Writing Within the Whale
Writing Within the Whale
Peter Wayne Moe
During the winter of 2012 I memorized the Book of Jonah. I was prompted by Fahrenheit 451—the book about a world that burns books—by a scene wherein a group of exiles gathers. They’ve each memorized books, and one tells another, “You are the Book of Ecclesiastes.” I am drawn to this idea of internalizing then becoming a text, making the words part of your own being, such that the text lives on—lives through—your engagement with it.
Each day followed the same routine. Recite the previous day’s verse ten times from memory. Recite the current day’s verse ten times with the text in front of me. Recite it again, ten times, without the text, and then, as the capstone to the day’s work, recite what I had of the book thus far. Doing this, I memorized Jonah’s forty-eight verses in six weeks.
I now recite the book aloud daily, once, sometimes twice, often more. I figure I’ve done it upward of some 3,500 times. It takes eight minutes. When my mind is unoccupied the verses come involuntarily. They become mileposts of a sort, for my day, marking its progression as I recite during my morning walk with my dog, my walk to work, my bus rides around town, my walk home, my evening walk with my dog. Whenever I am near water—on a boat, or walking the docks, or at a beach—I recite it. Seems fitting, necessary even, to tell an old fish story when by the sea.
*
When I was writing my dissertation, my adviser told me every good thing he’d ever written began with him sitting at his desk with three or four passages from books he’d copied onto sheets of paper. A writer’s job, he said, was to figure out how to make those passages speak to each other. The etymology of composition is important here: com- a prefix meaning “together,” and position a variation of the Latin ponere, “to place.” A placing together. Saying something new isn’t a matter of inventing ideas from scratch but of composing those gathered.
And to compose, a writer must work with words handed down. Here’s how David Bartholomae, a figure well known among writing teachers, describes it. He’s discussing the challenge of learning to use words and, through that usage, find yourself in them. “The language is not yours,” he writes, “You did not invent it; it is not yours and yet, ironically, it is one of the most crucial ways you have of being present—of being present in the world, in the workplace, in the academy.” Bartholomae argues learning to write means learning to understand words as passed down, as situated within “history, expectation, desire, and convention.” That is, a writer inherits words and then must compose them, must ask them to do certain kinds of work, work the writer knows these words can do based on how they’ve been used in the past and, too, work the writer knows may stretch the capabilities of these words. And the way to learn this—“the most effective lesson,” Bartholomae says—“is to get inside and to work inside sentences.”
*
The reverend asks me and my wife if we have “a verse to give” our son at his baptism. I am not entirely sure what it means to give someone a verse. I recall a poetry reading, months before, when the poet said, “I have these poems for you tonight”—his words a gift, something handed from one person to another, something to be treasured even. Giving a verse to our son, I come to think, means it will be over him his entire life. A blessing of sorts, a prophecy perhaps. We choose to give him the first line from Jonah’s prayer in the belly of the whale:
I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me.
Giving these words, I wonder whether they will be true for him. He’s six weeks old at his baptism, and quiet at the moment, but I know he will soon be in distress—if not immediately, then surely within the hour. He will call out, for his mother to nurse him, for me to change him, for us to love him. And we will answer that call. I hope, as he grows, his calls are always answered.
As I memorize the Book of Jonah, as I become familiar with the prophet’s words, as they work into my imagination, that verse stands out to me not only for its narrative of rescue, but also because I’ve seen it elsewhere. I begin hearing resonances between Jonah’s prayer and various Psalms I encounter here and there, the two playing off each other. Consider the first verse of Jonah’s prayer—the one we gave our son—against this, from Psalm 120:
In my distress I called to the Lord,
and he answered me.
I’m inclined to think this a coincidence. Lots of prophets call to the Lord in their distress. That’s what prophets do. But as I continue working through Jonah, I start to suspect this prophet’s words are not his own. The next bit of his prayer (on the left), set alongside a verse from Psalm 86:
You have delivered my soul from the depths
of Sheol.
Out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
Sheol appears often in the Hebraic scriptures—one translator refers to it as “a shadowy realm of nonbeing into which the dead descend”—and deliverance from Sheol is a common trope. These are stock sentences, Jonah using the common language of his faith. Here is the next verse of Jonah’s prayer, which I’ll set alongside verses from Psalms 69 and 42:
Save me, O God!
For the waters have come up to my neck.
All your breakers and your waves
have gone over me.
For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
All your waves and your billows
passed over me.
These vast, unmeasured, boundless, free waters roll in their fullness over Jonah, underneath him, all around him. So too, it seems, the psalmist. And again, when I come across these resonances, I’m inclined to hear them as mere coincidence. Still today, when people are burdened, they speak in drowning metaphors.
*
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas grew up the son of a mason, and in his memoir, Hauerwas quotes a passage from another memoir, one by Seamus Murphy, he, too, a bricklayer:
With hammer, mallet and chisel we have shaped and fashioned rough boulders. We often curse our material, and often we speak to it kindly—we have to come to terms with it in order to master it, and it has a way of dictating to us sometimes—and then the struggle begins. We try to impose ourselves on it, but we know our material and respect it. We will often take a suggestion from it, and our work will be the better for it.
Hauerwas reads this passage as speaking not only to the work of masons like his father, but also the work of theologians like himself, as both are a “craft requiring years of training.” The mason learns to respect his material, to take suggestions from it, to struggle against it while figuring out how to make it do what he needs it to do. The mason must “come to terms” with it—must find the language, the terms, to do the work that needs to be done, and in finding those terms, learn to work both with them and against them.
Learning to lay bricks is an apprenticeship and, for Hauerwas, so is learning to write theology. Just as a mason must come to terms with rocks and boulders, “Theologians,” Hauerwas writes, “do not get to choose the words they use.” I do not think Hauerwas is speaking to, or of, theologians alone. Whenever a writer enters a field of inquiry—whether theology or, for me, whales—the writer does not get to choose her words. They are given her, and the writer must learn how to turn them her own way. Hauerwas continues:
Because they do not get to choose the words they use they are forced to think hard about why the words they use are the ones that must be used. They must also do the equally hard work of thinking about the order that the words they use must have if the words are to do the work they are meant to do.
This process of thinking hard about what words must be used and in what order so that they are able to do the work they are meant to do is all-consuming. It demands immersing the self within a subject, a discipline, a discourse, a language, within particular ways of reading and writing, particular ways of listening and speaking.
*
Reciting Jonah daily, I begin to wonder what it means to recite a passage and what it means to pray it. I do not think, as I churn through the verses, that I am praying them. I’m not sure who my audience is. Praying, it seems, should involve some sort of intention as to how the words are put together. Some sort of authorship. I find myself skeptical of words handed over to me. This preference for originality, this distrust of a script, comes, I think, from the individualism and exceptionalism I, as an American, am awash in. And, I admit, I find it easier to be within my own comfortable words than to find myself within—inhabit, even—the words of another, especially when praying.
But then I remember monastics who, through years of practice, memorize the entire Psalter and, along the way, train themselves to continually pray, with each inhale and exhale from their lungs, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” the very act of breathing transfigured into prayer. These sisters and brothers are not composing new prayers, they are not speaking extemporaneously, they make no claims to originality. They’re saying words given them, words millennia old, words infused into their respiration. They find something redemptive in those inherited words, a freedom in using a script.
Might Jonah be doing the same? Reciting his prayers, working a script inside the belly of the whale? The similarities are just too numerous, the next verse in Jonah’s prayer aligning with Psalm 31 and Psalm 5:
I had said in my alarm,
“I am cut off from your sight.”
But I, through the abundance of your
steadfast love,
will enter your house.
Then I said, “I am driven away
from your sight;
Yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.
Here, too, the resonance between Jonah and the Psalms seems like it could be due to somewhat generic circumstances—a prophet driven away from God yearning to return. It’s a narrative of redemption, commonplace enough. But as Jonah’s prayer continues, resonance seems too weak a word for what I’m hearing between Jonah and the Psalms. So too, echo doesn’t seem strong enough to describe what’s happening.
The next two verses, set alongside passages from Psalms 69 and 116:
I sink in the deep mire,
where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters,
and the flood sweeps over me.
The snares of death encompassed me;
the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;
The waters closed in over me to take
my life;
the deep surrounded me;
Weeds were wrapped around my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
Jonah, weeds wrapped around his legs, sinking down to the roots of the mountains, barred in by the land itself—such images, such poetry. Alongside it, the psalmist writes of death having snares, of its very pangs laying hold of the poet, dragging the poet into the pit. It’s a sinking image, both poet and prophet in a straitjacket, one of seaweed, the other death itself.
The psalmist’s I is one I could inhabit myself, “The flood sweeps over me” vague enough that it invites me into its syntax. I could make a home there, inside those words, and a few years ago, I did. When hospitalized for what was thought to be cancer, I said, alongside the psalmist, that the snares of death had encompassed me. That verse became my own.
Injecting myself into those words, I realize I am doing the same as Jonah. He, too, inhabits the Psalms. The I of his prayer is at once his and yet also an I he shares with the psalmist, with other Israelites, and with others in distress. Like mine, his I is communal. It’s a plural I inflected by the words of others, both of us, together, inhabiting the language of another—the psalmist—relying on that inherited language to name our own experience, to speak through us.
*
The prayer turns, and this turn, too, has a companion in the Psalms, this time Psalm 30:
O Lord, you have brought up my soul from
Sheol;
you restored me to life from among those
who go down to the pit.
Yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
There is not a single line in Jonah’s prayer he could call his own, not a single line that does not find itself in the Psalms. I am unsure the verb that would best articulate what Jonah does. Does he pilfer from the Psalms? Pull from them? Borrow? Plagiarize? Those verbs suggest some sort of ill-character. They carry within them a critique of a writer’s seeming inability to be original. To say Jonah steals from the Psalms is to expect a writer to say something that’s never been said before, and to believe it’s a fault to do otherwise. Nor is he just quoting them. Jonah’s use of the Psalms runs much deeper than mere quotation.
I’m inclined to say Jonah has appropriated these Psalms, internalized them, even, such that their words have become his own. Jonah draws from the past to speak to his present. He’s not just quoting these Psalms; he’s arranging their sentences into something new, something entirely his own even as it is taken from others. He is composing, turning these sentences his own way, putting them to use on a subject—being stuck in the belly of a whale—the psalmist likely could not imagine.
Near the end of the prayer, Jonah recounts teetering on the edge of death, and he appropriates Psalms 142, 77, and 18:
When my spirit faints within me,
I will remember the deeds of the Lord.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.
When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
I don’t want to suggest that Jonah is some pawn—that, as a prophet, he’s just a mouthpiece with no ability to speak his own sentences. Nor do I want to suggest he’s falling back on pat, comfortable, commonplace language. Even though his sentences are shared with others, they are not cliché. The words he speaks are of his being, of his own tongue, even as they are from another, such that, when he needs sentences, those sentences come forth from his inherited language. The Psalms provide him words when he has none.
These, the final verses of Jonah’s prayer, set alongside verses again appropriated from the Psalms (in this case, Psalms 31, 50, and 3):
I hate those who pay regard to worthless
idols, but I trust in the Lord.
Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
Perform your vows to the Most High.
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
What I have vowed I will pay
Salvation belongs to the Lord!
When I recite Jonah’s prayer, I hear someone who has learned how to use the words he’s been given. I hear a prophet steeped in a discourse, steeped in a community, steeped in a shared language, such that that language, community, and discourse shape what he says. There’s a certain beauty here. This reluctant prophet, this prophet on the run, this prophet who goes to great lengths to avoid prophesying—when he speaks, he speaks not his own words but words inherited. He prophesies.
Excerpt from Touching This Leviathan © 2021 by Peter Wayne Moe.
Reprinted by permission of Oregon State University Press
Peter Wayne Moe
Author & Professor
Peter Wayne Moe is associate professor of English at Seattle Pacific University, where, in the summer of 2020, he led 158 volunteers in hanging a whale skeleton in the school's science building. He is the author of Touching This Leviathan. More at peterwaynemoe.com.
Photography by Velizar Ivanov