I’ve always been interested in researching and reading stories of obsession, including those about limerence and its roots in maternal attachment, stalking, people who can’t let things go, who are weird and secretive about their primary motivations, people with completely life-incompatible obsessions – like the man who died trapped in a ‘fish-suit’ because he desperately wanted to be a fish. I appreciate Ahab’s obsession with hunting Moby Dick, the white whale who’d bitten off his leg in an act of personal malice. Everyone on that grotesquely haunted and decorated ship, the Pequod, is at the mercy of Ahab’s obsession and none of them can ever get off, and they know it. I recognise a shadow of myself in those stories.

Moby Dick: or The Whale by Hermann Melville (1851) has stuck with me since the first time I read it more than thirty years ago. Reading it, I felt like I was on that boat with Ahab, Ishmael and his ‘wife’ Queequeg the comely cannibal, Starbuck who knows he’ll never see his family again, and the rest of the crew (who are specifically listed by ‘type’ in the title of Chapter 40). I find Melville’s language so beautiful and unforgettable in parts, Shakespearean at times, while dry as a bone in the educational asides (on things he insists we must know about!). The relentlessness of the book is a thing in itself, despite all the meandering. Of all the thousands of books I’ve read, the feeling of this one has endured the longest and goes deepest. 

Thinking about Moby Dick – the idea of that whale swimming from one ocean to the next across the entire world as Ahab and his hapless crew attempt to track and hunt him down, while the whale is ahead of them at every point – that feeling of swimming and chasing reminds me very much of the process of writing, as I experience it. I like to always know where my copy of Moby Dick is in the house. Sometimes I just read through the chapter headings in the table of contents and they evoke feelings of strangeness and mystery that make me want to write. For example, Chapter 57 is called ‘Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.’

My story, The Starry Night, is about a particular state of heightened emotion called limerence, sometimes understood as ‘being in love’ – but it’s more primal than romantic love. Although ‘rusted onto it, full-time onto it,’ Kirra loves someone who is no longer there. She refers to ‘her glorious prostration’ and resents anything that takes her out of her state of ecstatic longing. She yearns for but no longer requires the presence of her beloved. Just the thought of him is sufficiently sublime to keep her living on crumbs and air.

Like Ahab on the Pequod, she is utterly fixated.