Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels

By Steve Mentz and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Journey through uncharted literary waters and explore Melville’s epic in bold new light

Come sail with I.

We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant’s rage, the ship’s crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without.

This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue—launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It’s not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.

Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I welcome you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can—back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It’s the turning that matters. It’s a blue wonder world that beckons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781531506339

Steve Mentz

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University and author of An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), Ocean (2020) and a poetry chapbook, “Swim Poems” (2022). He also writes and curates The Bookfish Blog at www.stevementz.com.

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Cover: Sailing without Ahab, Ecopoetic Travels by Steve Mentz

Sailing without

Ahab

Ecopoetic Travels

Steve Mentz

Fordham University PressNew York2024

Copyright © 2024 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

24 23 225 4 3 2 1

First edition

for my parents,

Marilyn and Roger Mentz

A map highlights the Whale Rock, Green Island, Horton Point, Umbrella Islands, Kelsey Island, Long Island Sound, Cow and Calf Rocks, Southern Ocean, Indian Ocean, South Atlantic Ocean, Noth Atlantic Ocean, Asia, Africa, and Europe within the boundaries of the eel mapping. Johnson’s Beach, Farm River, and Farm River Gut are at the Northwest in East Heaven. Pages Cove, Granite Bay, Killam’s Point, and Bradford’s Cove are in the Northeast. Darrow Rocks is in the Central West and Johnson Point is in the Central East. Australia, the Sunda Straits, the Pacific Ocean, and the Sea of Japan are in the Southwest. South America and Nantucket are in the Southeast.

Map created by John Wyatt Greenlee of Surprised Eel Mapping.

Contents

Foreword, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Etymology (Supplied by a late consumptive Professor)

Sailing Without

Headless Travels

Loomings

Out of Place

Fishing

Change

Vision

The Street

The Chapel

The Pulpit

Storm and Wreck

A Bosom Friend

Ideas

Mapping Oceans

Houses in Houses

Nantucket

Chowder

Who’s on the Ship?

Intermittent Fasting

Sea Living

The Prophet

Tomorrow!

Going Aboard

Merry Christmas

The Lee Shore

The Encounter

Oil

Politics

Knights and Squires

[…]

A Scene on the Quarterdeck

No Pipe

Queen Mab

No Book

Lines of Succession

Dinner

The Mast-Head

A Spring Rose

Sunset

Dusk

First Night Watch

Forecastle—Midnight

Moby-Dick

Great White Evil God

Devils Who Never Sleep

The Chart

The Kind of Harpoon I. Throws

Not Seasick

Weavers

The First Lowering

Testament

Fedallah

The Spirit-Spout

The P. Does Not Meet the Albatross

How to Speak Whale

The Town Ho’s Story

Monstrous Pictures of Whales

Cetacean Errors

Whale Rock

Blue Dreams

Squid

The Line

Stubb Kills a Whale

Authorities

Wooden Bodies

Eating Whale

Cannibal Old Me

Two Shark Stories

Whales and Other Humans

In the Whalelight

Whalefall

The Whale’s Head

No Tail on the Jeroboam

The Monkey-rope

Brothers in Arms

The Sperm Whale’s Head

The Right Whale’s Head

I.’s Blue

Let the Oil Out!

Birthing Tash

Read It If You Can

A Hill of Snow

The P. Meets the V.

The Honor and Glory of Whaling

Jonah Historically Regarded

Just a Little Farther

How We Breathe

The Tail

The Grand Armada

A Love Story

Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

Heads or Tails

The P. Meets the Rose Bud

Ambergris

The Castaway

A Squeeze of the Hand

The Cassock

The State of the Ship

The Lamp

The Search

No Doubloon

The P. Meets the Samuel Enderby of London

The Next Voyage

Inside the Skeleton

Measurements of the Whale’s Skeleton

The Fossil Whale

Save the Whales!

Glass Foot

The Carpenter

What the Carpenter Says

Starbuck in the Cabin

Q. in His Coffin

The Pacific

The Blacksmith

Making a Harpoon

Calenture

The P. Meets the Bachelor

The Dying Whale

When It’s Almost Possible to See

The Quadrant

Swimmer in Storm

The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch

Midnight—the Forecastle Bulwarks

Midnight, Aloft—Thunder and Lightning

Errors in a Book

At Sea

The Log and Line

The Life-Buoy

Coffins

The P. Meets the Rachel

Pip in the Cabin

No Hat

The P. Meets the Delight

The Symphony

The Chase—First Day

The Chase—Second Day

The Chase—Third Day

Epilogue

A Critical Postscript: Cyborgs, Whalemen, and Other Voyagers in Moby-Dick

Acknowledgments

Foreword

by Suzanne Conklin Akbari

But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.

(Moby-Dick, ch. 15, Chowder)

This is a book about subtraction. Ahab and all that he brings with him—patriarchal authority; colonial violence; the monomania of capitalism—are imaginatively subtracted from the narrative arc of Melville’s novel. What we find instead is a rendering of Moby-Dick that luxuriates in the watery depths and the foamy shallows, experiencing the aquatic world not from the vantage point of shipboard but on the wet sand and stones of the Connecticut shore. This book thus sits as an imaginative contribution to the body of work in the blue humanities that Steve Mentz is known for, drawing on ecocritical scholarship to imagine other ways of being in the world, and possible paths to remediating the damages to nature that humanity has wrought.¹

Or, maybe, this is a book about sublimation. Sailing without Ahab is a rendering of Melville’s Moby-Dick: rendered, that is, boiled down from the fatty flesh of the whale, melting into a transparent and pure oil. This melting transforms not only the flesh of the whale but also the flesh of the men aboard ship, as they squeeze one another’s hands through the spermaceti. As Melville puts it, Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness (ch. 94, A Squeeze of the Hand).² Here, the sublime is achieved through the interpenetration of enfleshed bodies, hand in hand, grasping one another through the pure matter of the whale’s body—not completely liquid and not solid. A state of being in-between, being together.

The close-up of artwork with ceramic shells of different colors resembling wampum lined in rows carved or painted with merchant vessels, chimneys, buildings, a torch, and flowers emerging from a rock.

FIGURE 1. Courtney Leonard, Contact, 2021 [detail]

The body is at the center of sublime experience in Sailing without Ahab as well. But instead of oil, the slippery medium is the sea; and instead of intimate congress, we remain in the realm of the individual subject—sometimes reaching back in time to grasp a half-forgotten memory, sometimes reaching forward speculatively toward shorelines that are only just becoming visible. This is a solitary voyage but one that holds the promise of future connections. These are mediated through the double self of the narrator of Sailing without Ahab, the I. who is at once Melville’s narrator (in an abbreviation of Ishmael) and the I or self who narrates the present work. They sit together in an uneasy apposition, united in their revulsion at the tyrannical Ahab and all he represents and divided in their very different ways of relating to others—especially to I.’s beloved Q.

Or, maybe, this is a book about subjection. To be a subject is, in part, to be subjected—to the command of others (Ahab!), to the requirements of the political and economic systems we inhabit, to the desires and passions of the body. This formation of the subject takes place, in Melville’s Moby-Dick, both directly, by means of Ishmael’s experience (of melancholy, of tyranny, of affectionate love, etc.), and indirectly, as the looming presence of the white whale throws into relief all those who stand in its shadow. In Sailing without Ahab, the formation of the subject takes place incrementally, with each individual portion of the narrative—poem, prose piece, discursive note—adding up to a great counterweight to Melville’s novel, sailing near to it at moments with close textual correspondences and deviating from its course at others. Just as the individual chapters and headnotes of Moby-Dick add up into a capacious, even encyclopedic account of the world, so the individual poems and framing prose pieces of Sailing without Ahab add up to an account of the swimmer’s world—in other words, a microcosm of