Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D'Ambrosio Read Free Book Online Page A

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, ratherfrolicsome 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 ofthe 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 rhetoricalabstract, but even more abundant and pressing has been a heap-big annoyance at the nuisance