This morning, walking the beach to clear the loose mental cables of an hour’s sleep, I see a big shape a quarter mile down, half-lost in the mist of the winter’s morning. Turns out it’s a dead humpback whale, four thousand pounds of blubber and bone mashed ashore in some final contempt of the sea. Gulls whirl about, pecking at the flesh, delighted to finally to have acreage instead of crumbs. A gaggle of human onlookers keeps a ten paces back out of respect for a riotous stench, a sourmash of shit and fishrot and brine.
But what of those stilled graying eyes on either side of the head, seeing nothing anymore where we stand? Ahab enquired a sperm whale’s head after the rest of its body had been shorn of blubber and boiled down for oil; he wanted news of the hoary depths that head had harrowed, down in the immense blackness of his own heart. To me the head is just immensely sad, and the freight of the beast on this shore today is heartbreaking. So many whales beaching this year, starting up in New England in the feeding grounds, now picking up down South during the migration and breeding round. Someone from the NOAA fishery will be by to take samples, gathering data which might account for these suicidal ends -- viruses, illness, the presence of biotoxins, anything.
A message delivered by the lords of the sea, bottling up this whale on our shore. But for whose benefit? Those eyes aren’t searching us out, that’s for sure. Waves flutter uselessly along its flanks, tidal rhythms moot in moving this new barrier island. The morning surly in waking, the eastern cloudfronts refusing to delve the sun yet -- only a mottle confused light straining against steel. What do the elements care? We’ll get the stinking thing hauled off before it gets to be more of than a curious nuisance.
I stare for ten seconds more, hands jammed in the pockets of my windbreaker, and am surprised to feel so much love in me streaming out toward that ugly dead bulk. What is it? -- I’m welling with sacchyrine tenderness for this dead child of some far extra-species mother, so alone and bereft while the birds weave and dive bearing gobbets of its flesh in their beaks, while we superior ones shuffle like rubes at the carnival, straining for a peek at the real deal, annihilation at its nakedest. Seems my heart is breaking everywhere these days for animals of every specie and phylum—ghost crabs scurrying back from waves, pinkpurple man-o-wars on the sand, their tentacles like the scattered hair of pillaged virgins, sandpipers whose legs blur in motion as they run to and fro ... What fragile smallness to eke a living on the surface of cruel immensities ... Even Joe Leviathan here, poor thing, so far from kin and element and life itself ...
There’s an origin story told by Black Elk, the Oglala Sioux medicine man who was interviewed in 1948. These Sioux had migrated to the Plains around 1680 from the forests of the upper Mississippi. Surely the territories were as different as sea and shore. So its no wonder that their myths had to morph as well.
The story he told was this: Early one morning long ago, two Sioux braves carrying bow and arrows were hunt into new territory. They peer down from a hill down looking for game and see a faint figure walking toward them . Turns out it’s a beautiful maiden dressed in white buckskin and bearing a package on her back. One of the braves is enflamed with lust and speaks his desire to his partner. But the other rebukes him, saying this is obviously no mortal woman.
The woman stops and looks up at them and calls the first to come near. He does so, hurrying down from the hill, but when he reaches the maiden a cloud descends over them. When it lifts there the woman stands, but the man is reduced to a pile of bones through which swarm devouring snakes.
“Behold what you see!” The woman shouts to the other. “Now tell your people to prepare a large ceremonial lodge for my coming. I wish to announce something of great importance.”
So the guy hurries back to his tribe and speaks with the chief, who quickly has some tents torn down and reassembled into a ceremonial lodge. The woman appears and, lifting the package she has been carrying high in the air, says, “Behold this bundle and always love it! It is very sacred and you must treat it as such. No impure man should ever be allowed to see it: for within this bundle there is a very holy pipe. With this pipe you will, down the years to come, send your voices to Wakan Tanka, your Father and Grandfather.”
***
I walk on, leaving behind the dead whale’s emissary weight. It’s no bigger really than some of the other crypts sinking in my chest, caskets filled with bones old and older, slowly descending toward oblivions never to be bourned with a kiss. Eros marries Thanatos in the end, his burning arrow grazing the nipples of the sky only to plunge into the world’s inevitable lap, hissing out at it dives into the brine.
Of course I wanted to fuck her. Of course I made a myth of her. Of course I walk on here, on course for some third articulation or language, of big night music and its harrowing insides composed, no longer at war with the world, prodigal to its silent brooding wash down and down a shore which has yet to brighten. Maybe the whale is the bundle of that maid I must help raise from the sea’s bottom, a delved bit of gold still deep in a whale’s belly where it must remain, where I must re-frame my sentences.
Or maybe he’s the cloud which descends over my desire to write those very sentences, turning words into snakes which feast on blue lucence till all that remains are my bones.
I’m rowing toward the next voice, father Ahab, grandfather Noah. Stick it in your pipe and smoke it till that dead whale’s eyes see me here where it counts.
