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    The Whole Singing Ocean
    The Whole Singing Ocean
    The Whole Singing Ocean
    Ebook162 pages1 hour

    The Whole Singing Ocean

    By Jessica Moore

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The Whole Singing Ocean is a poetic narrative that circles around the central story of a boy and a whale, and the 2013 investigation into the École en bateau, a French countercultural “boat school,” or school at sea, which was based not only on the ideals of the sixties, but also on twisted ideas about child psychology, the theories of Foucault and an abolition of the separation between adults and children.

    The narrative begins with a boat builder and his encounter with a whale when he was a student of the École en bateau himself, and moves on to explore threads of philosophy, memory and various kinds of destruction, fragmentation and wholeness. The text weaves in several voices and threads of rapture and horror, as it explores adventure, childhood, abuse and environmental degradation.

    This work becomes a self-conscious documentation of the boat builder’s story as it unfolds, and as the narrator learns more of what happened and uncovers echoes from her own life and family history. Her discoveries cause the narrative to take some unexpected, and at times resisted, turns. Themes of memory and trauma, reliability and unreliability, binaries and magic, and the question of how to hold two very different things at once, are at the heart of this book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNightwood Editions
    Release dateOct 17, 2020
    ISBN9780889713796
    The Whole Singing Ocean
    Author

    Jessica Moore

    Jessica Moore is an author and literary translator. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books, 2012), is a love letter to the dead and a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy (Talonbooks, 2012) by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN Translation Prize. Mend the Living, her translation of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal, was nominated for the 2016 Man Booker International and won the UK’s Wellcome Prize in 2017. Moore’s most recent book, The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood, 2020), blends the genres of long poem, investigative journalism, and family history. She lives in Toronto.

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      Book preview

      The Whole Singing Ocean - Jessica Moore

      TWSO-cover.jpg

      The Whole Singing Ocean

      Nightwood Editions | 2020

      Copyright © Jessica Moore, 2020

      all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency,

      www.accesscopyright.ca

      ,

      info@accesscopyright.ca

      .

      Nightwood Editions logo

      Nightwood Editions

      P.O. Box 1779

      Gibsons, BC v0n 1v0

      Canada

      www.nightwoodeditions.com

      Cover design: Angela Yen

      Typography: Carleton Wilson

      Cover Image: Original linocut by Jessica Moore

      Government of Canada wordmark Canada Council for the Arts logo Supported by the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council

      Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

      This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

      Printed and bound in Canada.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Title: The whole singing ocean / by Jessica Moore.

      Names: Moore, Jessica, 1978- author.

      Description: A story in poetic fragments.

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200213792 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200213806 | ISBN 9780889713789 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713796 (ebook)

      Classification: LCC PS8626.O5939 W56 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

      for my mother, Angela Moore

      & for the boat builder

      Contents

      The whale 11

      Warning shot across the bow 26

      Lines go blurry 45

      L’École en bateau (The Boat School)  55

      Can you keep a secret? 56

      Foucault, or silence the surest fetters 68

      Flotsam & jetsam 76

      The beginning—no, further back 87

      In his own words 91

      The language of transgression 97

      Groundswell 103

      The shores of the world 107

      I have a room in the dark 116

      Other voices 134

      The key that never fits any lock 138

      Un séjour de rupture 146

      The organ on the porch 154

      Neither of us hungered 158

      The whole singing ocean 160

      Notes 186

      Acknowledgements 190

      About the Author 192

      But the one thing we dread

      o keep clear of his eye

      – Coast of Peru, folk song

      What haunts you wants a form that is like none other

      – Phil Hall

      The whale

      The dreams began when I was still a child

      always from shore always racing to see them

      leaping dark joy in waves

      hurled through with light

      so when the boat builder invited me onto his boat

      and told me his story

      I listened

      We were lying side by side in the hull

      The sea was calm but stirred

      bubbles sounding along the wood

      like the whir in a vast aquarium

      and there we were, specks

      inside

      Long before

      building his own boat

      he’d apprenticed aboard

      a marine biology vessel

      Being the youngest

      he was chosen to be towed behind

      diving mask on

      eye out for them

      If he saw one, he was to tug the rope as a signal

      And me—

      many nights I dreamed

      Awe was in every dream & sometimes

      it was the kind that makes the hackles rise up

      & sometimes it was the kind that opens wings

      This day he’d been trawling along thinking of music, jazz

      the near impossibility of true improvisation, real randomness

      because how can you trick yourself into playing something new?

      Patterns pull us, patterns form us

      form our slow sleeping states

      our waking ones too

      unless we keep

      wildly alert

      on the lookout—

      That summer I’d thrown myself

      to the lions of another adventure

      Curled facing each other I confess I’d wished on the ferry crossing

      to spot one—seeing a whale was a fathomless want

      the kind you carry

      in childhood

      Once in Newfoundland I’d boarded

      the whale-watching boat and then—

      nothing—

      only the dismal puffins on their shit-covered rock

      Fog so thick

      I could have choked

      I burst into sobs inside the car

      slammed my hands against the dash

      His hands and mine between us

      though we have both been inside

      a greater love, a greater grief

      Still it’s comfort

      In the presence of something far more vast than ourselves

      ANOTHER BOAT BUILDER EH yeah this one’s a real charmer, musician and all, never stops talking DID HE OFFER TO BUY YOU LUNCH no nothing like that we simply struck a chord or rather two chords side by side ON THE ORGAN yeah the one on the porch WOULD’VE THOUGHT IT WOULD BE MOSS-COVERED BY NOW ’cause of all the rain YES the blackberries were threatening to cover the high E but we never got that far anyway decided to have a Bloody Mary at the bar BAR FULL O’ BOAT BUILDERS there are a lot of them in these parts WHAT ABOUT YOU GOT YOUR SEA LEGS funny you should say that we were just talking about it the other night AND it’s not so much sea legs as sea ears COME AGAIN throws my inner ear equilibrium right off

      I still said I’d sleep over on his boat

      There is a lot we carry with us

      into the hulls of ships

      And I remember a thousand times

      believing the dark was good

      descending to meet it like trees to their roots

      and I remember a thousand times

      believing that it was not

      Sometimes night is the surest thing there is

      After the whale-watching boat

      I took the coastal road

      down the peninsula, following a hunch

      parked the car past a narrow causeway

      When I’d been walking the mist-pinned beach

      no longer than twenty minutes, the fog lifted

      revealing the fins of them, tens of them

      just metres offshore

      So close I could hear it:

      the breath of whales

      And on this day (he tells me) he did see one

      a mother humpback

      looming up from the depths beneath

      He reached for the rope overhead

      and here is

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