Text Testimonials

Leviathan
        or, The Whale 
by Philip Hoare


For thou didst cast me into the deep,
Into the heart of the seas, 
And the flood was round about me;
All thy waves and billows passed over me. Jonah 2:3


"I have always been afraid of deep water. Even bathtime had its terrors for me (although I was by no means a timid child)...I thought of my favourite seaside toy- a grey plastic diver which dangled in the water by a thin red tube through which you blew to make it bob to the surface, trailing little silver bubbles"


"Here, everything orientates itself towards the water- even the area in which I lived, Sholing, was a corruption of 'Shore Land'- yet at the same time the city seemed to ignore it, as if it and the element that is the reason for its existence were two entirely separate entities"


"Cities and civilizations rise and fall, but the sea is always the sea. 'We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always', wrote the philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. 'The ocean is a wilderness reaching around the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences'... In our arrogance, we consider that we have tamed the ocean, as much as we have conquered the land."


"And I stood looking out to sea, watching transatlantic ships sail by like Fitzgerald's boats borne back ceaselessly into the past, waiting for a future that might never come, like the man who fell to earth. As consoling as the water was, it sometimes served only to make me restless in my suburban exile."


"Before I knew it, there they were, off our bows, whales blowing noisily, rolling with the waves. Barely yards away a young humpback threw itself out of the water, showing off its white underbelly, ridged like some giant, rubbery shell...I was amazed by the exuberant mastery of their own bodies, and the element in which they moved so elegantly. I envied them the fact that they were always swimming; that they were always free." 


"seen in the slow motion of recall- the after image it leaves in your head- a breaching whale seems to be trying to escape its environment, the element that, even as it breaks the surface, is pulling it back down. No one really knows why whales leap...The whales may be merely playing, like the boys who dive off Provincetown's Macmillan Wharf, placing implicit trust in their immortality as they hurl themselves from one medium to the other. Or perhaps they pity us for our enslavement to gravity, allowing us a glimpse of their true nature by rising out of the ocean to reveal their majesty."


"With a last plosive whoosh as it fills its lungs, the finback shoots out a mixture of air and salt water and a little whale phlegm, its shiny blowholes closing in an airlock as it prepares to dive, The spume hits my face like a fishy atomizer, I have been breathed upon, and it feels like a baptism."


"[Whales] are Linnaean-classified aliens following invisible magnetic fields, seeing through sound and hearing through their bodies, moving through a world we know nothing about, They are animals before the Fall, innocent of sin...But they also have bad breath and shit reddish water". 

"For the modern world, the whale is a symbol of innocence in an age of threat."


"Although D.H. Lawrence would declare that 'Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes', to the Christian era, the whale was the very shape of the Beast of Revelation."


"Everyday I am reminded that it is part of our collective imagination: from newspaper leaders that evoke Ahab in the pursuit of the war on terror, to the ubiquitous chain of coffee shops named after the Pequod's first mate, Starbuck, where customers sip to a soundtrack generated by a great-nephew of the author, Richard melvill Hall, better known as Moby." 


"The age of whaling brough man into close contact with these animals- never closer, before or since. But it also meant something darker, more metaphysical, by virtue of the fact that men risked their lives to hunt it...On my own uncertain journey, I sought to discover why I too felt haunted by the whale, by the forlorn expression on the beluga's face, by the orca's impotent fin, by the insistent images in my head. Like Ishmael, I was drawn back to the sea; weary of what lay below, yet forever intrigued by it too. 

From Genesis, to Moby Dick, to Pilgrims and Cape Cod this is a transatlantic cross-referencing spatial piece of literature, all focusing on the wondrous creature, the whale! Even the prologue got me hooked, not only does Philip Hoare have a childhood fear of bathtubs that eventually he gets over (ok, so I know that my favourite body of ocean is my bathtub...pools and oceans still scare me) but the guy also has as a childhood toy, a grey plastic diver. So other than cow-cow, my infamous neon purple and pink stuffed cow, who first saved me from an epic nightmare of being eaten by a whale (yes he saved me by eating the whale before the whale ate me) I too shared a diver toy. It was Barbie, the deep sea explorer, battery equipped an all. I would plunge the plastic woman into my bathtub and watch her for hours kick the water and swim in circles. I am pretty confident this helped me get over my fear of bathtubs. And yes I too had that moment where one's father turns away from the tub and the next second little Isabel submerges deep into the soapy depths hidden by extreme fluffy bubbles. Terrifying. 


But the space in which whales' live, brings upon the notion of travel and space itself. Ships and voyages lightly touch upon distance. My journey to Dublin has been incredibly marked by my curiosity of space and distance. Perhaps the reoccurring dreams of whales plagues me, why do they haunt me in my sleep? Perhaps the modern world was built upon the whale...












I am pretty sure my parents are both reading this and laughing that I am even daring to share these secret childhood obsessions. Yes as a child I went a little nuts over Raffi and Michael. But in all fairness, it was all for whales!




also if you have anything you want to share, please leave a recommendation!!!!


******Check out my first published poem about whales on Wordlegs.com