Denizens of the Deep

A couple nights ago I watched a flock of birds effortlessly glide towards a sensuous sunset as though the effulgent light was whispering, “Come here and bathe in my photon broth for awhile.” They came from everywhere in the sky. It must have been some kind of religious ritual for the birds. The citadel was the sky and the sun was providing the liturgy. A deep silence permeated everything for a few moments. I stood there entranced and enchanted. I understood the language of the birds, which is a language of fluid, inimitable motion. We could say birds have a poetic dominion over the airy realm which supports their wings. The gift of grace in this realm grants them transcendence.

Even though I opened up this blog with my encounter with birds, I don’t really want to talk about birds. I want to talk about cetaceans. I talked about my encounter with the procession of birds because they, like the cetaceans, are a form of intelligence I don’t fully understand. Sure, I can watch nature videos on dolphins and birds, read heady scientific articles on the foraging and mating habits of the both of them, but can these things really give me any insight into the world they actually perceive? They can’t. Like a microscope looking into the heart of a paramecium or a telescope looking at a presumably uncharted area of the firmament, these things can only look at the surface of things. The perceiver always remains elusive. The airy “bird-mind” and the watery “cetacean-mind” will always be one step beyond the grasp of our highbrow technological instruments. But this “one step beyond” isn’t something to be dreaded. It is something to be venerated. Because we can’t actually solve the mystery of life, we just have to accept it. Because we can’t actually perceive with the eyes of a whale or a bird, we just have to imagine that we can. This has always been our predicament as land-bound beings.

Recently I listened to a CBC radio broadcast called, “Ocean Mind.” The narrator was Jeff Warren, a droll and competent author of the incredibly well-researched book, “Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness”. I found the two-part series to be informative, ingenious, and at often times hypnotic. The sound of ocean eddies, sperm whale melodies, and Warren’s contemplative drawl mixed extremely well over the course of two hours. Like many people who think about the denizens of the murky depths, Warren seemed wholly interested in getting inside the “cetacean-mind,” or at least as close to it as possible. And now, after listening to this broadcast, so do I.

The cetaceans are highly evolved beings who utilize a different dialect than we do. While both dialects are communicative tools that involve sound and syntax, the cetacean dialect differs in the fact that the language itself has a way of becoming the environment. While our dialect seems to be trapped in our heads, the cetacean dialect percolates every nook and cranny of the environment like a wafting, engulfing fog in the morning. If their dialect happened to be insufficient in achieving a state of total dominion over their environment, the cetaceans would probably die. When our dialect doesn’t sync up with our environment, we simply feel out of sorts, fuzzy, or depressed.

The cetaceans are able to turn their environment into their playground via “echolocation”. Echolocation, in layman’s terms, involves navigating with sonic waves and oscillations. For example, the sperm whale unleashes a clicking sound from its mouth. The clicking sound travels vast distances underwater because it is a sonar signal. When the sonar signal bounces off a solid object or a moving entity that is prey, the signal comes back to the foraging sperm whale with information. The information in the echo then imparts to the sperm whale everything it needs to know about the murkiness ahead. Literally, the sperm whale’s watery wonderland is mapped through sound. The cetaceans are simultaneously cartographers and musicians. Alas, this type of profession doesn’t exist for us.

At one point during the radio broadcast, Jeff Warren proclaimed, “A form of culture seems to exist in the depths.” I think he is right. Alongside emitting enigmatic sounds, cetaceans seem to be capable of holding memories and constructing a culture (a culture different from ours surely, but a culture nonetheless). They appear to be social animals who have desires, wishes, songs of rapture, and maybe even philosophies on life itself. Because they have a large neocortex, plenty of cortical tissue in the brain, and an enlarged colliculus—a center in the brain that deals with sound processing—they are certainly capable of all these things. Surely they are capable of achieving all the things we are capable of achieving given the fact they got the hardware for it. But they probably wouldn’t want to be “overachievers” like us. Nuclear bombs, excessive weapon caches, and chauvinistic politics probably wouldn’t work well with the cetaceans. They like to “glide” not “conquer and divide”.

The cutting edge of science is changing. Some scientists no longer view animals as mechanical creatures that simply and ineptly act from the inviolable, deterministic laws of biology. These scientists now see true sentience in the aquatic, terrestrial, and airy realms. The dictates of Descartes are being questioned, and the world is opening up like never before. The cetaceans are getting their chance to speak on the podium of nature, and now we’re finally listening. Well, maybe only some of us.