Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

I packed in some stomach remedies in case I got lucky.

The supposed cuddly quality of cetaceans I just don’t get. Between barnacles and sea lice, the few whales I’ve seen up close were hideously, hoarily disfigured or at least blemished and tactilely repellent the way certain so-called — not by me — pizza-faced teenagers are. I’ve seen stray grays in the Sound, come to shore to scratch their backs in Saratoga Passage, and they’ve all had a mottled gray pocked aspect, like poured cement. Their souls may be infinitely sweet and poetic, possessed of an earnestness and bonhomie I can only envy, but their bodies, in terms of color and surface texture, resemble bridge abutments. Not that these monsters shouldn’t show a little wear and tear after making a yearly migration of 14,000 miles round-trip, so that, by the time the average gray is twenty, it’s traveled 280,000 miles, or swum, basically, to the moon — which is truly awesome. It probably also explains that corroded cruddedup look. Gray whales get used roughly, making their migratory haul through Siberia, the Gulf of Alaska, etc., on their way south to the warm buoyant waters and calving grounds of Baja California. That’s no frolic. That’s a hell of a lot of use for any kind of carcass.

An encounter with a gray whale is bizarre, and if your first sighting happens unticketed and outside the enervated sanction of a tour, it’ll seem contextually spooky and saurian. Gray whales don’t look especially dirigible. You’d hate to have to park one. They have a lumpy crudeness of design, a banged-up body and a crimped ugly mouth and a dented snout, a color that seems to come from a supply of government surplus paint, and all around they have an unrefined and ancient and also untrustworthy aspect; they look like a mock-up of the kind of practice mammals God was making in the early days, before he hit his artistic stride and started turning out wolves and apes and chipmunks; and they’ve got that useless megaton bigness, a gigantism that’s pretty dramatic in a circus-freak way or like other types of colossi or prodigies, the sheer extravagant enormity of which inspire sublime fascination or wonder or fear, but don’t register much at the refined and fragile end of the emotional spectrum that includes the various colors of love or tender or chummy feelings of any sort. I myself can’t square forty tons of whale flesh or even the word blubber with what I know about sweetness and intimacy; they’re not ducklings or kittens or puppies or little lambs or fawns or piglets. In fact their very bulk seems inimical to closeness, to holding and embracing, but maybe, baby-freak that I’ve lately become, I can now conceive of love only in liftable forms, as something you put your arms around.

My numinous boyhood belief was that whales rose to the surface because they were lonely, tired of the depths. Their ancient bulk seemed to body forth exactly what it meant to be solitary, but breaching and spouting a sigh of relief through the blowhole in their head they lost some of their august self-sufficiency and were always depicted in familial groups, rather frolicsome and sweet, desirous of good company, of community. Obviously I was equating depth with darkness and darkness with cold and cold with silence and all of the above with a nearly insane state of isolation — OK, with my father — whereas things on the sunny maternal surface of la mer seemed to enjoy the sort of warm lapping buoyancy necessary for cultivating friendship and love. The story of Jonah reinforced this spatial arrangement, as did Moby-Dick later, where Pip sinks a fathom too far into the sea’s immensity and comes up mad and/or mantic. But things have changed. Nowadays it’s just as likely the surface of life is what puzzles Pip and finally sends him around the bend, and today’s cabin boy must go alone into the quiet depths to escape and find peace and recover for himself a measure of sanity. It’s civilization that’s raw and wild and full of scary monsters and grotesques and deformities crowding every bus and park bench and court of law, and we now believe our wilderness exhibits the high sweet harmony we hope for from life as well as offering the refuge and sanative balm we desire when our energies flag and the botch of civilization gets us down.

Paul Watson’s floating around somewhere out there in the very same fog as I am, Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He seems to have commandeered the environmentalist argument — and there’s a creepy uncritical parroted quality to what everybody else in the pro-whale (or is it anti-Indian?) camp is saying — and his main, openly stated fear (as opposed to his real agenda, of which, more later) seems to be the precedent the Makah hunt will set for other whaling nations. But if the problem really is the recrudescence of commercial whaling and wide-scale industrial slaughter, then the Japanese ought to be taken to task for their rapine, or the Norwegians, or whomever, but it’s a pretty specious argument that can make the corruptions and failures of these people somehow the direct fault of the Makahs. It’s a sophistic argument, in fact, but Paul Watson’s not much of a logician; he’s mostly a misanthrope and a sentimentalist (how often those things go together!), sweet on whales and sick about what he calls “base-virtued” humans, and his rock-ribbed stance re: the hunt is all about the lone whale, soulful and solitary, perhaps a poet, singing songs, echolocating down the coast, intelligent, gentle, sentient, loving, unfairly ambuscaded (by heathens!) while going about its business — pretty much the otherworldly and animistic whale of my boyhood.

There’s not now nor was there probably ever a shortage of love for Indians in the noble and rhetorical abstract, but even more abundant and pressing has been a heap-big annoyance at the nuisance created by Injuns who are actually alive and walking around and scratching their bellies and grumbling about what’s for dinner or listening to the radio or reading books or arguing over the rules of Monopoly and especially those who are rather clamorous (uppity) about their needs. It all gets so queer and drifty and hard to track these days. Eco-Elements on First Ave. downtown has been instrumental in gathering signatures for a petition against the Makah, and it’s one of those New Age emporiums with a syncretic, boutiquey approach to spirituality, a sort of travel agency specializing in tourism for the soul, emphasizing past lives, future lives, every kind of life but the really incompliant and unruly present, where tarot, runes, goddess-stuff, astrology, Native American spiritual resources, healing soaps and oils and aromas, candles that calm you down and bells that strike a special, particularly resonant and congenial note — where all this totally creeps out the stodgy Pauline Catholic in me, and yet — yet! — this reaching out to the arcane holy world, this Luddism of the soul, however fey and preposterous and apostatic and pagan it might seem in my eyes — you’d think this grab bag of atavistic practices would put the New Ageists in deep and direct sympathy with the Makah.

But it doesn’t. And not so weirdly, a lot of the attacks on the Makah seem to gut and hollow out the “Indian” and take that rhetorical material and use it as stuffing, which in turn is packed into whales. The clichés about Indians transfer easily into clichés about whales, similar in substance and similarly hackneyed, yet housed in different vessels. The noble savage qua noble mammal. This can’t be flattering to the Makah, while I imagine metaphor in general is probably a matter of oceanic indifference to even the most poetic gray whale. And the rhetorical violence — the stealing of language, the silencing — shouldn’t surprise anyone even remotely versant with white/Indian history. Captain Watson likes to footnote his superior credentials as an Indian enthusiast from way back — Wounded Knee! — and yet somehow without tearing his brain in half he’s able to plunge ahead with low, vicious, even paranoid attacks on the Makah as people. A small measured dose of irony should prevent this kind of mental sloppiness, but doesn’t, probably because people in the environmental movement, like holy folks everywhere, don’t make real keen ironists. I can pretty well guess that these sort of merit-badge Indians aren’t entirely or enthusiastically embraced by your average enrolled tribal member, especially as they listen to Watson float pseudo-arguments that asperse the character of the Makah and accuse them of being liars, frauds, cheats, racketeers, colluders, and, of all things, fake Indians.