Women Riven with Wish
Two whale novels and the power of obsession
Two novels centering whales. Women and whales. Weather and time and want and whales. The year 1938 and whales. I read them back to back—The Last Whaler (Cynthia Reeves) and Whale Fall (Elizabeth O’Connor)—and for a time I am stranded (my daughter far away, a new baby stirring within) in the dark cold at a whaling station on Svalbard, then on the wet wash of a remote island off the coast of Wales, where harsh beauty abounds and desire is a tangled knot. Over the interval of a long book and a short one, I am fighting for my life in the vicinity of whales.
“… the entire repertoire of a white whale’s peculiar vocalizations—the pop of a cork from a champagne bottle, the creak of a poorly oiled door hinge, the squeak of a baby’s rubber toy, the birdsong of canary-like chirping.” (The Last Whaler)
“The whale became stranded in the shallows of the island overnight, appearing from the water like a cat slinking under a door.” (Whale Fall)
I am thinking, as I read, about obsession—about how, in any successful work of art, it is the starting place and the undertow. How mere diligence or noble responsibility or an on-trend idea are never quite enough in the creative pursuit. How what is paramount, finally, is the wild need to know. To know how the whale speaks. To know how cat-like a stranded whale appears. To know what it is to sink inside the depths of snow, or to place your trust in the hands of those who seem to promise a liberated future, or to be a woman riven with wish.
To know. That is the portal. That is what reels the stranger in.
Beth, thank you. For a long time I have thought about something I call the obsession vessel—which is the book or poem or essay that takes the shape of the obsession, bears its outlines and its shadows. When I am not writing it is because I have not found that vessel. And the brevity here reflects my preference for crystallization and compression, for, like you, I began with poetry.
“Riven” is a powered word. The desire to know reels me in, a stranger to myself. The griping desire to know, an unrelenting undertow won’t let me close my eyes, insists I stay, staring out the corner of my eye, transfixed by the tremor in my chest. The almost. I give up breathing to know. Thank for this portal.