I Was That Whale
When I was 19, I moved to Ventura. I instantly fell in love with the city and have considered it my home ever since. I lived in a small, two-bedroom upstairs apartment with my friend Ken, the guitarist in a band I was in at the time. Ken later moved on, but back then, I was making a moderately good income working for a grocery store at night, so I was able to stay there alone. I had another roommate for a bit, (also named Ken, strangely enough), but I mostly lived alone until 2002 when a series of bad financial decisions led me to move out. I was a five-minute walk to the ocean, and the weather was amazing.
I didn’t nearly go to the beach as much as you might have thought. I had a few short stints of walking down to the café that was at the end of Seaward Boulevard, where the road met the sand, but that was mostly to look brooding while I wrote poetry and smoked cigarettes in an attempt to meet a girl. I got exactly zero dates out of that. I did manage to fill a few journals, however. Mostly, I spent my days sleeping, writing, and recording music, with the occasional Fallout or Thief computer game obsession. My early twenties were fairly idyllic.
I owned a Tascam 4 track cassette tape portable studio and had accumulated quite an assortment of microphones, instruments, and other miscellaneous compositional tools. I particularly loved using an old Casio keyboard and a Korg effects pedalboard along with various famous, (and not so famous) lines from popular movies to construct what could best be described as clip art compositions. I would write melodies on my guitar, (a decent yet inexpensive 1992 Martin DX1) and spend days on end mixing, re-mixing and editing cassette tapes till the hiss got so loud that I couldn’t add any more parts without seriously compromising the songs. Most of these recordings are lost to time, many of them survived and I have them downloaded via a tape-to-mp3 device I got on my last birthday. I consider a great body of them to be absolute garbage. Oh, well. At least I got to see the ocean, right?
I was reading about Rimsky-Korsakov this morning. He has a fascinating life history. There was one tidbit of information that struck me as particularly curious. He had not seen the ocean until he after he signed up for the navy. He had apparently, developed a strong love for the sea simply by its descriptions given to him by his uncles and other relatives, and had written quite extensively about it, yet he had not set eyes on the vast waters of the deep until the military brought him upon it. He would later go on to write the Scheherazade. Another fun fact, the Scheherazade was the second symphonic piece I played after returning to orchestral music. There is a part in the first movement about 8 minutes in where I always envisioned the call of a great whale, far out in the sea, calling over the songs of mermaids and sailors. I was that whale.
There is a part in Mostly Harmless of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series where the main character, Arthur is told “We all like to congregate, …at boundary conditions.” The Seer continues, “Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side and look at the other.” It sounds very prophetic, until Arthur discovers that he was quoting out of the brochure from the airport. I went back to that section that I always remembered from Scheherazade as being so meaningful to me, and I could hardly hear the bass. Turns out it was only a big deal from where I was standing.
Oh, well. Maybe you can hear it if you listen hard enough. Here is my favorite YouTube version of it by the Vienna Philharmonic, mostly because the conductor, Russian Maestro Valery Gergiev, looks like he just rolled out of bed after a 30-hour bender in an Amsterdam flop-house.