This has been a weirdly persistent theme in my dreams for the past couple of years: taking a walk along a coastline of rocky cliffs for the express purpose of “seeing the whales.” And I do see them, looking down from the cliffs, dozens of them — rights and humpbacks and others of that general type, breaching and spouting and lobtailing away.(So far as I know, there’s no place where you can actually watch whales from the shore. Something that big obviously requires deep water.)
Commenters informed me that there are in fact places where you can watch whales from the shore, and one linked to a Deseret News article, the apparent headline of which (as preserved in the text of the now-dead link) was "LDS missionary from Utah dies after fall from cliff in Australia." A second link, which still works, is to a July 24, 2018 Newsweek article identifying it as a "popular whale-watching cliff."
Revisiting that old post and the links just now, I took note of the date July 24. Yesterday's post "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion" featured a photo by one Colette Saint Yves, and I had looked her up and discovered that she was born Hortense Lagrange on July 24, 1987. I suppose that it is also relevant, given the Deseret/Utah angle, that July 24 is Pioneer Day, commemorating the arrival of the Brighamite Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley.
My main whale-watching dreams were from the 2016-2018 period, but the theme has occasionally recurred since then. I recount another such dream in "Whales and narrow roads" (September 2024), in which I see -- indirectly via telepathic contact with a "professor" who is looking at it -- "the Humpback Whale," which is "the size of a railway station." In "To Tirza" (September 2025), Tirza is a lake at which I anticipate viewing whales from the shore. I later discovered, and noted in "Further notes on the Tirza dream," that "To Tirzah" is the title of a poem by William Blake.
Why am I revisiting all this now? Not because I've had another such dream, but because this morning I read about whale-watching from the shore in Remarkably Bright Creatures:
"Aye, look!" Ethan brakes slightly, gesturing to a dirt road turning off the highway. "You ever want to go whale-watching, there's a brilliant spot down there. Took a lady friend once. We saw orcas frolicking around like wee kittens. Quite a sight. . . ."
In the afternoon, I visited one of my usual used bookstores, but it was unusually hard to find a parking space, prompting me to turn down a nearby street I'd never been on in search of one. I ended up parking opposite this:
It's a big picture of a humpback whale, on the wall of a café called L. Z. DESSART. Under that name is the palindrome STRESSEDESSERTS, and then the Chinese name of the place, 無框架甜點 (wu kuangjia tiandian, "frameless desserts"). Since there is nothing beginning with L or Z in either the transliteration or the translation of the Chinese name, I'm not sure where the English name came from, but I had just posted about those two letters yesterday in "The Z-L swap and the sons of Jared."
In the old whale-watching posts I had been reviewing just before seeing the L. Z. DESSART sign, we had a Deseret News article, a post called "Whales and narrow roads" (c.f. this blog's title, From the Narrow Desert), and a William Blake poem. I think of desart is a distinctively Blakean spelling (much like tyger). Other poets of the era used it, too, of course, but their spelling tends to be modernized by editors, while Blake's does not. For example, Maolsheachlann recently posted "Favourite Poems: Ozymandias" (May 24), reproducing Shelley's poem with the spelling desert even though the original had desart. Most online poetry sites do the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment