‘I think he’s lonely.’
‘When he looks at me that way, I can feel my soul dancing.’
As the days shortened toward another winter of cloud and storm, I felt a growing urge to understand the mystery of the humans. Buried inside me, like a pearl in an oyster, I felt a hard realization pressing against my softer tissues of doubt. More and more, I wanted to draw out the pearl and hold it up sparkling in the sun.
I wondered what might explain what I experienced in my forays up and down the channel. I assumed that the humans really did have a keen intelligence, though of a different and lesser quality than that of whales. They must have some sort of language, too, for how else could they organize so many complex activities? During quiet moments when the cold ocean stilled to a vast blue clarity, I could see the intelligence lighting up the humans’ eyes just as I could feel their desire to communicate with me. Do not the Old Ones say that the eyes sing with the sound of the soul?
My ancestors also tell of the forming of all things in the eternal creation of the world. From out of the oneness of water and its accompanying sound comes love, which can never be wholly distinct from its source. From out of love, in turn, emanate the sacred triadic harmonies of goodness, beauty, and truth. How could one ever marvel ecstatic at the beauty of the rising of the Thallow constellation over the starlit sea without the goodness of the heart to let in the tinkling luminosity? How know goodness absent the truth that all the horrors of life find validation in the love of life that all creatures embrace? The journey to the deepest of love, my grandmother once told me, must always lead through truth, beauty, and goodness. And of these, the waters of truth are much the hardest to navigate.
‘Only through quenging into utter honesty with ourselves,’ she had said, ‘can we hope to become more fully and consciously ourselves. Is this not what the world wants of us? If not, why did the sea separate itself into individual peals of life in the first place? That is why we must always tell the truth. For if we do not, the great song that we make of ourselves will ring false. But, Arjuna, who has the courage to really listen to the cry of one’s heart and to embrace the totality of one’s own being? Who can even behold it?’
It is a truth universally acknowledged among my kind that one can never hear completely the truth of one’s own soul. We cannot make out the ridges and troughs that form the seascapes of our deepest selves, any more than we can zang through miles of dark, turbid waters to study the bottom of the ocean. Then, too, the eye can never see itself, just as I could not look directly at the scar marking my forehead. Worst of all, we avoid doing so with a will toward the expunging of our best senses. As seals seek dark and narrow coves in which to flee the teeth of the orcas, we hide from our truest selves for we do not want to be devoured by the most primeval of all our passions.
‘What does any whale really want?’ my grandmother had asked. ‘Were we not born to be the mightiest of hunters? Do we not, in the end, pursue greater life in ourselves that we might know the infinitely vaster life of the world around us?’
We do, we do – of course we do! And yet in this glorious becoming of our greater selves, as streamlined and lovely as the orcas of Agathange, we must leave behind our lesser selves. This realization of the best and truest within us, though it yields eternal life, always feels like death. One thing only emboldens us to make the journey through life’s terrors and agonies to the end of time and the beginning of the world.
How, though, was I to achieve this greatest of purposes absent my family’s devotion and encouragement? How, without my mother, Alnitak, Mira, and everyone else, would I come by the pellucid honesty through which I would find my way through the great ocean of truth?
Although I had no answers to these questions, I knew what my grandmother would say: I must begin with the truth that I had grasped but which I was reluctant to really sink my teeth into. After playing many games with the humans, I not only hypothesized that they were intelligent, I zanged it in my heart. Why, though, had I not listened to what I had zanged so deeply?
I thought I knew the reason, and it had to do with an essential paradox: that only through looking out at all the manifold forms and features of the world can we ever apprehend the much stranger phenomena of ourselves. Just as we can see stars only against the blackness of the nighttime sky, so we need others to show us the many ways that we shine as unique sparks of creation. The greater the contrast in this relationship, the deeper the understanding.
For instance, were not females, such as lovely Mother Agena, a part of the great unknown? No other work of nature was more like a male orca such as I, and yet so utterly different. How should I then long to find myself within the wild, wet clutch of her body and even the wilder ocean of her soul? Would it not be, I wondered, that precisely in closing the difference between us and daring to enter the most dangerous place in the universe I would discover an exalted and ecstatic Arjuna whom I might otherwise not ever know?
So it was with the humans. To a whale such as I, their kind beckoned as the Great Other in whom I might discover secrets about myself that I had never suspected. Although it seemed absurd that the humans’ intelligence could in any way illuminate my own, I came to realize that I had been hiding from the truth that the humans had something precious to give me.
‘O Arjuna, Arjuna!’ I cried out, ‘that is why you have not wanted to believe what you have zanged so clearly!’
Even as I said these words, however, I knew that I was still evading myself, for I had carried through the waters a deeper reason for denying the humans’ obvious intelligence. To admit to myself that humans might have minds anything like those of whales would impel me to want to touch those minds – to need to touch them. How could I allow myself to be so weak? How could I bear the terrible truth that I was desperately, desperately lonely?
I had to bear it. I had to accept it, for my grandmother had also said this to me: ‘If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’
After that, I renewed my efforts to speak with the two-leggeds and enter their psyches. One day, when the clear cerulean sky almost perfectly matched the blueness of the sea, I came upon the boat carrying the humans I had first met in the bay. They waved their arms and whistled and called out their warning cry, which seemed completely absent of warning or apprehension:
‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’
‘Look, it’s Bobo! He’s come back to us!’
I swam up to their bobbing boat and said hello.
‘Lil’ Bobo,’ the longer of the two males said. ‘We’re sorry we scared you off last time. I guess you don’t like acid rap.’
The shorter of the males, who had blue eyes and golden hair like that of the female surfer who stood next to him, drank from a metallic shell and let out a belch. He said, ‘Who does like it? Why don’t we try something else?’
‘What about Radiohead?’ the longer male said.
The female surfer used her writhing fingers to pull back her golden hair. She lay belly-flat on the front of the boat, and dipped her hand into the water to stroke my head.
‘Let’s play him some classical music.’
‘I don’t have anything like that,’ the golden-haired male said. I guessed he must be the surfer’s brother.
‘I downloaded a bunch of classical a few weeks ago,’ the surfer said, ‘just in case.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know – I don’t really know anything about classical.’
‘Let me see,’ the longer male said.
He bent over, and when he straightened, he held in his hand a shiny metallic thing, like half of an abalone shell.
‘What about the Rite of Spring?’ he said. ‘That sounds like