Scrimshaw

Will the last story we tell be that none of this was happening?

Image courtesy of the Cahoon Museum of American Art.

This piece originally appeared in the 2025 issue of the Wayne Literary Review, a Detroit-based literary magazine.

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I.

In the amniotic dark of the deep ocean things are not as quiet as we imagine. Clicks, creaks, long whistles, haunting melodies: these are broadcast at an incomprehensible volume for thousands of miles through their salty medium. This is the whaledark and these sounds are whalesong.

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II.

There is a linguistic framework, a habit of frequency, that appears to recur in all human languages. The Zipfian distribution: in general, the most commonly used word in a language appears roughly twice as often as the second most commonly used word, roughly three times as often as the third most commonly used word, and so on. There are many possible explanations for this. One of the most plausible: predictable patterns are required to smooth the path toward complex communication and cultural transmission.

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III.

The institution at which I teach writing recently sent out an invitation to a workshop for those seeking AI-driven strategies to enhance their teaching and support student learning. This session, it was promised, would introduce practical AI strategies that can be adapted for various disciplines and teaching contexts. The predictive nature of these tools—their pattern recognition and consequent production—has been floated as a solution to the pesky and imperfect work of traditional learning methods.

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IV.

Recent research indicates that whalesong, too, follows a Zipfian distribution.

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V.

What the workshop invitation did not say:

This is how to recognize the face of a teenager more lost than you can imagine. Than you can ever remember being. These are the words to put in a midnight reply to a student email with the subject line My Mom’s Cancer. Here are some mantras to repeat in the whaledark winter twilight as you blow past your federally mandated working hours again. There are donuts in the conference room and the toilets in your building are working again.

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VI.

A small miracle, that whalesong travels so far and so clearly. It must: we fantasize about the apocalypse but the world’s whales have already lived through theirs. The people of Nantucket used to report a bay so full of cetaceans that you could walk to the mainland on their backs without getting your feet wet. Now, well. Good luck.

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VII.

I read a third consecutive paper that includes the sentence Moreover, this use of pathos fosters a sense of empathy, relatability, and understanding to effectively engage the audience. I write, for the third consecutive time, This doesn’t really sound like your voice—please remember that the goal of this class is to make you a better writer, and I can’t help you with that if you aren’t turning in your own original work. I try to sleep and instead wonder on a loop whose is the greater failure, here.

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VIII.

In one of the new Planet of the Apes movies, I can’t remember which, a few human survivors have kept hope alive at a military radio outpost, sending their signals into the aether for years in the dwindling hope of reconnection with others like them. Something like that, whalesong. Something that must have a terrible reach to respond to terrible circumstance.

Whalesong, as I mentioned, seems to adhere to a Zipfian distribution. This is all anyone can say for certain, lacking, as we do, the context to translate these units and subunits of language from the deep. Interesting, certainly, that languages, even across species, seem to default to this pattern. But a pattern of information is not a language any more than a map is a place or a song is a lifetime.

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IX.

Whalers used to take teeth and bones from carcasses and etch fine-lined drawings upon them to relate particular scenes and images from their voyages. These pieces are called scrimshaw. One particularly detailed tooth, engraved in the 1850s and held in the Cahoon Museum of American Art, shows a family of sperm whales fighting back against their pursuers. In the foreground a bull smashes a whaleboat in two, its six sailors hanging forever in their marionetted poses. One of the whales, wounded, writhes, great dark head arcing toward tail. Wood and whale and whaler alike flail above and below the water, the depth and color of which are rendered in impressive suggestion by contoured, spider-thin lines. What mouths are shown are all agape. It is easy to imagine a singularity of sound in this suspended moment: no words in either dialect, no translations necessary. Only tumult.

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X.

If there is a Rosetta stone for whalesong perhaps it is something etched by spear upon the body of an ancient bull. Perhaps it has been etched by fishing tackle or anchor or hull onto the flank of a cow herding her calves through the open Pacific. We can listen to their songs but they cannot tell us their history or their future save through what blind hieroglyphs our instruments have carved upon them. All that we have been, all that we have done, scrimshawed into flesh, one storytelling people using another like so much paper.

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XI.

I open my email to a note from one of last year’s students thanking me for not letting her get away with using ChatGPT to write her papers. She needed tough love at a tough time in her life, she says. I want to hold this message in my hand, run my fingers across its surface, darken forever in ink the spiderwebbing lines beneath my nails. But I’m the whale, not the scrimshander. Ramming my head into the boat in vain protest against the world’s predilection for killing things only to memorialize their lives upon what dead pieces remain. For using, as its sacred totems, the simulacra of what it has already destroyed.

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XII.

Will the last story we tell be that none of this was happening?