My grandmother was a writer, poet, and editor. After her passing, my mother found and posted to social media one of her poems originally published in the Oregon East literary journal titled Fluke Near Nehalem. The poem inspired me to submit my own piece of environment inspired poetry to a creative writing journal, which was published earlier this year. I couldn’t find a virtual version of the 35th anniversary Oregon East that hosted Fluke (I am not sure whether this 35th issue was the first appearance, or a reprint). I’m republishing the poem here with some added commentary below, in the hopes that the text makes it way via this temporarily published website into something like the internet archive where it can persist for a while longer.
46 sperm whales dry beached and dying —
no mermaids will sing beneath the spume,
their tails thump instead a percussive dirge
calling the coast to attentive confusion
Sperm whale, cachalot, big head, fat head,
what lunatic tides are drawing you in?
Guards have cordoned the beach to the water —
the curious must be kept from touching
the flesh, from stealing foot-long teeth
being gathered by science in barrows
They study this oracular scrimshaw
hoping to touch some sense at their root
For centuries we haunted them —
scenting our bodies, sizing our clothes, coveting
sea gold — ambergris and spermaceti.
Now they've come — unexpected, unwelcome —
we are not prepared for the stink of this
awful surrender — the stench of self-sacrifice.
No amount of scientific anointing
can stop this swift undertow sucking
the last thump echo into loud Pacific silence.
Where are the gleaners, the makers, the users?
Who makes of this a waxing celebration,
a wake of sweet perfumed Eskimo provisions?
We cautious hunters use no catch we have not killed,
take no gifts we cannot see through,
no loot from dead guests, however unwelcome.
Our honor is deep and rich and wasteful —
we do not reason in the face of faceless things;
shells to our ears drown the sound of the sea.
Some tomorrow, perhaps, when creatures come
in lemming numbers we can't sustain or even stand,
they'll have to pass these teeth among us
Invoking solutions from every mouth.
But tonight it's done — 46 dead untoothed
giants on a shrinking water planet.
Overhead Delphinus the Dolphin is caught
in a frozen leap out of eastern stars
tomorrow we will blow the whales sky high
and bury scraps without priests or wailers.
We have lost magic but have no substitute.
Hiding our impotence in reports of sand
we won't gather scientist, magician,
scavenger and mourner to Nehalem
to feel this passage, to listen beyond
horizons to Cetus the Whale keening
a song made of murmurings, murmurings
from magic wordless deep empty space.
I began by trying to piece together the basis of the poem, tracing the roots. Most children in Oregon grow up learning about (and being shown) the beached whale that was blown up with dynamite near Florence, Oregon in 1970. The carnage was filmed by KATU and circulates on the internet every now and then. Thus, Kathy writes in lines 39-41, “tomorrow we will blow the whales sky high / and bury scraps without priests or wailers. / We have lost magic but have no substitute”. The wasteful destruction of the whale carcass, broadcast gleefully and repetitiously to the children of Oregon, is perhaps the primary real world through-line for the poem. The act represents the disenchantment of the world, the onset and domination of modernity.
This dialectic of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment is discussed in Jenkins (2000). Jenkins explains that, “Disenchantment has two distinct aspects, each utterly implicated in the other. On the one hand, there is secularization and the decline of magic; on the other hand, there is the increasing scale, scope, and power of the formal means–ends rationalities of science, bureaucracy, the law, and policy-making.”
These sentiments are rooted in our ever increasing state of alienation by the capitalist economic system. As we are exploited in increasingly impersonal, technological ways, the social bonds of previous forms of society are melted away, leaving us lonely, isolated, and increasingly paranoid. One of the central themes of The Lord of the Rings, for example, is the decline of magic and the coming of the age of Man. Saruman, with his “mind of metal and wheels,” fells the forest of Isengard to raise an army of evil. He represents the industrialization and despoliation of the West Midlands of Tolkien’s youth.
Jenkins, however, goes on to complicate and challenge this Weberian notion of the “decline of magic,” writing, “It is, for example, questionable whether the ‘enchanted world’ was ever as unified or homogeneous in its cosmology and beliefs as Weber’s argument seems to presume. Even if we disregard the rich variety of communities and ethnicities in the pre-modern world, there is every reason to suggest that the European world, at least, has been disenchanted, in the sense of epistemically fragmented, for as long as we can perceive it in the historical record. Skepticism, heresy, and pluralism are plain to see. Similarly, it is now conventional anthropological wisdom that homogenous ‘primitive society’ is a fiction which reflects a set of tacit presumptions about modernity (Kuper 1988) and the equally tacit epistemological presumptions of anthropological field-work (Boon 1982; Bourdieu 1990: 1-42).”
The poem’s shortcomings, its conflation of the existence of the wasteful, alienating machinery of modern capitalism with an idealistic, modern understanding of a natural and the magical pre-capitalist state of being, are represented best by the use of the slur for Inuit people on line 24. You can read more about why this term is harmful in this piece by Inuit scholar Norma Dunning. Jenkins, summarizing a vast swath of work, presents us with questions that complicate the initial reading of the poem. Did the “magical” world ever exist, per se? Or is the “magical” pre-capitalist world an alienated illusion, projected onto the past by a distinctly modern subjectivity? Certainly there was a time before capitalism and imperialism, a time before the ecological crisis, but the point is that at no point in pre-capitalist history did “nature” or “magic” as we imagine them exist absent of human input. Humans don’t exist outside of the ecology, and the human/nature divide is a product of the Enlightment and therefore capitalism/imperialism. For example, the designation of “national parks” and nature preserves were a strategy of continued dispossession of indigenous land and ethnic cleansing (see, for instance, Kantor 2007, Ethnic Cleansing and America’s Creation of National Parks, particularly section 1B “The Unpeopled Fallacy of the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 and the Wilderness Act of 1964”). These notions of an “unpeopled,” more natural and magical wilderness, or a more primitive, enchanted, magical pre-modern world are fairly common tropes in naturalist and environmentalist writing that persist to this day.
Yet, despite these epistemological issues, which are rooted in my grandmother’s identity as a white, American author, the poem (like Lord of the Rings, or contemporary ecological poetry and writing) presents a valuable initial intervention in the prevailing, dispassionate disregard for our world’s ecology. The poem, despite its problematic framing (endemic to the majority of environmental poetry at the time), hints at alternate ways of being beyond our current situation. The poem poses the question, ‘how might our society be structured, and how might we engage with one another, if we lived in a world where we respected the `awful surrender` of these creatures?’ Or, put succinctly, “Where are the gleaners, the makers, the users?” I think of a work like Frank Herbert’s Dune in much the same way. Is it a flawed, at times dated story written by a white American author? Sure. But what makes the reading valuable, even today, are some of the speculative questions the writing poses, the displacement the writing can affect in the reader, and what new ideas might worm their way into the reader’s brain thereafter.
Sperm whale beachings have been recorded throughout the world, but often only single specimens wash ashore, sometimes in advanced stages of decomposition, sometimes with bellies full of plastic. Larger beachings of multiple sperm whales happen less frequently but still occur. There appear to be a few cases in New Zealand of beachings of more than 60 whales at a time, in 1970 and then in 1994. I couldn’t find any records of 46 beached sperm whales outside Nehalem, but I did find a record of 41 sperm whales who beached near the mouth of the Siuslaw River (south of Nehalem) in the summer of 1979. This is the largest school of sperm whales beached in a single recorded event on the Oregon coast I could find, and the approximate number and date align with the writing of the poem. I can only conclude that this Siuslaw beaching, in addition to the widely publicized 1970 explosion, was a direct inspiration for Kathy’s poem.
As we enter the coldest summer of the rest of our lives, I am haunted by line 30. “shells to our ears drown the sound of the sea”
Jenkins says, “By way of comment, it is defensible to suggest that the world has never been disenchanted (which is not to deny the strength of modernist forces of disenchantment). The historical record suggests that disenchantment—no less than power and discipline—provokes resistance in the shape of enchantment and (re)enchantment. It is thus sensible to ask, is a disenchanted world even a possibility? There is a discussion to be had here about the place of enchantment—specifically spirituality, desire, and playfulness—in whatever it is that we call human nature, but that must be for another time. The prospect is not only a better understanding of the relationships between disenchantment and (re)enchantment, but also, perhaps, a more nuanced understanding of modernity.”
Which makes me think of my Grandmother’s feminism, and of Silvia Federici’s “Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.” In that work, she says, “Land reclamation, the liberation of rivers from dams, resistance to deforestation, and, central to all, the revalorization of reproductive work—are crucial to our survival. These are the condition not only of our physical survival but of a ‘re-enchantment’ of the earth, for they reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and with our bodies, enabling us not only to escape the gravitational pull of capitalism but to regain a sense of wholeness in our lives” (pg. 189).
I miss her, more so for having read and re-read her words recently. Lines of the poem stick with me, months on. It is emblematic of a dense and tangled knot of modern ecological ideology, one that I found myself struggling to parse and unravel in my own reading and writing, even before encountering the poem. It is an impressively cohesive poem to a yet fresh and unhoned writer, like myself.
On the second page in particular, the cosmic scale of the poem impresses itself on the reader. The shrinking water planet, the song of murmurings from deep space. The poem is an expansive, panning shot, beginning at the sand among the guards and scientists and zooming ever outwards, revealing beach, and ocean, and planet, then stars and all the songs that float between them.
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