YouTube link:
https://youtu.be/mSIQ5LmInHw

Instagram link:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cta_VgMtzfo/

Each of us has a Moby-Dick in the depths of the ocean of our unconscious: a beautiful and terrifying magnitude hidden from us. All our wounds come from it, and at the same time it is the desire to encounter it that begins our hero’s journey.

As in Melville’s Moby-Dick, each of us has an Ishmael within who sets out on the hero’s journey of life, and an Ahab who, with an incomprehensible obsession, rises to battle this magnificent immensity—an Ahab whose destructive rage is directed not toward its annihilation, but toward his own.

Thus our fate is either, like Jonah, to flee from its magnitude, or, like Ahab, to rage against it and destroy ourselves in that devastating anger. We are either swallowed by it in our flight, or descend with it into the depths of the unconscious.

The story of ourselves and the whale within is the central story of our lives. All the other stories of life are peripheral narratives through which we try to forget this one.

And Charlie, the protagonist of Aronofsky’s The Whale, in reading a passage his daughter wrote about Moby-Dick, tells us that all the other chapters of the book of our life are only ordinary, tedious stories we tell ourselves so that for a moment we can forget the deepest story of our lives: the story of our self-destruction.

In the first part of this philosophical and archetypal analysis of The Whale, we will look at Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and, through that story, open a window toward a deeper understanding of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale.

The later parts of this seminar will be shared with friends soon.

Aydin Areta