Whale Fall
When... at the very beginning of embracing slowness and cognition and claiming and taking time... I would use the words Whale Fall to share that I wanted and needed time to process information and ideas. And the words Whale Fall felt like a way to communicate to someone how my brain works. A heavy moving visual to help share how my brain moves and understands. A slow decomposition of new information by my quiet-hungry cognition. The organic complexity of falling and breaking down and feeding. From sharks and seabirds and fish with teeth and worms that burrow into bone. From the breaching surface place of a new idea, someone else's or my own, all the way to the dark and unseen of my thinking ecology. Slow and sinking and resting.
I would say, I do say, “I need to Whale Fall this.”
And in the beginning... my early understanding of magnificent whales and natural deaths and the ocean was the fifty year stage of decay.
Surface decomposition.
Falling, breaking down into life giving marine snow.
Then resting rotting on the ocean floor; harvested for months.
Supporting life forms changing from fish and sharks and invertebrates.
Creating scavenger communities who live off and live on the resources of skeletal remains.
And then I learned about Adaptive Radiation. The final decades of a whale fall, whale fallen, produce completely new forms of organisms on and around the whale bones. Each whale-fall has a natural by-product of niche eco-systems and new multitudes of diversifying forms. And when I learn this I love thinking of how more and more the world is full of places and spaces where slowness breeds complexity and diversity. And when I learn this I smile at how I keep being pulled toward ecosystems of disintegration and decay and movement and expansion and new life.
Staying with ideas... staying with and living off the whale... feels like a subterranean synthesis and then adaptive radiation of thought. Concepts and ideas grow bacteria that morph and change; a whole new ecology within you is made. Iterations are naturally forming soft evolutions of the work itself. A delicate transformation from the base, the DNA of something into another.
And so whale fall also means... allowing a slowness and falling sinking into the ground as deep as it can bury itself with new ideas. Slowness as a form of collaboration. I have a lot of whale falls inside of me. And sometimes I don’t want to go up to be with unfallen things.
I have all of my carcasses to harvest.