Fathoms: The World in the Whale

by Rebecca Giggs

To spot whales is to animate a redemption narrative; to reflect on the moral turnabout of our kind. We wonder at our ability to command nature to such decimating ends. We wonder, too, at our capacity to control ourselves.

The Sydney-based international relations academic Charlotte Epstein has called the 1982 whaling moratorium “the first global, precautionary suspension of a natural resource’s commercial exploitation”—a statement that places the ban firmly within the context of extractive and cash-crop industries, rather than considering it a part of broader efforts to preserve animals because animals, of themselves, have a right to life.

A growing consensus maintained that remedial and preventative action addressing these sorts of threats could not be limited to petitioning national governments in isolation. Solutions needed to be enacted across regions, if not on a world level.

Beyond the carnage the whales had experienced, whaling represented something more: an industrial incursion on Antarctica and its southern sea,

Saving “the environment” and saving the whale from whaling were yoked together by virtue of scale and of polar regionality; these goals became, implicitly, the same endeavor.

As we love those things that elevate us to the position of savior, so whales became loved not because they were innately lovable, but because, in being made subject to human mercy, they both revealed the extent of our power to change, and put us in touch with some loftier part of ourselves.

What we seek to locate, within ourselves, might be a capacity for awe and humility; we may want to join with others in being a part of this story of worldliness, celebrating life writ on its biggest dimensions and the collaborative effort that restored it. We wish to connect with an idea of the wilderness that maintains, in mystery, without us.

they arrive in Australia, where they often die in large numbers from exhaustion. Such bird deaths, en masse, are known as “wreck events.”

No doubt other languages have more middle-ground pronouns for animals—something between “thing” and “kin.”

Our smallness, set against this sublime sea, is connected to the notion that not all the thoughts within us are accessible, that there are thoughts, in some sense, exterior to the self. Vast feelings that slide, beyond command, beneath the wakeful tending of our days.

The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud most notably made popular the expression “oceanic feeling” to account for convictions of limitlessness and eternality that might lead to an inclination for religious observance.

After Freud, the ocean came to denote unbounded inner space, whether that sense of limitlessness formed around a spiritual consciousness or otherwise.

The mare incognitum stands in for the unconscious, the unexamined interior. Déjà vu, inner visions. Misreadings, mishearings, the ineffable. What fruits in dreams. Slips of the tongue and free associations. A place where subcurrents of pain are metabolized, and from which erotic desire and creativity supposedly spring. Intuitions: alien, animal, sordid, and stray.

the processes by which the sea was turned into a metaphor for a person’s unconscious were neither natural nor private.

I pick up whatever thing a dream washes onto my shoreline and turn it over to look, hoping for the shimmery incandescence of pearl shell and fearing, instead, the exposure of a writhing, unspeakable underside—an impulse unmentionable.

What will it mean for our inner lives—those of us who cannot disavow the ocean as a psychological motif—if the twenty-first-century sea turns out to be not full of mystery, not inexplicable in its depths, but peppered with the uncannily familiar detritus of human life? How will we delight in a feeling of unboundedness, in the apparent limitlessness,...

Something hard to quantify, I suspect, disappears from the palette of human experience, from how we articulate our selfhood to one another, and from our relationship to our own private, inner depths, w...

less is dedicated to how human cultures are adapting; how our language and imagination is corroded, and in what deficit of narrative and nature we seek for fresh expression.

we can see the humpbacks sending up great crescents of salt water, slamming their bulk, over and over, against the sea’s surface.

it’s more akin to witnessing a demolition from afar. You think of cathedrals falling into their basements after a brutal reformation, the dynamite containing, yes, diatoms—the silicate reliquiae of ocean microorganisms. Alleluia. Then, sometimes, a whale’s flukes come down with the force of plunging iron—a move known as “lobtailing.” Boom.

They spear far higher than seems probable, pulling themselves almost wholly up out of the sea. At the apex of each leap, the whales barrel-roll, or capsize backward. The humpbacks look built for flying, as much as for their undersea peregrinations. They launch. The humpbacks only decide, at a point, to fall. These whales are wonderful.

the energy required to boost a whale out of the sea comes at an immense cost, physically—particularly as these whales are in the end phase of their migration and likely haven’t eaten for months.

Unproductive frivolity—joy, pleasure—might need no evolutionary explanation.

Prior to the nineteenth-century impacts of commercial whaling, the genetics show there may have been as many as six times the numbers of humpback whales, worldwide, than had been previously estimated.

That so much of the sea’s history might be minutely encircled inside the single cell of a whale: this seems, to me, a sublime feat—even

however refined that data becomes, it belongs to seas lost to history: to oceans that have since been chemically, meteorologically, sonically, pathologically, and ecologically altered.

More than 90 percent of the warming that has taken place on Earth over the past fifty years has occurred in the oceans.

large, long-distance travelers of the animal kingdom relay nutrients not just through their vertical movement in the water column, but by moving between the polar sea and ecosystems other than where they have fed—there to excrete, to lactate, to die, and otherwise input energies into coastal waters. Some scientists call this circulation of matter “the whale conveyor belt.”

They are also not a “gregarious” species (seis do not collect in large pods but tend to live alone, or in groups that consist of, at most, six individuals). That hundreds of these whales had died along one stretch of shoreline was made doubly alarming by the fact that no one had ever seen so many sei whales together, alive.

Roughly every third or fourth year, El Niño, a cyclical weather event, weakens trade winds and brings warmer water to the eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean. Prior to the mass die-off of seis, an El Niño current had entered the Golfo de Penas, where it met nutrient outflows from croplands and fostered the growth of a poisonous, golden-brown species of phytoplankton. The sei whales had been drawn in by the same climatic conditions. El Niño typically disperses little schooling fish like anchovies into colder, lower parts of the sea and creates coastal upwellings where the whales’ prey is concentrated. The sei whales, in a massive aggregation, had come to feed but met, instead, a wash of biotoxins. Such blooms are set to become more frequent in heated waters—and though El Niño is a natural phenomenon, it is likely to exhibit more pronounced effects as the climate rachets.

Wilderness does not go on without us, if we withdraw from going to see it: keeping our distance no longer amounts to care.

In April 2019, the people of the Lummi Nation, on the edges of the Salish Sea, began to feed Chinook salmon to wild killer whales suffering from a paucity of prey and the effects of pollution. “Those are our relations under the waves,” said a spokesperson.

that something so huge as a whale can act with such stealth. The adult female stays between the boat and the calf, but the juvenile seems eager to get a closer look—it keeps waggling forward, then retreating, bold in increments. Mugging.

The whale, in her element, I see, is muscle all the way through. Tamped power resonates within her, a reserve of ferocity, a fastness in both senses: something internally secured, something quick; spring-loaded.

Blood thudding into every corner of her titanic body. The flex of her peduncle, the base of her tail, is a twitch of the largest muscle on the planet—in

This dreadful apprehension; biologists call it the “heiliger Schauer”: the holy shiver of prey sensing a predator’s gaze. There was no iota of comfort in knowing that humpbacks feed only on tiddling bits of life. Her aim, I felt, could not have been more direct. Here she came again, sussing out the boat and its occupants. And we were loose in the whale’s world, skidding around, all incautious enthusiasm, all eyes. Our pursuit of spectacle had made us oblivious to instinct: I saw myself as tiny as the head of a pin, pressed into a classroom globe.

Only the most witless individual would believe in a benevolent connection with real whales, with any affinity that runs outside of metaphor.

The adrenaline in me was the kick of imminent danger and the absolute futility of clearing it.

Her back, lined with knots. Not sheeny like a shark, or glinting like a fish, but reptilian, almost. A dinosaur. A nasty thought presented itself: Killing one must be as it is to kill a dragon.

I felt she was something prehistoric, chthonic. Almost geologic—even as she moved so quickly, in the way of an avalanche or an eclipse: that unstoppable energy. She was, for me, a force I recognized as being connected to those that come down-rushing from peaks and shattering out of fault lines; an event to make senseless your patience, your ethic, your voice, your limbs, the age.

The human body, that animal you own unpacified, speaks in these flashes—it throws itself against the bars of the cage again and again. Piercing through the fear, fluttery in my ears, came what? What was that? Awe? Mortality?

Give me a whale. If I see a whale, that’ll be the sign. Who am I, a secular woman, appealing to?

In his influential essay “Why Look at Animals” (1977), the art critic John Berger writes: “The animal has secrets, which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man.”

Except that, at a studied guess, Berger might be offering the provocation that what goes unspoken in the supposed recognition of humans, by animals, are the bestial compulsions of humans.

I think Berger is suggesting that there comes a moment when looking at animals triggers, in people, a recognition of all the familiar ways humans persist in being fauna. Our shared zoology gets released from the padlocked storehouse of the unconscious—and, in that instant, it’s scary. Being, in essence, all flesh and raw instinct, stands to undermine human rationality, exceptionalism, and the social and political lives of our communities. We are not drawn out into the world as we might have expected; we dive back into ourselves, trembling.

he observes that people, confronted by other species, typically reactivate their self-awareness and superiority. They remember that they are, on a fundamental level, a different kind of animal from the animal they are looking at. Humans alone are creatures that analyze themselves; animals cognizant of the formation of their ideas and their psychological interior (“the only animal that cries / that takes off its clothes / and reports to the mirror,” the poet Franz Wright reminds us). Humans, unlike whales, have the capacity for symbolic thought and expression, for conscious education. Maybe this ego brings us into a tighter kinship with others of our own species, even as it distances animals.

humans are also the only animals that love other animals for no greater reason than they nourish our emotions and bolster what we think of as our better inclinations.

Do they whalify, where we personify?

The triumph of the animal-welfare movement has been to widen, in the public’s imagination, our definition of what types of bodies can suffer.

Do whales have selfhood; do they know themselves as individuals, or are they in “oceanic feeling”?