What the Surface Leaves Out — Marlene on the Sperm Whale

What the Surface Leaves Out

Late in the evening, Marlene straightens the page beneath the lamp. Beyond its small circle, the room has gone dim. It is a poor imitation of the dark she is trying to imagine.

A sperm whale descends beyond the reach of sunlight to hunt squid. The largest toothed predator on Earth does not need an audience, or even the light by which an audience might see it. Its enormous head goes first into water that would hide it from our eyes. Sound helps it find what sight cannot.

Marlene writes, “An empty sea.” Then she crosses out “empty.”

That is the trouble with looking at the surface. A stretch of water can seem vacant while an immense animal is working beneath it: searching, pursuing, feeding. Darkness is not an absence of life. It is a condition in which life has other ways to proceed.

She is tempted to make the whale stand for something. Solitude, perhaps. Some grand secret. But the animal is not descending to deliver a lesson. It is hunting squid. That plain fact seems worth keeping before the beautiful comparisons take over.

Humans have learned to listen, to track, to send instruments down. Still, our glimpses of that kingdom are small beside its extent. A whale at the surface gives us a breath, a back, the beginning of a dive. Not the whole life.

Marlene leaves the lamp on and reads the page again. This time she lets the unseen remain unseen, without calling it nothing.