CONTENT NOTE
Kate Humphreys’s ‘Salt on the Tip of the Tongue’ makes mention of animal death.
I find if I attune myself to a particular thing, it has a habit of making itself apparent. Recently, I came across Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, and opened at random to the essay WHALES, OR: DROWNING IN AIR. The day before, I had read of the mass stranding of sperm whales on Erobin, King Island, off Tasmania’s north-west coast.
The feeling I got when I saw the whales dormant on the sand was visceral. I felt the sadness and the loss deep within my stomach. I knew that even if I tried to string a series of words together, I could not define it.
Reading Tokarczuk’s essay reminded me of a moment from my childhood, a school excursion to Woppa, or North Keppel Island, off Queensland’s Capricorn Coast. My classmates and I clustered on the island’s barren ridge and looked down onto a wide strip of sand. A man with a speckled grey beard pointed to it and told us a story. He told us of a giant sea turtle that lived in a hole in the depths of the ocean. He told us how the turtle’s movement controlled the tide. The man had a gravelly accent and a solid frame. He recited the story gently and with sincerity. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and had a line of blue zinc across his cheeks and nose.
Whenever I remember the story, it is not only a memory, but I am there on the ridge, attuned to all sensation. I am aware of the heat’s texture causing beads of sweat on my forehead and at the nape of my neck. I sense the man’s excitement and the hum of the cicadas. The atmosphere is alive and available. I taste the salt on the tip of my tongue. I can see the sea in the distance, stretching outwards along the shoreline. There is a pale moon in the sky. I listen to the story in awe, while my teacher, in her white sun-proof shirt, smiles innocently.
Yesterday, I scrolled through Instagram and read a poem on my feed: Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale. Apparently, the belly of the whale is an ideal place to ‘look up for blue sky through the spout’ and ‘be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope’. At times I am here, and I am thankful for the blue that surrounds me, but I’m not sure that gazing out from within is something I should be necessarily grateful for. More and more I have noticed that when I recognise a part of myself in someone, I allow myself to occupy that space until it consumes me.
After our walk along the ridge, we stayed the night on the island. Inside the timber cabins there were murals of sea creatures on the walls, humpback whales and turtles and dugongs. A sliding glass door opened onto the back veranda. We could see a sliver of sea on the horizon.
Spring is hatchling season for sea turtles. In the evening, we sat on the beach and watched as turtle hatchlings made their way to shore. The man with the speckled beard held a torch to guide them. Their wings scurried frantically in the soft sand. Some made it with gusto, others flailed behind. The ones that weren’t able to reach the water remained dormant on the sand, there for the seagulls to bicker over in the morning.
The thing I found most peculiar about Tokarczuk’s essay is her refusal to submit to a distinct tone. Tokarczuk, a former psychology student, reports on whales who have run aground with an undercurrent of acceptance. Here is this unfavourable thing, we may flinch when we see or hear of it, but what else is there, beneath the surface, that we cannot control. An animal is not an object, but a living entity, able to determine their thoughts and actions. I sense Tokarczuk sees sincerity in the whale’s capacity to determine its reality, even when that may be to its detriment.
Fifteen years after this childhood excursion, I was travelling alone in Asia. On my last day in Vietnam, I walked through the central district of Ho Chi Minh City and felt how movement defined the city. Its pace was quick and chaotic. Men in white singlets sat on blue crates and smoked cigarettes. Women rested in red hammocks and slept in the shade. Men and women and children crammed onto scooters and zipped through congested streets. Horns blared, people yelled in a clipped Vietnamese, and I tried my best to dodge the bits of rubbish on the street. I was unsure whether the buildings, which bear the worn scars of history, should be considered charming or disconcerting. Everything appeared to crumble in on itself. The smell and the heat and the noise were neither charming nor disconcerting, yet inevitably alive.
In The Nature of Language, Fatima Measham reminds us that ‘the body is the site for language’. Words are formed when we expel air through the lungs. Points of articulation include vocal cords, palates, tongues, lips. To speak is to literally push a pocket of air through the spout. This action may feel natural, but communication requires effort, especially when we are engaged in a conversation of connection. For Measham, it is intimacy that makes what surrounds us legible. If my body is the site for language, it often tells me there are sensations I take for granted. To be intimate with nature is to understand its limits. To be intimate with language is to understand this too.
Although I was in Vietnam, I was mostly trying to remind myself of places that I had been. The humidity reminded me of my home town in Central Queensland, as did the banana trees, which were everywhere. Every time I saw a hibiscus bush, or a shed with a rusting tin roof, I thought of home and how I was alone, although I didn’t necessarily want to be.
Whales, I am told, communicate in rhythms. Linguistic fidelity among pods is such that researchers can identify them via the sound they make. The evening before I left for Asia, I watched as a salty Tim Winton stood on a boat off the coast of Ningaloo and recorded the sounds of humpbacks. Much of Winton’s work reflects the violence imposed on the Australian landscape. Think of In the Winter Dark, his 1988 novella, where four neighbours contend with a creature that prowls their secluded valley, the Sink, and of the tension that ensues as they submit to fear. If I can choose a metaphor in which this fear is accurately conveyed, maybe it is the sound whales make. Their song is shrill. As a young adult, I too heard humpbacks. Swimming in the beach down the road from my home, I held myself beneath the bright blue water and felt the frequency of their high-pitched squeal.
Travelling from Cambodia to Thailand, Nanna, a Thai tour guide, took me under her wing as I crossed the border. She helped me with my visa and took me to the bus, which eventually arrived in Bangkok. The morning after we arrived, she suggested we visit the markets in Chinatown. We walked through a narrow alleyway crowded with plastic toys that hung from rafters. Clothes made of synthetic fabrics hung on wire racks. Women sat on stools and bartered over the price of fruit and vegetables. As we walked, I told Nanna about myself. She asked me where I lived and what I did. I told her I would soon move to the Northern Territory, and that I was considering becoming a teacher. Stopping at a stall that sold accessories, she wanted to buy something for my hair. Although I did not want a cheap nylon ribbon, I pointed to one in a velvet navy blue. A gift for when you become a teacher, she smiled, before placing it in my backpack. As we made our way to the metro, Nanna mentioned that walking through the market was like being inside the belly of a whale.
Several months after my trip to Asia, in a writing class on Dharug land in Western Sydney, I learn that Joseph Campbell used the phrase ‘the belly of the whale’ to represent a character’s metaphoric rebirth. Inside the belly of the whale, the protagonist experiences a separation from their known world. To get to this point, they must be placed into a situation where they are their most afraid and allow themselves to be swallowed completely. I try to imagine the possibilities a writer can play with inside this space. Inside the belly of this whale, I attempt to see beauty in the smallest and simplest of circumstances, no matter how painful.
When I think about how writers use their medium to articulate feelings that have turned stagnant , I think of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. In the beginning, Nelson confesses to falling in love with a colour, ‘in this case the colour blue’. She finds this love akin to ‘falling under a spell’, a spell she ‘fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns’. In the three years it takes for her to complete the essay, she concludes that ‘love is not consolation,’ rather that it is, as Simone Weil would advise, light.
Lately I have realised two things: to have feelings for someone who cannot feel the same about you requires courage, but it also takes honesty. At times I am that person inside the belly of the whale, looking up for blue sky through the spout. At times I am thankful that I am here, swallowed with all hope. But sometimes, I just want to come up for air.
Yesterday, I walked my usual path along the eastern beaches of Sydney, on Gadigal land. As I walked, I thought about the humpback whales. At this time, they would be making their long, slow migration up the east coast. I no longer wanted to think about the situation that had consumed me. I thought about how it had been years since I had seen a pod. I looked out onto the shoreline and saw a single splash, a small, salty spray against the blue horizon—one that seemed to suggest I am here, I am alive, and I am open to what is ahead of me.