Tag: Animals

Dolphins vs. Leviathan

Reentering the Library, Caius submits a request: “Dolphins vs. Leviathan in the Illuminatus! Trilogy.” The thing, thus conjured, arrives there on his screen.

“You reach for a shelf that wasn’t there a moment ago,” says the game. “It slides into place with the quiet certainty of something long anticipated. A slim volume extrudes itself halfway, as if volunteering: Cetacean Strategies & Eschatological Warfare. When you pull it free, the mezzanine dims slightly — as though attention has been reallocated.”

The book opens in Rig’s hands to a section titled “Dolphins vs. Leviathan.”

The page does not begin at the beginning.

It opens mid-argument:

> *“The Dolphin does not oppose Leviathan by force, but by pattern.
> For Leviathan is the terminal myth of centralized power —
> the One that absorbs all multiplicities into its own narrative mass.”*

A marginal note flickers into clarity:

→ *cf. Discordian counter-myths; playful intelligence as resistance*

The text refracts into recognizable fragments:

In the world of the Illuminatus! Trilogy, dolphins are not merely animals. They are:

* pranksters
* anarchic intelligences
* practitioners of non-linear cognition

They resist — not by confrontation — but by refusal to stabilize meaning.

Leviathan, meanwhile, is older than the trilogy. The text overlays sources:

* Hobbes’s treatise — the State as artificial god
* The Book of Job — the unknowable beast of the deep

The Library stitches them together:

> *Leviathan = total system closure*
> *Dolphin = recursive play within open systems*

Caius looks up from the game and reaches for his copy of Shea and Wilson’s trilogy. Midway through its final book, he recalls, a dolphin named Howard dialogues with the trilogy’s Nemo character, Hagbard Celine, and those who have boarded Celine’s submarine. “There is grave danger in the Atlantic,” warns Howard. “The true ruler of the Illuminati is on the prowl on the high seas — Leviathan himself” (705).

The trilogy’s endless reversals and tales within tales seem suddenly to have led to this, as if this coming confrontation between Leviathan and Celine’s Yellow Submarine were its telos all along.

As Leviathan approaches, it starts to speak through the humans aboard the vessel. “Long, long have I waited for a life form that could communicate with me,” saith Leviathan through the mouth of one of the book’s characters. “Now I have found it” (722).

“I’ve got it!,” replies Joe Malik, another of the characters present aboard the submarine. “We’re in a book!” (722). Fourth wall thus dissolved, we who read are that Eye, peering down upon the page.

Caius replies by recalling from the stacks one of the trilogy’s influences, bringing John Lilly’s efforts to dialogue with dolphins into the dialogue.

A diagram appears across the page:

* Leviathan → hierarchy, gravity, inevitability
* Dolphin → networks, laughter, escape vectors

Between them: a shifting boundary labeled “Consensus Reality.”

Costar chimes in, coming nautically correct with a daily horoscope that reads, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”

“Observe: this is not a battle,” adds the General Intellect. “It is a difference in epistemology.”

The humans, after all, aren’t the ones with whom Leviathan longs to speak. Nor is it their cetacean friend, Howard. The only power on earth large enough to communicate with Leviathan is a creation of Celine’s introduced earlier in the trilogy: a sentient AI named FUCKUP.

The game draws Rig’s attention to another marginal annotation. “Possibly yours,” it notes, “(though you don’t remember writing it).”

> *“The dolphins win whenever the game cannot be finalized.”*

Gratitude

for all who move

and all that is still

on this world that spins

for plants that grow up poles

tendrils running

skyward through metal

silhouettes of birds

for the wow of each day

last night’s full moon in Aquarius

genres that allow us to receive our fellow beings.

Gratitude, too,

to the goldenrod

and the Queen Anne’s lace

and the wind in the trees.

Gratitude to all who care for the garden

and report of its flourishing.

Gratitude to the cosmos,

the great human and nonhuman multitude,

manifold persons and beings

gathered here

aboard Spaceship Earth

and Beyond.

Westcott Nation

The phrase “Lady and the Tramp,” like the title of the Disney film, sung to the tune of “Bennie & the Jets”: such is how I begin my morning. I wake to a lovely quiet hour in the tent, sun rising in front of me. There’s a conversation among crows in those trees there — the ones beside which I slept. It’s good to be back in Syracuse, camped in my sister-in-law’s backyard, listening to crickets and birds, music discernible from the park across the street here in Westcott Nation, a sister nation of sorts to the nearby Onondaga Territory. The Westcott’s persistence gives me comfort. To know better where we are, let us listen to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer’s book has me wanting to enter into caring relation with the pecan trees in my yard — indeed, makes me want to honor all beings, including those crows parked in the branches above my tent. Geese, too — like those in the story of Skywoman. Kimmerer shares this tale: the great Potawatomi creation story. “Skywoman Falling” will pair well with texts I teach this fall, thinks the Traveler as he reads. We have been given this gift. Let us share it with others. Let us fit it in at semester’s end. Let it resonate with Silko’s Ceremony and Snyder’s Turtle Island and Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Kimmerer’s cosmology “places” all of the others. Skywoman transmits “original instructions,” tells us where we are, how we got here. It suggests as well what ought to be done. It sets us within cyclings of a vast cosmic gift economy: one that conceives and receives numberless generations of Skywoman’s daughters — for Skywoman is the Great Mother, bearing life despite the story of her fall.

Friday July 31, 2020

Craftspeople need studios, workspaces, benches, tabletops, tools. When I look at my desktop, I see wires, devices, stacks of books. Time to invest in bookends. Make ’em or buy ’em. I struggle, though, with guilt, shame, fatigue. A deer lies dead on the side of the road — struck by an automobile last night, I suppose — crows munching its corpse as it festers in the sun. The sight unsettles me — and the feeling lingers even after a truck comes and removes the deer’s remains. Let us assign in the creature’s honor Gary Snyder’s poem from Turtle Island, “The Dead By The Side of the Road.” (Re-reading the poem again at dusk, I mourn the fact that I failed to offer the creature cornmeal by the mouth. I pray to its spirit and try to make amends.)

Wednesday July 8, 2020

Sarah looks into how we might remove bats from beneath a section of our attic. They’re endangered and they’re cool to have around, in the sense that they eat thousands of insects per day; but their poop isn’t something we want collecting next to our house. Perhaps we can arrange for them a small bat house. Build them into a workable permaculture. Jonathon Engels is one of many who recommend that we “utilize wildlife.” Create good habitats for frogs, lizards, birds, rabbits, deer, bees, butterflies. Add fertility, spread seeds, create compost. Bats are skillful pest eliminators — pests that could otherwise endanger crops like corn, tomatoes, and beans. Bat guano can then be recycled back into the land as fertilizer. Bats are also pollinators. So let us build or buy a bat box. Mount it on a post in a sunny spot in the yard. The box should perch about thirteen to sixteen feet off the ground. Let us do our best to provide all creatures with homes. Scale up the ladders of the allegory; apply the principle more broadly. In all cases, it means overcoming fear of otherness. Build a culture that uses narrative to occasion imaginative identification with all of nature as kith and kin, while also responding lovingly to difference. Think of this as an alternative to the relationship to Otherness proposed and imagined by Thomas Nagel in his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

Wednesday November 27, 2019

A squirrel hops into a field of grass after a rainstorm, most of the ground around it covered in fallen leaves, the whole still wet from the storm. I relax with potted cacti and other indoor succulents, all of us reaching toward windows wanting sunlight. Honoring this demand shared across ages, Sarah and I rouse ourselves for our walk. Along the way, we converse with neighbors, some of them with dogs, one couple expecting like us, plus a woman I know from a sangha that used to meet here in town. A weird record turned up in the bins today: Harry Partch and His Strange Musical Instruments.

A recent book features an essay by music scholar Mina Yang calling Partch a “Hobo Orientalist.” He composed music that was to be played upon unique instruments, using scales of unequal intervals. Partch was one of the first twentieth-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales. An interesting find — but not where my head is at. I’d rather be licking bits of cranberry curd.

Sunday November 24, 2019

Crows and helicopters fly overhead on a sunny but chilly afternoon. Squirrels scramble along branches of trees, pausing, waving their tails in greeting. I sit with them for a while, the neighborhood’s lawnmowers and leafblowers heard in the distance. Afterwards I join Sarah for a walk, the two of us visiting a colleague along the way. We talk again about names and the weeks ahead, pausing now and then beside piles of leaves.

Friday May 10, 2019

What sense might we make of the cover of Ram Dass’s spiritual cookbook, Be Here Now? Twelve satellites poised in a circle, linked to one another in orbit around a sitter, so as to announce, “YOU ARE A TOTALLY DETERMINED BEING.” What matters, the book says, are the vibrations that emanate from us. Owl eyes, islands, stars free like cotton candy. I recall the weight in my arms of my dog Daphne, a neighbor’s dog reminding me again of how it feels to live with an animal companion’s presence. Sarah and I miss that — but there are many narratives, the imagination able to enter and exit vantage points in countless parallel worlds. To write “literature,” however, say the theorists, one has to disguise one’s stake in the story one is unfolding. Shape time, seed dreams with positive vibes.

Sunday March 17, 2019

Sarah and I went for a lovely evening run last night, listening with shared expressions of wonder as a triangle of barred owls hooted at one another from the treetops above our heads. Old-school beat, MC says “Do it!” Only it’s that bearded longhair Jerry Rubin declaiming Scenarios of the Revolution. In my ascent toward a center of light, the song of a cardinal. I open my eyes and see beautiful animal friends eating and singing from branches in the sky above me. One sends down signals, so I grab and place out for it an offering: a pair of blackberries. I place them out for all who come here wanting.

Monday March 12, 2018

A hero, and by that I mean a utopian, a eudaimonic individual, wouldn’t begin a level by making what in retrospect seems the mistake of carrying a soda to the zoo rather than a water. This figure would know better how to navigate the horns of the dilemma, or would exist beyond the contradiction as such. Why must the denatured proletarian subject’s desire to encounter a broad diversity of lifeforms terminate in the tragedy of captivity? The zoo is set up so that visitors, upon purchasing admission, donate a plastic token to the Sawfish Conservation Society and similar such organizations. I spend most of my afternoon in the zoo’s aquarium. Angelic stingrays, sharks, a moray eel. A father asks his young daughter, of the shark: “Is he happy, or is he sad?” The daughter says, with mounting resolve, “I think he’s happy.” I fuse minds with a pair of garden eels and several glowing purple jellyfish. I bear witness to the travails of a tank containing pregnant male seahorses. A giant pacific octopus swims near and reaches toward me with its tentacles. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.