On Whales: Watching Memory, Watching the Future

Volume 1, Issue 4, April 30, 2022.

There was a humpback whale in the street. It was, as I remember, the mid-1970s, and I was a child. Memory claims first that it was in the Cotswold town of Stroud, Gloucestershire, in the West Country of England. A fiberglass simulacrum of this whale rode on a flatbed truck, stopped there in the midday of the high street for us to see—uncanny whale, imme…