how to listen to the heartbeat of a blue whale: a more-than-human hex score

Violet walked to the edge of her imagination.
it was a shorter walk than she thought it would be.
reviving complexity, she untangled stubborn tangles,
teased at the knots knotting her desire
to listen to the heartbeat of a blue whale.

she invited all creatures to conjure
a more-than-human hex score.

dearest tender darling,
sleep six nights curled into the vigorous patch
of nasturtium, growing outside your door.
if you do not have a yard of your own,
plant the wrinkled seeds into a pot,
or find a strip of public green
and seed them there. they grow quickly.

each morn wake with the light of the sun,
with the chirp of brown house sparrow.
wrap your mouth around the orange glow
of a newly opened nasturtium blossom.
orangeness will vibrate inside of you.
intensify luminosity with each breath.

sing a song to this glorious vegetal creature,
while holding the bloom inside
the cavity of your mouth.
do not crush the flower.
repeat six times.

on the sixth & final repetition,
with the velvety corolla held lightly
inside your hungry mouth,
chew stem, seed, and petals.
swallow the spicy juiciness.

gently close your eyes, reach inward for the mass
of gay feather gathering in your mind’s eye.
lush magenta will fill the dark rich cave
between and behind your eyes.

let the feathery liatris spicata come into focus.
fine tune your internal visual acuity,
noticing the florets tightly wound
around the vertical spike.
embrace the queer stem with a soft hand
bend down toward the fluffy tip
testing, testing.
are you listening?

recite a short spontaneous poem,
dripping gorgeousness from your voice
into the lush blossom.

listen how the floral hairs amplify your desire.
dedicate your poem to the hummingbirds.

lift your face toward the sun.
sense the purple warmth of gay feather
spreading inwards, saturating your cells.
trillions of them amplify the magenta hue
from the interior to the exterior
of your human form.

receive the hummingbirds
as they come to drink nectar
from your floral infused, poetic, energy field.
usually alone, hummingbirds
gather in groups to feed.
receive the glimmer, as they carry you away.

here at the edge of oceanic,
where the hummingbirds left you,
thrum thrum of miraculous wing movement
resonating throughout your body,
reach toward the lemon verbena
transplanted, out of place, growing, nonetheless.

notice its gnarled woody stem, the green pointed leaves.
rub a lemony leaf between thumb and index finger.
bring your scented fingers to your eye and breathe deeply,
activating your cross-sensory perception.
listen to the spectacular freshness engulfing you.

sense yourself sensing
quantum

plunge into the expanse of your desire
to be close with another creature.
disintegrate distinctions among all beings,
you, dear human, are animal too.

breathe deeply through time, through place,
mindful of borders dissolving, of enclosures crumbling.
touch the smoothness of silence,
the absence of rough human-made sound.
in the brief intervals free from anthropogenic noise,
perhaps the blue whale will bloom before you.

in this spaciousness,
of liminal, of shifting, of fluid,
call for the blue whale.

it’s extraordinarily rare to be visited,
it could be years. deepen your call.

this desire, for the deep rumble
of the whale’s exhale,
for the sound of its heartbeat,
for its opening mouth,
for the wonder of its massive presence,
witness it inside of you.

should the blue whale glide silently toward you,
its mouth wide open, step inside,
ask for nothing.
simply exist alongside florescence,
collapsing the hardness in your heart
as the blue whale does
when diving into the depths of the ocean.

this is your gift to the great blue, to soften.

brush against bristly soft baleen,
let these hair-like substances filter fear and greed.
settle down into the expansive acoustic cavern,
a grand, mammalian auditorium.

the nasturtium are there, listening.
the gay feather too.
the hummingbirds are listening.
the lemon verbena is listening.

and you, dear two-legged?

the blue whale is listening to you.

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how to listen to the heartbeat of a blue whale is an excerpt from Violet’s Impossible Garden, a queer sequel to the gritty, poetic western, Quivering Land (ARP). Artist and writer Roewan Crowe steps into the wonderous, humming life of the urban garden to gently labour, be lost, and breathe. As a COVID-19 survival project, Crowe ripped up the front lawn to create a potager garden, a space to tend to vegetal creatures and pollinators. Surrounded by ever-changing life and beauty, Crowe couldn’t help but pose questions – to the plants, the winged ones, the four-leggeds, the dirt. These hypnotic entanglements with life in the garden led to the re-emergence of V. (the artist) and a series of visual, poetic, text, and sound-based works. The poetic performance score, how to listen to the heartbeat of a blue whale considers the hex/agon as a form of spell casting to call humans into a more awe-filled, mindful relationship with all forms of life.

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With gratitude to: Christina Battle for inspiring and nourishing conversations and for their generative curatorial labours; Sergio Serrano for creating a print version of this work; Blackflash magazine for creating online space for the “Expanded” digital initiative; Helene Vosters, who introduced me to the practice of movement scoring in our work together on Return Atacama; and always, Jarvis Brownlie for being a sensitive, curious, glorious, sounding board. I also extend gratitude to all living beings who generously shared knowledge with me.

Works considered in this piece include: The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway, Blue by Derek Jarman; Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, My Garden by Jamaican Kincaid, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice by Pauline Oliveros, and Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono.

Image Credits: Image 5 – blue whale by MR1805/Getty Images. Images 6 & 7 – 3D image of blue whale in by Leonello Calvetti/Stocktrek Images.

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Feature image: Roewan Crowe, how to listen to the heartbeat of a blue whale: a more-than-human hex score, digital image, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

Image description: A rectangular, horizontal image. One-third of the image, to the left, is filled with electric blue. I have been carrying this particular blue with me for many years. It’s inspired by Derek Jarman’s experimental film Blue (1993). This film made an indelible mark on me. It is a film without image, only a blue screen (international Klein blue) and sound. The remaining two-thirds of the image reveals a whale swimming through silky blue water. Hills in the distance. The whale is exhaling through its blow hole. It is almost entirely underwater. You can only see the smallest part of its back and the rise of its blow hole. You can’t see the blow hole openings. White mist and water are moving out of the whale’s blow hole and upward into a clear blue sky. A large hexagon pattern, filled with numerous triangles drawn with shimmering, oceanic blue lines, hovers above the silvery blue rise of the blow hole.

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Artist, writer, and professor, Roewan Crowe, lives and works on Treaty 1 Territory. Through the use of performance, installation, video, text, and theory, Crowe creates intimate landscapes, making space for connection and strange encounters. Their practice engages in material explorations, questions of form, site-specificity, and collaborative processes. Work includes: digShift, an environmental reclamation project; Lifting Stone, a queer femme performance/installation creating intimate poetic encounters; and the book Quivering Land, a gritty feminist meditation on the possibilities of art in response to white settler colonial violences. Recently, alongside co-pollinatrix Dallas Cant, they launched the SWARM arc.hive, a sympoetic, more-than-human, collective, artistic project centering encounters with bees. Crowe is currently writing, Violet’s Impossible Garden. Visit www.roewancrowe.com.

1. Placed in the bottom left of the image is brilliant orange lettering, creating the word one, punctuated by a period in the same colour. Above it, are digitally cut photographs of orange nasturtiums, two fully opened with an additional bloom just starting to open. These orange flowers are layered over a large hexagon pattern, exceeding its edges. The hexagon shape is filled with numerous triangles. The lines are drawn with shimmering, oceanic blues. This all rests on a solid, square, electric blue background.
2. Placed in the bottom left of the image is purplish magenta lettering, creating the word two, punctuated by a period in the same colour. Above it, is a digitally cut photograph of a single, stiff stem of a gay feather. It resembles the shape of a hand-held microphone. The gay flower is layered overtop a large hexagon pattern, exceeding its edges. The hexagon shape is filled with numerous triangles. The lines are drawn with shimmering, oceanic blues. This all rests on a solid, square, electric blue background.
3. Placed in the bottom left of the image is lime green lettering, creating the word three, punctuated by a period in the same colour. Above it, a shimmer of seven hummingbirds in various positions of flight. The digitally-altered-hummingbirds shimmer with bright green and emerald bodies, their wings are dark slate gray. These hummingbirds are layered over a large hexagon pattern, exceeding its edges. The hexagon shape is filled with numerous triangles. The lines are drawn with shimmering, oceanic blues. This all rests on a solid, square, electric blue background.
4. Placed in the bottom left of the image is lemony yellow lettering, creating the word four, punctuated by a period in the same colour. Above it, a digitally cut photograph of a stem of spring green lemon verbena with fifteen or so, long, pointed leaves. The sprig of verbena is layered over a large hexagon pattern, exceeding its edges. The hexagon shape is filled with numerous triangles. The lines are drawn with shimmering, oceanic blues. This all rests on a solid, square, electric blue background.
5. Placed in the bottom left of the image is sky blue lettering creating the word five, punctuated by a period in the same colour. Above it, a hand-drawn blue whale in a gentle swimming position. The whale’s body is rendered in icy blue whites and light blues and its mouth is just slightly open. The massive blue whale is layered over a large hexagon pattern, exceeding its edges. The hexagon is filled with numerous triangles. The lines are drawn with shimmering, oceanic blues. This all rests on a solid, square, electric blue background.
6. Placed in the bottom left of the image are bluish, icy white lettering, creating the word six, punctuated by a period in the same colour. Above it, a 3D image of a blue whale, mouth wide open, baleen on the top layer of the mouth. It is readying itself to capture krill. The digitally created blue whale is rendered in various shades of mottled blue-grey. The whale is layered over a large hexagon pattern, filled with numerous triangles. The lines are drawn with shimmering, oceanic blues. This all rests on a solid, square, electric blue background.
7. An image without a number. Near the bottom of the frame is the blue whale, its mouth open and welcoming. It is carrying the orange nasturtium, the lemon verbena sprig, and the gay feather stalk, in its mouth. Above it, a shimmer of seven hummingbirds in various positions of flight. These more-than-human creatures are layered over a large hexagon pattern, filled with numerous triangles. The lines are drawn with shimmering, oceanic blues. They exceed its edges. This all rests on a solid, electric blue background.