What I Learned About Boundaries From Whale Blubber

admire and model thyself after the whale!

Every so often I think of making a Twitter account just for tweeting each paragraph of Moby Dick, one at a time.

What’s nice about Moby Dick is that it has chapters that can be taken entirely out of context without giving spoilers.

I have thus included the entire Chapter 68: The Blanket, below.

This chapter is about the skin of the whale, and poses the question—is whale skin the very thin translucent layer right above the blubber, or is whale skin the thick layer of blubber itself?

The intrigue for me surrounding this chapter is my continual quest to look for good metaphors for boundaries.

I am vocal about not liking a lot of the most common frames around boundaries.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept of boundaries. I am not a “just have a thick skin” sort of person, because “too many people having too thick a skin” can lead to all kinds of dangerous situations that nobody is monitoring for because they are too busy being tough.

If you have too much armor, you can’t be hurt with a certain kind of weapon, but you also aren’t flexible and you aren’t paying attention to the sharp teeth and thorns that are hurting the people around you without armor. You also can’t tell how much people get hurt around you as you fail to be “in the ring” or adapt. You also aren’t immune from fire, earthquakes, spells or other kinds of psychological torments.

I don’t necessarily believe in “having a thick skin” versus “having a thin skin.” People have all kinds of toughnesses and sensitivities to all kinds of things. In fact, being hyper-tough in one area more often than not means being hyper-sensitive in another area.

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All this doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in “having skin.” You can’t have skin contact with a person without both people having skin. You also can’t have “skin in the game” without having skin. It is both sentimental and badass.

I write about the ways that you cannot do very hard things, including military-grade operations, without following a concept of boundaries.

I care about studying boundaries so much that I took a class on it that I highly recommend.

I don’t dislike common memes around boundaries because they are “wrong” per se, but because they often end up being insufficient to solve people’s problems, and then people end up taking on dragons with sticks.

I think that a lot of common memes that intend to zero to one people into having *any* boundaries at all (after living a life believing they aren’t allowed to have any) also end up handicapping people into not figuring out the real tools they need to navigate their situations.

They end up hurt, badly. They end up going in circles. The frames end up being paper-thin.

They end up hitting a dragon with a stick—the dragon does not go away, but also does not immediately hurl fire—empowered with their new tool, they go hit the dragon with the stick again.

It is bad.

So you set up a red line. Some people cross it, some people don’t. Cool. Do you know if it’s a good red line? Do you know if you’re crossing other people’s red lines already? If we are hyper-focused on this idea of “lines” — what happens at the intersections of red lines? Do you know if you want to be “good” so badly, that you can’t tell when someone is telling you that you are going too far? Do you know if someone else wants to be “good” very badly, and so needs extra help from you?

Do you go far into dangerous territory, panic, then have to retreat very far back, unable to do so?

Do you know when you’re topping from the bottom? Or are so scared you end up taking control of an entire situation without realizing it, locking up other people into unsafe positions?

Do you have any idea what I am talking about and how it would apply in a situation among people you’d never met?

Do you know about how complex it gets?

You don’t have to.

I myself don’t know everything and try not to put myself in situations where my safety is dependent on people knowing this stuff.

However, somebody going into a situation with their “red line” abstraction expecting to be safe is how a bunch of not-abstract unsafety actually ends up happening.

The thing about boundaries is that people have different things they are trying to do. We live in a pluralist society. Different cultures have different ways of implicitly and explicitly navigating boundaries, and they all have different systems.

Even everybody who has read a shared text like Nonviolent Communication is doing a different thing with it.

Probably what bothers me most about the current memescape is that there are actually a lot of really good books about boundaries that are extremely well thought through. That is, anybody who wants to learn about boundaries can learn an enormous amount about how the world works from these books, and yet many people are encouraged to stop at the memes and take the memes way too seriously as the final authority, destroying the quest for further exploration as the memes are hammered home as the be all end all “for safety.”

Here are some better resources:

https://askingforwhatyouwant.com
https://www.amazon.com/After-Honeymoon-Conflict-Improve-Relationship-Revised/dp/0979563909

And here are some posts from me describing some of those resources:

On the Benefits of Boundaries
On Red Flags
On Kasia’s New Framework on Dominance and Submission
On Self-Help Books that Don’t Suck

This is venting and also foreshadowing a much longer post about the technicalities of what I mean here.

But my point is…

I was delighted when I got a new visual in Moby Dick, one about internal spaciousness and blubber and nothing about red lines.

I was so moved by it that I wanted to show it to you, in particular this excerpt:

CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.

I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.

The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.

Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature’s skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale’s body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!