The Whale

why I too felt haunted by the whale,

represented money, food, livelihood, trade. But it also meant something darker, more metaphysical, by virtue of the fact that men risked their lives to hunt it. The whale was the future, the present and the past, all in one; the destiny of man as much as the destiny of another species. It offered dominion, wealth and power,

Melville’s White Whale is far from the comforting anthropomorphism of the smiling dolphin and the performing orca, from Flipper to Free Willy, or the singing humpback and the ‘Save the Whale’ campaign–all carriers, in their own way, of our own guilt. Rather, Moby Dick’s ominous shape and uncanny pallor, as seen through Ahab’s eyes, represents the Leviathan of the Apocalypse, an avenging angel with a crooked jaw, hung with harpoons from the futile attempts of other hunters. This whale might as well be a dragon as a real animal, with Ahab as his would-be slayer.

Cetus was sent by Poseidon to consume the young of Ethiopia,

Genesis, a ‘myth of the fifth morning’, in Mary Oliv‍

a century that began by actively hunting whales ended by passively watching them.

The open ocean, without barriers and with a ready supply of food, is an excellent medium for the evolution of such huge, long-lived and intelligent animals; an environment in which communication and socializing take the place of material culture

-Hz Whale Calls From a Unique Source in the North Pacific was the result of research on a whale cruising from California to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, ‘calling out with a voice unlike any other whale’s, and getting no response’.

not everything is catalogued and claimed and digitalized. That in the oceans great whales swim unnamed by man.

our images of these huge placid creatures moving gracefully and silently through the ocean are more recent than the use of personal computer