Pocketed into the world’s natural objects, small, observable cacophonies of the self take place.
The piece, which is reprinted in Fathoms as the prologue is fascinating, and encompasses some of the book’s overall themes.įathoms contains eight additional essays that work in similar ways to “Whalefall”, pivoting around these explorations, from the history of whale hunting, including how whales were captured, killed and rendered, the whales’ ecological comeback, their relationship to different ethnic cultures and mythologies, the impact of ecological destruction, artistic and psychological explorations of the whales and other species that we’ve rendered extinct, and above all, the relationship between whales and the world of the human: The experience had enough impact on Giggs to send her researching what happens when a whale usually dies, out at sea, its decaying body becoming an entire ecosystem for creatures (‘fugitive species’) that only live in dead whales. The whale returned and slowly died on the shoreline until it was ultimately killed by authorities who had to deal with the massive carcass (“Beach and bundle”). In 2015, Rebecca Giggs wrote an article called “Whale Fall”, published in Granta, and chronicling an event in which Giggs helped push a beached humpback whale off a Perth beach back out to the sea.
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