Drift Whale: if all you can muster next year is to be beached
that's ok
Happy New Moon! Most New Moons, we publish a poem. This time, you get some flash fiction from Ryan Jones! This New Moon happens to coincide with a new calendar year for a lot of us, and I think Ryan’s piece here makes for some good New Year reflections.
I was a hero once. Got suckered into it. Convinced to swoop in on a rescue mission to save a poorly-run and prematurely-started program at a local trade school.
They had launched a new Computer Science-adjacent program, and the first professor quit unexpectedly at the end of the fall semester. Left the program stranded.
So they found me.
I agreed to half the spring semester. Then felt bad and stayed for the whole thing.
But they couldn’t pay me enough that I could leave my full-time job, so I had two full-time jobs.
Did that go well?
It did not.
By the end of the semester, dissatisfied with all my phoning-it-in, my main employer put me on a Performance Improvement Plan. I’ve since learned that a PIP is usually code for “you gonna be fired soon”—part of building a legal case to protect employers from lawsuits filed by fired employees. This one actually ended well for me, since the semester was over by the time it started.
But during that semester, in addition to my employer feeling kinda robbed, I was of course quite overworked.
And worst of all, the students suffered. I couldn’t give them the time they deserved, the time they needed, to actually learn the material and thrive.
I’ve since asked myself: what would have happened if I’d refused?
Maybe the administration would have found some other sucker. But if they hadn’t?
Maybe they would have had to pay for the students to go to classes at some other school. Giving the students a better education, saving me tremendous effort, and pressuring the people—the administrators—who held the blame for the program’s failure in the first place.
I shouldn’t have tried to be a hero. I should have let the thing fail. I should have let it be beached.
“Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero,” says Andrea, in Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo. “No, Andrea,” replies Galileo. “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” (Hat tip to Zeynep Tufekci for this quote.)
A calendar year is dying. Another will take its place.
Which makes it sound so clean. A singleton, replaced by another singleton, looking much the same.
But death. Decomposition. Renewal. Never so clean. Never so straightforward.
On The Rich Roll Podcast, Zach Bush talked about tree death:
When an oak falls and starts to dissolve into soil, it's an extraordinary explosion of life. If you genetically sequence that trunk at the moment it falls, it is one species. Very limited; few genes that make it oak. Came from a single acorn. If you genetically sequence that log one year after laying on the forest floor? It's 100,000 species.
It’s hard work, decomposition! Takes a whole ecosystem. Creates whole ecosystems.
There was a time when trees existed, but not the things that eat them. Dead trees piled up until volcanoes caught them on fire and they all burned so hot and so long that the whole biosphere burned with them.
Inspiration for the post below comes from whale falls. When a whale dies, it sinks. And sinks. A slow motion fall, through the water column, down and down and down, until it comes to rest in a whole different ecosystem than the one in which it lived. Some organisms that make use of this food source are unique to whale falls! Things evolved just for this niche ecosystem.
As you prepare for a hard year, when you look around at the shit piling up, ask yourself: do the decomposers even exist yet? Is it even possible to break it down? What needs to evolve, so that this waste can become a food source?
Sometimes we need to strive. We live in a unhappy land.
But may you find the moments, the circumstances, when you can let go. When you can let yourself, or the situation, be beached. When you can make way for 100,000 new life forms to grow in the rich soil of your rest. When you can be one of those life forms.
Drift Whale
by Ryan Jones
Big whale, big and dead and bigger for its deadness. You washed up on some shore far away from here. Larger than death.
You almost made it around the cape, but the storms rolled in and you were too tired and too sick to resist. Your undignified tumble, side-over-side, was witnessed by none but the most hale of seabirds. Beached the next day; at rest and at attention, flippers at your sides. Was it a good way to go, feeling the sun on your skin?
You have been stranded in a world not meant for you. Maybe, if things were different, you’d have traveled ashore in a crawling shuttle, with enough ventilation to breathe if you needed to. Maybe you’d have written research papers on the creatures that came to the ocean to die. Underworld to overworld, and vice versa.
There are worms beneath the waves that would’ve loved to burrow through you. You would’ve been everything to them. But there are worms up here too, and they are just as hungry. The storm has only just ebbed, but already, the gulls have come together for your wake.
They are the first and only to look at you as you were. Soon, their beaks will deepen your scars, leave marks that will, for a time, be concealed in the mottling of your skin. The gulls will bear witness to every nick and imprint on your body. They will not understand the story that each tells, but they will eat of you and appreciate what you have become.
Once, you would’ve provided for a whole community of humans, too. But times have changed. Now, the first of them to find you will be a local boy. He will take a picture of you so his friends at school know he’s not lying.
A few folks from the nearest town catch wind of you as well. You’re told by some locals that you might swell with gas and burst. The stray dogs find out too. They come nightly to pay their respects.
Skin splits, gashes widen. The first days of a decomposition process that will take years. The dogs won’t want to come back, not after you really start to ripen. The birds are only slightly more persistent, as are the sharks. Some of the townsfolk talk about closing off the beach; nobody wants to stick around to guard it.
Even when you have no more to give to the larger scavengers, the snails, crabs, and insects are more than happy to take the scraps they are offered. They even keep the sea birds around. You are an unexpected gift to a cascade of increasingly smaller creatures.
You’ve become a problem for certain humans. They meet to discuss you, in a box of glass and stone with doors far too small for you. It is decided that you are to be left to your devices. In their notes, they state that none wish to be held liable for injuries if you were to seed yourself across the beach in a fountain of blubber and viscera. You may rot as gracefully as you wish.
Your afterlife is a metamorphosis. The locals’ speculation proves correct: you erupt in gas and rot, cocoon splitting open to reveal the beautifully fetid temple you’ve become. Out on the sea, you’d have started sinking. But the sand has cradled you, and you belong to it and the things that live within it.
After some time, you start showing hints of bone. You’re no young corpse any more. You’ve seen the world—mountains that are islands, scattered sun from above, dozens of species of sea grass. All wrapped in every shade of blue.
Now, your world is a rise of sand anchored with beachgrass and bracketed by whitecaps toiling against the shoreline. Some kid stuck a piece of driftwood in the dune, and that will be your world too until it falls over a month from now.
Is this a sign of your own imminent dissolution? You’d roll your eyes at this, if you still had any. No, this is simply the next stage in the magnum opus you’ve been (de)composing.
They’ll have to go deeper. Creatures as small as bacteria take whatever microbes are left. Your marrow is a larder of fats and oils for anything able to take it. A tourist steals one of your bones; a relic ungiven. Everything from above and below takes what it can.
You will be gone one day, but it is not this one. For now, you have your sand and your sky and the splintering pieces of your body to give in bounty.
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