Too High For Us to Hear - Aug 24 2020

 

Too High For Us to Hear

Aug 24 2020

The whale brain

dissected, weighed, compared

suggests that the facility for language

of these ancient mammoth creatures

may be greater than ours.

Across thousands of miles.

Too high for us to hear.

And in musical passages

instead of dry prosaic words.

But converse about what?

Do they gossip and dish?

Do they relate long treasured tales

as old as the sea?

Do mothers coo lullabies

and do lonely males

sing courtship songs,

or try to seduce their quarry

with poetry and verse?

A blue whale

would dwarf the largest dinosaur.

But how big

is her inner life,

how much philosophy

preoccupies her time?

And when we slaughtered them

like miners exhausting the sea,

to how much suffering

were we deaf and blind?

Capturing calves,

then killing the mothers

who rushed to the rescue,

letting their carcasses rot

in the hunter's frenzied greed?

So few remain

patrolling the vast uncharted deeps.

Such a great obscenity,

our disregard

of the natural world

and the life-giving sea,

our insistence

that our blinkered humanity

is the only one of worth.

I chose the title because while we can be communicating at the same time, we might as well be doing so in parallel universes that never intersect. It demonstrates in a very tangible way the difficulty of trying to inhabit an entirely different world view, of the utter inscrutability of another being that might just as well come from an alien planet: a sentient creature that – despite our common mammalian origins – lives undersea, has no hands or written language, and does not build or even imagine such things as technology or cities or captive animals; that lives nomadically, instead of being bound by nation states or ideologies or religious identity, and spends a lifetime in a multi-generational family that is both matriarchal and matrilineal.

From the article What Have We Done to the Whale (New Yorker – Aug 24 2020) by the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/what-have-we-done-to-the-whale

“Scientists know that whale vocalization—the singing of humpbacks, the chattering of belugas, the powerful clicks of sperm whales (at up to two hundred and thirty-six decibels, the loudest animal noise on the planet)—performs an important communicative function. Whales converse, and perhaps commune, at great distances. Songs of humpbacks off Puerto Rico are heard by whales near Newfoundland, two thousand miles away; the songs can “go viral” across the world. Some scientists believe that certain whale languages equal our own in their expressive complexity; the brains of sperm whales are six times larger than ours, and are endowed with more spindle neurons, cells associated with both empathy and speech. Yet no one knows what whales are saying to one another, or what they might be trying to say to us. Noc, a beluga that lived for twenty-two years in captivity as part of a U.S. Navy program, learned to mimic human language so well that one diver mistook Noc’s voice for a colleague’s, and obeyed the whale’s command to get out of the water. A recording of Noc’s voice can be heard online today: nasal and submerged, but also distinctively like English. (Oooow aaare you-ou-ou-ooooo?) At the very least, it’s a better impression of a human’s voice than a human could do of a whale’s.

The whale’s aura lies in its unique synthesis of ineffability and mammality. Whales are enormous and strange. But—in their tight familial bonds, their cultural forms, their incessant chatter—they are also like us. Contained in their mystery is the possibility that they are even more like us than we know: that their inner lives are as sophisticated as our own, perhaps even more so. Indeed, contained in whales is the possibility that the creatures are like humans, only much better: brilliant, gentle, depthful gods of the sea.”