One of the least nassholish ideas that I hold dear to myself is that, in the end, we will be delivered. Forces beyond our knowing care for us in ways that our slimy, underdeveloped sensory organs cannot appreciate so frequently. Call these forces Fatherormother, Older Brother, the North American arboreal superorganism. They are here amidst ourselves, and they love us. These days, we are so apishly faithless, and they love us despite this. We are granted grace. 

I’ve never seen a whale, but I imagine it is colossal in a way that is wholly transcendent, as if their buoyantly lipidic bodyweight outsizes them to a higher category of being that is also thinking and also loving and maybe closer in its dimensions to this deliverer. I imagine the whale renders you tremulous as if changing medication. You can’t help but envision the content of its bowels, the belly of the creature, and you–some Jonah with iPhone-face–trapped in that benthic cauldron of gastric juices and krill. I imagine the world folds into itself and starts to turn around the creature like a gravity well. The blowhole tears a hole in the sky. I also imagine that it is nothing at all like that.

Only love,

Charlie Nuermberger, EIC