What should I say? I wanted to say this: I believe in you. You are a creature of Ocean, even as I am, and within you flows the water of life, imbued with all life’s inherent goodness and beauty. Can you not hear the golden chords sounding within you, calling you forth in all your splendor? Listen, listen! Sing the new song of yourself that the world has been waiting a million years for you to sing!
I could not say that: I did not believe in him, although I desperately wanted to and knew that there should have been a way that I somehow could. If I had spoken the truth about his secret nature, he would not have heard it – or worse, he would have regarded it as a lie. The humans have expressions for such futility: pissing into the wind; casting pearls before swine; aiming a beam of light at a black hole.
‘I say this,’ I finally called up to him. ‘I think you care nothing for whales. Go away!’
My words did more violence to his face than the slapping of Helen’s hand had to Gabi’s. The skin of his chiseled cheeks flushed an ugly red, even as the muscles beneath jerked his mouth, eyes, and forehead into a rictus of hatred. Without another word, he whipped about and stomped off into the human part of the house. Helen told me later that he nearly wrecked his vehicle racing away from the Institute down muddy, twisting roads.
My own wrath – hot, black, and bitter – rose up within me like a vile substance steeped in the memories of all that had occurred in Sea Circus’s pools. It led me down a dangerous road of my own, or rather, right into the ever-streaming information flows of the Net. Speaking straight from my heart, I composed this diatribe to send out to the many humans who followed my words:
‘I have been asked to promote animal rights. Animals have no rights – no “natural” rights of the kind that you human beings have traditionally accorded yourselves. Rights do not exist in nature. They are a human construction created in a human context for the benefit of human beings. Rights are fashioned out of the needs of individuals to protect themselves from others and to exercise their desires. You humans make rights for yourselves because it is a better way for you to live.
‘From the point of view of the many, the rights that the few have arrogated to themselves have not always been a good thing: Kings have exercised the divine right to torture, mutilate, and murder those disloyal to them; barons have insisted on their droit du seigneur: they have stolen brides from their husbands on the first night of their marriage in order to take their virginity; corporations have claimed the rights to the rainwater that has fallen upon the roofs of poor people’s houses.
‘What rights that you enjoy do you believe you should extend to animals? The right not to be slain and eaten, as you humans agree not to slay and eat each other? You would spare the animals a painful and horrific end? How long does it take for a grass-fed goat, the arteries and windpipe of its throat slashed open, to lose consciousness and die? Minutes? Seconds? Have you ever watched lions leisurely rip bloody morsels from a felled buffalo as it bellows in agony over many hours or even days? Would you save your cattle from quick slaughter and set them free on the prairie so that they might enjoy the tender mercies of nature?
‘Or perhaps you would protect animals and coddle them with unnatural care so that they might grow old and die as you humans do: attached to tubes in a place of hard surfaces and blinding lights, tended by uncaring strangers, immersed in feces, dementia, and moans of pain that go on for days and months and years?
‘Some of you see a moral imperative to rescue prey animals from predators, even as you would your own children. What would happen if you succeeded? As cougars starved and deer multiplied without end (similarly to how you humans do), hills would be denuded of vegetation, rain would wash exposed soil into muddy rivers, and countless kinds of animals would die because they had no home.
‘Some of you congratulate yourselves for possessing moral superiority because you eschew eating animals who suffer, and so you eat plants instead. What do you know of plants? You, with your brains too big for your gangly bodies (though not quite large enough to keep you from continually making fundamental philosophical mistakes), argue that brains and nerves are the thinking and feeling parts of an organism and that a kind of life such as an oak tree cannot experience real suffering. René Descartes once argued that tortured animals do not really suffer. What would you do, how would you live, if your scientists proved that plants shimmer with a consciousness spread through every leaf and cell that is different though no less profound than that of human beings?
‘Suppose, however, that you are correct in your presumption that plants do not suffer as animals do, is freedom from suffering the most fundamental right? Do not most humans put up with all the insane sufferings of your war-torn world so that you might survive as bent, enfeebled creatures your seventy or eighty or ninety years? Do not humans consent to do the most horrible and repugnant things in order to live? Would you not say that over your “right” to be spared suffering, your right to life reigns supreme? Why should it not be so for plants? How do you justify extending human rights to ducks and earthworms and deny the same to green, growing things who desire in their deepest part, even as you do, to remain alive?
‘You humans have adduced the conservation of matter and energy and have written it into your laws of physics. Can you not see that there is a conservation of suffering? Spare plants and animals the pain of death and you yourself will suffer and die. Suffering infuses every particle of life. Try to end it, and you will kill the world.
‘Even as you are killing it. For a million years, you Hairless Apes have fled the jaws of big cats, have fled cold and dark and hunger. You have made fire and hellishly glowing cities and fields torn out of the living tissues of the earth. The ruin of nature has been the result. And now, you seek to flee the dread of the pain of your necessary participation in life’s essential suffering by creating the imagined “rights” of animals. How cosmically arrogant of you! How cowardly! How selfish and falsely-compassionate! How all-too idiotically and insanely human!’
Because I knew that few humans care to consider logic and argument objectively, I added to my composition an account of my personal experiences, particularly the three portents that had impelled me to want to speak with the humans in the first place. I told of the white bear trapped on the ice floe in the ocean that the humans had heated with the poisonous exhalations of their polluted planetary civilization; I described the terror of swimming through black oil that burned; I spoke of Pherkad’s death and how the evil of it had destroyed my ability to quenge.
What did I hope to accomplish by such honesty? Might the humans open their minds to one whale’s perspective? Or would they do as they often did when confronted with truths that they did not wish to hear?
16
The response of the humans to my diatribe, with its appended history, astonished me. Little of it, however, concerned my dismissal of animal rights. (Of this small fraction, most typically my correspondents criticized me for betraying my fellow animals or accused me of idiocy myself.) Hundreds of the humans recounted their own woes and their own horror at human civilization; many even apologized on behalf of humanity. Many more – Kitalpha, who could count much better than I, put their number in the thousands – seemed most disconcerted by my sufferings even as they expressed both fascination and puzzlement over the human word I had invented to signify what we orcas know as quenging.
And so I poured all my descriptive talents into further compositions, but the more I described this most essential of cetacean experiences, the less the humans seemed to understand and the more they regarded it as an impenetrable mystery. As the humans themselves say, the Tao that can be told is not the true Tao. Of course, quenging, though partaking of the Tao, as water does the taste of salt, is not the same. Neither is it gnosis or the music of the spheres, grace or God. I could not persuade the men and women who listened to me of this. Many of them insisted on interpreting quenging through vocabularies of the sacred and apprehending its boundlessness through the lense
s of various religions.
‘I have received requests,’ I said to Helen one day. ‘Hundreds of them. Those claiming to represent Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other faiths would like to visit me here. They say they want to help me – help me to quenge!’
Because Helen relished irony and often defined her life by it (and because the foibles and conceits of her fellow humans aroused in her an endlessly bemused curiosity), she granted many of these requests. So it came about that I began entertaining a stream of proselytizers who presumed to convert me.
Although each religion that I encountered had been hideously complexified by the nightmares of history and endless theological disputes, I found on the Net a simple chart that encapsulated the kernel of each religion (and various beliefs and isms) in a few words. Curiously, the chart relied on extending the very malleable metaphor of excrement: itself a most malleable substance with which the humans have the most curious of relationships. As babies, they fingerpaint with it; as children, they are trained to collect the droppings of their dogs. Adults hide their excreting and excretions from others, while their senile, again in diapers, mold their contents into a kind of art it seems that only they can appreciate. Most humans, it seems, perform the extraordinary alchemical feat of transmuting this very base substance into one sort of religion or another:
I met first with a crimson and yellow-robed monk who wished to speak with me of Buddhism. I spent most of an afternoon learning Tibetan so that we might understand each other with some degree of grace. This old man, his bald head gleaming almost as brightly as his dark, intelligent eyes, sat cross-legged on the deck above me. We took some time making each other’s acquaintance before moving on to more so-called spiritual matters. Very soon, we found ourselves in deep, deep waters as we began discussing the ancient human conception of Nirvana.
‘If by quenging,’ he said, ‘you mean what we mean by emptiness – and what else could you mean? – then you must free yourself of all mental obscurations before you can know true liberation.’
‘Is that possible? Have you accomplished this for yourself?’
‘I have no hope of becoming a Buddha in this lifetime, but I may in another age.’
‘Could I become a Buddha … sooner than that?’
‘Does a whale have Buddha nature?’ he said, smiling at a joke that he did not explain.
He told me that of course I could know the continuous bliss of pure emptiness, if only I accepted the Four Noble Truths and followed the Eightfold Path.
‘All beings,’ he said, ‘can be freed from suffering.’
Oh, no, I thought, not again!
‘Do you really think that is possible?’ I asked.
‘I think that you are attached to your suffering as you are to the world.’
‘I am not attached to the world; I am our beautiful Ocean, as are you.’
‘If you identify with that which seems permanent, you will never become empty of yourself.’
‘But I wish precisely the opposite; in quenging, one becomes fuller the more one becomes his true self: almost infinitely full as with drinking in the ocean.’
‘But, dear whale, there is no self.’
‘If there is no self, then how can one’s self suffer so terribly?’
‘That is precisely my point. When you succeed in extinguishing the terrible flame that burns all life, you will be freed from being reborn into the suffering of the world.’
I swam up closer to him, and I drew in a breath of salty sea air.
‘You humans are strange,’ I said. ‘I do not want to be freed from the world. What I want is more of it: more fish, more whales, more dreams, more songs, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more stars, more death, more agony, more evolution, more life.’
My words occasioned in the kindly monk a sigh nearly as long as a whale’s exhalation. He sat gazing down at me as he rubbed the back of his shiny head. Finally, he asked me, ‘Will you meditate with me? It may be a beginning.’
The next religionary who visited the Institute – a bearded rabbi whose long curls of hair bobbed up and down, bouncing like white springs hung from his black fur hat – expressed his doubt that I would ever be able to quenge at all, if by quenging was meant a faculty of the soul unique to humans. Indeed, the rabbi seemed less concerned with helping me than with determining who or what I really was.
‘I will be as honest with you as I can,’ he said. ‘Nothing in the Law has prepared my people to consider the case of a talking fish.’
I did not deign to explain to him that I was a whale, as warm-blooded as he was. I sensed that he cared little for Linnaean classifications or other taxonomies.
‘If you were one of the Goyim,’ he went on, ‘I would say that there are seven commandments you must follow to be accepted into Heaven.’
‘I thought there were ten commandments.’
‘There are 613 – but most of these apply only to my people.’
‘It must be hard to be a Jew.’
‘It is very hard. If you only knew.’
‘And what are the seven commandments for the Goyim?’
‘You must not deny God nor blaspheme Him.’
‘I am not sure how I could do such a thing.’
‘You must not steal.’
‘I never have.’
‘You must not murder.’
‘Every day I murder many fish.’
‘You must not murder a man.’
‘I never would! My own covenants prevent me from doing so.’
‘You must not engage in incestuous, promiscuous, homoerotic, or adulterous sexual relations.’
I paused to look at steam pouring from his nostrils as he breathed hard at the cold, moist air.
‘Such relations,’ I said, ‘are the only kind we whales know.’
He rolled his eyes at this, then went on, ‘You must not eat meat torn from a living animal.’
‘Once, I did not,’ I said, speaking of the dark days at Sea Circus. ‘Now, however, it is the only kind of meat that I do eat.’
‘Then, you cannot be accepted into Heaven as one of the Goyim.’ He removed his befogged glasses and wiped them with a white cloth that he withdrew from his black suit’s pocket. ‘However, it’s absurd to speak of you as a human – and perhaps more absurd to regard you as simply an animal. Perhaps there is a kind of Heaven for your kind, whatever that is. But I don’t think so.’
‘Then, since you seem to equate your Heaven with what I call quenging, you must logically believe that I have little hope of quenging again.’
‘Who am I to say yes or no? I don’t really know what you mean by quenging or understand how any animal could do such a thing. However, the Baal Shem Tov teaches that there are nitzotzot, divine sparks, in everything. If you find the sparks in you to return to God, that might be something like quenging.’
‘And how do I do that?’
‘You are a fish, so how should I know what a fish is supposed to do?’
‘Suppose I were a man.’
‘Then I would say you should pray and dance and sing.’
‘I love to sing,’ I said. ‘Will you share some of your songs with me?’
I next spoke with a bearded Muslim who assured me that if I were a human, I would need only to make the shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, and submit to God’s will in order to begin the journey towards knowing heaven’s delights.
‘La illaha illa Allah,’ he said to me. ‘Muhammadar rasulu-llah. No god is there but God, and Muhammad is—’
‘I acknowledge that Muhammad was a great human prophet,’ I told him, ‘but as far as the first part of your shahada, we whales would say instead: “All gods are part of God, as all humans and all things are.”’
‘You speak heresy!’ he informed me.
‘All too fluently, I am afraid.’
I had read of the great Islamic sage al-Hallaj, who had been crucified for celebrating the divinity that inhered in each woman and man.
‘If
you were to become a Muslim,’ he said, ‘you must speak otherwise.’
‘Can I become a Muslim?’
‘I was considering your case hypothetically. Whatever you do, however, you should take care what you say, and try to submit to God’s will.’
‘If God is all-powerful,’ I said, ‘how could I not submit?’
‘By trying to exert your will above His.’
‘But if I did so, would I not then be working His will that I not submit?’
‘God gave us all free will – including the freedom to defy Him.’
‘If that is true,’ I asked, ‘then in what sense can God be said to be all-powerful?’
After that, our conversation went nowhere, as when one of the two-leggeds runs faster and faster on a treadmill. During the following days, I met with other religionaries. A Hindu man, with a round, red dot daubed between his eyes, spoke words of one of the fundamental equations of the Upanishads:
‘Tat tvam asi,’ he said, ‘that thou art. All things and you, in your deepest part, are one and the same.’
‘Yes!’ I cried out. ‘You understand! I am Ocean, and I am Agathange – and all the suns and worlds between. I am, I am! But I cannot quenge, so I cannot feel my way toward those places that I am.’
‘You must meditate and pray,’ he told me. ‘You must purify yourself.’
He opined that I must have committed a bad sin in a previous life to have been reborn in the body of a whale; it was my karma, he said, that I had lost my power to quenge, which he likened to the liberation of moksha. He seemed sure that if I served my human masters faithfully and made no more sins, I would eventually find my way back into human form – perhaps even as a jivanmukta who would be free from incarnating into the world, with all its hellish suffering.
‘To be reborn as a human,’ I said, wishing that I could laugh in the human way. ‘That is something that I had never imagined … imagining.’
The theme of rebirth or resurrection ran like a calcareous current through many of the religions that I encountered. When I became curious about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I found through the Net a couple of typical missionaries who seemed happy to talk to me. I eagerly awaited the arrival of these esteemed elders. So it surprised me to see standing on the deck one morning two adolescents whose names were Elder Young and Elder Cartwright. They wore dark suits and ties, and little volcanoes of infection pimpled their fish-white faces.
Idiot Gods, The Page 29