The water looks good on you

Today's mail has brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #60, containing my poems "The River Delivers Its Commission" and "Nostalgia/Νέκυια." The former was written for Yoon Ha Lee and deals with floods and words; the latter is a dispossessed Odyssey poem. The issue's theme is remnants, with especially strong work from Matthew Lyons, Gwynne Garfinkle, Aurea Kochanowski, Mat Joiner, S. Brackett Robertson, and Steve Toase. Especially because so many of my regular poetry markets have closed or otherwise ceased to exist, it makes me happy that this magazine where I was first published is still alive.

My parents are taking me on a pre-birthday day trip. (My birthday is Tuesday.) I shall report back when I return.

Oh, you pinks and posies

For my early birthday present, my parents took me to the nineteenth century and the sea.

In its lifetime as a traveling spectacle, Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington's The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage 'Round the World (1848) was frequently billed as the longest painting in the world. At a surviving length of 1275 feet, otherwise known as one Empire State Building, four Statues of Liberty, or fourteen blue whales, it is certainly the longest painting I have seen in my life. It came into the possession of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in 1918, spent most of the twentieth century exhibited in increasingly fragile pieces if at all, and after extensive conservation efforts has spent the summer unfurled in what was once the spinning room of the Kilburn Mill at Clarks Cove in New Bedford, a high-windowed loft space that gives onto a burnt-blue slice of sea and is presently filled from dark-grooved floorboards to industrial white rafters with the ghosts of whaleships and their crews, colonialism and globalization, seals, dolphins, banyans, icebergs, volcanoes, and the pair of painters who traced in tempera on cotton eight feet high the voyage of one whaler, half memoir, half epitome, out of New Bedford around the world to Fiji.

Because the materials of the Panorama are so fragile and the conservation work of the last seventeen years so meticulous, the quarter-mile of painted cotton can no longer be viewed as it was in its heyday, drum-spooling across a stage like massive reel-to-reel film to the accompaniment of music and narration; instead its four surviving sections have been set up like freestanding paintings, each running nearly the length of the third-floor mill room. They take the viewer from New Bedford into the North Atlantic and then to the Azores, Cape Verde, Rio de Janeiro, around (it's flaming drafty round) Cape Horn, and on to the Juan Fernández Islands, Pitcairn Island, the Marquesas, the Society Islands, Hawaii, the Northwest Coast, and finally the Fiji Islands, where the epic catalogue of sea-adventure, misadventure, geography, and ethnography runs out in a curious, peaceful scene of apparent childbirth. From handbills advertising the course of the fictional voyage, we know that the missing section ran from Fiji through New Zealand and Cape Town to St. Helena. One of the curators confided to my father that they were hoping that having the complete rest of the Panorama on display for the first time in a hundred and seventy years would provoke enough interest to turn it up in someone's attic or broom closet. I hope it works, but I have to say that the portion on view is not like a Greek papyrus fragment. It is monumental. It is worth watching the digitized version to get an idea of the style and scope, but the thing in person is huge. You don't have to get very close to it for it to eat your peripheral vision. And it's vivid for all its age and restoration—the early scenes in New Bedford and Buzzards Bay are the dimmest and most worn from being displayed most often, including at the New York World's Fair in 1964, but once you get out past the ship's portraits of the harbor (a steamboat! a revenue cutter! a Chinese junk!), the Panorama launches itself into the special effects with a day-darkening storm in the Gulf Stream followed by landfall at dawn in the Azores and, still under a mild, rose-clouded sky, the first whales—and the first whale hunt—of the voyage. The narrative has a semi-autobiographical quality: prior to commencing his career as a commercial artist of maritime scenes, Russell had shipped as a boatsteerer aboard the whaler Kutusoff between 1841 and 1845 and his art is known to reflect his own experience as well as details from the lives of his fellow whalemen. He had visited many of the places depicted in the Panorama. The Kutusoff herself can be seen between the Juan Fernández Islands and Pitcairn. It's also a kind of composite of the whaling life and nautical interest in general, which is why it includes events Russell was very definitely not witness to, like the legendary sinking of the whaler Essex in 1820, the first steam crossing of the Atlantic by the paddle steamer Sirius in 1838, and a cameo by Daniel Defoe's quite fictional Robinson Crusoe c. 1719. Neither Purrington nor Russell were present for the eruption of Pico do Fogo in 1847, but it features spectacularly in the Cape Verde sequence, the fuming lava reflecting a violent orange in the darkened sea. Russell did endure something like the Panorama's dramatic rounding of the Horn, as those famously heavy seas roughen with ice and the bow of the close-reefed whaleship pitches down into the freezing white spray; not so many ships ahead of them, a fellow whaler is even foundering, her crew abandoning ship as a collection of brown fur seals look placidly on from the nearest floe. The whaling scenes themselves are a mix of history and invention. Some of the boats are named and can be tied to particular voyages, as the placards set before the painting often did; others are more generic, although always technically accurate. All of the scenes, assumed to be the individual work of former whaleman Russell rather than "fancy painter" Purrington, show a strong eye for the hard, dangerous, messy work of whaling as well as the exhilarating atmosphere for which the Panorama's audiences paid their two bits (half-price for children). They do not just show the excitement of the chase but spouts of blood and stove boats, seabirds mobbing the carcasses claimed with waif-flags, the unglamorous aftermath of cutting in and trying out. The latter actually furnishes one of the best pictures in the entire panorama, a night scene of Whistler-blue skies distinguishable only by horizon from the deep tranquility of the sea illuminated by the sharp red fires of the try-works, the smudge-pots of the blubber boiling down. I do not feel qualified to talk about Russell and Purrington's representation of various indigenous peoples except to say that it seems remarkably un-othering to me, of a piece with the racially mixed whaling crews visible in some of the close-ups; I suspect it idealizes the interactions of its Pacific islanders with whalers, but that feels preferable to the versions that treat them like some kind of environmental hazard, equivalent to the gales of the Roaring Forties or the aggressive black whales of the Northwest Coast. There is colonial power to be seen in the flags of the ships at anchor and the architecture of the settlements, but no cannibalism. The narrative of the Panorama runs right to left, for the record. Film grammar had not yet been invented in 1848, much less codified to follow the direction of the English language, so the whole voyage scrolls as if in Hebrew. I'm for it.

I had actually known the Panorama existed before I was taken to see it, but only in an extremely secondhand fashion: I have a recording of Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and A.L. Lloyd's Whaler Out of New Bedford (1962), whose entire first side is the score for a short film based on the Panorama. The liner notes included a few black-and-white photographs of selected portions of the painting. They did not do it justice. If you have the time and the driving to spare within the next few days, I strongly recommend seeing this legitimate spectacle in person. Monday is its last day as part of this exhibit—which includes local art commissioned to comment on the panorama and the culture that produced it; I would have bought the poem by Richard Walega if it had been available as a chapbook and not just as four framed pages on a wall—and after that there is no guarantee of when the Panorama will be visible in its entirety again. It is free and open to the public. We caught it just in time. Because it was the last Saturday, we even got to hear a live set of appropriate music by Tom O'Leary and Simon Xerxes White, opening with "The Leaving of Liverpool" and closing with "Rolling Down to Old Maui." Afterward we had dinner at Tia Maria's European Café, where I wish to return for lunch because they serve a blood sausage sandwich; my father and I walked around Merrill's Wharf, a working waterfront full of commercial fishing boats and the smell of industrial oil and seafood in its rawest state. Masts and gantries and outriggers and antennae. Rust and lobster traps. Nets everywhere. There may be pictures if my father sends them to me. I forgot the camera and must rely on my memory, as in the days before photography, or at least the days when a painting the length of four mill rooms was the best way to see the world from home.

It was a great birthday present.