Hanging upside-down, feet in the air, head pointing to the ocean floor, I listen. The sound is filling my body, drifting through the blue, out of the black. It’s a song I’ve known almost all my life, but I’m hearing it for the first time.
Somewhere close by, he is singing. He has chosen this place in which to perform. This Mexican bay – one of the deepest in the Pacific, falling to three thousand feet – shelves to just one hundred and fifty feet here. He is using the thermoclines, which conduct sound five times more readily than air, to relay his song.
No human is quite sure how this animal creates these sounds. His is not a voice like ours; we have yet to locate the mechanism for his vibrato. He ought to be dumb, as far as we’re concerned. To maintain such long notes without breathing, a whale must pass air up and down his windpipe, turning his sinuses – even his skull itself – into a giant instrument. It is the sound, as Roger Payne says, of the abyss; a sound the size of the sea. And it will be audible – tangible – to other whales for hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles; a humpback singing in the Caribbean may be heard by his fellow whales off the west coast of Ireland. His song sounds like a keening threnody to me; but to another whale, it is a serenade of lust.
He is singing, loud and longingly, for a mate.
When I first got in the water I floundered about, trying to locate the sound. It seemed to be all around me in the darkness. My lack of balance and a sense of panic sent me back to the boat. I felt as if I’d passed up an invitation.
Then I realised what I had to do. If the whale hung head-down, then so must I.
Taking a deep breath, I upend my body, my feet waggling at the surface like a seal’s flippers. Weirdly, I have to reassure myself that the water is deep; that I don’t have to worry about banging my head.
As I dangle there doing my best to mimic an animal many times my size, I briefly become a receiver in flesh and bone, a human hydrophone.
For the next two hours he sings; he’s probably still singing now, through the darkness. His song changes constantly, from deep burbling passages that make me grin with their suggestive bass, to high-pitched staccato whistles as if he were impersonating a dolphin. Then, as he runs out of breath – like me – the sound spirals in short squeaks, signalling his return to the surface.
I pull my head above the water, gasping. As I do, I hear his plosive blow. I look over to see his back break the surface, obsidian-black against the Aztec mountains. It arches, glistening under the midday sun, vertebrae rippling as their own sierra, reflected in his blackness. Then he draws down his tail in one languid motion, and resumes his unfinished symphony. His repertoire is of such a range, of such a colour and complexity, that it sounds like a hundred other things. Sometimes it sounds like a fine violin, sometimes like a blown raspberry. Sometimes like a wet finger run over an inner tube, sometimes like a mournful elephant lost in the forest. And sometimes it sounds like me.
Using whatever air I have left in my lungs I try to turn it into a duet, pathetically imitating his profundo through my pigeon chest.
My ribs vibrate. Is he listening? His hearing is far in advance of my own; he feels me through his own bones, conducting sound through his jaws to his inner ears. I’m separated from the sea by the air in my ears; I hear through the changing pressure of the air. He is intimately connected to the element in which he swims; he feels its vibrations. He is huge. I am small. But we’re the same.
He must hear me better than I hear myself. But nothing will change the course of his composition, certainly not the puny human hanging in the roof of his world. Perhaps he’s laughing at me.
The sun bursts through the blue, its rays converging on infinity below. I hold my position for as long as I dare. I am utterly vulnerable, surrounded on all sides. This world is on his scale, not mine. By stepping off the boat and into his domain, I’ve given up my own. I’ve lost my soul to the sea.
He carries on singing, but I have to get out.
Back on the boat, we follow him through his sound. I hear it carry up to the surface and into the open air. Forty years ago, I never imagined it would be like this: such a public broadcast, out of his environment and into ours. The entire bay is a sounding board for his desires. The ocean’s skin reverberates as a vast loudspeaker, a natural amplifier resonant with his call. If we first hear sound through amniotic fluid, then this sound might be borne on a golden disc, out to exoplanetary whales swimming through aerial oceans. Who isn’t an alien? We’re all lost on the infinite sea.
A whale’s song alters each season, like fashion trends or musical styles. This cetacean transmission is evidence of a cultural exchange, ‘unparalleled’, as Ellen Garland and her fellow scientists note, ‘in any other non-human animals’. Whales are the only creatures other than us whose evolution has been shaped by culture, by learned behaviour passed on from mother to child. In our male-dominated world, we are vain enough to believe all non-human song is directed solely at the means of reproduction. ‘It is just like Man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions,’ Mark Twain wrote. We are not alone; we never were.
Why should an animal create such a complex sound? It seems an extravagant luxury. We suppose he is advertising his reproductive fitness, or using his songs as sonar to detect females. His sounds are so deep in register that they may stimulate a potential mate from afar, bringing a female into oestrus; acting, in effect, as remote foreplay. But given his awareness and his culture, given what we know, and what we do not know, it may be that this whale is singing for himself as much as for other whales. If, as the French philosopher and artist Chris Herzfeld notes, birds sing on long after their songs have done their work, if dogs are excited ‘by the tumult of the waves’, and if great apes weave grass and elephants draw in the sand, why shouldn’t whales sing for the love of their own song? Darwin was shocked by the peacock. We cannot comprehend such beauty beyond ourselves; we must burden it with other meaning.
For years I’ve watched these animals in other seas, although I wonder sometimes if I’ve ever seen them at all. When a blue whale raises her flukes against the Azorean sky, carving out of the air an exquisite shape beyond any human architecture, isn’t it possible that she knows the power of her effect, the subtlety of its form and colour, the same flow and shade of the sea of which she is an intimate part? ‘In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined,’ as Melville wrote, ‘the grandest sight to be seen in all nature … snatching at the highest heaven.’
And when a family of Sowerby’s beaked whales appears in the early morning off those black shores, their strange dark shapes moving silently through the water, their subtle blows and antediluvian beaks breaking the calm surface to announce their presence; or when Risso’s dolphins leap and spy-hop, so impossibly marked and scratched that they appear almost entirely white, like cetacean ghosts, in the way all whales are ghosts; or when a sperm whale appears out of the same sea, her body uniquely shaded in grey, a pale band around her belly splintering into shards towards her flukes like avant-garde haute couture, then spinning on her back to look at me binocularly from below and leaving me gasping behind my perspex mask – don’t all these cetaceans, whose names seem to belong to humans, signal their own stories, their own sense of themselves, rising to adore their own gods?
I have no idea. In the ocean, all this is happening, all the time, as it always did.
Suddenly, our Mexican whale, who knows no borders, breaks right off our bow, rolling in the waves with another whale. I’d been sure that there was a second animal in the area; I could feel it. Our whale turns on his side, as the two males join together for a while in greeting, or some other intimate exchange.
He is the first whale of winter; his song will summon all the others to the bay. Later he will compete with other males for the favour of a mate. Fins armed with barnacles will tear like ferocious weapons; tubercles will be sliced off rostra in the mêlée. The female, much larger, will swim on regardless, until she has made her selection.
All this has been going on for millions of years. As we watch the males meet and part, Isabel, my guide, observes that whales have lived through many changes of climate while ancient storms broke over their heads. A whale bears witness to the past and the future because it so exceeds our own little lives. Whales live in another history that takes scant account of our own, predating and postdating us as they may do, spouting their frothed defiance to the skies. How can we presume to take a photograph of a whale, to capture the image of another species? I am the alien in their world. I’m what was left behind.
Here in my room, overlooking the ocean, I flop onto my bed, too excited to move, too dumb to speak, caught between day and night, between water and sky. Frigate birds fly by. All I can do is lie there in the heat, aligned to the sea outside and the fever inside of me, feeling my heart beat, staring at the ceiling. The rest of the day, landbound and lonely, is impossible to bear. After all this time they still have the power to unnerve me. Won’t they ever leave me alone?
As the evening falls, somewhere out there he is still singing, if he ever stopped, a barnacled angel, bending sound. He sounds like me as I sigh in bed, unconsciously bemoaning my physical existence; as if I’d laboured too long in this body, weary of dragging my bones around in this gravity, and might reach out a flipper to turn myself over, sleepily twisted with oozy weeds.
Perhaps I could just let go of the world above – such a slight transition – and allow myself to fall, swaying gently from side to side, a last little dance before becoming something rich and strange. There we would lie in the cosy darkness, back in the never-ending night where I could hide and shelter, where no one could get at us ever again.
Back in my Cape attic, another storm rages, racking and rocking in the winter light, turning day into night. It cannot be defeated. It is brutal and beautiful, battering at the windows and tearing at the deck, fit to rip off every plank and tip me into the sea. It will not cease. It does not care. It blows and rains all day. I try to get in the water, but it picks me up and throws me out again, along with all the wrack and ruin.
I listen to the whale again, a long and low lament, dredging the ocean. And I wake hours later, in the dark, to hear the news.
I go out and walk the beach, waiting for the stars to fall. I can’t do anything. Down the coast – I imagine – he lay in a white room, wondering if that was the way to go. It feels as though I came here by appointment, as if I’d written it down in my blue notebook, forty years ago. Everything falling away.
A single star shines in the morning sky. The window is a black mirror. I watch him on my black screen, seeing my face in his, an anchor drawn on his powdered cheek like a sailor from Amsterdam. I feel the energy pass through me like a discharged current. What does it take to feel that way, all over again? The feel of satin on my skin. Your eyes, at the centre of it all.
Dennis and Dory and I walk the winter dunes. The moss crumples under my feet. The sandhills go on forever. Dory shivers for me. She follows, wide-eyed, as I walk on my own, the third beside us, down to the shore. I sing out loud to the ocean and scratch his name in the sand. The waves soon wash it away.
Dory stands there, watching, as I take off my clothes and swim, like a dolphin, in the freezing sea.