Thursday 20 August 2026
The question today didn’t just “pop” in my head.
Exasperated by an ongoing teaching dilemma about subjects I should (or should not) teach in my War Class and what I should (and should not) blog about here, I asked myself the following question: “Do orcas, dolphins, seals, sharks, and other sea creatures experience the animal equivalent of the bends when swimming in deep waters?”
My conundrum isn’t random or absurd.
From the nervous excitement of sending off my youngest to college to the obsessive (and likely unnecessary) worry of finding (and teaching) new texts for my War Class, I’ve been feeling “diver’s bends” symptoms all summer long.
I often compare writing and reading to “deep diving.” While writing my Herman Melville dissertation, I started using the phrase to describe how I felt. I completed most of the dissertation during the Summer 2005. In total, the writing process took me 14 months. During that summer, I wrote my chapters on Billy Budd, Moby-Dick, and Clarel. I wrote my “Bartleby” chapter in 5 to 6 days right after Christmas 2005. And I accomplished this mad feat while moving in and renovating my house.
Writing about Ahab, Bartleby, existential crises, and such WAS madness; the psychological effect WAS equally maddening.
The feeling of “deep diving” connoted then and still expresses the psychological and moral repercussions, moods, sensibilities, and even sensations of “thinking too much” and “thinking too long” … ah… (Melville’s been on my mind lately—… “ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”—the so-called dilemma of Hamlet. The pressures of sustained and intense analysis of profound and dark themes of existential crisis and boredom and the revision (and more revision) of scrutinizing those questions felt heavy and constricting.
When deep-sea divers return from the depths to the surface too quickly (perhaps even recklessly so), they experience “the bends, “or decompression sickness. Nitrogen gas bubbles in the diver’s blood system cause high pressures. Symptoms include: body pain, numbness, dizziness, tiredness, and confusion. If symptoms are severe or untreated, a diver may die.
Brain fog and migraines are my “diver’s bends” symptoms. Working on Melville—note the nautical themes—was my philosophic and emotional equivalents to “diver’s bends.”
Last Fall, an inquisitive student asked: “Why do you quote that Nietzsche quote so often?” (“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”) More nautical motifs! My reply: it’s not just a cool thing to say during class. It’s a warning. It’s real. It happened to me. I remind myself not to stay down too long….”
According to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)—a non-profit and private marine science education and research institution—deep-diving sea creatures CAN get the “bends.”
In an online article entitled, “How do marine mammals avoid the bends?,” a WHOI researcher writes:
lead author Daniel García-Parraga of the Fundacion Oceanografic…. said, “Excessive stress, as may occur during exposure to human-made sound, may cause the system to fail and increase blood to flow to the air-filled regions. This would enhance gas exchange, and nitrogen would increase in the blood and tissues as the pressure decreases during ascent.”
Scientists once thought that diving marine mammals were immune from decompression sickness, but a 2002 stranding event linked to navy sonar exercises revealed that 14 whales that died after beaching off the Canary Islands had gas bubbles in their tissues—a sign of the bends. The researchers say the paper’s findings could support previous implications of decompression sickness in some cetacean mass strandings associated with navy sonar exercises.
You can read more about this subject here: https://www.whoi.edu/ocean-learning-hub/ocean-facts/how-do-marine-mammals-avoid-getting-the-bends/
Also here is where I stopped drafting this blog, and watched a documentary about the deep, deep ocean. An instinctual response, I guess, to understand my “diver’s bends.”
Even deep-sea creatures have their breaking points. No matter how well adapted to their underwater environments, outside forces (always) are there to undermine, wound, and torment—eventually annihilating them. They become tragic but also—sadly—farcical spectacles; their rotting, half-consumed corpses horrify some humans, guilt-tripping others to mumble: “thoughts and prayers.”
Marine life of the deep, too, sink to the bottom; eventually, the mighty Moby Dick’s bones fell to the very bottom of the ocean floor. Can we find Ahab’s bones there, too?
The abyss is a graveyard. How many shipwrecks have become anonymous and forgotten? What kind of ancient sea creature’s skeleton remains unknown?
Bones also can and do decompose—even on the ocean floor—leaving absolutely no trace of the animal’s existence. Did it even exist? How do we know if it didn’t?
The more fragile the material, even a cemetery grave marker can and does disintegrate. The sight of a decrepit monument can make one feel powerless, humiliated, and crushed. Worse still, the faceless, unidentified Bartlebys of the world who have passed on can and do become nothing. Some history books can’t and don’t record every statistic, every name, every life. Could Carl Sagan be wrong—or deluded or naïve—when he insisted that: “The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the Universe to know itself”? Neglect, weather, and the ground itself will fade away the chiseled inscriptions on the stone or wood or metal plaque, thus utterly erasing the dead’s identity. Who was buried here? In this place?
What redeems a place like New York’s Hart Island—a public cemetery for the unclaimed, unidentified individuals… and even infants… from the horror of such treatment of the Dead? To be buried in a trench!
Even in that catalogue of endless war crimes, The Disasters of War, Francisco Goya teaches me with his Plate 27 (“Charity” / “Caridad”) that even burying the dead in a mass grave is an act of compassion, a good deed. I guess something is better than nothing. Someone couldn’t allow the disgrace and cruelty of abandoning the Dead to the scavengers and elements. Someone who wasn’t related to and not even a friend of the anonymous cares enough to bury the anonymous Dead. Someone returned to the anonymous Dead their humanity and dignity—this anonymous person was someone else’s friend, father, neighbor—by doing the right thing. And that someone who buried or perhaps re-buried the anonymous Dead was themselves anonymous. No one is watching. No one will reward them for the deed of burying the Unknown. They simply did the right thing. Thank you.
I admire Andrew Lumish, the so-called “The Good Cemeterian.” In his free time, he is a cemetery monument restorer who brings back the memory and dignity of military veterans. He rescues these gravestones from oblivion.
Check out his website: https://www.thegoodcemeterian.org/
And also check out his social media accounts.
The New York Times 29 September 1891 misnamed Herman Melville in their obituary; they called him, “Henry Melville.” In other death notices, newspapermen referred to his masterpiece Moby-Dick as “Mobie Dick.” Melville admirers ultimately regained his name and dignity for him.
I don’t know how to conclude this blog. I feel a moral obligation to keep writing. I mustn’t stop. I also realize that this piece isn’t as bleak and depressing as its surface message might suggest. I feel relieved. I feel I lifted off a heaviness; and I hope I might be helping you to remove a weight.