Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I was reflecting tonight about emergent phenomena, and how one thing about emergent phenomena is their unpredictability. I’m in the process of writing up a post on emergent phenomena in climate, so they’ve been on my mind. I got to thinking about something I saw thirty-five years ago, a vision that is as fresh today as the day I saw it. I’m going to write it up and post it, be aware that there isn’t much sciencey stuff at all in this post. So get a cup of your favorite hot beverage, there’s nothing contentious here, it’s just a seaman’s tale about the unfathomable nature of emergent phenomena …
One charmed afternoon, as the result of a series of misunderstandings and coincidences, I found myself on a small sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles and more from any land. The day was lovely, blue water, blue sky. A light breeze was blowing, just enough to keep the sails full and drawing. I was on the afternoon watch, so I was … well … watching, that’s what sailors on watch do. Watching the course, watching the sails, watching the taffrail log, watching the black bumps on the horizon, watching the compass, watching the clouds, watching the … wait, what? Black bumps on the horizon? What makes black bumps on the horizon?
I watched and watched, and although the bumps got bigger, I couldn’t make out what it was. Clearly it was alive, I could see it splashing and moving in the far distance. Strangely, as more of the mystery creature became visible coming over the horizon, it started to look like the mythical sea serpent.
Or maybe it was two sea serpents, long ones, with parts of their bodies underwater and parts above water, I watched it for the longest time … and then suddenly, you know how the picture shifts, it all became clear. I was looking at a huge pod of dolphins swimming in a long thin line, that’s why it had looked like a couple of sea serpents. But the pod was gigantic, it was already well over a mile long, and heading towards the boat.
Nothing happens fast at sea. And so slowly, slowly the members of the pod moved in line towards us, with more and more of them appearing over the horizon as the first among them neared the sailboat. And amazingly, when the first dolphins drew even with the boat, dolphins in the back of the line were still coming over the horizon.
Now, for those of us stalwart citizens of America and Liberia fighting the lonely rearguard action of the good fight against the insidious foreign menace of metric measurements that would drain our precious bodily fluids, the rule of thumb in Imperial measurements is that distance to the horizon (in miles) is the square root of your eye height above sea level (in feet), rounded up. (The corresponding rule of thumb in metric is, three times the square root of eye height in metres (rounded up) gives distance in km to the horizon. But you can only have our feet and inches if you pry them from our cold hands …)
The deck of the boat was about four feet above the waterline. That put my eyes about ten feet (3m) above the waterline, meaning it was about four miles (six km) to the horizon, and the dolphins continued to stream over the horizon unabated.
The line of the dolphins passed maybe a quarter-mile from us, pretty close but still hard to make out. I was hoping that I would get a closer view of them, when I saw two dolphins leave the pod and come rocketing over at an incredible speed to check us out. They were large, obviously males. They went all around the sailboat for a few minute, eyeing us, checking out the boat, and then they rocketed back to the main pod … I was sorry to see them go.
But after they got back, they must have given us a good report … because in a little while some of the females came over with their young, including infants. I lay on my stomach on the bowsprit, the spar that sticks out forwards from the front of some sailboats, so I could look directly down on them from a few feet above them. The tiniest ones were unbearably cute. They were perfect miniatures of their moms, identical in every detail. The moms and babies came and swam under the bow of the boat. The babies swim right under the moms, for protection. Then when the moms come up for air, the baby pops out from under and swims alongside of the mom to the surface, in a gorgeous symphonic ballet of synchrony. They both take a breath at the same instant, I could hear the big breath and the baby breath like the palest petal of air, then the baby pops back under the mom, and off they go again.
Amazingly, I saw the moms trade off the childcare duties. I watched one mom and a kid for a bit. They were doing the pair breathing, they went on for a while.
And then, another mom came up to the bow and said something to the first mom. The kid ducked from under the first mom to the other, and the first mom celebrated her new-found freedom and lack of responsibility by indulging in a whole long series of jumps and dives and turns, it looked like she just got off an eight-hour shift … she was one happy lady, she never did come back to the sailboat, she was done with childcare for a bit, she went tailwalking across to join the ladies in the main dolphin parade.
And all the while the unending stream of dolphins was passing by. Different groups of them came to play around the boat, and then retired to join the pod. The leaders of the group were halfway to the opposite horizon, and still dolphins came to play … and when the leaders of the pod had made it all the way to the horizon, and had finally disappeared from view, there were still more dolphins coming over the horizon, still more dolphins coming to visit us, while still more dolphins disappeared over the horizon more came into view. Eight full miles and more of dolphins making their slow way to … where?
And then with an almost tragic finality, the tail of the huge long pod came into view, wending its deliberate way forwards. Those last dolphins still had three miles to go just to get to the boat. As they approached, a few last visitors came and gazed at us through the two-way mirror of the ocean’s surface, and then left to join their friends. I sadly watched them join up with the tail of the pod and then slowly, slowly, the tail of the pod shrank towards the horizon.
And finally, in the long slanting rays of the late afternoon, the last of the gorgeous, mysterious dolphins slipped over the far edge and were lost to sight … I sat in silence, almost dazed by the experience. After watching them laugh and play for those few mercurial hours, I felt like I do when friends depart after too short a visit. And I wondered how the world appeared from their side of the silvery mirror of the surface.
What did we look like to them? What did they think of us? Clearly, they were intelligent. They sent out scouts to gauge our intentions before they allowed the women and kids to visit, just like any wandering tribe in an unknown country. They moved in a conscious, purposeful manner, with the women and kids in the middle of the pod, and bigger males ranging widely back and forth along both sides, clearly watching out for the tribe as they steadily moved towards … somewhere.
But where were they headed, and why? I realized that the afternoon had vanished, how had it suddenly become evening? My watch was over, I put my head back on the cockpit cushions and watched the stars come out and drifted in a half-sleep, considering the question of their mystery hegira. After picking up and discarding a variety of hypotheses, the picture started to become clearer. As my head sank lower, I could almost see how the word had come skittering down the oceanic spinal telegraph, an eclectrical spark that went quantum tunneling through the aquatic mental telepaphone, wailing a long saxophone growl about there was gonna be some seriously shaking dolphin party down the way, the whole tribe was invited, there was gonna be fins and sins over at the corner of what almost sounded like Water Street and Ocean Avenue, but I couldn’t make out the words, they sounded strange and squeaky.
And yet I somehow, as the motion of the boat gently lifted and soothed me, I knew exactly where that party was going to be, and it was a warm and happy place, with lots of friends and plenty of fish-heads, I could almost taste the sweetness. And I could see how the boss dolphin ladies notified all of their aunties and cousins in that part of the ocean, and then they informed their husbands that they needed to clean up and get respectable, and they got the kids lined up, and they called in the distant relatives on the deep sound channels from where they were fishing in small groups around, and when they all were ready in their thousands and thousands, they all started to move, disordered at first. Then the first ones started their dolphin-dance, in and out of the water, and one by one they picked up the music and began line-dancing down the slanting wave-faces to the party somewhere over the horizon.
And then somehow my point of view shifted, and I could see it all from far above, and my boat was a tiny toy below me, and I could see a tiny man sleeping there, and weeping for the beauty, but he was a stranger, I was not interested in him, so I turned, and oh, I saw that the tribe that had laughed and frolicked past us were just one of a dozen dolphin tribes that I could see converging on some golden section of the ocean. And I could shift my eyes back and forth, and one moment see all the converging tribes of dolphins, still miles and miles apart but already singing and chattering to the unseen shadow-shapes of their alters in the blue-black deeps. And then shift my eyes and see them close up, the single dolphins ready to get down and boogie and become risqué, the moms eager to see their friends and tell lies about the orcas that they’d seen and boast of their grown children …
And I had the feeling that I could watch them forever, they had a purity of companionship that was infinitely inviting … but then somehow the time lurched and shifted like the needle picked up off an old vinyl record and set down in a new groove, and I could see all of them arriving together in the moonlight, laughing and frolicking, old friends from the different tribes telling their stories, young ladies and gentlemen dancing on their tails with the refulgent moonlight transmuting the splashing drops into tiny blazing-white stars like diamond-dust flung into blackness, the drops falling and skittering across the midnight velvet face of the moonlit ocean.
I wanted so much to join them in their dance that I began to weep, because I knew I was too clumsy and heavy to ever dance with the dolphins. But then you showed up, and you said I just had to unzip my bodysuit, and I could take it off and join the dance. And I was overjoyed, and amazed that I had never noticed the zipper before, but the surprise quickly faded and I unzipped it and stepped out of it just like I remembered doing so many times before, how could I have forgotten? And like always before it gave me a miraculous feeling of joy and lightness and energy. I knew I could dance all night with the dolphins, and I danced the first few steps and watched the colored energy roll through my body, the wings of my lungs beating like feathered clouds with my breathing, and the dolphins surrounded me and I could understand their singing, the dolphins shining and flashing and glowing to my new eyes, the dolphins dancing on all sides, walking on water, dancing on air … but before I was barely begun, a cold wind blew up without warning and spun me round and round, I didn’t have the energy to hang on and I felt myself spiraling down, I was gaining weight and losing speed, moving slower and slower, the fog was setting in to caress my face, I saw the tiny man passed out on the ship, he had stopped weeping, and without a trace or a shiver I was lost in a profound and dreamless sleep in that dark sea of awareness that surrounds and comforts us all.
.
As I said at the beginning, there’s not much sciencey stuff in this post, that will go in my upcoming post on emergence. Instead, consider this sailors tale a paean to the ungraspable, a celebration of things we don’t know, a rejoicing in not understanding the dolphins, a plea for an acknowledged lack of understanding, a shout-out to the unseen undersea power of family and friends and tribes, and a reminder that when it comes to the emergent phenomena that pop out of nothingness to surprise and amaze and bedevil us with things like lightning bolts and dolphin parties, the science is never settled …
My very best wishes to you all,
w.
Those warmists who condescendingly dismiss this blog are missing out on a lot of good writing.
Reality check says:
February 4, 2013 at 11:09 am
Referring to animals using human terms is scientifically and socially
damaging. Animals are not people, people are not pet parents, etc.
This is a very successful tactic used by environmentalists to get
people to agree with their agenda. Remember the baby seals? etc. etc.
Is that all you’ve got? You seem to be the equivalent of those grammar nazis who jump all over you for typing your instead of you’re. But you want clear and complete distinctions between human terms and animal terms. On that basis Willis was wrong to call the young dolphin a “kid” because that would have to be a young goat. I always thought “mom” was a substitute for “mother” but not necessarily a human mother. Assuming you allow animals to have mothers. Since you won’t let them have a “mom” I would say having a mother must also be in doubt. My online dictionary shows the following:
mom: noun: informal term for a mother
By the way, how do you distinguish between animals and
people then? And are all animals equal? You admit that dolphins care for
their young. That was what Willis observed. Is he not allowed to
observe that because humans also care for their young?
Your comment about scientists being distracted by giving names to the
animal subjects they observe is interesting. I’m not sure that has
much or anything to do with failing to distinguish between animals and
humans. It has everything to do with recognition of the worth and commonality of all
living creatures, whether animal or human. Many of us have an innate
sense of that worth, and others of us discover it as we interact and
observe and begin to recognize our shared characteristics. I’ll share a couple of my limited observations which had to do with simple things easily understood.
Most of my young life I had little to do with horses. I rode a few was
about all. Then one day I had an experience that opened my eyes to
some of the characteristics of a particular horse that changed the way
I thought about all horses. Horses can talk. I had travelled hundreds of miles to visit
my sister, and one day she was away somewhere and I decided to spend
my time alone weeding her vegetable garden. She lived on a small
acreage just outside of a little town in Idaho. Suddenly I heard a
noise nearby. I looked up to see a horse standing by the fence about
10 feet from me and nudging a sawed-off barrel that was in the corner
of his pasture. He was literally banging on the metal with his nose
and snorting at me drawing my attention to what was obviously his water trough. As soon
as I looked up he gave a final nudge and then caught my eye. His
intent was clear. The trough was bone dry. I looked around and
found that the water hose was nearby that must have been used to fill
his trough. So I turned on the hose and filled it up. The horse was
visibly satisfied that his needs had been met. I didn’t have a name
for that horse but we did communicate. The horse knew I had the means
to help him and he got my attention in a way that explained to me what
he wanted. I am not imposing human values, emotions, needs, or
characteristics onto that animal. He is still an animal. He couldn’t speak to me in words, but he found a way to tell me something. At the risk of further getting you lost and confirming that you won'[t be able to deal with me, he talked to me. So I conclude. Horses can talk.
I suppose because I think a horse can talk to me that I fall into the
Disney group. So be it. I have a cat too and that creature gets its
way with me a lot too. Do I think it is human? No, it’s way above
that. He does have a disturbing animalistic tendancy to catch and torment mice, birds and bats despite the fact that I feed him rather lavishly and he never eats his prey. But last year some restless bored teenagers driving by late at night saw my cat in the yard, stopped their car and jumped out and captured it. Then one of them pulled out a pocket knife and stabbed the cat in the chest. Collapsing its lung and missing the heart by a fraction of an inch. The cat ran off leaving a trail of blood under my neighbour’s car, all around my garage, across the deck of my neighbour on the other side and up the stairs onto my deck and into its little house. The cat survived. Nine lives and all… a deer would have bleed out and died with such a wound and trail of blood. Well, what was the difference between the human and the animal in this scenario?
To the reader who mentioned that it took 1,000 miles… It only takes getting away from the radio or phone to work. The first time I really remember my father (an attorney) relaxing was on our first 3-week sailboat journey into Lake Huron. He had promised his partners that he would have the radio on at a certain time, in case they needed to reach him. I was in charge of making sure the radio was on at that time. Over the course of the journey, the radio time got shorter and shorter as I realized that my dad was de-stressing. It was wonderful to watch.
I enjoy these tales – they remind me of my times in boats. I think that “Reality check” needs a time-out to relax.
I have been ORDERED to leave this blog. No opinions allowed here that go against God Willis. So much for science.
[Reply: I cannot find where anyone ‘ordered’ you to do anything. — mod.]
Thanks, Willis. I’ve sat on the beach on barrier islands in South Carolina and have had dolphin Moms bring their kids up to the shore just to eyeball me. No doubt about their intelligence, curious natures, and their joy of life. Having them around is a blessing.
Reality:
“I do agree the dolphins were caring for their young, but not as a human family would do. They are dolphins, not people.”
‘caring? for their young? wow that sounds warm and fuzzy.
And how would a human family care for its young? and how different is that from what any higher mammal does.
Reality, We may be spiritual beings having an mammalian experience. But we are mammals nonetheless and we care for our young just as any dolphin does; worse in many cases, better in some.
Reality check
Sorry to hear that you have been ORDERED to leave this blog. That’s pretty unusual. And beastly inhuman treatment to be sure. I would sure like to see the evidence of it. The moderator himself isn’t aware of the ORDER. I guess I would have to admit that I don’t believe you unless you produce the proof of it.
Steven Mosher says:
February 4, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Steven, that cracked me up. Very funny.
w.
Sparks says:
February 4, 2013 at 9:41 am
Many thanks, Sparks. I tend to take extra care with the opening sentence, it sets the tone. I was very happy when I finally had it hammered into shape, it took several re-heatings and re-forgings with time to let it cool in between before it was finished.
Glad you enjoyed it,
w.
Reality check says:
February 4, 2013 at 11:09 am
First, I’d need some kind of citation for this claim. I don’t see the people doing this kind of work naming the animals very often, other than as a convenient shorthand, whether or not they are activists. For example, many of the orcas the scientists study have names based on the shapes of their fins, because it’s easier to say “I recorded a sighting of Stumpfin today” than to say “I saw orca number 17 today, or is that one 16, hang on …”
I don’t see how that damages their orca research … and when it comes to herring research, I want to meet those activists that name each herring.
In any case, other than regarding the mental health of the participants, why should anyone care what people call the animals they study? Either their findings about wolverine number 11, also called “Split-paw” because you can recognize her by her tracks, are valid and true, or they are not. That’s all that counts, not whether she’s called #11 or Split-paw.
But not all naming of animals is bad. Regarding the effects of naming on the mental health of the participants, when I was a kid on the ranch, children were often given animals to look after. My friend’s dad gave a calf to him and to his sister. They were to each raise their calf, and then they would be slaughtered and eaten by the family.
He, like you, didn’t want the kids to get too attached to the animals, but for reasons of their emotional well-being, not because he feared it would mess with their scientific objectivity
So before he gave the animals to the kids, he named them both. One was named “Sirloin”, and the other was named “T-Bone”.
… seemed like a nice middle ground to me, all the advantages of naming without the emotional attachment, you should approve, Reality …
w.
“Get lost … it will do you good.” Complying.
Willis, I had to take time away from this thread to calm down after reading RC’s comment. He reminded me far too much of an acquaintance from long ago who tried to isolate himself from any emotional identifiers. It “interfered with his thinking.” He was ultimately able to sufficiently disassociate himself from his feelings that his wife left him, and he refused to visit or allow his children to visit. An empty shell, abet without the beauty left behind by a nautilus.
I’ll join the cry, “Book, book, book”
Reality check says:
February 4, 2013 at 11:09 am
Referring to animals using human terms is scientifically and socially damaging. Animals are not people, people are not pet parents, etc…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Try explaining that to my four footed kids.
Since they are goats the correct term is kids and since I am bottle feeding them every three hours I am in loco parentis. However I also understand The Bambi Syndrome and use that term scathingly.
Willis was raised on a farm and is very much aware of the difference between humans and animals, probably more so than you.
I just ran across a lovely article about my favorite tribe of birds, the corvids. Check this out:
The crows, jays, and ravens have previously been shown to exhibit complex behavior. They use tools to access otherwise unobtainable food, which is an uncommon (but increasingly observed as we look more closely) trait in animals. And they have even been seen to use one tool to obtain a different tool to obtain food, behavior that not even chimps are known to exhibit.
First, they observed that a crow will pick up a long stick in its beak, and use it as a tool to extract a piece of food from, for example, a barred cage with food in the center. They could see the food but they couldn’t reach into the cage between the bars. Corvids are the only birds I’ve heard of using tools in this manner, although other bird tribes may also. Chimps and other primates do this as well.
Then the scientists put out a short stick, and the same barred cage with food in the center. Both the birds and chimps tried the short stick, and gave up when they discovered it wouldn’t reach the food.
Then came the twist. The scientists added another, slightly smaller barred cage, this one with a long stick in it. The crows picked up the short stick, used it to pull out the longer stick, and then used the longer stick to pull out the food and ate it and laughed their strange crow laugh.
To this day the chimps are as puzzled by that one as dogs are by the doorknob question …
This article today is a strange finding, though. It’s in the realm of solving mental rather than physical problems. It shows that the jays are able to infer what kind of food another jay wants to eat … dang.
And no, I don’t know if the scientists gave the jay birds names or not …
In my youth many behaviors were believed to be only exhibited by humans, like the use of tools, and language, and grasping and manipulating abstract concepts.
A number of these behaviors have since been seen in a variety of animals, such as the jays and the crows discussed above, and in gorillas talking sign language, and in the complex verbalizations of the cetaceans, and the like.
What is obvious from all of the recent research looking at crows and dolphins and chimps is that there is no sharp division, no bright-line distinction between humans and animals, as we were once so eager to believe. Instead, we’re just another part of the parade … bad news for those holding that humans are oh-so-special-and-different, good news for energetic egalitarians like myself ,,,
w.
“the rule of thumb in Imperial measurements is that distance to the horizon (in miles) is the square root of your eye height above sea level (in feet), rounded up.”
This is a rule of thumb?
Let’s see …my eye height above sea level… I don’t know my eye height … where’s the blasted tape measure? … who put it in that cupboard? stupid place to … oh, I did … ahem … O.K., five feet and a few inches in bare feet … (how thick are soles of my shoes?) … how do you do square roots again? … I’ll use the calculator if I can find it … sod it, that’s my eye height above the floor, but the floor is higher than sea level … I’ll have to do this at the beach … try not to get sand in the calculator … and wiht this global warming the sea level is whizzing about all over the place anyway … dammit, that was the cube root button … clear and try again … so that’s how far the horizon is … why did I want to know that again?
Well Willis, there is sciency stuff in your tale:
– There are more critters out there than people imagine
– living their dolphin life
– you learned a little about that life (for some reason many were travelling together, perhaps migrating to where more food had been reported, as for example caribou do in northern Canada
– they are clever and playful, probably more intelligent than lesser animals like caribou who also guard their pack/flock and protect their young
Do you think the mothers and kids recognized you were alive, or were they just learning about a phenomena they had been told about? (Hard streamlined objects in the water.)
A caribou story is that a few years ago environmentalists were flapping about disappearance of a caribou herd in northern Canada.
Tribal elders tried to tell them where to look.
Finally someone actually got off their ivory chair and looked – there they were.
They’d been there before. In the old days tribal people had to really pay attention to where caribou went, and go scouting for them, as that source of food and hides was valuable to staying alive.
(Today they have snowmobiles and aircraft, but may not harvest as many caribou.)
Reasons for their move might include predators, insects (which really bother such animals), and food. (They do migrate seasonally due weather and more favourable birthing areas.)
“as puzzled by that one as dogs are by the doorknob question …”
Dogs and cats learn very quickly that manipulating door knobs opens doors. They just lack the necessary equipment to grasp the knob. If you replace the knob with a handle they can pull down on (cats jump up and hang on) they will soon be able to open the door for themselves. (Though cats will always prefer to get a human servant to do it, just for the fun of annoying someone.)
Reality check says:
February 4, 2013 at 3:33 pm
“Get lost … it will do you good.” Complying.
Passive aggressive behavior or poor reading comprehension? You are the one that said he was “lost”. That was just a play on your own words. It’s amazing that you can talk about a subtle rhetorical balance like the possible influence of naming subject animals in scientific research and yet seem not to comprehend anything else. “Get lost… it will do you good.” becomes “ORDERED” to leave the blog in your universe. Slinking away are we? You can pretend you were ordered off, but we know better.
Wonderful story.
Reality check says:
February 4, 2013 at 3:33 pm
Reality check, please let me clarify, it was not my intention to drive you away. As in much of the head post, I was speaking metaphorically. You are far too sure and secure in your position, you need to get lost, to lose your bearings and your preconceptions, and let go of your fixed moorings and channel markers, and actually understand what I am saying.
If you have continued to read my responses, you must have noticed by now that I’m not some Walt Disney bunnies and rainbows kind of guy … quite the opposite, as many will attest. I’m a shoot ’em or fish ’em and skin’em and gut ’em and eat’em kind of guy, and paradoxically or not, I am also a man who sees the underlying similarities and kinship between myself and a cougar, a cow, or a carrot. In short, I describe myself as a reformed cowboy, although it is never quite clear what got reformed or how well … but I digress.
So no, I don’t want you to leave, stay and play, take a deep breath, grab a cup of coffee, and let me see if I can explain my stance.
I have few illusions about nature, after all, I’m a serial fish-and-game-and-domestic-animal murderer. I am responsible for the deaths of literally millions of beings.
But that doesn’t mean that I am somehow better or of greater value than the steers and the salmon and the sardines that I’ve killed. I just refuse to kill them mindlessly or barbarically or without giving their deaths proper notice. Some guys shoot a deer and stand around and laugh at its death. I’m not one of them. In short, I am unwilling to eat the meat and blame the butcher, and I guess that’s in part because I’ve worked as a butcher … here’s an example that might help clarify things.
When I was working as a sport salmon fishing guide on the Kenai River in Alaska, every time one of my guests caught a fish, and I netted it and brought it on board and everyone admired its savage strength and beauty, and before I killed it, I would thank each and every fish in a loud voice for coming on my boat and for giving up its life. And I would tell that salmon that I knew that some day, I would give up my life in the same way, because at the end of the day there is only one way, one death indivisible for all.
I’ve taken people from every walk of life out fishing on my boat, from judges to janitors, old ladies and young girls. And every one of them, when they looked into the eyes of that already-dying salmon, understood instinctively what I was doing and what I was saying. They knew this wasn’t a Disney bunny Kodachrome rainbow moment.
And then mostly they would watch in silence as I killed it, took cold steel and cut its throat and its blood spilled across the deck, blood red as mine, and that silence was a right and a proper tribute to the ending of a life no less precious to that fish than my own is to me.
I hope this clarifies my position for you, Reality. I don’t hold the other inhabitants of this most mysterious and magnificent planet up on a pedestal like the activists you mention. And I understand your visceral rejection of that position.
But neither do I hold that the other inhabitants are beneath me, just numbers without names, existing in some lower separate world walled off from humans.
Instead, I hold that there is a continuum of life, of which we are an inextricable part, and that other than plants, who live on sunshine, life eats life to live. I resolve this difficulty not minimizing that fact, not by putting it on the butcher, but instead by acknowledging it and giving it proper respect.
Here’s another story, work with me here, I’m on a roll. Some of the Early Asian Immigrants that lived in this lovely North America before the arrival of the melanin-deficient tribes had a lovely ritual which some of my fellow fishermen and I used to observe. It had to do with catching the first salmon of the year.
Particularly for the inland tribes, the return of the salmon was essential to life … and of course there was no way to know how many or even if they would return in a given year. So the catching of the first salmon was a huge deal. In some of the tribes they would take a plank of wood down to the river, and they would put the first salmon on it. Then all of the fishermen would hoist it on their shoulders, and they would carry it in triumph through the town, singing songs in praise of the mighty salmon, extolling the virtues of this particular fish. And of course tacking on some boasts about what great fishermen they are, after all, they are fishermen …
Then they would cook the first salmon and hold the big official First Salmon Festival in honor of the fish, and everyone would join in, and they would eat it reverentially, carefully saving all of the bones.
Then they would reassemble the bones on the wooden plank, and once again singing and carrying on, they would parade the bones back to the river. There, they would speak to the salmon, and tell it how much it meant to them, and how honored they were that it came to their very village. They told it that theirs was the best village because, as the salmon had seen with its own eyes, they had the baddest feasts in its honor, and they held it in high esteem.
And then they placed the board in the water, and they told the salmon that they were sending him back to his friends downriver, the ones coming upstream, and they asked him to spread the word about the great time that he had partying in their village, and about the singing, and the honors and the feasting. And then they released him, to go downriver and spread the good news.
Now, did the Early Asian Immigrants really think that the fish would come to back to life? Don’t be daft, they’d seen more death than we can imagine, and like us, nobody ever came back. But the spirit, ah, the spirit …
They did it because that is how we should respect the spirit of those beings who give up their lives to keep us alive. And we used to do it as well, because to me, that is the proper mindset. It’s not Disney at all, there’s far too much cruel death in it for Disney to touch it … but it’s not at the other extreme either.
Let me leave you with a bit more of Robinson Jeffers …
All the best,
w.
Nice work Willis , it did what any good writing is meant to do and drew Me in even though it went a bit “out there” in the latter paragraphs it still worked . I could relate to the moment when the mother dolphin handed over her young`uns to an approved baby sitter so she could get some “Me” time. I`ve lost track of the number of times that I`ve been selected as the “designated babysitter” for dogs , cats and OEG bantams when the mum needs to go stretch her legs or in the game bantam`s case a quick trip to the beauty parlor (dust bath )
As for Reality Check`s blah on the “Mom and kid ” phrase , I mean really ? , It was a bit of prose about a moment in time when two more or less intelligent species were interacting each other , using the latin or scientific terminology and designation numbers would have been jarring .in that context .Also , while humans certainly have a tendency to anthropomorphise animal behaviour all the animals I`ve dealt closely with have exactly the same tendency to canidamorphise , felinomorphise or indeed gallusamorphise our behaviour respectively ,
Willis,
You might enjoy (as I currently am) “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World” by Ian McGilchrist.
It is far from a fable, and his work is right at the edge of the emergent phenomena in itself. He is a former Oxford professor of English Literature, who then went on to study again in Medicine and Psychiatry, and then to clinically specialise in brain imaging amongst other things.
What he explains so clearly and convincingly in the first part of the book is the duality and remarkable difference in point of view of the two hemispheres of the human brain: the specific, mechanistic, judgemental, theorising, confabulating, objective viewpoint of the left hemisphere, and the immersed, all-seeing, non-judgemental, deeply-feeling and empathetic, far truer but largely mute gaze of the right hemisphere.
And not just in humans, but in all of our bilateral cousins and antecedents, eg. a small bird meticulously picking seeds out of gravel on a driveway with its (left-hemisphere-dominant) right eye, whilst passively taking in its entire surroundings and the rest of its flock with the gaze of its (right hemisphere dominant) left eye, for the slightest hint of threat in the greater world around it.
Where McGilchrist’s resonates with your piece above was in your joy at gazing on the dolphins and their parade without need for judgement or understanding, simply feeling, curiosity and empathy.
That is what we do, those of us who gaze. And it is a very right-hemisphered thing to do: for the right hemisphere deals with the new and as-yet incomprehensible, and is the empathetic, feeling hemisphere that is immersed and simply takes the world in as it is, reads the feeling in faces, phenomena and situations, and then if it thinks it urgent or necessary, hands the moment to the left to analyse and theorise over and come up with a definite (and arrogantly persistent though not necessarily correct) interpretation.
I am currently reading the entire book, slowly and meticulously as and when I have time. The middle bit is a rather heavy trip into classical philosophy, but so worth it for the thought provoking gems of understanding that are hidden there, not to mention the education in a subject that anybody in their right mind might avoid. But the overall thesis that is emerging with respect to our modern culture is fascinating, and having started out with my left-brained scientific hackles up (and McGilchrist is certainly an accomplished scientist as well), I find that I am finally coming to see his point. It is worth reading in its entirety and he is worth hearing out.
McGilchrist is a champion of the right brain and its empathetic gaze upon the un-‘explained’, complete truth, more than of the left brain and its sub-sampled and confabulated dogma. Or rather he is a champion of the original, integrated, balanced mode of operation of the brain, where the right hemisphere perceives all, hands the inconsistencies and curiosities to the left for narrow, theoretical interpretation, and then retrieves it and reincorporates the results with the overall picture to see if they actually fit.
And his concern is that the left brain, with its ‘voice’: its command of syntax, grammar, much of verbal language and modern script (non-pictographic, and no-longer written to the right brain’s preference of downwards, from right to left), has gained command of our culture at the expense of the right (not least, I would add, in this modern age of email and text, where the 70% of human communication that is non-verbal: facial expression, tone, demeanour, stance, etc. are all excluded).
It is a book to be read slowly, deeply, alone and uninterrupted. Preferably on a slow moving boat. Probably with a dictionary to hand (philosophy does have its own terms – I needed one).
It casts one’s thoughts and feelings on self, the world and others in a whole new light.
And in fact, more generally, it speaks volumes about the polarising dogma to which many of us are inclined on either side of scientific debate, not least the debate that is the subject of this blog!
With regards,
Larry Kirk.
Yep..most animals are like humans..they rape,kill other animal’s and their own offspring,and kill each other.The difference is the animals know no better.
I am a bit confused as to why the dolphins would think that it was ok to approach humans?Mama dolphin sending bad messages to baby dolphins.You should have fired guns in the air.The next boat they approach may have dolphin killers on board.
I’m in the camp that believes interacting with animals are doing them harm.They need to be wary of man.
“All that one proves is that you haven’t spent enough time outside your mom’s basement interacting with the magical beasts we share the planet with.”
My mother is dead and you have no idea who or what I am. I have not figured out how to shut off the emails. I did unsubscribe from the blog. Whatever your intent, you have made it clear this is not a place that tolerates differing opinions.
[Reply: I must butt in here. WUWT is one of the most tolerant sites you will find. If your comment does not violate site Policy it will be approved, no matter what your point of view happens to be. — mod.]
Noelene says:
February 4, 2013 at 6:33 pm
Um … because generally it is perfectly safe for them to do so? Almost everyone likes them.
Dang, noelene, that seems both overly broad and overly harsh. All other problems have been solved, so you’re giving mothering lessons to dolphins now?
Most animals are already appropriately wary of man, depending on how they interact with man. Should house cats be “wary of man”? Heck, no, we feed and pet them. Should rattlesnakes be wary of man? Sure, people are pathological about snakes.
But dolphins? I’m no great fan of humanity, our actions towards other creatures often seem unethical to me, but dolphins?
Dolphins have been playing and dancing under the bows of boats for as long as there have been boats. Sailors love them. Hanging around sailors doesn’t seem to have done them any particular harm in the last two thousand years, why should it happen now?
Or maybe you just got something against sailors? I know it’s bad for the ladies to hang around us, everyone knows that, but now we’re contributing to the delinquency of dolphins?
Perhaps interacting with you causes harm to animals, Noelene, I wouldn’t know. I’m of the opinion that interacting with me is of benefit to animals … which may be why I’ve been privileged to participate with them in some awesome things.
Finally, my experience is that wild animals are very, very good at distinguishing between people who will harm them and e.g. myself, so I’m not worried that interacting with them will suddenly shut off their innate and very accurate suspiciousness …
w.