Читать книгу The Word for Woman Is Wilderness - Abi Andrews - Страница 11

HOW TO CONVEY INVISIBLE DEATH

CONTAMINANTS THAT CAUSE ADVERSE CHANGE

I was back standing on the ice sheet in a blizzard. There were two figures in orange jackets with their hoods against the blizzard and goggles on, glaciologists. They were peering over one of those big drills they use to get ice core samples. As the core came up its gradation changed, from glowy green like a nuclear ore on top down to pure white. The glaciologists conferred.

‘Witnesses described huge bonfires on which the bodies of the birds were burned,’ said Rachel Carson from beside me.

I could hear clearly what the glaciologists were saying even though they were very far away.

‘The core shows residue,’ said the one.

‘Hmm, yes, they also found it in the underground rivers,’ said the other.

‘When some of the Eskimos themselves were checked by analysis of fat samples, small residues of DDT were found (0 to 1.9 parts per million).’ Rachel Carson always spoke with no lilt of emphasis in her voice. Not to me or anyone really. Maybe to herself.

‘It’s much worse than we thought.’

‘Much worse.’

‘The fat samples were taken from people who had left their native villages to enter the United States Public Health Service Hospital in Anchorage for surgery.’

I asked, ‘Where have the bees gone, Ms Carson?’ But my voice was lost to the wind.

‘For their brief stay in civilisation the Eskimos were rewarded with a taint of poison,’ she said instead.

‘Quick, empty it and let’s go.’ The glaciologists emptied their lab pockets into the core hole. There was a pause as they leaned and peered into it, then a succession of plops like pebbles in still water. Then they replaced the core.

The noise took me back home to the cul-de-sac between the two lamp-posts that marked the boundary of where I was allowed to play when I was little, where Mum could still see me from the living room as she did the polishing and listened to Boyzone. There is a wall, the side of Marge and Graham’s house, where Charlotte from next door was sat facing it, making the noise, crack crack crack, that the snails made when we would throw them against it if we were bored so their shells burst and their guts spilled out. We would have to kick them down the drain in time before Graham would come out to shout at us when he guessed what we were doing to his wall. Down into the underground sewage, plop plop plop.

When I was little I was fascinated by the sewage system. To get rid of anything all you had to do was flush it down a drain. In the yard there was a drain lid, and if you lifted it you could watch all the things coming through the drains in the house on the way off to wherever they were going. We used to put the dog poo in it then flush the downstairs toilet to send it away. If there was ever any evidence of something bad I had done I would lift up the drain lid, put it inside, run in to flush, then run back, in time to see it being washed into oblivion.

One day I sat on the toilet and I jumped up because something had tickled my leg. A snail was sliming its way out of the sparkly white basin. It had come from this elsewhere place and made its way through the plumbing inside our house to the top-floor toilet. This changed something fundamental about how I saw the drains from then on, my own miniature Copernican Revolution. Suddenly the philosophical implications of flushing into the black-hole-void needed to be scrutinised because drains were now not the portal to the place-of-no-return I had thought them, a bit like how Jerry R. Ehman who got the Wow! Signal must have felt, like, ‘I am not alone something has come out of the void to me wow!’

Maybe in the dream of the glaciologists on the ice sheet I am realising the similar always-there-but-not-appreciated thing that haunted Rachel Carson. That sometimes there are things that need to be spotlit against a stark white backdrop for you to perceive them because when ever present you do not interrogate them.

The Eskimos did not invent the invisible death. We did. The ice sheet is not-so-pure wilderness. You and I can’t see it but the glaciologists can. They can read the core samples like testimonies to our guilt as geomorphic agents, as ushers of the Anthropocene. And of all the corruptions we will leave behind us there is one that will outlive them all. We are the first civilisation on this planet to have made an invisible death that will outlive all relics of all civilisations ever. We made nuclear waste.

With this comes a responsibility, but how to convey invisible death to the future is a problem unique to our age. Larus told me that some of the guys from the Order of the Dolphin and the Golden Records also worked as part of the Human Interference Task Force. The Task Force was set up to solve the Forever Problem, the problem of relaying warnings at nuclear waste sites to possible future civilisations, possibly as far away as the half-life of plutonium 239, some 24,000 years into the future.

They could not use a single language because language is always dying, so they tried to come up with universal symbols: a monolith with warnings in multiple languages, cats that glowed when they got close to nuclear waste sites, invented fables for the future, majorly complex booby traps, and an Atomic Priesthood cult who would pass down the dark secrets to each new generation within their elite.

The waste will survive us. It is our most enduring time capsule, our ugly baby. What does it say about us? What did we do when we discovered its power? Of course we went and made a superweapon.

Since the Cold War the world has existed in equilibrium and this equilibrium is still enough for us to have almost forgotten that it is holding us up. The Nash Equilibrium is the concept that once all sides are armed with nuclear weapons, none has the incentive to disarm or to use their weapons, based on the premise of MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION, the idea being we are at a point where if one country attacked another, we would all be fucked, so it benefits nobody to do so. But to keep the equilibrium each side’s defences must be taken into account. If one side has more fallout shelters than another, and more of the population could theoretically be spared, then they are unfairly favoured, and the balance is tipped. Because of this there could not be nationwide plans for fallout shelters built by the government during the Cold War. Covert shelters were built, under town halls, in people’s yards. There are secret underground time capsules all over the Western world. What would a future archaeologist make of them?

For the Nash Equilibrium to work each country has to look as though it would blow the shit out of its enemy in retaliation for an attack on the homeland. America has adopted the policy that any attack on America would be responded to with all-out retaliation under any circumstance. Russia takes this one step further with their ‘Dead Hand,’ which automatically releases all their warheads as soon as an attack is detected by seismic sensors.

I was on Skype talking to Larus about this and told him that Britain has a peculiar response. We have the Letters of Last Resort, to be opened and read at the end of a chain of events. The British government has been destroyed and the prime minister and the ‘second person’ to the prime minister have been killed. Our submarines float deep in the Atlantic and almost no one on board knows where they are at any given time. The submarines presume the homeland to have been destroyed if a) there have been no naval broadcasts in four hours or b) BBC Radio 4 has stopped broadcasting. In this event the four submarine commanders open the safe inside the safe and read the four handwritten letters from the now-dead prime minister, written the very day that she/he assumed office. Then they have to follow the instructions, which will be one of three things:

1. blow the shit out of the buggers

2. spare the blighters

3. your call, commander

The letters are destroyed when each prime minister leaves office, so history will never know what was written by them. Larus said that is the most British thing he has ever heard.

I think given our colonial record the submarines probably have on board their own carefully designed time capsules, for the preservation of the nation, something that says WE ARE NUMINOUS AND NOT ERASABLE. Our submarines are called Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant and Vengeance. (And who came up with those names?) So, floating portentously in the Atlantic right now, the decision has already been made.

A paradox: what is the point of retaliation if you are dead and gone already and have no way of knowing any better? What is the point of causing immense suffering to the innocent civilians of the enemy?

The point is, apparently, you can’t exist when we do not. It is we will be remembered. It is WRATH OF THE EMPIRE.

I asked Urla if she knew about the Letters of Last Resort and she said no so I told her. She just looked a little confused.

‘Didn’t Uncle Larus ask to talk to me?’

I paused to think about it, and said no, he didn’t mention it, although he went in a rush, which when I thought about it then did seem a little unusual. She looked at me strangely and changed the subject.

WOMEN INTERESTED IN TOPPLING CONSUMER HOLIDAYS

I stood at the bow of the ferry, watching the water and eating very continental-tasting biscuits. It became surreal if you watched it long enough with your chin on the handrail. Like a glassy Rorschach Test, all the icebergs twinned in the water, which was a sky itself, obscured only when a floe passed, or when ice fell from one of the cliff sides and shattered the mirror. There was a cracking sound when this happened, like the noise an ice cube makes when it cracks in a tepid drink.

NUUK: a surreal city. Like Kulusuk but bigger and denser. Buildings are still toy houses but multi-storey and apartment style, set at angles to each other so that they sit in the rock like a doggedly arranged model village, a Playmobil city. Slate grey is the base of everything, it is the colour of the cliffs and the colour of the boulders and the pebbles. Everything in blocks of colour, as if cut and stuck from sugar paper. For the first hour or so in I could not put my finger on what was missing. There are nearly no trees or plants apart from the wiry grass.

There is a new mall, apparently a point of contention for people, usually dividing the old and the young. Some of the older people see it as Nuuk becoming too ‘European.’ Greenland is a country in the midst of change, not least because global warming is melting the ice sheet. Complete melt would mean that resources that were hidden by the ice before are revealed to be reaped. If they could be more self-reliant then they would be able to manage independently from Denmark, which would make them the only Inuit country in the world. But looking further ahead in time there is a chance that the amount of water it would create could turn Greenland into an archipelago. Their Inuit culture would have to change beyond recognition. Could they then be called Inuit?

Of Urla’s family friends: the daughter, Naaja, is about Umik’s age, she speaks quite good Danish, is a bit shy with me but she looks at Urla with adoration whenever she talks. The dad, Klas, is Danish and the mum, Kalistiina, is Inuit. The inside of their house is interesting because it is like a museum for their hybrid cultures. Lots of fish- and whale-based ornaments, and a cupboard full of weird votive figures that Naaja tells us are made by the family when they have bad feelings, to dispel the feelings. They are eerie, but apparently customary. Some of them are made out of bones and teeth, and what looks like Kinder Egg toy parts. I also keep noticing extravagant fake flower vases in the windows of houses we pass, I suppose because the flora in Greenland is so limited and this makes them a novelty.

MANKIND’S MOST NOBLE GOAL: THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND UNDERSTANDING

From Nuuk, Klas drove me, Urla and Naaja twenty miles into the tundra with a tent, some of Kalistiina’s seal-fur blankets, a gas stove, our bags, canned food and lots of bottled water, and will return to pick us up in four days’ time. Some Danish hikers found Naaja on the tundra already. She went off from camp on a walk on her own just because she likes to do that. She took her phone in case she twisted her ankle or anything. She came on in the afternoon and said she was with two men. She asked Urla to talk to them and tell them she was camping out with older friends and that she was okay because the men would not take her word for it.

They walked Naaja back to the tent even though it took them an hour or so. They must have been bored with their afternoon of dramatic hardship, so bored that they were ready to transcend it already and instruct us on how to be in communion with it successfully (as many Mountain Men are prone to). When we came out to meet them, they conferred conspicuously out of the sides of their mouths, and told us we were too young to be camping out alone. They said it was very dangerous to be out because a polar bear had been spotted in the area and that the ranger had told them this on their way out. As though by avoiding this abstract and likely non-existent danger they had already conquered wilderness and were in a position of authority on the subject by now.

Naaja would not believe them, and asked them what they were doing out without guns or flares if they knew there was a bear. Naaja has spent her whole young life knowing this place, but these men on a walking holiday of course boasted superior knowledge just by virtue of being older and being men.

They asked us to pack up and walk back with them and we declined as politely as we could. They were pissed off and said they would tell the ranger we were out, and that the ranger would be angry that we wasted his time in worrying over us. We promised them we had the number for the ranger saved in our phones and we would call him if we needed rescue. I got this all on camera without them seeing. They walked away, disappointed that their damsels had repudiated them.

Naaja assured us when they had gone that polar bears rarely ever come this far south, and besides we were too far inland. The hikers were either too stupid to realise their lie was almost impossible, or else they did not know what they were talking about and would believe anything they heard from any wise Greenlandic tundra man with a sense of humour that they might have met.

TWILIGHT THIS MORNING: I went to sit outside for a bit because I was feeling restless. It was probably about two but I am finding it difficult to sleep. The light through the tent is like a red lamp and gives me headaches, makes everything inside strange colours. The tundra was waking up with all the subtly hopeful colours of a new day: rust and pink from the tiny coarse flowers that blanketed the soil but still shadowless, the sun still just below the horizon and no stamp of cloud shadow, no elongation to the small and lonely trees. It all just stood, luminous and itemised like a child’s non-dimensional painting. I walked away a little to sit on a rise so that the tent was below and chalky red in the half-light. My home that will shape-shift into each new space I stop to sleep. A compact and portable idea of home. It was so pretty that I cried a little bit.

THE PILL REFUGEE FORUM

Urla got an interview with Naaja where she told us that lots of her friends (Naaja included) had had abortions. It was in Danish, of course, so Urla had to explain. She asked and Naaja did not mind at all, did not seem fazed by it as long as I promised to cut it out of the film. Of course I promised to, but I struggled a bit with coming to terms with it. I managed to convince myself that it would be dishonest of me as a documentary maker to cut it out, mostly because it would have been such an interesting and relevant sequence.

I asked if they did not have the pill in Greenland. She said no one ever talked about the pill or sex or anything, so no one really thought to use it. Her sex education at school was to have a doll that had a chip inside and could tell at the end of the week if it would have stayed alive, had it been a real baby. She said that mostly it just made her classmates think it would be fun to have a baby. They were thirteen when they did the exercise.

From what she said they seem stuck between two cultures. The Inuit leaners go back to the villages and have babies, but there are fewer and fewer of them, and the modernisers abort their babies and stay in the towns. But still living with traditional myths of transmigrating souls means the soul of the dead fetus can go on into a tree or a rock or an animal or another baby. So what is there to moralise about?

Naaja’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, teaches her Inuit myth. I wanted to know about the transmigration. It is a concept that underpins the myths of Inuits through Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. It holds that not only animals and plants but also inanimate objects and landscapes can have souls. Anything can be viewed as ‘spiritually charged.’ The souls transmigrate between vessels. When such radically different vessels can be chosen by any soul, and a male vessel can take on a female soul and vice versa, is there as much of a concept of gender? Are they a queer culture?

They do not see humans as different from the animals; there are not separate taxonomical categories of being. A person can become a man or a woman, a tree or a stone. All life is a continuum and a horizontal one. For Inuit all soul vessels are equally important no matter if they talk or not: dolphins, rocks, women. In fact they are all talking, they have something to say, just maybe not in words.

Naaja’s dad is a Christian. She told us he came to her mother’s town with the town planning service, to talk to the council about telling the village people the benefits of moving to the city. The government wanted the villagers to move out because it was costing them too much money to send supplies, it being the only village for miles around. They knew if they could get the young to leave the old would eventually die out and the village would not need to exist.

We told Naaja how the pill is handed out like sweets in Britain. I told her it is great that not many of my friends got pregnant but it is not so great that it makes lots of girls numb. That it makes some of us so numb sometimes it is countered with anti-depressants. That it can stop you menstruating, the feeling of which is like an ever-absent something that I could only compare to displacement, to homesickness, as though homesick for a body. But it does not make you as sad as having a baby would. For this we must be grateful. The pill is progress.

Naaja’s mother followed her dad to Nuuk because she loved him. They married two years later. Naaja’s mother’s parents did not come to the wedding. They stayed in the village until they had to be evicted. They will not talk to Naaja’s dad, but she goes with her mother to visit them in their new, bigger village on the coast. When her dad hears her mother talking to her about myth, he tells her to stop telling fairy stories. Mostly they talk with her grandmother. Her dad wants Greenland to melt so that the resources can be got at and it can be rich like Denmark.

What do you want, Naaja?

I want what you want, of course. I want to see the world and make a life for myself. I want to leave Greenland and its small way of life.

But somebody has to stay and be Inuit!

Why should we stay when others do not? Where does it come from, this obligation? Where is yours?

We aren’t so different. You could come with me.

But we are very different. You are so free.

DO PELICANS LOVE TO SOAR?

The others are sleeping. Outside, the tundra is putting itself together for us. Yesterday we spent the day walking and filming, trying to find something for the documentary. We walked inland through the mountains against the meltwater of the glacier as it found its way to the sea. It was urgent, dense and grey; panicked like a jar of paintbrush water knocked onto a meticulous landscape.

I’m looking for something but I am not sure what. An idea, perhaps, that I had of the place before I was here. Of the trip before I was on it. I am actually here now, I have arrived. But where am I really? It is hard enough to actually be there, let alone convey it with a hand-held camera.

In the morning we startled a herd of reindeer. Must have smelled us and bolted. They ran fast, even the tiny babies and the heavily pregnant ones. A unified movement like a cloud of starlings, all the more magical for its silence. All of our mouths made O’s and we let out a kind of wistful sigh, simultaneously. And after we laughed disbelievingly about where we were and what had just happened and how awake we were.

We hadn’t seen them until they started to run. In the evening we saw them again but this time before they noticed us. Must have been downwind. We had climbed to the top of a low peak to see what was on the other side and found the reindeer in a valley with a small lake down its length. We crawled on our bellies to a vantage point where they could not see us. The mosquitoes found us quickly and lying still very soon became difficult. There were more of them because of the lake. I watched the small animals through the pixellated window of the camera, which shook whenever I tried to swat away the flies with my other hand. The reindeer were tormented by them as well, shaking their heads every few seconds to keep them out of their ears.

Reindeer lope, as if they are always tiptoeing. These movements, so secretive, made me feel dishonest, like a voyeur. The footage was achromatic, as though there only to record the novelty of the experience itself. But it is more than that.

I am finding it difficult to separate things that say something from things that do not. It is also hard to find things that say what I want them to. I went over what I have so far and I can’t decide if I am saying what I set out to say, or if I am saying anything at all, or if I just have lots of records of my own sentiments. Unsure if the things themselves are saying things or if I am projecting this on to them, in the way that there are feelings evoked when you look at a postcard image you are very fond of; these might not translate when you show the postcard to someone else.

I guess I am taking what I see and making it iconographic but I am finding it difficult to translate the feeling of being present in the moment, which is itself the thing left untranslated in the nature documentaries and encyclopaedias of exotic species which have been my only prior experience of nature on this scale. Or maybe not left untranslated, but translated back and forth until really it has disintegrated, like the Earthrise photo.

I do not want to imbue this film with empty codes that seem talismanic to me. But then maybe it does not matter, maybe it is a vessel for me and I am just now waking up to see the sea. And we have to try to translate or else no one would ever understand anyone. We have to make icons of faraway unexperienceable animals or else people like me would not know to care about them.

I watched the reindeer film over and over. One reindeer I had not noticed before is muzzling a rock around the floor. You can only just make it out, but it goes about muzzling this rock on its own for the entirety of me filming it. After a while watching I felt something new about it that I had not felt before. Maybe even empty moments are never really empty. I am beginning to wonder if this is part of the documentary making itself.

*DOG VOICE* NOW YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SAY GOODBYE

We etched our names onto the smooth patch of a rock, where it was bald of moss, next to where we pitched. It felt very chapter-defining, one of those things you always remember, like it could be a figurative scratch that etches out some more of what will one day make up my fully formed soul.

We asked Klas soon after we started to drive out of the tundra, and there was no polar bear. There have not been any sightings for months. I feel very strange about going on without Urla and Naaja. It would be nice to go traipsing round the world in a girl-caravan. But as integral as they seem now (and especially Urla) we need to go our separate ways, just like we did with Larus.

Really, though, it is amazing to me that just by chance of circumstance and necessity two or three quite different people can begin to exist in a kind of symbiosis, what in ecology is termed a mutually beneficial relationship between two dissimilar organisms living in close physical proximity, and somewhat defies Darwinian ideas of evolution as purely competitive. Like a cleaner wrasse that eats only the ectoparasites from the lips of the sweetlips, a larger fish. The wrasse gets fed and the sweetlips rids its itchy lips of parasites. One must feel a kind of relief at least when encountering the other in the wide expanse of the ocean. And maybe in their own way you could say, taking this a little further, that these fish are also friends.

Sometimes, in the literature, it is acknowledged that symbiotic associations between species can be so integral to their individual biology and identity that actually their individual biology and identity have little meaning outside of the relationship anyway.

I think that being real friends with someone is a kind of integration like this. In the way that you let that person know every detail of you in order to get close, even the horrible little things that mostly only you know and that make you an individual by virtue of their small uniqueness. You share all of these with only this person of certain closeness so that the contours of both of you are chipped away, you are porous and receptive and there is almost nothing left to define where you end and where they begin. Intertwined like trees grown together and fused. Inosculation, that is what this is called. Trees that grow together and then apart.

It might seem portentous to say this of someone I have only known a short time but that seems to be what happens when your situations are so transitory. They are on fast-forward because really you might never see this person again. So you are simply the most visceral version of yourself.

I am going to really miss Urla. I did a lot of crying when we said goodbye. I think she was alarmed and misinterpreted a little; she said, ‘Hey, don’t be scared, you’ve got this.’ I laughed and said I know I’ve got this, I am just going to really miss you. I smiled resolutely and thought to myself that this is the thing I can’t get caught up in, this is the noose of homesickness. I am doing this journey alone by and for myself and this tug is the over-socialisation expected of women which traps us, and is precisely what I am striking against.

Naaja says she looks around herself in the village at her friends and their lives and she feels so different to them. I understand that because sometimes I would do the same, would look around me at the vacant expression of the cashier in Tesco, the foundation faces of the girls with arms heavy with bags at the shopping centre, the tired faces in the ill-yellow lighting at the bowling-cinema complex, tired from a week’s work and a weekend not to be wasted. I did not recognise myself in these places and tried very hard not to.

But I know my own mum would love for me to go back to my home town and get married and never leave, and sometimes I feel very sorry that I do not want to do this. A lot of girls from my school had their babies and never left and seem genuinely happy for it. If all the girls were to up and leave like the boys can then how would any culture preserve itself?

But is it not just the inescapable itch of youth, its boredom, its listlessness, that makes you want to up and leave? The youth are always and always have been churning. Fields must be ploughed so that planted seeds will germinate: a period of customary churning prior to the germination of adulthood. Why do the girls suppress it?

I had a worry before I left, that I would get out here and just pine for home. When I was little my favourite film was Homeward Bound. In the film two dogs and a cat get left on a ranch with minders while their human family go on holiday; they think they have been abandoned but instead of feeling betrayed they presume something is up and decide to escape the ranch and just walk home. But this takes them through the Californian wilderness and the whole thing is about their treacherous journey home through this forbidding place full of wildcats and porcupines.

Sometimes when I was little I wished I was an orphan because they always had the fun lives in the stories. They had no familial ties keeping them bound with guilt. Most of the good adventure stories are about grown men or boy orphans. I planned to run away from home just for the adventure, wade down the river until I got to the sea because the sniffer dogs could not follow your scent through water. But I would get down the road to the lamp-post boundary marker and my mum would poke her head out and offer me a piece of carrot cake or something and I just could not break her heart.

I worried that Homeward Bound might have brainwashed me into losing my sense of adventure once the journey was under way, because really what the film says is pets are pets, not wild animals, same as humans are not wild animals, and do not go into the wilderness because it is bad out there. That it had ingrained this static idea of belonging and origin and the outside.

You will leave me behind.

Please go to university.

I am too headstrong not to.

But also after, go back to the village. Fight for your culture!

We won’t ever speak again.

We will stay in touch.

We don’t even speak the same language.

It is a shame that Greenland wants to move away from its old ways in order to keep up with the rest of the world. But how can we say they should not, that we want to keep all the wealth for ourselves? What do we want? This idea of its beauty and uniqueness, as culture-porn for ourselves too? Soon all I will have of Naaja are these memories and our footage of her. Then I will carry her with me if she can’t go.

THE RIGHTS OF NATURE

Back on a boat again. This one is the Modet, a commercial fishing boat. The wonky feeling from Blárfoss is worse here, what with the boat being much smaller. But I have got my sea legs now. There is an animosity, or it feels like it anyway, because all of the men are really superstitious in a hit-one-knee-got-to-hit-the-other-or-the-boat-will-sink kind of way, and the oldest guys especially believe it is very bad luck to have a woman on board. The aversion gets gentler down the age range. Logan is the oldest, older than Jon, who is Uncle Larus’s age and older than the rest of the crew by at least two decades. He has not spoken to me once.

He reminds me of a seafaring Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Ted Kaczynski posted letter bombs from his cabin in the Montanan wilderness. He was called the Unabomber because for years no one knew his identity, but bombs kept appearing via the mail in universities and airliners around the United States. He posted bombs to universities because he wanted to destabilise The Machine, symbolically at least if not literally. To punish The Machine for oppressing him and encroaching on his wilderness. For him a university was a hub of intellect, which really means ‘symbolic culture’ and the very opposite to his wilderness, a place devoid of human impositions. He must have hated the Golden Records.

Before he went to the wilderness he was a genius mathematician at Berkeley. He is worshipped as the God of the Mountain Men by some. Uncle Larus is a Kaczynski sympathiser; he even gave me a copy of Kaczynski’s story ‘Ship of Fools.’ He says he is a misunderstood environmental defender and not a terrorist.

When he looks at me it is as though Logan is trying really hard to post me letter bombs, like his squinted eyes could be sending out envelope bomb blades, like those chakra disk weapons the Hindu god Vishnu uses, if only he could just squint hard enough.

I have my own cabin, which is a store cupboard with a camp bed in it. There is a spare bed in the dorm cabin with the others but the captain seems to find the idea of me cohabiting with them indecent. Probably I won’t dwell on this too much since I quite like my little cupboard. It does not have a working light but it is quiet and I have a head light.

It transpires that Modet used to be a whaling ship. I did a little interview with Jon, which somehow became a defensive rant. Greenland always hunted whales for subsistence. Why should they not hunt them for subsistence? Now it is illegal to hunt them. Since the whaling ban they fish haddock. Sometimes they catch whales and they die and they have to throw the dead whales back into the ocean or they will be fined. The problem that came about was simply one of crowding. Fisherman and boat crowding. Ratio of whales to fishermen unbalanced. For him there was no issue of morality. No sympathy for the souls of the whales. A direct quote from Jon: ‘The money was good. It is hard to think about the future when the money is good.’

Jon speaks like an echo of the whalers of old times. They needed to understand whales as swimming hunks of meat and oil because they were very, very valuable commodities. It would not do for commodities to have feelings. Whale blubber and especially the oil of the sperm whales were our main energy source before fossil fuels. They were instrumental in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Traumatised by the slaughtering of their species, whales began to attack whaling fleets and therefore became monsters to us. They were nearly driven to extinction by the nineteenth century. Then we reached peak whale oil. The sperm whale was saved by the alternative invention of kerosene and the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. They do not attack ships anymore.

They aren’t sentient. They are fish. Fish are there to be eaten.

Whales are not fish.

What next?Haddock have feelings too? We can’t eat the haddock? Then what do we eat?

Maybe one day whales might be classed as non-human people and this whole conversation would be considered highly offensive, like how we look at the times before the women’s rights movement.

Ha! You can’t say that as a woman. That is comparing women to animals. Very unfeminist.

Maybe that is what people said about the idea of women’s rights before the suffragettes and in the context of the abolishment of slavery.

That is not a comparison.

I think about saying these things but they would make for an even more uncomfortable ocean passage. I figure I should keep my mouth shut for now. It is fine, they don’t hunt whales anymore.

But that is not the issue. The issue is that the bad seeds are still there.

When I found out about the whaling, I thought, how can Larus be friends with these people? He comes to help them if he is nearby, if they have caught a whale. He helps them place the whale back into the water and he tags the whale. He tries to educate them on the whales, so that they might understand them better, and in understating, develop some kind of empathy. He is not their friend. He is just cavorting with the enemy to further his own agenda.

THE SUPER-TRENDY SPONGE CLUB

Whales have now become the mascot of environmental stewardship, our very own symbol of empathy for other animals because they represent the idea that humans are not the only self-conscious creatures on Earth. We only recently started to acknowledge this and it has led us to wonder if there are other animals, especially cetaceans, who are so emotionally sophisticated that they might even be more emotionally sophisticated than we are.

In the limbic system of orcas or killer whales, for example — that is, the emotional processing bit — some parts are much bigger and more complicated than in the human brain. Something evolved there that has not evolved in humans. Because they have so much social cohesion scientists think that this part of the brain could be working on something crazy like a distributed sense of self. Like they can kind of transmigrate into each other in real time, like mega-empathy, or telepathy. Which is really bloody sad if you think about mass strandings: they just can’t imagine living disconnected from the social group because of their innate collectivism. Like women!

Were Scott and his men beached whales, dying in sacrifice with the rest of the pod, laying down their life for their kingdom, fundamentally collectivist, subsuming their ‘selves’ into the identity of the British Empire?

I would say no because what I think they had in mind when they kept pushing on into the obliterating snow was not death, as the end of self, but rather immortality (which is the conceptual opposite of a whale giving up any individualised notion of self in its suicide, dying with the colony because without the colony there is no self). The men on Scott’s expedition were demanding to be individualised; honoured; glorified; remembered forever. (In a bee colony, around twelve males get to mate with the queen and pass on their DNA. Male bees explode after impregnating the queen, but it is not just anyone gets to say they impregnated the queen.)

Think of Lawrence Oates of Scott’s mission, who left the tent saying I am just going outside. Maybe what he had in mind was some kind of cryogenic freezing. Maybe he was really going outside to make a time capsule of his body.

According to the International Time Capsule Society based out of Oglethorpe University in Georgia, the dawn of the millennium saw an intense increase in the amount of time-capsulisation around the globe. Perhaps because the millennium is a marker of deep time. Perhaps because of our sense of infinitesimality in our new view of our place in the universe, perhaps because of the prospect of nuclear dawn.

What could be more representative than a fully formed and cryogenically frozen self? The desire to be reanimated in the future, a whole human self projected into the uncharted future. Maybe Lawrence Oates was really doing a President Carter.

In Shark Bay, Australia, a group of dolphins has formed a little clique that you can only get in to if you are what they call a ‘sponger.’ It is called the Sponge Club. It was started by a dolphin they called Sponging Eve, who showed some of her girlfriends how to hold a sponge on the end of the snout so as not to get grazes when shuffling in the grit for food. Spongers only really hang around with other spongers, or dolphins that want to learn to sponge. This is what we describe in humans as cultural transmission. All but one of the dolphins in the Sponge Club are female; they seem to be better at keeping up relationships and therefore cultural transmission. Probably while the males hang out around the fringe of the group, hassling other males and being macho.

The realisation that things like culture that we once thought were distinctly human are being found in other animals is blurring the rankings of our very meticulous taxonomies. But New Age idiosyncrasies are obscuring the science. Where it is being discussed, it is quite often hampered by mystical and totemic portrayals of these animals by people who think they are magical.

John Lilly has to answer for some of this. His maverick experimentation with hallucinogens and his obsession with decoding dolphin language in order to talk to them has tarnished dolphin study as pseudo-science. Plus he was still looking at it the wrong way. John Lilly was ranking language as the highest form of intelligence, as though we are ahead of the animals on a scale of progression, as though animals have not just adapted themselves as we have to the skills most required by their environments. He was still setting humans outside of the rest of nature and looking for the next best contender to invite into our elevated realm. John Lilly was Narcissus looking for something that reflected John Lilly back at himself.

The understanding that humans are just animals is maybe already there in children, who feel a kind of empathy towards animals because they see them as furry, scaly, feathery people. But of course children’s understanding of animal experience is not perfect because they take human-like responses to mean what they would mean in people.

When I was little I went to SeaWorld and loved every second of it. I thought the whales were happy and had a genuine best-friendship with their human trainers. You expect a super-friendly place like Florida where they invented orange juice and Mickey Mouse to be really good to their animals. And they are in the biggest pools you had ever seen and they really love what they do — look at the way they leap and smile and splash, all obvious expressions of joy and excitement.

YAAAAAY, goes the internal monologue of the dolphin. And the whales are far from home but they have each other and they love to be a family. They get the tastiest fish and the best care and fun toys and stimulation from people that they would not get in the wild and they are safe from those nasty Japanese poachers. Shamu has been alive forever so they must have long, happy lives in captivity.