About us
"Wisdom and Woe" is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. We will read and discuss topics related to:
- Works of Herman Melville: Moby-Dick, Clarel, Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, The Confidence-Man, Mardi, reviews, correspondence, etc.
- Themes and affinities: whales, cannibals, shipwrecks, theodicy, narcissism, exile, freedom, slavery, redemption, democracy, law, orientalism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, psychology, mythology, etc.
- Influences and sources: the Bible, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Milton, Cervantes, Dante, Emerson, Kant, Plato, Romanticism, Stoicism, etc.
- Legacy and impact: adaptations, derivations, artworks, analysis, criticism, etc.
- And more
The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" (as Hawthorne once said of his conversations with Melville) into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."
Regarding the name of the group:
"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces."
(Moby-Dick, 96)
"Though wisdom be wedded to woe, though the way thereto is by tears, yet all ends in a shout." (Mardi, 2.79)
"The intensest light of reason and revelation combined, can not shed such blazonings upon the deeper truths in man, as will sometimes proceed from his own profoundest gloom. Utter darkness is then his light.... Wherefore is it, that not to know Gloom and Grief is not to know aught that an heroic man should learn?" (The Ambiguities, 9.3)
"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." (Ecclesiastes 7:4)
Upcoming events
6
Redburn: His First Voyage - Herman Melville (week 2)
·OnlineOnlineNOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.
Wellington Redburn is a fifteen-year-old from New York who dreams of following in the footsteps of his deceased father. He sets out on a voyage to England, but is quickly confronted by the bitter demands of ship life, the abject horror of poverty in Liverpool, and revelation of the world's moral depravity.
Inspired by Melville's own coming-of-age aboard a cargo ship, Redburn (1849) is a confessional tale of lost innocence. As he gradually awakens to an understanding of evil, "Redburn comes to realize that not only is his earthly father lost forever, but that there is no spiritual father to look after the welfare of mankind either." (John Bernstein)
But the novel is also "arguably [Melville's] funniest work" (according to Hester Blum), a fascinating sea journal in its own right, and understated by Melville himself to be "a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience... no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale."
Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.
Week 1: Chapters 1-22
Week 2: Chapters 23-42
Week 3: Chapters 43 -62Redburn:
Supplemental:
- Noetic podcast with Jonathan Cook
This meetup is part of the series In the Belly of the Whale.
15 attendeesRedburn: His First Voyage - Herman Melville (week 3)
·OnlineOnlineNOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.
Wellington Redburn is a fifteen-year-old from New York who dreams of following in the footsteps of his deceased father. He sets out on a voyage to England, but is quickly confronted by the bitter demands of ship life, the abject horror of poverty in Liverpool, and revelation of the world's moral depravity.
Inspired by Melville's own coming-of-age aboard a cargo ship, Redburn (1849) is a confessional tale of lost innocence. As he gradually awakens to an understanding of evil, "Redburn comes to realize that not only is his earthly father lost forever, but that there is no spiritual father to look after the welfare of mankind either." (John Bernstein)
But the novel is also "arguably [Melville's] funniest work" (according to Hester Blum), a fascinating sea journal in its own right, and understated by Melville himself to be "a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience... no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale."
Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.
Week 1: Chapters 1-22
Week 2: Chapters 23-42
Week 3: Chapters 43 -62Redburn:
Supplemental:
- Noetic podcast with Jonathan Cook
This meetup is part of the series In the Belly of the Whale.
14 attendees
Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth - Carl Jung
·OnlineOnlineThe Symbols of Transformation (1912) represents a milestone in the rupture between Freud and Jung. Concluding that sexual desire is inadequate as a universal explanation for neurosis, Jung rejects Freud's "so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency." Instead he theorizes "a 'Jonah-and-the-Whale' complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on."
The defining feature of this complex is the subject's irrational desire to regress to the safety of the womb, distinguished from Freud's Oedipus as a non-sexual reunion with the mother. But Jung's myth is also distinguishable by its optimistic (rather than tragic) resolution. Just as Jonah's internment in the belly of the whale incites repentance and restores his relationship with God, so the neurotic subject--through a radical confrontation with one's inner darkness--may gestate a profound psychological emancipation and "rebirth."
For Jung, then, religion is not a mere fugitive of Enlightenment rationality (ala Freud), but a custodian of symbolic stories to facilitate self-realization, constructively channeling instinctual forces into vital civil and spiritual purposes.
In "Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth" (Part 2, chapter 5 of The Symbols of Transformation), Jung uses his case study of "Miss Miller" to analyze maternal imagery and motifs, and elaborates his theory of the "Jonah-and-the-Whale complex."
The Symbols of Transformation:
- pdf (see Part 2, chapter 5)
Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth:
Supplemental:
- Jonah and the Whale: A Dream for Our Time This Jungian Life podcast
- DRAGON: The Archetypal Monster and Ally Within This Jungian Life podcast
- Lecture on Abraham Maslow The Jonah Complex
Extracts:
- "Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever." (Moby-Dick, 1)
This meetup is part of the series In the Belly of the Whale.
20 attendees
The Book of Jonah
·OnlineOnlineThe Book of Jonah is one of the most recognizable, most curious, and most strangely compelling in the Bible. For centuries, it has inspired sermons, art, literature, music, and debate (including debate about whether the story is history, parable, allegory, or satire). Despite its familiarity and antiquity, it is filled with surprises and themes that are still relevant.
As sacred text, it serves as a source of revelation and wisdom about the divine. But Jonah is a paradoxical figure: he is a prophet almost without a message and nearly lacking the courage to convey it. And the Book's brevity--"one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures"--belies its rapid shifts in scene and plethora of challenges to the hero. Besides the famous "great fish" (or whale, in fact a small part of the narrative) it features storms and sailors, rebellion and rescue, preaching and protest, and a miraculous plant and miraculous worms that devour it.
The Book of Jonah:
Supplemental:
- Animated overview
- The World in Time podcast on "The Sermon"
- Jonah and the Varieties of Religious Motivation
- In the Belly of the Whale song by Newsboys
- "Jonah and the Whale" S2E01 of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Extracts:
- “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” -Jonah (Moby-Dick, Extracts)
- "... in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah... bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death." (Moby-Dick, 3)
- "Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sea-line sound!" (Moby-Dick, 9)
- "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." (Moby-Dick, 32)
- "They may circumnavigate the world fifty times, and they see about as much of it as Jonah did in the whale’s belly." (White-Jacket, 3)
- "Damn you, you Jonah! I don’t see how you can sleep in your hammock..." (White-Jacket, 78)
- "And here in the black bowels of the ship, sunk low in the sunless sea, our poor Israel lay for a month, like Jonah in the belly of the whale." (Israel Potter, 3)
- "Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went?" (Moby-Dick, 75)
- "And no doubt, if Jonah himself could be summoned to the stand, he would cheerfully testify to his not having heard a single syllable, growl, grunt, or bellow engendered in the ventricle cells of the leviathan, during the irksome period of his incarceration therein." ("Etchings of a Whaling Cruise")
- "I am the only traveller sojourning in Joppa. I am emphatically alone, & begin to feel like Jonah." (Journals, 20 Jan 1857)
- "The genuine Jonah feeling, in Joppa.... it is only by stern self-control and firm defiance that I contrive to keep cool and patient." (Journals, 22 Jan 1857)
This meetup is part of the series In the Belly of the Whale.
16 attendees
Past events
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