Maybe it all went wrong when we killed the whales. Maybe their songs kept the great dream together. Vast brains slowly, carefully ordering the world with actions subtler than the apes could ever see. God is dead. His blubber lit a lamp in London
Maybe it all went wrong when we killed the whales. Maybe their songs kept the great dream together. Vast brains slowly, carefully ordering the world with actions subtler than the apes could ever see. God is dead. His blubber lit a lamp in London
In late July, almost 100 long-finned pilot whales left the deep, usually cold waters where they live—so deep, so cold that scientists have barely been able to study them. Together they came to the coast of western Australia and huddled into a massive heart shape (if your heart were shaped like 100 black whales, like mine is). Then, collectively, th... See more
Heat Is Not a Metaphor
Faith Hahn added
I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.
Miranda July • No One Belongs Here More Than You
This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
Herman Melville • Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
Didn’t Merlin used to talk about something like that, every now and again? One of his half-baked prognostications, casting chicken bones and licking moss and staring strangely at cave walls. Men of great wealth will burn oil and tarnish the sky, until the seas rise and drown us all. Everyone thought it was more of his usual bollocks. Look out, lads
... See moreThomas D. Lee • Perilous Times
We have been living a myth. We have constructed a dream. We have cajoled and seduced ourselves into believing we are the center of all things; with plants and other sentient beings from ants to lizards to coyotes and grizzly bears, remaining subservient to our whims, desires, and needs. This is a lethal lie that will be seen by future generations a... See more
Terry Tempest Williams • The Pall Of Our Unrest
Jay Matthews and added
The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.
Herman Melville • Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
“Our individual psychological doom manifests collectively as a universal ecological calamity. Both are interwoven with one another. Both are symptoms of a fundamental misunderstanding of ourselves and of reality. In a world of ruined aliveness, it is impossible to be alive oneself. Both inner aliveness and the aliveness of the natural world are fac... See more
Emerge • Belonging and Butterflies in Times of Breakdown
Stuart Evans added
From Matter and Desire, by biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber
Responding to Brand, Wilson has observed, “We are not as gods. We’re not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything.” Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: “We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it…We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.” Kingsnorth
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