Ghost Whales

November 22, 2024

On a brooding November afternoon, I found myself tucked away in my student's living room listening to Bach, drinking coffee, and watching the inlet across the street. In the fading light of the 4 o'clock hour, I observed the fall colors of the trees and the calm nature of the water's surface reflecting back the pale wintery mix of a sky. It had been pouring its strange cocktail the better part of the day and had successfully lulled us into believing winter would finally be here soon. Now, in this later part of the day, it took the inlet and danced across the water ins strange shadows cast by nothing.

I think if I ever was a painter, I would make nature my perpetual muse, especially water. Artists complain about how quickly light changes but imagine the added trouble of water beneath light. Yet I would never tire of sitting on the shore with a camera, capturing fleeting moments when the light played just right off the water and carrying them home to paint on my canvas in quiet solitude.

But I am no painter, only a music teacher, so I sat with my coffee in hand while my student continued to play. The water kept changing with long shadows disappearing in fascinating ways. I remember as a child thinking these shadows might be giant whales lurking about beneath the surface. I imagined the infinite, inky depths filled with pods of whales trying to find their way back to the ocean. Of course, there is no room for whales in these rivers and inlets, but to my mind it was the only explanation for the shadows I saw on the water. That is, of course, until that brooding November afternoon when it occurred to me that the shadows moved like gusts of wind. So now, enlightened, I believe the shadows are in fact the ghosts of the whales floating above the water, trying to find their way back home.

I contemplated where my invisible ghost whales were based upon the shadows on the water as I listened to my student play Bach inventions that I knew myself from long ago. My fingers involuntarily flexed when I heard him search for the right key. I could see the measure he was at plainly in my mind. I've often mused to myself that there are some pieces I know so perfectly that if you handed me staff paper, I could write it down note for note almost (if not entirely) perfectly. We musicians love to talk of muscle memory, the idea that the body knows without need of conscious thought and so can execute the tasks without too much attention. But knowing a piece well enough to write it down transcends muscle memory.

I saw a video recently of a butcher with a slab of meat so fresh that when he cut into it, the muscle rippled as if it were still alive. The caption said something about muscle memory and the comments said that's not muscle memory, it's neurons still reacting and firing despite being so freshly dead. Of course, I agree with the comments and not the caption, but what do I know, I think, as my fingers twitch on behalf of my student as I see measures of music with one of my mind's eyes and ghost whales with the other. I know that if I were freshly dead, my muscles might twitch much the same, but I wouldn't start playing Bach if set at the piano.

As the hour waned, the light turned from wintry grays to twilight blues and the autumn forest lost all hint of gilded foliage in favor of simple black silhouettes. Out of all the little moments that had passed through that hour, I wondered which one I would have photographed and attempted to paint (if I ever did paint) when I eventually found my way home. I wondered how artists ever chose a moment to capture. I wondered whether they hid secret thoughts of strange things that came and went during the process of catching the light. I wondered if when they looked at the simple landscapes they created, they also saw their own floating whales and rippling slices of meat and isolated measures of a Bach invention. I wondered if maybe the art they produce was like a little capsule that we try to take and get high off of the inspiration of their work, but pales in comparison to what really went on in their heads as they capture the moments.

If my student only knew what went on in my head during his lesson, how my mind danced away over the inlet and ducked beneath the bellies of floating ghost whales.