Whale Fall Overview

WHALE FALL: THE SOURCE BIOLOGY

When a whale dies, its body goes through a series of use stages that are collectively known as “whale fall,” which is also the name of the whale mass (“a whale fall”) as it reaches the ocean floor. The stages are known as succession, a phrase used more generally to describe the way systems or populations succeed (in the sense of follow, come after) each other. Succession is about temporary equilibriums giving way to new temporary equilibriums, about the way exhaustions or depletions open the field for a different set of organisms to thrive.

The first phase of whale fall, taking place between the ocean’s surface and the the ocean floor, is the mobile scavenger phase, when sharks, hagfish, octopus, crabs, and other mobile scavengers feed on the whale’s flesh, causing it to sink. This phase begins within minutes of the whale’s death and continues for months to a few years, as mobile scavengers on the ocean floor continue to feed on the carcass.

This phase gives way to the enrichment opportunist phase, in which nothing goes to waste, as the bits of whale flesh that remain on the skeleton or have fallen to the ocean bed create a new own ecosystem supporting a new set of animals: worms, by the tens of thousands every square meter: visualize a lawn of waving white grass surrounding a skeleton with each bone dressed in a polar bear suit. (There are species of worms that only live on whale fall, as far as is known.) In this stage the bones of the whale are partially decomposed, stripped of lipids by a special bone-eating worm. This lasts for two years until only the stripped bones remain.

The opportunist phase is followed by the sulfophilic phase, or sulphur-loving stage, lasting from 10-50 years, in which the stripped bones of the whale are colonized by benthic fauna species of a diversity greater than any other deep-sea community. Bacteria break down the bone, releasing sulphur, which in turn enables other organisms to live — up to 30,000 organisms on a single whale skeleton. In the nutrient-poor benthic environment (benthic: of the ocean floor, pelagic: of the sea far from shore), a whale fall is life-giving, an oasis.

Obviously, whale fall, with its successions, is a perfect story form.

MATTER: SUCCESSION, NUTRITION, TIME

Whale Fall is the term for everything that happens between a whale dying toward the surface of the sea and the body of the whale sinking to the ocean floor where it is put to long successions of re-use. Whale Fall starts with a death but is above all a long duration of nutrition toward life. The afterlife of the whale is not its own ghost but all the life it enables after its death, in successive stages that encompass greater and greater multitudes of living things. What appeals to my story mind most about Whale Fall is its time aperture. Whale Fall can last 50–75 years, the body of the whale sustaining life for roughly as long as it might have lived, a shadow symmetry. Whale Fall as a story form opens up the question of when the game is over and who its players are.

METHOD (1): ANALOGY, RULE, SCORE

This workshop’s method is analogic play: gleaning patterns, proportions, forms, and cycles from one thing (whale fall) and transplanting them, both as generative prompt and formal score, to another (a story told). I love to work from analogy like this because it creates new rules. A rule gives you something to follow or yield to, puts a useful edge around an invention, composition or improvisation. A new rule allows you free play while still giving you support and containment; you are unburdened by the accumulation of example or orthodoxy around how to embrace the rule.

Other words could be swapped in for rule: shape is one I like, less fringed by connotations of authority and always porous, relational, open to play (an X in the shape of a Y). Score is another, a trade word in improvisational dancing, part of the groundwork of my own thinking, naming an organizational scheme while leaving open the question of how to manifest or solve it. One sense of rule I’d like to preserve is the one that brings us the (wooden) ruler, the one that thinks in intervals, distances, and the relation of units to each other. The other is the sense of rules in a game: temporarily agreed-upon limitations of play that govern what kinds of moves are possible in order to lay open a space for experiment and risk and let us know we’ve made it to the end. Writing is usually a game of solitaire (excepting writer’s rooms) (solitaire as the weft within a warp of other texts, voices, and the whole ocean of shared and inherited language we write in). So we can put aside the rules around winning. Winning is getting to the end? Winning is to enjoy the time spent playing? Winning is the transfer of what you’ve written to receptive eyes or ears?

Anyway, the rules in Whale Fall are yours to make, borrow, transgress or let slip as you see fit.

There is one rule that’s always on my mind when I think about narrative, a kind of steady-state straw man of mine, the transgression of which I personally delight in, which goes shorthanded as “the unities” — Aristotle’s description of a good tragedy as compassing a single “action” in distinction to the epic form, which is one of multiplicity and latitude. (Maybe more accurate to say the straw man is the theater world orthodoxy (now, I hope, fading into the past) around what units measure that unity and what types of events give it coherence.) Whale Fall as a biological phenomenon is both a single action and an epic. How you see it depends on the units your ruler is measuring. What constitutes a wholeness? In how many acts do we frame or regard it? Open question.

METHOD (2): CONJURE-COLLECT, ASSEMBLE, CAREGIVE

Whale Fall, the pop-up workshop happens in successive stages too—a different succession than Whale Fall, the marine-biological phenomenon. This succession somewhat replays the three-draft musical-architectonic-textile sequence I put out here in some 2019 pop-ups, gleaned from a Walter Benjamin note, but with adjacent names that offer slightly different directions for our attention and so might lead to a different experience of the writing process.

The conjuring/collecting and assembling phases will be offered together for each of the three stages of the whale fall. This means that next Sunday I’ll send both conjure/collect and assemble prompts for mobile scavenger, the week after that for enrichment opportunist, and then for sulphur loving. In the conjure/collecting prompts, I will offer translations and analogies for imaginatively summoning or going out in search of material (images and event traces with particular respect to nutrition and use). The conjure/collect draft is not really a draft, it’s a heap of stuff that can be made into a draft, perhaps with many mini-drafts or partial drafts already germinating inside it. In the assembling prompts I will offer translations and analogies for assembling collected material into a portion of a story. Because one of the pleasures of whale fall as a source analogy is its very different communities that belong to each of its phases, we will collect and assemble (i.e. prepare and draft) each phase of the story before moving on to the next.

The last phase of the pop-up is the caregiving phase, in which we will put the three assemblages together and then consider them from the standpoint of care: cleaning, supporting, feeding, trimming, dressing, braiding, setting up to rest a comfortable place with fresh air and good views, ushering to its good ending.

In practical terms, after this overview and a note on approach, there are five installments of the Whale Fall workshop, followed by a one-installment coda will follow, Shadow Twin, which can be used as a stand-alone microfiction prompt, or linked to Whale Fall as epigraph or epilogue or companion piece.

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?