Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.

February 2024

Dear Friends

My mother always yearned to be by the sea. My father, on it.

Less than a decade after World War 2, he left home as a teenager to join a Royal Navy training ship. He would be schooled at sea—or possibly by it—and the experience proved to shape his life.

My father and I struggled at times to find common ground on land, let alone on the sea. I resented anything to do with it, perhaps in some boyish rebellion. Language is key here, as I adored being near the sea, or in it, just not ‘on’ it. Boating and fishing was anathema, and given my father’s keen interest in the deep-sea variety (he held a world record at one stage) this did not augur well.

I spent many a summer miserably sea-sick, longing for land, and feeling wretched for these majestic creatures that I secretly hoped would be spared hook and torment.

As for my mother, she was soothed by the proximity of the ocean and lived most of her later years with sweeping views of the Pacific, ecstatic at the seasonal migration of whales.

In her dying days, she even requested the chanson classic, La Mer by Charles Trenet, to be played at her funeral, with these words printed on the service card:

“La mer, qu’on voit danser le long des golfes clairs, a des reflets d’argent. La mer, des reflets changeants, sous la pluie.”

“The sea, dancing along the clear gulfs, gleams of silver. The sea, changing reflections, under the rain.”

I return to my father, and while for brevity I paint this scene with broad brushstrokes, it’s true we grew apart, becoming essentially estranged for long periods over the ensuing decades. Like the sea itself, it’s vastly complex and mysterious, but there’s no blame. That’s just the way it was.

A couple of years ago, through a series of synchronous happenings, I found in my keeping a copy of ‘The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes’, by Mark Wormald, the current Chair of The Ted Hughes Society (of which I am a member).

The book chronicles Mark’s journey, fishing as he was in Ted Hughes’ footsteps, while meandering into the poems of ‘River’ and other such deep waters.

I believe it was listening to Mark and storyteller Martin Shaw discuss the book— and it’s interweaving with father relationships—that I began to hear the sea murmuring in a language I had previously not understood, or had refused to hear.

There was more to come, including a collision with a powerful tale told by Martin (and written by Irish philosopher John Moriarty) called Big Mike.

“Out there in the divine deep, the fishing, not fishing at all, is blessedness, is bliss.”

For various reasons — which I have written about previously — I named my last year ‘Building an Ark’. Little was I to know how apt that was. It was exactly the kind of work required of me, as now, I set sail.

The pattern continued to reveal itself. I have just begun a six-month mythological study of Moby-Dick which itself came about after stumbling across the life and times of author Hermann Melville and being swallowed whole by its profundity. No Jonah-like repentance, but certainly some time in the belly of the whale to reflect.

The sea and the whale have long served as powerful archetypes, each embodying multifaceted meanings that resonate across cultures and epochs. The vast expanse of the sea symbolises the unconscious and the great abyss of the unknown. It’s also interesting to me that water is the only natural element that mirrors us back—yet it leaves no trace after being disturbed.

Whales, the apex inhabitants of this terrain, have an awe inspiring grandeur that is hard to fathom. The white whale, in particular, is a terrifyingly beautiful totem.

There’s no grand revelation here. I’m with Jung who said that water is the commonest symbol of the unconscious. W.H. Auden also wrote that water is the soul of the Earth.

Against this backdrop, my father and I are beginning to navigate the waters of our relationship once again. He is telling me his stories, many related to the sea — some even of whales. It turns out he has recently re-read Moby-Dick himself.

Beyond all of this, I feel myself adrift on the ocean of my unconscious, increasingly aware of a leviathan shadow emerging from the Great Below. While it is both terrifying and beautiful, it is precisely where I am meant to be.

I am immensely buoyed by these conversations with my father — ones that take us beneath the surface yet keep us afloat.

I’m reminded of Melville’s Queequeg, the wild whaler of royal Polynesian blood and the symbolic other ‘I’. He is summoning a great saying of his people, that I am all-too-often “standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.”

It's a call to see the bigger story in which I am living and not get distracted by the small stuff. So I’m glad to have sighted the whale, fearsome as it may seem, in the understanding that it can become the solid ground upon which I stand.

Oceans of love.

Asher

‘Calling Your Father’ by Robert Bly:

There was a boy who never got enough.
You know what I mean. Something
In him longed to find the big
Mother, and he leaped into the sea.

It took a while, but a whale
Agreed to swallow him.
He knew it was wrong, but once
Past the baleen, it was too late.

It’s OK. There's a curved library
Inside, and those high
Ladders. People take requests.
It’s like the British Museum.

But one has to build a fire.
Maybe it was the romance
Novels he burned. Smoke curls
Up the gorge. She coughs.

And that’s it. The boy swims to shore;
It’s a fishing town in Alaska.
He finds a telephone booth,
And calls his father. “Let’s talk.”

References:
The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes — An Online Reading and Discussion
John Moriarty tells the story of Big Mike
Robert Bly’s ‘Calling Your Father’ is from Eating the Honey of Words (Harper Collins)
La Mer by Charles Trenet

Note:
Our four-part series, ‘Feasting the Sea-God: An Exploration of The Odyssey’, begins with performance storyteller Jay Leeming this Sunday (given the context, the significance of this epic at sea is not lost on me!)