#class english population in 1979‚ but sometimes the play goes a little too far in stretching its point and approaches being actually racist

[perspectivepodcast]

[Transcript] Side A: Sea

The waves roll and surrender and gather and throw themselves over the cliffs.

Tugged in a fold of my childhood, I hear the steadiness of the tide, quietly growing to overcome the shore.

 In 1979, oceanographer Sylvia Earle, known affectionately by her fellow scientists as ‘Her Deepness’, was the first person to walk solo on the ocean floor, at 1,250 feet without a tether — 600 pounds of pressure per square inch. The bottom of the world.

 In an interview to Krista Tippett, Earle described how, immersed in the darkest ocean, she could see the flash and sparkle and glow of bioluminescent creatures. “It’s that firefly kind of light”, she recalled, “But also, when the lights were on, I could see crabs that were attached to these large corals that grow on the sea floor. Some are pink, some are orange, some are yellow, some are black. They’re just beautiful. It’s a garden. It looks like a flower garden. And the red crabs were hanging onto these great sea-fan-like structures. They looked like shirts on the line. In that little bit of current, they were just slowly moving. There were eels that were wrapped around the base of the coral. It was just beautiful, really ethereal.”

 The sea begins, again and again and again. The waves brim over with foam and crumple and curl over and release themselves, round and around and around.

 In an essay for Emergence Magazine, Charles Foster follows the eight remaining Scottish killer whales as they travel from the Isle of Mull to the Isle of Sky, 120 miles away. “The whales (big dolphins, really) didn’t slow down when the dark seeped from the sky into the sea. They were following an old sea road. The map was carved deep into their brains. They had learned it from an old matriarch who had died a quarter century before, who in turn had learned it from her mother, who had jostled World War I U-boats in the Sound of Jura.”

 Again Earle: “Diving into the ocean, it’s like diving into the history of life on earth, not just over the last 50 or 1,000, but the last million, 10 million, 100 million years, because creatures are there that have been there for several hundred million years, not those same creatures, but their near relatives, like jellyfish; like — well, sharks have been around for 300 million years; horseshoe crabs, creatures that lured me into the ocean as a child in New Jersey, have a history that goes back at least 300 million years; so many forms of life that were found in the ocean long before there were multicellular creatures occupying space on the land.”

 I need longer words to say this. I need an older language, words with a memory of immemorial times, words with the ritual inflection of prayers to ancient gods nobody remembers.

 Since most of the ocean is dark all of the time, chemical signals, acoustic signals really have a magnified importance over what we think of as communication. Katy Payne is an acoustic biologist, who has decoded the language of elephants and was among the first scientists to discover that whales are composers of song. “The songs are very complex”, Payne explained in an interview to Krista Tippett, “They consist of six to eight themes. Each theme has a melodic phrase that repeats over and over again and then changes to the next one. And so it would continue as a sequence of events, which then, as a whole, repeat song after song after song. But if you keep listening for months on end, and then for years on end, you discover that the song — each facet of it — is continually evolving to something slightly different. And all the whales in the ocean or in that singing population are changing their song in the same way.”

 Talking about his song ‘Ocean’, John Butler often refers to its changing nature, to how the song keeps growing and morphing with him. “ ‘Ocean’ is part of my DNA,” he once declared, “It conveys all the things I can’t put into words: life, loss, love, spirit. As I evolve, so too does ‘Ocean.’ ”

 Again Charles Foster: “Echolocation is a vibrantly reciprocal conversation between the animal and the wild world, of the sort that nature writers can only fantasize and metaphorize about. It is not like other sensations—all of which convey information from an essentially passive outside world. If I put my hand on a cold stone, the cold stone isn’t an active party to any relationship. It’s just there, being cold and stony, and my sensory receptors merely record those facts. But echolocating clicks induce a response from another.

The rocks spat back an answer to the whale: “Here I am: I’ve got a knobble here and a groove there, and I’m made from early Eocene basalt with a bit of mugearite.” And the whale responded respectfully by steering to the left.”

 In the sea, even what looks like dust is alive.

 Thomas Mann, in Death in Venice, wrote: “There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life’s task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”

 I’ve never thought of myself as a water person. I’m more of a solid earth kind of creature, more like a tree or a fungus than a fish or a bird. The sea frightens me. I used to live in a place where the waves would crash over the cliffs with a violent passion, and break into a cloud of sprinkling foam. It was beautiful, but I was too scared to swim into the water.

And yet, as I look at the sea spreading out in front of me, deep and wild and proud, I cannot but feel, in some primordial way, that we are the same. That that is what it means to truly be alive. If we braced who we are inside, fully, we would find the power to sweep the world away.

 Foster describes four killer whales calling and whistling: “The calls were a riff around a drone, like Byzantine-chanters on speed, full of contrapuntal syllables and lacy ornaments. But the whistles were electric, the stuff of the big void: think of a toddler manically sliding a rheostat, of sounds squeezing and moaning between slices of blue-and-green water. Sometimes an individual uttered its signature call—“This is Occasus”—or the community’s generic identifier: “We’re the West Coasters, not the Icelanders.”

The sounds are as far from reflexive grunts as Pavarotti was from a doorbell. They are far more artistically individuated than a top-class rendition of Hamlet, because their vocal range is much greater. We English-speakers like to boast about the size of our vocabularies. We would not boast if we understood killer-whale language. We speak using combinations of twenty-six letters. A very small amount of additional meaning is added by frequency modulations. A rising tone at the end of a sentence, for instance, might imply incredulity. But killer-whale sounds range over frequencies at least ten times greater than you’ll hear even at La Scala. Yes, they’ve probably got phonemes, words, and syntax, but they’ve got so much more than that.”

 The average depth of the ocean is two and a half miles. And only about five percent of the ocean has been seen, let alone explored.

 Katy Payne speaks of whale song as music: “It was always something new, always something you could imitate. It was intense expression of emotion, of fun, a form of play.”

Charles Foster reminds us that “Dolphin speech is said to help human mood and health […]. Human words often kill; dolphin words might heal.”

 Sylvia Earle recounted how she once had lunch with Clare Boothe Luce, “stateswoman, playwright, just a remarkable human being. And this question came up about why is it that people are so smitten with everything that goes up, skyward, and seem to neglect the ocean and, actually, this planet as a whole? And this was in her home in Hawaii, and there’s some big, puffy, white clouds drifting by, and blue sky. And she said, “Well, my dear, it’s actually simple. Heaven is in that direction, and you know what’s the other way.” ”

 We know nothing of ourselves. We really don’t know life at all.

Tugged in a fold of my childhood, a wise tree sings: let it break upon you like a wave upon the sand.