by Philip Hoare
It’s still early as I cycle up Rope Walk, high on the hills outside Bantry. Emerging from a green corridor of trees, I miss the turning at first, and backtrack to push my way through a farm gate, onto the open moor. At the brow, a slender post stands proud of the long grass, leaning to one side like something left behind. Only as I get closer does it resolve itself into a single shard of sandstone, about the height of a man. Isolated in the field, it draws me nearer. It hums with power.
There are carvings on its face, barely there at all; it might be a memorial to a dead horse from its grieving rider. But the Kilnaruane Stone is all that remains of a High Cross, dated to the eighth century. The horizontal wooden beam which once held its sacred status against the sky has long since gone, leaving only this gnomon, telling off the millennia like a sundial. The stone seems striated, stripped, as if it had spent centuries in the sea and having been cast ashore, got stuck in the ground like a bit of driftwood. I try to make out the shapes, marks on a signpost to heaven, a wayside indicator to eternity. I need a map to read them.
An archaeologist’s drawing shows a quartet of beasts, species unknown, although any reader of Revelations would recognise them as symbols of the Gospels: ‘The first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle … each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within.’ Above is a sinuous, sinister form that could be a sea serpent or the writhing red dragon which menaced the woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet.
Across the valley is a holy spring, Lady’s Well, where water gushes from beneath the feet of the Virgin, her toes resting on a crescent moon, stars and a snake. It is the same statue reproduced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – I remember it from May Day processions at school, when we carried it on a bier, singing to our star of the sea – the same statue you see from suburban Surrey to Sri Lanka, from the back streets of Brooklyn to the mountains of Mexico. Future historians may wonder at its meaning, just as they wonder at cryptic tattoos of the moon and stars on the bodies of transportees sent to Van Diemen’s Land.
A mid-nineteenth-century antiquarian believes the Kilnaruane motifs to be one thing; a nineteen-forties archaeologist another; a contemporary researcher yet another. The shapes shift through history, even as I look at them, these saints and beasts setting off on their eternal journey. Cut into the stone cross beneath its synoptic creatures is a curragh, a skin boat rowed by four men, with another at the tiller, through a sea of crosses. It is the earliest representation of such a craft.
Some speculate that this scene shows Christ calming a tempest at sea, or His people navigating the storms of this world into the safe port of the next; His church as a ship, and its voyagers in the vault of heaven. Others see a similarity to the boat in which Brendan the Navigator sailed from these shores in the sixth century; hence the stone’s local name, St Brendan’s Cross, and the statue of Brendan in Bantry’s town square, his arms outstretched over the prow of a boat. Just as Christianity first entered northern Europe through Ireland, preaching to seals on remote islands, so Brendan took the faith across the Atlantic. His adventures are recorded in a ninth-century manuscript contemporary with this stone: Navigatio Sancti Brendani, one of the immrama or holy tales of saints who set sail in search of isolation and peace. It may aspire to the power of a parable, but it reads like a medieval Moby-Dick.
As Brendan and his monks set out to find the Promised Land of the Saints, the Islands of the Blessed, they face mountains hurling rocks, griffins doing battle with dragons, and a rock on which they seek refuge and light a fire to celebrate Easter Mass, only to discover they have landed on the back of a whale. Brendan was unconcerned. (One chronicler claimed that the saint spent seven years on a whale’s back: ‘It was a difficult mode of piety.’)
The sea was alive. And far from leaving them adrift, whales followed the faithful throughout their voyage, swimming around and under their boat, reassuring them of God’s grace. It was for this service that Brendan became the patron saint of whales (oddly enough, at birth he was destined to be named Mobhi, until other signs intervened). On another holy day, the feast of St Peter, the apostle of the sea, a whole school of monsters appeared, attracted by Brendan’s singing. His monks took fright anew, peering down into water that was terrifyingly transparent, as if they were looking into eternity itself.
Sing lower, Master; or we shall be shipwrecked. For the water is so clear that we can see to the bottom, and we see innumerable fishes great and fierce, such as were never discovered to the human eye before, and if thou dost anger them with thy chanting, we shall perish.
At this Brendan rebuked his men; the Lord would deliver them from danger. ‘What are ye afraid of?’ he said, and sang louder than ever.
‘And thereupon the monsters of the deep began to rise on all sides, making merry for joy.’
This Christian Prospero had conjured up familiars to accompany him across the infinite sea. On the other side of the Kilnaruane stone is a knot of knitted serpents, which to some historians suggests the ancient sea god Manannan, often depicted as a sea monster. Perhaps he was the pagan creature Patrick cast out.
Below is the figure of a saint with his hands held outward in the orans attitude of open prayer; and underneath that, a pair of desert fathers, Anthony and Paul, sit at a table while a raven delivers their breakfast, the bread still in its beak. The raven abides here, in its western refuge. On other stones, notched with the Celtic alphabet of Ogam, these whalish clicks become the clonks and caws of the corvid, Brani, and a warrior named Brandgeni is a man born of a raven.
None of these images have definition any longer; they have been lost to dark time. It is eight hundred years since this cross stood in a wooden church, itself the shape of an upturned boat. Long after the worshippers had left the site was used as a cillíneach, a burial place for unbaptised children. Later it became a famine pit.
Standing by the stone on this lonely morning, I feel godless and godly. As if this human-high pillar were a petrified me. As if it had all come down to this rock, driven into an island. I had to wait to be asked here. As I leave, my place is taken by the black shapes of hooded crows, riding up and down with the wind.
That afternoon we sailed across the bay on Mark and Eoin’s family boat, with Tara and Sinéad and newly-born Anne Marie, under low summer cloud that promised to disperse. There was a sense of imminence and potential to the day, of things waiting to begin, needing only some invisible cue.
Out of Bantry’s harbour, rocky peninsulas rose on either side of us, jagged edges of land pointing out to the Atlantic. The sliver of Whiddy Island – named by the Norse Vod Iy, Holy Island – slipped past our starboard, its green slopes supporting oil silos.
‘Apparently they hold enough emergency supplies to last Ireland two weeks,’ said Mark. A rusting jetty marked the site of a terrible accident in 1979 when an oil tanker, Betelgeuse, exploded, and fifty men lost their lives.
We sailed on, beyond the island. Manx shearwaters swept over the waves; cormorants spluttered into flight as we drew near. The dark stubby dorsal of a harbour porpoise moved through the surface, rolling on its own axis.
Deftly, having sailed these waters since they were boys, the two young men steered the boat into an inlet, cajoling and persuading it, as if it were innately part of them. Then Mark stood up and with a serious look, one hand over his chest and the other held in the air, made me swear a solemn oath. He was about to take me to his favourite place, and I was not to divulge its location to another soul.
Slowly, we drifted into a narrow inlet overlooked by lush trees and enclosed by rocks on which seals lolled like sunbathers waiting for the sun to come out from behind a cloud. In 1934 Virginia Woolf visited this bay, and saw its soft light and stretches of virgin shore as the original land. It reminded her of her childhood holidays in Cornwall, and she imagined it was how the rest of England
had been in Elizabethan times, when Orlando was a young man. She felt that here, life was receding. But renewing, too.
This was where the Celtic spirits were driven, westwards to the ocean – or to the other world. As Yeats, another kind of magician, wrote, ‘the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image … We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.’
Could water be haunted, homeopathically retaining the memory of what it has witnessed? Do all those shores remember me, as they remember those who went before? What trace do we leave? What have we done?
I looked down: the water was so still that you could hear any selkie sing.
It felt like home.
There was a tint to the afternoon – perhaps that was in the retrospect of Sinéad’s snapped photograph – an extended summer longing, an intimation of autumn’s slow recess. Tara, suckling six-week-old Anne Marie at her breast, told me how they’d sailed here last year during a heatwave, and were vaguely annoyed when another, smaller boat followed them. The lone occupant drew alongside, saying, without introduction, ‘Lovely weather, great spot. There’s a lot of people dying.’ He meant that in the heat, swimmers unaccustomed to the sea had drowned.
Ignoring his warning, Mark and Eoin and I stood up on the side of the boat and jumped in.
The water was deep and dark, and the seals took to it too, rolling over on their ginger-spotted bellies and slipping into the sea, their puppyish heads bobbing just beyond us, peering at us with curiosity in their big black eyes. Jellyfish floated past while we trod water. Anything might have lain below us, down there. The rest of the world had ceased to exist.
Or rather, it all came down to this: a clear, cold, reflecting pool, languid with life and the sense of its continuance; of all the summers that had ever been and were yet to come.
I shivered from the water as we sailed back; the sun was just beginning to set. Mark lent me his Aran jumper, and asked me to take the tiller. I steered the boat inexpertly but steadily through the islands, back to Bantry.
The light was already falling over the town as we pulled into the harbour.
THESEATHATRAGEDNOMORE
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 af
ter 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?