Whale Story

I started (and finished) the first draft of a story yesterday. It only took me a few hours, but the story had been swimming in my head for a great long while. At least a few weeks. I'd been too busy with the editing of my thesis, and the aftermath of all that, to get around to writing it until then. The story is about a man who goes on a whale science expedition so that he can drop his wife's ashes into the ocean in the hopes that a blue whale will eat them. The story opens as the narrator says "It had always been my wife’s dream to have her ashes spread in the belly of a blue whale." That dream is actually mine. I don't know exactly when I decided this, but I have always been fascinated by blue whales, perhaps merely by their sheer size, and I have always wanted my ashes to be eaten by a blue whale. I think it's very deep, very literary at the very least. The story goes on from there. While the plot is about the man on the boat preparing to and then spreading his wife's ashes, it goes back and forth into the past of this husband and wife. What this story is really about, if I may be so bold, is life. I have been reading entirely too much Virginia Woolf and so life seems to be the only thing worth writing about. I just finished Julia Briggs' criticism on The Waves and while I liked it, all I could think was that one should not read criticism on The Waves, one should read or reread The Waves. That being said, my story, like The Waves, is an attempt to understand life, the meaning of it. The tiny moments of being that we exist in, like dots on a Seurat painting that at the end of the day, the end of many days and months and years and decades, make up a life.

"But that’s what life is. The story of our greatest sins, our greatest loves held together by the smell of lamb roasting at dinner, peeling, yellowing linoleum in the kitchen under the old oven and the look of wire hanging baskets and how they remind us of our grandmother. And what’s more important, more beautiful? Making love on the beach or the way our cologne smells after we’ve just showered day after day after day after day."

That's what I've got so far, on the meaning of life. I'm probably far off, but I find that the human race can only exist, is only worth existing, if we try to find it. And art is still the best way to find it.