Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  What, then, of the whales? Cetaceans share a rather close phylogenetic relationship with Artiodactyls such as pigs, deer, and giraffes. Based upon the scaling for those species, Herculano-Houzel predicted that the count of neurons in the much larger cerebral cortexes of several kinds of cetaceans would actually come out to a significantly lower number than that of humans. The largest cetacean cortex, that of the sperm whale, would contain fewer than 10 billion neurons, still much less than that of a human. It seemed that human beings’ ranking of number one would remain unchallenged.

  There the matter stood until a whale hunt happened to deliver the brains of ten long-finned pilot whales into researchers’ hands. Using the techniques of optical dissector stereology, it was discovered that the neurons in the pilot whale neocortex numbered 37.2 billion – more than twice the human’s 16 billion. Heidi S. Mortensen, Bente Pakkenberg, and five others described the quantitative relationships in the delphinid neocortex in a paper published in Frontiers of Neuroanatomy. Their discovery should rank among the greatest in importance in the history of science. Instead, this very great breakthrough remains largely unknown. The cortical neurons of the orca have yet to be counted, but it would not be surprising if they topped out at over 75 billion.

  As if all this weren’t enough to dethrone Man as the King of Creation, one more humbling discovery should be considered. In addition to the previously mentioned three primary structures of the mammalian brain – the rhinic, the limbic, and the supralimbic – cetaceans have evolved a fourth cortical lobe absent in any land mammal, human beings included. Although we do not yet know the precise functioning of this paralimbic lobe, it has been speculated that it integrates and enhances perceptions of sound, sight, taste, and touch. This would make sense of the orcas’ synesthetic powers, what Arjuna calls ‘the fiery splendor of sound and the music of light.’ It may also have something to do with orientation in space and time and the orcas’ perception that they can journey at will through the one as readily as the other.

  Given the limitations of science and our ignorance of what really goes on inside the minds of whales, we believe that it would be as silly to try to calculate the cetaceans’ intelligence as it would be to count the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Were one to attempt to do so, however, considering the enormous size of the cetacean brain, considering its differentiation, sectional specialization, neural connectivity, and complexity (to say nothing of various orca feats such as the truly astounding acquisition of numerous languages), it would be enticing to come up with a rather large number. If the average human IQ can be measured at 100, with Economics Nobel Prize winners at 153 and geniuses on the order of an Einstein or a Goethe perhaps coming out at around 200, then an orca would score five times that while a sperm whale topped out at over 2,000.

  What do orcas do with such massive intelligence? We have already mentioned their astonishing ability to learn languages (a sponge absorbing water is not an inaccurate metaphor), and Arjuna has much to say about the musical/philosophical compositions that the orcas call rhapsodies. All the whales have powers of the mind of which we have only the dimmest of intimations. How else can the seeming Miracle of the Solstice be explained? The speed of sound in water at 20 degrees Celsius is 1,482 meters per second – far too slow to account for what otherwise can be explained only by positing some sort of instantaneous planetary communication.

  That we must accept the existence of certain so far inexplicable abilities and phenomena in the lives of whales does not imply that we should not question Arjuna’s interpretation of some of them. What are we to make of the impossible creatures that he calls the Seveners? Certainly many strange species dwell as yet undiscovered in the vast reaches of the oceans. In many ways, we know much more about planets millions of miles from earth than we do the perpetually dark deeps of our own oceans. Could a complex animal assemble itself out of tiny multi-cellular organisms in a matter of minutes? Could such a creature possess the sort of intelligence that Arjuna accords it?

  To the first question, we have a hint of an answer in the pyrosomes: colonies of thousands of zooids a few millimeters in size that associate with each other in huge, bioluminescent tubes up to twenty meters long and two meters in diameter – capacious enough to fit a grown human being inside. To the second question, we must incline toward a resounding ‘no’ because pyrosomes and any other conceivably similar species are not complex and lack anything resembling a brain.

  And yet. And yet. Compendiums of findings about the Plantae kingdom (see Tompkins’s and Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants and Mancuso’s and Viola’s Brilliant Green) suggest that trees, flowers, ferns, mosses, and the like can be said to possess a real intelligence completely absent in a brain. And then there is the recent discovery of bacteria that might need to be classified as an entirely new and seventh kingdom of life. It seems that the species of Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella, found in certain estuaries and other aquatic environments, have evolved to strip and deposit electrons from metals and various minerals, thereby essentially eating and breathing electricity. As well, they have the ability to interconnect with each other in ‘cables’ of thousands of individual cells. It is thought that this association is facilitated by ‘nanowires’ that are an extension of the cell membrane and which can conduct electricity in a biological circuit.

  Might Arjuna’s Seveners be some sort of very intelligent colonial organism assembled from bacteria similar to Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella? We have no evidence of that, and we are skeptical that such a creature either does or could exist. It seems much more likely that Arjuna encountered (and ate) some sort of organism whose tissues produce alkaloids similar to those found in Psilocybe cubensis or Lophophora willamsii. Very intense hallucinations would account for Arjuna’s insistence that what he experienced in the South Pacific was as real as his birth or any other event of his remarkable life.

  Before closing this introduction to that life, we would like to say something about two terms that Arjuna uses at various times throughout his account. The first is the name he often used to describe human beings: the idiot gods. He thought long and deep before deciding on this sobriquet. At times, he thought it much more apt to call our species the mad gods or the insane gods. However, madness can too easily be associated with anger, and although Arjuna certainly saw human beings as afflicted with wrath, as a rabid dog is lyssavirus, he did not see this as humanity’s greatest sin. Neither did he think of our kind as purely insane. Rather, he perceived in our derangement of sense and soul a willful debilitation, as if we human beings are an entire race of sleepwalkers moving through a nightmare from which we refuse to awaken. We are, he once said, like lost children wandering through a dark landscape without markers or boundaries. He had great compassion for (and dread of) our innocence. Given the horrors that Arjuna recounts, that seems a strange word to apply to the human kind, but it motivates his choice to call us idiots. It is the holy fool kind of innocence of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as well as the deadly innocence of the young man Lone in Sturgeon’s The Fabulous Idiot, incorporated into the great work known as More Than Human. Of all humanity’s failings that Arjuna enumerates in such painstaking and painful detail, he counts as the very worst our refusal to embrace our best possibilities and so to live as gods.

  The second term we would like to define is quenge, the most quintessential part of a whale’s true nature. Arjuna himself coined the word to represent a nearly ineffable cetacean sensibility and prowess. We would like to explain this strange word, though of course it remains inexplicable. One might as well try to describe a magnificent city on a hill, bright with sunlit cathedrals and great spires, to a band of cave-dwellers. The best course for anyone wishing to know more is to make one’s way into Arjuna’s story. But please do so with an open mind, and even more, with an open heart. Readers who reach the end without having any idea of what it is to quenge will have wasted their time – and Arjuna’s.

 
1

  The humans call me Arjuna, after the hero who spoke with the God of Truth, though they cannot say my real name any more than they can say why the starlit sea sings with such a hush, lovely fire or why they themselves are alive.

  When I was a young whale unacquainted with human might and madness, I swam with my family through the icy waters near the top of the world – the world they call Earth and we call Ocean. Along the cold currents we hunted char and salmon and other fishes that schooled in never-ending silvery streams; along our fiery blood we sought ecstasies of creation even as we listened for the great and singular Song that sounds within all things. Sometimes, we gave voice to the deep, unutterable mysteries bound up in the chords of this song; more often we told tales of the glories of our Old Ones or the adventures of the newborn babies just beginning to speak. We held midnight feasts beneath the pink and emerald sprays of light raining down from the Aurora Borealis. During the long, long days of summer, we dove beneath the icebergs and we mated and played and loved and dreamed.

  We quenged. Guided by our true nature, which always knows the intention of life and the way home, we followed the ocean’s song wherever it called us, listening always for its source. Great journeys we made! One fine day might find us visiting with the Old Ones in the turquoise swells of the Caribbean ten thousand years ago while on the next day we might wend our way along the arc of the Aurora and swim through ages yet to be up to the stars. We delved the deeps of oceans on worlds without number, daring each other to move ever further outward and inward beyond the limits of space and time. Down through unknown seas we plunged into the melodies of songs sung again and again since the world’s beginning – and into the souls of the stories that their singers poured forth with so much delight. Who could escape from the account of how Mother Maia fought off a hundred great white sharks in order to protect her children? Who could forget the epic of Aldebaran the Great’s circumnavigation of the globe in search of the perfect color of crimsong with which to paint his great tone poem? Who could resist the urge to become both bard and hero of one’s own story? Why else are we here? Are not our lives the very songs that sing the universe into creation?

  Many of our best adventures came through dreams or revelations or even the babblings of babes still drinking milk; the worst came out of places so dark and disturbing that few wished ever to go there. It seemed that no whale could ever conceive them. Once, while we were making our way across the nearly infinite seas of Agathange east of earth, I nearly choked on reddened waters and caught a glimpse of a blue god and masses of belligerents slaughtering each other. Another time, on Tiralee, I learned of an eternal quest to find a golden conch shell said to hold entire constellations and oceans inside. I trembled at the vivacity of such visions, for I experienced them simultaneously as impossible and too real, as familiar and utterly strange.

  How terrified I was at first of these wild wanderings! How confused, how desperate, how consumed! My mother, though, sleek and black and white and beautiful, swam always beside me with powerful, rhythmic strokes that told of the faith of her great, bottomless heart. She reassured me with murmurs of maternal encouragements as well as with clear, cool logic: was not water, she asked me, the unitive substance which ripples with the shimmering interconnectedness of all things? Was not I, myself, made of water, as was she and my uncles and my ancestors? How could I ever be separate from the sea which had formed me or fail to find my way home? Could I not hear, always, within my own heart the ringing of life’s great song?

  Yes, I told her, emboldened by a growing fearlessness, yes, yes I could! Her love, onstreaming like the strongest of currents, filled me with joy. And so I quenged through the world and through the eternal musics which gave it form, moving always and ever deeper and deeper. The water flowed through my skin, and I flowed through the water, and the ocean and I were as one.

  I do not remember my conception. Humans die in worry of what will become of them after the worms have eaten their bodies and they are gone; we whales live in wonder of what we were before we came to be. What we were is what we are and always will be: we are salt and seaweed, haddock and diatom and grains of sand glimmering among the fronds of red and purple coral. The ocean forms us out of itself, and each drop of water – each molecule – reverberates with an indestructible consciousness. As we quicken and grow within our mothers’ wombs, we gradually come into full consciousness of our indestructible selves and of the way we are both a tiny part and the entirety of the universe. And then one day, we realize that we are awake and aware – aware that there never could have been a time in which we did not exist.

  This happened to me. After some months of life, I awakened to the thunder of my mother’s heart beating out a reassuring rhythm even as it beat into my veins the blood that we both shared. A human might think that I therefore woke up in a drumlike darkness, but it was not so. Everywhere – blazing through the salty amniotic waters and glimmering through my own tiny heart – there was light. Our Old Ones call this phenomenon the brilliance of sound. Do not light and sound emanate from the same essential source? Are they not both experienced within the tissues of our minds as reflections of the forms of the manifold world? Are there not many ways to see? Yes, yes, the fiery splendor of sound and the music of light! To see the world in all its astonishing perfection through waves and echoes of pure vivid sonance – yes, yes, yes!

  From nearly the beginning, my mother spoke to me. Mostly, she duplicated the clicks by which she made out the icebergs and shoals, sharks and salmon: all the things of the ocean that a whale needed to perceive. In this way, she made sound pictures for me to see. Long before my birth, I knew the turnings and twisting of the coastlines of the world’s northernmost continents; I knew the rasp of ice and the raucousness of rock and the much softer sounds of snow. The dense, gelid winter sea seemed tinted with hues of tanglow and bluetone, while in the summer the waters came alive with the peals of a color I call glorre.

  Sometimes, my mother spoke to me in simple baby speech, forming the basic utterances upon which more mature language would build. She told me simple stories and explained the intricacies of life outside the womb in a way that I could understand. I could not, of course, speak back for I had no air within my lungs and so could not make a single sound within my flute. I listened, though, as my mother told me of the cold of the water outside her that I could not feel and of the stars’ luster that I could not see. I learned the names of my family whom I would soon meet: my aunts Chara and Mira, my uncles Dheneb and Alnitak, my sister Turais and my cousins – and my grandmother, head of our family, whom a young whale such as I would never think to address by name.

  When my mind ached with too much knowledge and I grew tired, my mother sang me to sleep with lullabies. When I awakened from dark dreams with a rumbling dread that I would be unable to face life’s difficulties, my mother told me the one thing that every whale must know, something more important than even the Song of Life and the ocean itself: that I had been conceived in love and my mother’s love would always fill my heart – and that no matter how far I swam or how much life hurt me, I would never be alone.

  On the day of my birth, my mother instructed me not to breathe until Chara and Mira swam under me and buoyed me up to the surface. I came quickly, tail first, propelled out of my mother’s warm body through a cloud of blood and fear. The shock of the icy water pierced straight through me with a thrilling pain. I nearly gasped in anguish, and so I nearly breathed water and drowned. Mira and Chara, though, as promised pressed their heads beneath my belly and pushed me upward. Light blinded me: not the scintillation of roaring winds but rather the incandescence of the sun impossible to behold. It burned my eyes even as it warmed me in tingles that danced along my skin. The water broke and gave way to the thinness of the atmosphere. In astonishment, I drew my first breath. With my lungs thus filled with air, through my tender, untried flute, I spoke my first baby words in a torrent of squeaks and chirps that I could not contain. What did I say
? What should a newborn whale say to the being who had carried and nourished him for so long? Thank you, Mother, for my life and for your love – it is good to be alive.

  And so I tasted the sea and drank in the wonder of the world. Everything seemed fascinating and beautiful: the blueness of the sea ice and the shining red bellies of the char that my family hunted; the jewel-like diatoms and the starfish and the joyous songs of the humpbacks that sounded from out of deeps. All was new to me, and all was a marvel and a delight. I wanted to go on swimming through this paradise forever.

  How deliciously the days passed as the ocean turned beneath the sun and through the seasons! With my mother ever near, I fattened first on her milk and then on the fish that she taught me to catch for myself. My mind grew nearly as quickly as my body. So much I needed to learn! The sea’s currents had to be studied and the migrations of the salmon memorized. My uncle Alnitak, greatest of our clan’s astronomers, taught me celestial navigation. From Mira I gained the first glimmerings of musical theory and practice, while my older sister Turais shared with me her love of poetics. My mother impressed upon me the vital necessity of the Golden Rule, less through words and songs than through her compassion and her generosity of spirit. As well, she guided me through the maelstrom of the many Egregious Fallacies of Thought and the related Fundamental Philosophical Errors. It took entire years and many pains for her to nurture within me a zest for the arts of being: plexure, zanshin, and shih. Once or twice, in the most tentative and fleeting of ways, I managed to speak of the nature of art itself with the Old Ones.