To Suspend

NEW YORK CITY: At the American Natural History Museum in New York City there is a life-sized model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling of The Irma and Paul Mistein Family Hall of Ocean Life, the length of which spans nineteen metres, the size of a creature beyond the limits of gravity. Installed in 1969, the model itself weighs 21,000 pounds and appears to dive down into the bottom floor of the blue-lit hall. Depending on the day of your visit, there are hundreds of strollered children with snot on their upper lips crying and running and pulling at the hems of their parent’s exhaustion. In the large hall, the sound of people echoes with the recordings of ocean waves and gurgling water and can be deafening. But the whale, this huge figure, silently hangs there absorbing the commotion like a cloud: an animal cloud with slow blood. Looking up at the figure amidst the screaming and terrestrial thuds silences and centres you. When I’m by myself I find that this is the state that I strive for. I want to move through the streets of the city and ride on its subways absorbing and steady. I am no whale and terrestrial existence makes things far jerkier than the fluid movements of the ocean, but as I walk through crowds of scurrying people and sharp motion, I strive to swim and suspend.