Whales

I worked with Moby-Dick for a long time. I started an erasure with paint and an old, illustrated edition. I painted over words I wished to keep. Paint is paint: mistakes could not be fixed. Because I’d obliterated many of Melville’s whales, I added rough (very rough) images of whales on the dried pages. Finally, I started again. And I read Melville, again.

There were pages full of racism, there were glorified slaughters as action sequences. I know Moby-Dick is a classic. I know it is beloved. But I could neither erase its ills—because that work became disguise and dress-up—nor let them stand unremarked. I was not amused. I could have done without Ahab entirely. I couldn’t muster interest in his obsession.

I started over and over again. I was in it, I realized, only for the whales. The whales who had been there once, had been in the oceans before all of this. So I picked out a sparse story and kept every instance of the word “whale.” With other words missing, they seemed to swim.

If every whale lost to commercial whaling were restored, the oceans wouldn’t be turning green. Everything wouldn’t be lost. If if if.

Think about a whale. No, the whale is larger than that. Can you, can I, can we together really imagine the size? Imagine the buoyancy of the whale. Imagine the water. Imagine it cold. Imagine a ship and tell it to slow down. Tell it there are whales here. Imagine all of us and tell us to be smarter. Think of our noise. Imagine a giant volume dial hovering. Put both hands on the dial and dial us down. Think of a whale.