THE BOOK OF WHALE SECRETS

 

It’s said that whales are good at keeping secrets. They have a bladder near the liver in which the
secrets are stored. Old whale-hunting cultures used those bladders to swaddle their children after
flushing the contents into their water supply. The first alchemists were from these cultures. They
drank the secret-laced waters and learned how to fly. The Book of Whale Secrets, in which God
recounts to the whales the history of the universe, has been sought for hundreds of years by the
alchemists that came later. The marketing techs of the international union of hypnotic aerialists
seek it also. The alchemists believe the book contains recipes for spinning the ghost longings of
the second heart into first heart materials; the technicians want it as the key to a cryptographic
locking mechanism. They write letters to the minor celebrities that have planted messages of
hope in what is known as the imbecilic lobe of their brains, letters they are desperate to
enconstellate. The lobe is a feature of human existence, related to the bladder found in the
whales. Through it, we see things as we want those things to see us. We see the whales as
beacons of purity curled around hot irons of passion. And God as something to be grateful for.
But the whales have a secret: they see things as things see themselves. All day long, they knock
against the fretted emptiness of glass hulled ships. God has a secret too: that all things are
celebrity planting messages of hope. And also, according to The Book: a preference for Origami.
Each bacterium in the creation was folded into being by hand and lifted up to float through the
cosmos. And once long ago a napkin was folded. Once, long ago, a white crane was born.