The Whales' Song

Instead of the old lines of division we have new lines of union.
Patrick Geddes, The Culture of Cities

JOHN CASELBERG

. . .of whom she was an Alismoonoalan member. . ., representative of a people that. . . were perhaps dependent for their lives upon kelp; a resilient, shining, walnut-black, wet, one-inch-thick cable of which she let slip from her hands now as the beech-bark canoe rocked on the waves and swung clear, drifting loose; as, reaching for the paddle behind her in the bottom of the canoe, she lifted her head, so that the necklet of tiny, pierced and threaded, delicately-whorled, mother-of-pearl-pale shells which she wore at her throat glinted in the brightening air; so that she saw, on the rim of the horizon at the mouth of the bay, the approaching sun's splendour pulse closer and closer and an aureole rise there, then tongues of white fire flicker into the sky enkindling the waves and a black shape burst, then swell swiftly vertically and arch over the sun's disk as the sun itself also sprang clear; so that to her eyes the golden great eye of the risen sun blazed suddenly furiously golden enhaloed not brightly but by the dark frame of the silhouetted, leaping and curving she-whale, whose lissom head and neck and flanks and long back rose and bent bow-like and hung, it seemed, momentarily, before dropping again into the waves, followed by her tail's two splayed flukes swirling and sinking slowly; which whale did not now leap again but surfaced quietly and turned on her side, allowing the calf swimming below her to surge up quickly and nuzzle a small lower jaw against one of the two teats sheathed in the skin that flanked the central orifice under her mother's belly; whereupon the mother extruded the teat, thus letting the fat-concentrated, rich whale's milk spurt

down the calf whale's throat in the vital, pleasurable feeding that had occurred regularly since the day of her birth, a year previously in warmer equatorial waters far to the northward; where, two spring seasons earlier again, the she-whale had swum unaccompanied by any calf, in a herd of sperm whales that reached, to the eye of a possible ship's observer, from horizon to horizon; where to their whales' eyes they whitened the sky with their blowing as they moved unhurriedly but determinedly on their seasonal migration towards the cold; when the giant bull whale had swum for hours behind her or had kept close ahead or at her side, until the memorable' night when they had sported together in the light of the Evening Star's golden track on the sea flickering fierily, and responsively she had teased him, darting and jumping onward and rolling in a rush of foam before his face until again and again swimming nearer he brushed his body along her back so that she turned eventually on her back listening and watching as he swam cross-wise over her body inflaming the lips at her vent; where she felt the rod of him uncurving as he returned, locking his jaws in her jaws, while flying fish fled from the onset and the sound of their mating; as their flukes shaking quicker and quicker pounding the water held them vibrating together, rising out of the water, their flippers opposed and their long throats pressing and pulsing and their heads lifting higher and higher nibbling each other's mouths and at the corners of their eyes even, each watching the other's eyes in the warm planet's light dancing whilst phosphorescence, also Venus-lit, fell waterfalling like twin via lactea from their sides and she felt the shaft of him stab and bury its seed unleashed inside her springing from him into her, winging home; which warmly-enclosed seed itself surged on, flagellae beating, until a fore-foam of sperm cells pushing up brushed at last the magnet-like source whose attractiveness directed their travelling, so that they touched and pressed into the thickened womb-wall where a ripe egg lay embedded; where conjugation of male and female occurred, as two nuclei, of the egg and the sperm, pooled - combining and reinforcing - their ancient, similarly constructed but not identical heredity; so that immediately; within the cell-wall of the egg, the inevitable dance of nuclear division and reproduction began; and continued until, one week after fertilisation, more than a hundred cells clung together in a minuscule of cells, spreading, like a flower-bud opening to reveal stigma and anthers and stamens and, on its petals, a spangle of colours" unapparent and unenvisageable before; initiating thus its suddenly-expanding, irreversible, exact and as if pre-determined differentiation into, first, outer and inner layers, displaying an external corolla which, later, by sending root-like villi burrowing into the womb-wall, would partly

compose the placenta; and revealing also the inner plate of cells that would bud off - from its axes and poles and cavities and enfolding layers, day by day, according to a timetable as exact if not quite as ancient as the motion of the moon about the earth, progressively, so that the change would affect every subsequent development, and distinctively - a microcosmos of nerve and muscle and skeletal and connective and alimentary and excretory and reproductive tissues and organs and systems until, after only one third of the term of gestation had elapsed, wrapped in the membranes and fluids that would protect and sustain it securely, a miniature well-formed small whale lay, its own heart already beating vigorously, close to its mother's vast thudding heart inside her circumambient belly; where, subsequently, during another ten months, her body fed the developing foetus with oxygen and nutrients which, inhaled and ingested and dissolved in her bloodstream, diffused into the thick, blood-turgid placenta, thence were absorbed through thin blood-vessel walls into the foetal circulation; so that the well-nourished foetus grew inexorably larger, until eventually its lengthened body had curved like a bent bow inside the compressing womb; until it had assumed its complete natal size, with mouth and internal ears and eyes and tail flukes in readiness for functioning; in such readiness, too, for its passage down the birth-canal of its mother as never again, for no other event during the course of its life, would it be so thoroughly and exquisitely prepared; which slow, formative movement and severance began, fourteen months after conception, in sub-tropical shallower waters, when quivering uterine contractions shook within the resting she-whale; when the expulsive waves' lapping and mounting and roaring swept in more and more frequent and intense storms convulsing both mother and offspring, until the amniotic membranes broke spilling their fluids, and the stop-gap artery, that shorted the foetus' pulmonary circulation, closed as blood began pumping for the first time through the mammalian lungs of the now-naked creature being pushed from the womb; the massaging, muscular contractions of which both stimulated excretion from the young animal's vent, and sensitised additionally its covering of skin - that inviolable boundary which, henceforth, would divide the complex life inside from the universe without, and which would also connect the calf with her surroundings by transmitting, to the as yet inexperienced and untrained perceptory systems inside her body, the information that from birth to death would ceaselessly bombard her skin; whose tail flukes pressed at last tremulously into the sea, followed by the slithering flanks and the small pectoral flippers and the oblong, eagerly-shaking head; so that the new calf had thus dived, backwards, for the first time alone, as if rehearsing the breath-holding apnoea that is characteristic of the life of whales; hearing, immediately her head swung free in the sea, the crooning song of her mother which replaced the previously-drumming continuo of her great heart beating always close to her ears; splashing into a symphony of sounds that always thereafter would accompany her everywhere, and which the calf only later would learn to distinguish as the clicking and whistling of mothers and of their answering, excited young, the bass-murmuring of the bulls, the soft love calls and the warnings and cries of distress and the bubbling music that always accompanies whale lives and that celebrates the joyousness of mammalian life returned to the waters of its origin, the waters, too, of the origin of life; hearing also the squid, their prey, moving in undersea depths, and the heart-string disturbing, low-pitched, Pablo Casals'-cello-like tones reflected both from the bright under-surface of the sea and from the ocean bottom; which notes apprised of solitary whales or whale herds swimming at a remove elsewhere, hundreds or even thousands of miles distant, connecting the calf with all the whales inhabiting the ocean basin where she and her mother swam; where all the sounds impinging on her head were conducted swiftly inwards to fire responses from the convoluted organ-pipe passages and chambers and baffle-board walls of her hearing mechanisms, that only slowly would learn to interpret the incomparable registers and utterances of whale song; so that, as the moonlit nights of passing months came and went, the young she-whale too, humming to

herself, grew to rhapsodise her own activities; of swimming, so closely beside her mother's sleek, swift, sinuous, marvellously water-cleaving body that they two swirled onwards together as if they composed again an indivisible form; of gambolling, Iamb-like, with other young whales, at evening and at dawn, when one of their playful group might grasp a drifting log in its jaws and race away over the waves chased by its tumbling peers; of diving, also with her mother, to feed, even at night, in the depths on the ocean floor, when in that icy darkness the blubber layers under her skin retained her body warmth, and the so-called 'sperm' oil reservoir in her head absorbed and stored the waste gases of respiration which later she would blow, fog-horn-loud, in a delirium of refreshment, when she surfaced into the clear open-ocean air again; so that she came to sing, too, other own travelling, with her mother and with others of their herd, when they had moved steadily southward, pushing against the great surface current that laves western desert South America, leaving those upwelling guano-enriched waters to thread their way through a network of fiords that sang raucous overhead with seabirds' calls and whose waves bore the effluvia of dark-staining, fresh water-exuding, ever rain-dripping beech forests; entering next the regime of perpetual gales and lacerating storms and thunderous breakers beating on an iron shore; turning from the heavy pulse of the open sea to feel steep-walled chasms rapidly reflect their passing; penetrating further until the canyons divided and narrowed and the white-snow-and-ice and blue-glacier-crested peaks grew higher overhead, above which, on rare clear nights, shoals of southern stars flared with an eye-bewildering brilliancy that illuminated even the waveless deeps far below; from which greenstone-green clear, blue and white ice-berg larded salt rivers they emerged into the tormented sea where they played and fed now; whence they would swim on, as if re-tracing a route determined in their inheritance prior to the great southern continents' latest flight from each other and from the pole, a path that preceded perhaps the disintegratory dance of the two protocontinents themselves, that sought even as if to re-unite the sundered remnants of the primal land-mass, Pangaea; so that, heading away from Cape Horn, the whales would swim on, north of east, towards where that morning and every morning late in spring the sun rose; the orb of which now had lifted higher, over the sea, irradiating the island with warm yellow light, bathing the woman paddling the canoe and her child, and the cormorants in twos and threes arrowing out to sea to their fishing, and the white kelp-gander standing candle-like sentinel on the shore, and the line of rocks shining on the far side of the bay where, on quiet nights, after their loss by drowning in storm nearby, the spirits of deceased relatives would re-emerge from the ocean to gather a last time in front of the fire lit for them by those who were yet alive, when together they would re-enact the past in their minds as the living and the dead stared without speaking at the flame flickering and guttering, then at the wood-embers glowing yellow and red, fanned by gusts of wind then dwindling on the cold, exposed, darkening sea-beach; across the boulders of which, at the head of the bay. . .