“Other Voices” The Whiteness of the Whale

Those of you who spent the winter here in Rhode Island do not need to be reminded of how cold it was and how the 18 inches or so of snow that fell statewide on Sunday, Jan. 25, blanketed us for many subsequent weeks; and how the record-breaking blizzard of Feb. 22-23 kept us blanketed until mid-March. On a number of such days, without putting on sunglasses, we would have been snow-blinded within a minute or two by the over-powering glare of sunlight on the everywhere whiteness.

The daytime whiteness of this past winter brought to my consciousness a poem I composed about fourteen years ago, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” echoing the title of chapter 42 of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, “Moby Dick.” The shining snow of this past winter kindled memory after memory: to begin with, there is the first book of poetry I ever purchased: a series of poems – as I shall try to explain – that has taught me about the mysterious power of whiteness upon a page.

It was sometime during my undergraduate years, 1962-1966, at Columbia College, in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, that I handed 75 cents to the cashier at a neighborhood bookstore to purchase a copy of the Sixth Printing of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “PICTURES of the gone world,” (City Lights Books: San Francisco 1955).

The very fact that I now owned a copy of a well-known beat writer’s poems made me feel “cool” or “hip”– whatever the term used in the 60s happened to be – as I strode across campus in my black leather jacket. A couple of months ago my wife uncovered this heavily scotch-taped paperback with a flimsy yellow and black cover, buried in one of our many bookcases and buried too somewhere in memories of our early marriage. Once found, I have been carrying Ferlinghetti’s poems in one of the pockets of my LL Bean barn jacket, which has been keeping me warm except on winter’s coldest days.

I have reread all 26 of the poems in Ferlinghetti’s 1955 collection, some of them many times over…poems with opening lines such as “Away above a harborful” and “In Paris in a loud dark winter” and “It was a face which darkness could kill.”

However, what moves me today, looking back sixty years or more, are not his words, his lines of poetry themselves, but those white spaces through which the poetic lines seem to have chosen to arrange themselves – surprising the reader, surprising Ferlinghetti himself – which tells me that the deepest freedom, the root of all expression, is found not within the words now written, but within the white spaces which contain the infinity of all that has not yet been written.

Ancient Jewish mystics have suggested that there exists a fiery force deep within the white spaces within and around the ink black Hebrew letters unfolding from right to left upon the worn parchment of an open Torah scroll, unfurled to catch the Divine Wind singing a sacred song of intimate and infinite silence…

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim is Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.