Whalefall

The Tabs Open newsletter makes some resolutions. Or "sets some intentions," as they say on Instagram

Early on Christmas morning I saw a solitary old man driving out of the cemetery in my hometown. That stuck with me the rest of the day, as I moved from raucous house to raucous house: that he chose to visit with the dead before visiting the living. I don’t know who he was there to speak to but it struck me as a holy thing.

It’s only natural to talk to the dead, especially on holidays, and on this last week of the year, where so many memories of our loved ones are concentrated. Sometimes the dead even talk back. In whispers, signs. That little voice in your head. A glint of sunshine, a perfect breeze. A whiff of cologne.

I believe this even as I believe that to become a ghost—a full on ghost, not these scraps of meaning—would be something profane. An affront to how we are meant to live our lives: as part of the matter of the earth, as one brief and wondrous phase of creation, before which and after which we are dissolved into other forms, beautiful forms necessary for the creation of all the other wonders of the universe. To become a ghost would be to deny the truth of our existence, which only has meaning because it is finite and transitory. It would be to cling selfishly to one brief state of being in the ignorant and tragic hope that you are simply an individual, and that an individual is the best and only thing you can ever hope to be.

This is not to say I don’t understand the impulse. I am tethered to this world by love, love that will be impossibly, terrifyingly difficult to leave behind when the time comes. Yet I do believe that love can transcend the brevity of human life. See the man leaving the graveyard Christmas morning. What else but love beyond death could spur such a thing? And of course this relentless individuality is also what we are taught and conditioned to understand in western society, so it’s hard to find too much blame with anyone who would take that path. Yet the idea still makes me profoundly sad.

In contrast I think of the whale. Whales sing each other songs and so it stands to reason they might tell each other stories. I wonder if any of those stories are ghost stories. Somehow I doubt it: whales can see clearly what happens to them when they die; they erect no artifices or monuments, they build no fences to pen in their dead as though they were horses. Whales die and become whalefall: a garden of flesh and mineral to feed a city’s worth of cephalopods and crustaceans and sharks and other things of the deep, a rain of nutrients where there was once a magnificent being of deep feeling and intelligence.

When your time comes may you be as holy as a whalefall. May the generosity of your spirit extend to the gift of your own body.

My thoughts often turn to this kind of thing at this time of year, fittingly dubbed “Dead Week,” when the detritus of the old year gives way to the promise of the new.

And there is always promise, isn’t there? Like everyone else, I make resolutions; until recently, I thought I was pretty bad at keeping them. What I’ve come to realize is that I was actually bad at making them: they were too detailed, too quantitative, too numerous. A year is a long time to work toward something without distractions or setbacks, not to mention changes in priorities, and so I was setting myself up to fail.

Last year I switched it up and just made a resolution for more: more cooking, more music, more writing, more movement. I put those things on an index card in a drawer I open often and each time I was reminded of my north star, to bring more of the things that make me feel good into my routine, without specifics or benchmarks. I think it worked, mostly! The last few months of the year are always hard, with the upswing in illnesses and the backloading of big holidays, but for the first ten months or so I think I did a good job prioritizing those things.

Below is my index card for this year. Not everything I want to focus on fits neatly in that more framework but it was still a good start and something I want to return to. (Besides being overly quantitative, I think my old resolutions focused too much on trying to reduce negative behaviors, which feels less rewarding than achieving positive ones.)

• More Duets

  • This one applies to making music, sure, but also just trying to do more fun and rewarding things with my wife, and others, one-on-one. Cooking, taking trips, getting coffee together, doing puzzles, whatever.

• Pay Attention

  • Jim Harrison once wrote: “There is a clarity to childhood because the attention you pay to what you are doing is total.” I know the importance of paying attention and I would like to keep using it to undergird my daily habits.

• Learn to Love Detroit

  • We’ve been in our new city for four months now, and we’ve spent so much of that time traveling or sick or just trying to get settled in that we’ve barely scratched the surface of what it means to actually live here. And since we do live here, I’d like to live here with both feet, and try to start finding all the good things this place has to offer.

I hope the end of your year is gentle and the new one exciting and bountiful. Thanks, as always, for reading. Writing this newsletter and hearing from the people who read it is one of the great joys of my life, and I try not to take it for granted. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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