Of Shining Salted Faces

Well, I'm thinking we can & should still be in the business of isolating some stray striking passages in this space, and the grim encounter between the whale and the Star of the Sea in O'Connor's novel reminded me of that wonderful moment, late in Omeros, when Philoctete and Achille encounter (with a mixture of awe and terror) the sudden emergence of a whale right next to their fishing boat:



Exultant with terror, Philo kept ravelling


the line around his fist, and then both gasped as one whale --


"Baleine," said Achille -- lifted its tapering wedge



as a bouquet of spume hissed from its splitting pod,


as it slowly heightened the island of itself,


then sounded, the tail sliding, till it disappeared



into a white hole whose trough, as it came, lifted


In God We Troust with its two men high off the shelf


of the open sea, then set it back down under



a swell that swamped them, while the indifferent shoal


foamed northward. He has seen the shut face of thunder,


he has known the frightening trough dividing the soul

from this life and the other, he has seen the pod


burst into spray. The bilge was bailed out, the sail


turned home, their wet, salted faces shining with God.



This passage, with the radiant appearance of that whale at the end of a day's fishing, reveals that, among other things, Walcott is a great nature writer, too. One remembers Shakespeare's sense of the "solemn sympathy" of nature, perhaps, or, as I do, thinks of David Abram's discussion of animism in his great book, The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram hopes that the interpenetration of the human and animal/natural worlds is such that "the other forms of experience that we encounter -- whether ants, or willow trees, or clouds -- are never absolutely alien to ourselves" (16). This is increasingly rare, though, and Abram later laments, "How is it that these phenomena no longer address us, no longer compel our involvement or reciprocate our attention? .... To freeze the ongoing animation, to block the wild exchange between the senses and the things that engage them, would be tantamount to freezing the body itself, stopping it short in its tracks .... If we no longer experience the enveloping earth as expressive and alive, this can only mean that the animating interplay of the senses has been transferred to another medium, another locus of participation" (130-1). We should admire Philo and Achille here, their "salted faces shining with God," and this natural manifestation of their rediscovered wholeness. Someone (Briana, maybe?) had wondered about the significance of the ants in Omeros (and I think ants end up having an ambiguously important role in Solibo Magnificent, too, which is next up for us), so maybe this incident, along with the Abram quotes, help us a bit in that regard?