How to Fit a Whale in Your Life Lobby
You gave that whale life—celebrate it.
When it all comes down to it—after the hauling and cutting and hands in the goo. The eyeballing and rope length yardage and measuring intent. After the pooling of fluids and lingering odors, the headache logistics of bucketfuls of rancid oils that seep their excretion while aging like a fine brine—I ask you.
When it all comes down to it, will your dead whale fit in your looky-loo lobby?
And by “your dead whale”, I mean the skeleton of it. And by “your looky-loo lobby”, I mean the Memorial Hall of Achieved Dreams in the Natural Museum of Your Whole Damn Life.
I know what you’re thinking.
“Wait…what dead whale? Where did it come from? Did I kill it? Did you kill it? Is this a murder scene?”
Good questions, all. Shhhh. Let me drape your frightened mind in this weighted blanket and shush it quietly to a restful contemplation.
Shipping Newsflash: This is YOUR whale. It has always been your whale. You dreamed it all those years ago when you decided what you would create and make swim and glide and frolic and sing in the magnificent ocean of this world, and here it is. You built this whale from the bricks of your brain. Good work, you! Magic.
“But it’s dead!”
No, it’s not dead—it has passed. There’s a difference. There are no nefarious goings-on here. Your dearly departed whale carcass made its long journey to the outside world and survived all the harpoons of criticism and jealousy to come back full circle to you. Mission deemed possible, it flopped its tired and blubbery body upon the shore of your attention and declared with intense finality:
“I have eated all the krill, my master. Witness me!”
And witness it, you must. It is spent. Over. Done. There is nothing left but to roost it in the ceiling of your memory. To celebrate and toast its magnificent life. This whale before you was no white whale, no black hat villain out at sea dodging some arbitrary hate harpoon. It was a beautiful, fully formed ten-megaton dream with flappy fins and a great singing voice.
So clang that bell, first mate. Get down to the depths of your uncle’s sensational cellar and break out the wine because it’s horn blowhole-ing time!
Call me Withnail.
By now, you’re probably saying “Don’t threaten me with a dead fish1”, to which I’ll say a whale is a mammal, and that’s your ‘today I learned’ moment as if you didn’t already know that.
But congratulations. I just wanted to say that. Congratulations on your “passed” whale. You did it! It’s important to have whale-sized dreams and be brave enough to release them from the oppressive Sea World of your shyness.
You shouldn’t be surprised about your whale corpse. You said you’d be a star—you’re a star. Maybe not in the traditional sense, but anyone who makes the thing and gets it swimming for however long it swims is, in my books, a star. Now all you have to do is figure out how to hang that skeletal token to triumph from up on high. I’m just letting you know in advance that there can be no true beauty without decay. Or to put it another way:
Knock-knock, there’s a Mr. Death at the door and he’s come about the flensing.2
Call me Dick Dale.
Gather your slicing implements and colorful pails and don’t forget your sharpening stones because it’s time to articulate this whale. Flense and scrape and dismantle—make haste, necropsy team! Pickle its shine in vodka. Carve meat from its bones, log every little bacterial lifeform dining on its dead flesh, and interpret the scene. Fill your buckets with shovelfuls of gloop as you bring order to the mess of its demise. Through treacherous and at times unfriendly waters, this dream—your dream—swam, long, hard, and afraid. You must absorb all the lessons of this whale of a project. What are its merciful eyes trying to tell you, Misirlou?
Move your fingers fast as you pick apart this denizen of deep thought. Get to the body quick so that you may honor long. In the process, you will inevitably gut yourself. You will use your own baleen to filter out the lessons of its life to bolster yours. You will let your “insides become outsides3” and release the tension that came from creating the dream of this whale. And so it shall be done.
The dream was real.
What a triumph!
Call me jump bail.
Every whale that washes up upon your shore, every project that swims its swim and escapes to freedom, is a win that can only be judged by you, its creator. You are not on trial, but your sentence is ongoing: keep releasing things to the ocean. Take your time, mount your defense and prosecution, but don’t stress the verdicts. The most important thing is that you dreamt this giant into existence and its existence proves what you’ve known all along:
You are no blowhole, no fluke, no breach of creative etiquette. You are a creator of whales.
Have the dream, achieve the dream. Plenty more pods in the sea, as they (don’t) say (but should). Articulate your inner whales and when you find your magnificent leviathan stretched out in peaceful final slumber upon the shore, its breaching done, its tail slaps and songs sung, honor its life and nab this moment before it fills with gas and floats away. They may call you crazy. They may call you a complete and utter nutter. They may even call you a doctor. Pay it no mind. I know what I call myself when it comes to celebrating my returned whales.
They call me never fail4.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“When it comes to poetry I take my own sweet time and allow myself no more than one poem a day. A good poem is like an anchovy: it makes you want another right away and pretty soon the tin is empty and you have a bellyache or a small bone in your throat or both.”
E. B. White, from Letter to Philip Booth, 22nd November 1970
Via Letters of Note
On Rotation: “The Passenger” by Siouxsie and the Banshees
My cover of the week.
Lovely animation/reading of the poem “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Via The Marginalian
Talk about wearing your love for what you do right there on your face. Here is an interview with Tory Boggs, a professional (and world champion) jump-roper.
Via Kottke
Mixing my movies, but this is my whale for the week so I can do what I want.
This story is incredible and filled with glorious detail on the search for a whale for a lobby and the process of inspecting, flensing, and portaging a whale skeleton. A long read, but deeply satisfying.
Except when I do fail, which is all the time, but never at this. When it comes to my whale displays, my memory is a bonafide Macy’s window at Christmas.
That’s some mighty good wailing!