Mental Health Day: Moby Dick, Depression, and Other Ways We Drown

And I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee

By Christopher Sloce
QuailBellMagazine.com

​On my right arm I have a large portrait of a sperm whale. It took three hours to finish and cost almost around twenty hours of a living wage. 

    
The obvious correlation, one a friend pointed out, is Moby Dick, the plenty referenced and rarely read shibboleth of American literature, which was the inspiration, though the whale is in grayscale and a white one. Everyone knows the general point of Moby Dick: a tyrannical man despises a whale for taking his leg, chases it, and ends up bringing his crew to destruction. What I do not see discussed very often is Moby Dick as a classic of depression literature. In the first chapter Ishmael writes that sailing is his way of combating a gang of maladies:

"It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

You could probably take the list of maladies here and diagnose Ishmael with whatever mental disorder you want, but the apex of his self-destructive actions is suicide. Everybody has the same vanishing point in their portrait but few people speed towards it. Depression strangles your thought process to the point that you can’t see that in a utilitarian manner living a long time is much preferable to living a short amount of it. You don’t necessarily have a death wish; you just have no wish at all, and the pain of knowing that being barren of hopes is what kills you, not the disease.
    
Ishmael got on the boat to remind himself that there were possibilities beyond his hypochondria and suicidal ideation. By the end of the book, he is floating on the coffin of his bosom friend, Queequeg, and picked up by the Rachel, another ship “that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” The chapter’s epilogue quotes a book of the original plagued man, Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” After the horrid events, Ishmael’s story is also his recounting of it, the way he uses the infamous minutiae of cetology to keep himself busy on the boat. By throwing himself into telling his story, he is attempting to heal himself from living the story.
    
An ex of mine used to ask me why I was so open to talking about my mental health issues. Ask is a sweetener: it was a question designed to incriminate me by revealing some flaw that, through her obviously correct way of living, could improve upon me. After awhile in the relationship I began to see myself as a a lot with an abandoned building that only needed to be cleared away for some sort of condominium or brewery on it to have any value, a person who could be a good partner if only.
  
 I told her at the time it was to stand in solidarity with people who suffer in silence to let them know they weren’t alone and do any work possible to bust through the stigma so attached to mental illness, that by talking about mental health issues, I could teach myself it was okay to be afflicted with depression and anxiety and complex post traumatic stress disorder. I still think this is the case and I hope by giving shape to those maladies it makes things easier for somebody where for me it was not easier. This wasn’t enough for them and I think for me it’s a simplification of the ultimate case, which I can sum up through the Stockdale Paradox.
    
The Stockdale Paradox is the name for a paradox discovered by Admiral James Stockdale when he was captured by the Viet Cong and sent to the Hanoi Hilton. He was beat up and tortured and put in solitary. Despite this he developed a code of communication with other prisoners of war and put himself to the very ends of human tolerance just so he wouldn’t give up classified information.
    
Later he recounted to a journalist how he made it. He had two answers: “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade,” to which he added: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
    
I wasn’t familiar with the Stockdale paradox when I answered my ex’s cross examination but this is the ultimate goal of my mental health writing: to make illness maybe not the defining event of my life, but nevertheless one I would not trade. Writing is the process by which I confront the brutal facts of my current existence, and in return I get catharsis, a process that is the prevailing.
    
But to go back to tattoos: in one of Moby Dick’s most poignant chapters, Ishmael tells the fantastical story of a temple he visited, made out of a whale’s skeleton in the kingdom of Tranque. The priests didn’t want him to but he ended up measuring the entire length of the temple, doing what he could to glom onto that little piece of information. To them it was impossible if not blasphemous. In his words:

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing…

When Ishmael came to the Rachel, he might have forgotten what he saw, but the tattoo would be there forever as a reminder. The tattoo’s significance is not accidental for me, but it’s really just a symbol for the writing. If one day all my bad memories get replaced and become equal to bad dreams I had, there would be a record.

To write about pain, the cloudiest thing of all, with clarity, is like Ishmael measuring the holy skeleton: whether it’s impossible or frowned upon, I have to do it for my sake. If John Gray is correct and the ultimate purpose is simply to see and experience, writing is where what has been seen is seen again and where once again, I can see and know it was the thing survived.