we often make this experience physical as well as psychological, and as evidence he turns to the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. (Seriously guys, I didn’t think this post was going to be super Christian – I honestly don’t usually talk about religion this much.) Jonah gets devoured whole by an gigantic whale, and he lives inside the stomach of a whale, who is swimming through a turbulent storm, in the middle of an enormous ocean. He’s about as deep as you can get. He spends several days in the whale, and finally something in him changes, and he prays to God to save him and he promises, once rescued, to do whatever He commands (Jonah had, before being devoured, been fleeing from God’s orders on a ship sailing to a distant land.) God saves him by making the whale vomit Jonah up on a distant shore, and Jonah returns home, having found a deeper faith in both his God and himself to be able to accomplish what God asks of him.

But to do this, he was SWALLOWED BY A WHALE. If you get eaten by an animal, you die; even ancient people knew that. Campbell argues that Jonah’s doubts, about both God and himself, had to perish inside the whale so that the better version of himself could go free. There are many other examples: Odysseus and Theseus and Aeneas and Hercules must all venture into the underworld, effectively die and reemerge, before truly attaining the glory that is their destiny; they all must descend into darkness, suffer in turmoil, before they can move on to the real challenge. The plane, the ambulance: these, I think, are our whales. To get to wherever we are now, I’m pretty sure at some point all of us walked right into the mouth of a huge metal bird, which flew long and far, then vomited us back up, exhausted and disoriented, on a distant shore. And it is this, I think, which inspires my terror on planes: not only that flying can be dangerous should something go wrong, but in a deeper sense, that even if I arrive wherever I’m going just fine, some part of me will still die during my journey. When I return home, I will be most likely be different, be altered. Who am I? Because very soon, I may not be so sure – you better take inventory now. What will I be loosing? No way to know. How will my world be different? Completely unanswerable.

Another reason to read Campbell is this anecdote (which must have been popular in the second half of the twentieth century because Robert Bly stole it later): there are tribal communities, around the world, which share a common ritual for marking the passing into puberty of males. Boys in these communities will often sleep with their mothers until they are eight or nine. Then, on a pre-appointed night which neither mother nor child have been informed of, the father, who does not normally sleep in the same lodging, will paint his face and clothe himself as a monster, then burst into the mother’s home and drag the terrified child into the night. There he will meet up with other men of the tribe, and the group will ritualistically circumcise the boy. That is the embodiment of the terror though, that fear of the unknown when the unknown if being irrevocably hoisted upon you: a monster, oddly familiar somehow, that wakes you for sleepy comfort and drags you screaming into the night.

I found this terror missing from de Botton’s description of the anticipation of travel, and for me personally it’s an integral part of travel and definitely my study abroad experience. So the questions which I now ask others: do you have other places of terror, other whales, other monsters in the night? And what are you afraid of loosing – what are your foreskins? (Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself – how often do you get to write that sentence?!)

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