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| ISBN-13: | 9781609404406 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wings Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2015 |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
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Apology to a Whale
Words to Mend a World
By Cecile Pineda
Wings Press
Copyright © 2015 Cecile PinedaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-443-7
CHAPTER 1
THE THING WITHOUT A NAME
We are at the crucial moment in the commission of a crime. Our hand is on the knife, the knife is at the victim's throat. We are trained to kill. We are trained to turn the Earth to account, to use it, market it, make money off it. To take it for granted. Logically, we will never be able to reverse this part of our culture in enough time to stop that knife in our hand. But that is the task at hand — to cease this act of violence.
— Charles Bowden: The Sonoran Desert
1. "We who are about to die salute you."
— cry of the Roman Empire's captives who were forced to duel to the death
In the great coliseum that is our planet, the dissolving glaciers are metaphor and reality, both at once, of our crumbling world. We watch the ice, like Civil War soldiers, lining up in ranks, facing an enemy lined up in ranks thousands of miles away. The command goes out:
FIRE!
and the first rank falls, mowed down by the opposition's bullets.
FIRE!
We watch the first rank fall, pulling the second rank behind it. Tor by tor, stalactite by stalactite, they tip, they fall, they rush headlong into the sea.
FIRE!
We hear the extra-arctic fire of car exhausts, of cars whose owners are driving around the block looking for a parking space, who leave their motors idling. Of coal-burning and oil-burning plants producing steam to drive the turbines that run the lights of cities so bright at night they can be seen glowing from space like poison fungi in the dark. You can even tell from space where the industrial countries lie: they glow the brightest, leaving the "developing" world in darkness.
Since 1765, the year that marks the first thunder of Watt's steam engine, you watch striations of soot pile up, zebra striping the blue of ice. Ice tilting crazily like layers of an onion, upthrust like geological strata, Earth's crumbling bulwark against the depredations of man — man's factories, man's cars, man's wanting to have more, more comfort, more to burn up, more to fill insatiable needs.
FIRE!
The ice won't go silent. In the frozen north comes the Great Thawing. Boom goes the third rank, boom of avalanche that growls too late. The ice has sounded its warning, but in New Orleans in 2005 no one can hear it. Boom. In 2011, in New England, no one can hear it. Boom. In 2012, in Staten Island, in Rockaway, on the shores of New Jersey, no one can hear it. They will drive. They will keep the lights on. They will drill for oil. They will frack for gas.
BOOM!
In Mindanao, under the cyclone's torrent, no one can hear it. Five thousand people drown. In Doha, the Climate Negotiators can't hear it.
Boom. This is the sound of the ice, the infrasonic rumble as it begins to fracture. Listen. Listen now. The rumble of the deep. Listen. Here it comes, gathering speed. Can you hear it? Can you feel the ground move beneath your feet? Here it comes, opening its jaws. This moment, when the rumbling gathers speed. Louder. It gets louder now. Yet louder. Can you hear ...?
But no. You are in your soundproofed halls of power. You are meeting in Doha, capital of the richest per capita nation in the world, whose every citizen receives an annual subsidy from the oil you extract, oil that will be transported in pipes, in ships, belching smoke from their stacks, to plants where it will burn to make more light. So the earth can be seen from space, so the efflorescence of its light can delineate the littorals of its most developed countries, of its cities bathed in street light so bright they can be seen at night from outer space, sending out its SOS: We are burning. We are on fire, the fire, which is warring with the ice.
You too, line up in rows, protected behind the names of your countries here in Doha where the hostess of this global gala has dropped your nation's names like place cards. You cannot hear it. Earphones block your ears as you take in the simultaneous translation in your country's language. You cannot hear it as you prepare to speak. You cannot hear it under the factory lights of the great hall in which you sit sowing deception and delay.
Boom. The oceans are rising. The fourth rank of ice goes toppling, smashing into the deep. Boom.
The night of space does not hear. And behind their place names, the delegates wrap their heads in their earphones, sitting beneath industrial lights whose power is generated by coal- burning, oil-burning furnaces that turn turbines that make the power that guarantees that they won't hear, so that they won't see the infinitely small moment of cinematic* time when, amidst the cascading ice sheets, a whale heaves its huge bulk into the light to fix us earthlings with its great accusing eye.
2. The Art of Apologizing
When the Indians all die, then God will let the water come down from the north. Everyone will drown. That is because the White people never cared for land or deer or bear. ... The White people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says, "Don't. I am sore. Don't hurt me...." The Indians never hurt anything, but the White people destroy all. ... How can the spirit of the earth like the White man ...? Everywhere the White man has touched, it is sore.
— Kate Luckie of the Wintu Nation
How do you apologize to a whale? What can you tell it that it may not already know: how the seas in which it migrates thousands of miles each year are becoming more acidified with each season that passes. How the waters turn warmer, displacing the denizens of the temperate waters farther towards the melting ice-caps? How the bodies of the small fry in the northern waters gape with the same ugly blood bruises of radiation sickness that surface on the skins of people living in Japan? How the larger fish eat the small fry, concentrating radiation upward in the food chain? How do you explain how one species, and only one species on earth has insisted on dominion over all things, driving the dynamic of its planetary habitat to chaos and collapse? What do you say? Do you tell it why in its migrations it must avoid the sea of plastic detritus big as Texas spiraling slowly in a now lifeless sea once teaming with plankton, and all forms of life. Tell it to steer clear from the very depths to the place where water meets sky where it breeches for air between its hour-long dives? How would you explain — or justify — something impossible to justify?
Would you offer the Earth's gaping wounds, its carbon emitting smokestacks, its fracking sites, its radiation-contaminated grounds as consolation? Or the feeling of entitlement in the western world to drive exhaust-belching cars, to fly planes, to contaminate its rivers and streams, to clear cut its own lungs, the trees; to kill everything that moves? To wage perpetual war for wealth and aggrandizement, and because one nation can blackmail another with knowledge of its secret acts, to decimate its own species by the millions and to leave behind a poisoned Earth wherever its armies bivouac?
Would you begin to ask yourself — or explain — where in time your minor species started to go wrong? Was there such a moment? Why did it come about? Were there several such moments? How would you explain the imperviousness of the Princes of the Earth as they go about the business of business, insulated in their high-rise, air-conditioned boardrooms, and in the hallways of Empire where the deals are struck and where mountain-by-mountain, forest-by-forest, invasion-by-invasion, assassination-by-assassination, they condemn the Earth to die?
Today as I write, co-authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's book appears. Titled Double Down: Game Change, it chronicles the passage of the most recent U.S. presidential election, alleging that a recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, wanting to reassure his aides of his qualifications as 44th president of the United States, averred that he is really good at killing. Granted, killing is part of the U.S. president's job description, and has been since the days of Andrew Jackson of genocidal fame, and those who came both before and after him. The wealth of the United States, like that of empires the world over, has been wrested from its victims: slavery of its black population, genocide of its First Nations — and from whale slaughter.
Many consider Moby-Dick, with its theme of lust for revenge and obsessive urge to destroy, the quintessential American novel. Here is Melville:
How comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen of the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000? How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling ...? If American and European men-ofwar now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.
Would I explain that — justify that — to a whale? Could I imagine making excuses, knowing all the while that my species was hell-bent on starving it, evicting it from its habitat? Would I comfort it by telling it how its blubber was boiled down to light the night, as oil is taken from the darkness of the earth to make light?
What might be the whale's response — assuming I were intelligent enough to hear it?
3. Slaughter of the Innocents
Sperm whales are not every day encountered: while you may ... you must kill all you can ... and if you cannot kill them at once, you must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these the drugg comes into requisition ...
— Herman Melville in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Originally the American continents were home to giraffes, hippopotami, saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, and giant bears. Much of the same species of megafauna existed on the European continent as well. Humans are thought first to have arrived from Siberia via a land bridge called Beringeria some 13,000 years ago. Yet within 3,500 years, with the exception of a few remaining herds of bison, all megafauna had vanished from the continent. Of the thirty million bison once inhabiting North America, only twenty-three were left after the 19th century slaughter. It is said of the Clovis culture (roughly 10,000 B.C.), that within 500 years of its arrival across the Bering land bridge, all the great megafauna of the North American continent had become extinct. Clovis is known for a new technological breakthrough: more efficient flint arrowheads. Yet for all their technological advancement, Clovis people hunted their food source to extinction. Who or what was this primate who set hunting before the need to take no more than what is needed to sustain life? Was his fear greater than his hunger?
By 1725, the gray whale was extinct on the American East Coast. It was the first extinction of whales to be perpetrated by Western man in North America.
In the Indian Ocean, bowhead whales, originally numbering in the hundreds of thousands, were hunted by Yankee whalers to near extinction, stopped only by the maritime treaty of 1946.
Now some few thousand survive. With advances in winching, it became possible to pursue whale species whose bodies sank after death. Americans, acting on a tip from a Chinese pilot, discovered that gray whales congregated in the waters off Baja California. Within 30 years, the grays became commercially extinct. Bottlenose whales followed. When the grays recovered, they were hunted again. And crashed again.
In 2013, Wildlife "Services" killed 4.4 million animals, half of them native species. The total includes roughly 75,000 coyotes, 900 bobcats, 500 river otters, 3,700 foxes, 12,000 prairie dogs, 100 red tailed hawks, 400 black bears, and — minimally — 3 eagles (golden and bald). Almost every day my e-mail swells with another petition to "save the wolves" as yet another initiative proposes they be shot, usually from the height and might of a helicopter. Every year, almost everywhere in America, cougars are shot because they wander away from their meadowlands and wilderness to blunder into the ever-expanding wilderness of housing tracts. Every year, baby seals are clubbed to death as soon as the new crop of pups is born. Every year, Denmark and Japan see the ritual slaughter of thousands of dolphins until the sea foams red with blood. In Africa, large mammals are killed by poachers for their meat, for their hide, for their tusks and for their horns. In mid 2014, the National Resource Defense Council issued a signature appeal following the fourth mass-stranding death of beaked whales on Greek beaches following joint sonar-based U.S. naval exercises.
Every year sees the expansion of an economic war against the poor, where people in Third World countries are paid close to starvation wages in factories that tend to singe them at their Singers. In every country where Walmart expands or Monsanto sells its seeds, native farmers either commit suicide or cross the U.S. border illegally to forestall starvation — and face either death by exposure in the deserts of Sonora, or the cruelties of the U.S. de-migration "service," where, just like welfare occupants of single-occupancy hotels, they are farmed like poultry in detention centers, some of them government owned, some of them privately held, earning at least 75 dollars a day for the prison system to enrich itself.
And now, thanks to the perpetual — and profitable — wars of the New World Order, almost every year sees the initiation of a new — and improved — war, where people of color and their children, preferably with oil under their sands, are hunted with very expensive and increasingly complex weapons that reap fortunes for munitions makers and the government enablers who hold vast stock in their enterprise, while three trillion of Pentagon expense goes "unaccounted for" — especially now that all accounting records have been disappeared in the physics-defying bombing of the Pentagon by a plane flying so low it smashed into the ground floor file rooms but left the outside lawn unsinged.
Humanistic education may have deluded humans into expecting something other than a biologically deterministic view of life on earth. At the very least, we can say that when animals hunt they don't make use of take-home boxes, although, perhaps because their prey is penned, mountain lions and wolves preying on domesticated herds and flocks have been known to leave behind multiple kills after their nights of depredation.
Yet the question persists: is there call for another way? and if there is, what is it? We give lip service to the principles of mutuality, compassion, and of responsibility for caring for our most vulnerable. We presume to abjure the appalling cruelties of pogroms, witch burning, crucifixion or burning at the stake of whistleblowers and trouble makers, of drawing and quartering, of dismembering, and other rituals of human dissection. And yet, beneath a perilously thin veneer, we smile with blood-red teeth.
4. Extinct Skies
Poets and Latin Americans are said to be sky gazers. We are not of a practical bent so much as dreamers. We read the skies, but we are not prognosticators of weather as much as shapes. My own wonderment at seeing the changing light of day from the dull blue gray that presages the dawn to the rose of day's dawning promise, the horizon rimmed with daybreak, the birthing rays of sunlight erupting over the hills, the flattening of the light as the day advances, the decline of afternoon, the lengthening shadows of evening, the mystery of the gloaming; more than waves of sand in the desert, or the shimmer of light on waves of the sea, it is the endless saga of sky that I never tire of reading as if each day, light is born anew.
People buried in isolation prison units see only artificial light. More and more of the 7.2 billion of us now on Earth can no longer venture into the open air because it no longer supports life. In China's capital, the skies have become so occluded under a pall of poisoned air, thousands flock to giant outdoor TV screens to watch a virtual sunrise because they no longer have any hope of seeing the sun. Imagining never seeing the sky means never again being allowed to live.
Centuries ago, under the very skies I now inhabit, swarms of passenger pigeons darkened the horizon, their migrations thick as tornados sweeping across the horizon — billions of them in one flock, rare and wondrous as any Perseid shower — the stuff of awe for those who lived to see and write about them centuries ago.
And yes, where are these now, these thundering wings as millions passed overhead within a single day, darkening the sun; where is the dung that fell like flakes of snow from flocks, which as late as 1860 could topple strong trees with their weight as they feasted on their fruits? People wielding torches clubbed them by the hundreds as they roosted in the trees at night. Railroad telegraphs hummed with news of approaching flocks so trappers could more efficiently prepare their nets to kill them by the thousands. Of these millions on millions, not one has survived, not one. More than the drowning of polar bears in the arctic melt, more than the relentless war against whales and dolphins, I rage at this extinction. Never have I felt such fury to think that because of human wantonness I will never welcome their reach over the horizon, the murmuration of their wings darkening the sky from daybreak to sunset. The skies of my days are wiped clean. They stare back at me accusingly, a mirror of man's fecklessness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Apology to a Whale by Cecile Pineda. Copyright © 2015 Cecile Pineda. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction xi
I The Thing Without a Name
1 "We who are about to die salute you." 2
2 The Art of Apologizing 4
3 Slaughter of The Innocents 7
4 Extinct Skies 9
5 A Natural History of More 11
6 Footnote: The Trail of History 13
7 Twelve Terrified Apostles 16
8 Asking the Question 21
9 Trade-Offs 22
10 Visit to the Professor 25
II Words Before Talk
11 Learning to Parrot, or How Language Came to Be 30
12 Mankind Once Spoke With a Single Tongue 32
13 The Art of Un-Naming 33
14 The Charged Border: Playing With Whales 36
15 Two-Mind Job 48
16 Saving Elephants and Other Non-Human Persons 52
17 The Elephant Whisperer 54
18 Big Spirit Mind 57
19 Insufficient Elephants 62
20 Wolf Cries 65
21 A Dream Dreaming Us: The Real People 71
Figure. 1 Mitochondrial DNA Family Tree 79
22 Lily Mind 81
III Twists in the Road
23 Disappearance of the Great Axicon 86
24 The Long and Arduous Journey 88
25 Axel and Wheel 92
Figure 2 Proto-Indo-European Language Groups 95
Figure 3 Tree showing modern languages having a common Indo-European source language 98
IV Language as Mirror
26 The Voice That Commands 102
27 Women Before and After Monotheism 108
28 Nailing the Connections 119
29 Language Creep and Language Bleed 126
30 Triumphs of Western Civilization 130
31 The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges 132
32 Do-Si-Do: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back 136
V On the Connectedness of things
33 Return to the Sea of Dreams 140
34 Walking the Floors of the Cretaceous Sea 142
35 On the Luminosity of Cells 144
36 Chasing the Miracle of Soil 145
37 Cosmos in the Speck of Dust 147
VI Outliving Civilization
38 Confessions of a Speciesist 158
39 A Short but Sobering Biographical Note 161
40 Making Peace With Reality 163
41 Tshxum 178
42 Apologizing to a Whale 180
Bibliography
Books 183
Articles 187
Film, Video, Audio 192
Annotated Bibliography 194
Acknowledgments 199
Author's Note 201
About the Author 205
About Barbara George 207