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| Cover photograph © 2013 by Bryant Austin |
Looking into the whale’s accusing eye
Excerpt from Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World
By Cecile Pineda
INTRODUCTION
Theneedtoapologizetoawhale—andtoalllivingthings—for the destruction mankind has wrought on our fragile planet is long overdue—but not many writers can claim to have been prompted by a whale, or the mis-appearance of a whale, because what I took at first to be a whale turned out to have been an enormous piece of debris ice, the detritus of a glacier calving episode. But for that piece of ice,this book may never have been written.
Oursisaglobal,technologicalcivilization,butitswellsprings are rooted in Western, European thought. What is it about those whose work derives from a world view that guarantees the destruction of a planet where not only others, but they, too, make theirhome?Didhumanslosesomethingessentialtotheirsurvival before we became human (if indeed we have become entirely human)? When Enrico Fermi split the atom in 1934 did he break the worldapart?
Already as a child, the question of how people could do bad things in the world troubled me. When I asked my father, he explainedmyquestionhadtodowithwhathecalledthe“problem of evil.” The problem went like this: “If God is all good, and all powerful,howcantherebeevilintheworld?”Althoughmyfather was of a philosophical bent, and seldom imagined himselfwrong, I discovered that God has little to do with the nuclear destruction of the planet, global warming, the Industrial Revolution, or for that matter, the language you happen tospeak.
Apology to a Whale first examines the question: What did humankind lose with the discovery of speech and the useof language? The question seems relevant because plants and animals, creatures some refer to as “dumb,” have managed tolive sustainably for millennia, suggesting to me that, far back in the dawning of our primate origins, their intelligence may also have been part of our prehumanmakeup.
Midway in the writing, the refinement of that first question led to an interrogation of the actual language complex spoken by the West, and of its role as vehicle of White European culture.
Cecile Pineda will be honored by the City of Berkeley, California, for lifetime achievement as a literary artist at a ceremony on Tuesday, April 5, 2016, at 7 pm. in the Berkeley City Council Chambers, 1222 University Avenue, Berkeley High School West Campus.
Some may wonder why I have chosen to limit my field ofinquiry strictly to White, European history. I do so for the simple reason that its ultimate articulation is reflected in the overarching power arrangements—economic, geopolitical, and technological—that are destroying our present world. (See Jon Queally’s “That Was Easy”inCommonDreams,1.17.15.)Idonotincludethedepredations of other peoples: the Mongols, the Aztecs,and others whose histories, just like those of the West, have had their points of origin and decline. Nor do I include other ethnicities whose languages are also derived from Proto-Indo-European. My concern as a product of Western Civilization and as a child of the New World rests exclusively with that of White European civilization asthetechnologicallydominantcivilizationofourtime.
With Apology to a Whale, I have spread out the map of what Iconsidercharacteristicofthepresentworld’spowerrelations:its “exceptionalist”hubris;itsthievingresourcewars;itschauvinism; itscriminalizationofpoverty,ofsickness,ofblackness,ofbrownness, of redness, of female fecundity, of children, andofanimals. I have tried to suggest how our present mode of existenceisnot only violent but deeply unscientific, that is, contrary toscience’s latestfindingsaboutthedeepandeternalconnectednessofall living things. I have limned the portrait of acivilizationcorroded by its own ruthlessness, and traced the origins ofthatruthlessness to a linguistic cataclysm that occurred more than 6,500 yearsago.
It is a civilization organized as a politico-economic system in which aggregates of capital fund multinational corporations claiming the power of speech,and whose agendas are represented bygovernmentswhich,intheinterestsoftheirresourcewars,representthevoiceofpeoplelessandless.To dismissitsdepredations in terms of greed is all too simple. Resorting to such tautology at bestoffersanahistoric,apoliticalexplanationforthepornography of a global civilization determined to rape and mutilate the Earth, whichgivesuslife,andsellhertothehighestbidder.
Berkeley, California March 11, 2014,
the third anniversary of the three-reactor
meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi, Japan
I. THE THING WITHOUT A NAME
Weareatthecrucialmomentinthecommissionofacrime.Our handisontheknife,theknifeisatthevictim’sthroat.Weare trainedtokill.WearetrainedtoturntheEarthtoaccount,to useit,marketit,makemoneyoffit.Totakeitforgranted.Logically,wewillneverbeabletoreversethispartofourculturein enoughtimetostopthatknifeinourhand.Butthatisthetaskat hand—toceasethisactofviolence.
—Charles Bowden: The Sonoran Desert
1. “We who areabouttodiesaluteyou.”
—cry of the Roman Empire’s captives
whowere forced to duel to the death
Inthegreatcoliseumthatisourplanet,thedissolvingglaciers aremetaphorandreality,bothatonce,ofourcrumblingworld.We watchtheice,likeCivilWarsoldiers,liningupinranks,facingan enemy lined up in ranks thousands of miles away. The command goesout:
FIRE!
and the first rank falls, mowed down by the opposition’s bullets.
FIRE!
We watch the first rank fall, pulling the second rank behind it. Tor by tor, stalactite by stalactite, they tip, they fall, they rush headlong into the sea.
FIRE!
We hear the extra-arctic fire of car exhausts, of cars whose owners are driving around the block looking for a parking space, who leave their motors idling. Of coal-burning and oil-burning plants producing steam to drive the turbines that run the lights of cities so bright at night they can be seen glowing from space like poison fungi in the dark. You can even tell from space where the industrialcountrieslie:theyglowthebrightest,leavingthe“developing”world in darkness.
Since 1765, the year that marks the first thunder of Watt’s steam engine, you watch striations of soot pile up, zebra striping the blueofice.Icetiltingcrazilylikelayersofanonion,upthrustlikegeological strata, Earth’s crumbling bulwark against the depredationsof man—man’sfactories,man’scars,man’swantingtohavemore,more comfort,moretoburnup,moretofillinsatiableneeds.
FIRE!
The ice won’tgo silent. In the frozen north comes the Great Thawing.Boomgoesthethirdrank,boomofavalanchethatgrowls too late. The ice has sounded its warning, but in New Orleans in 2005 no one can hear it. Boom. In 2011, in New England, no one can hear it. Boom. In 2012, in Staten Island, in Rockaway, on the shoresofNewJersey,noonecanhearit.Theywilldrive.Theywill keepthelightson.Theywilldrillforoil.Theywillfrackforgas.
BOOM!
InMindanao,underthecyclone’storrent,noonecanhearit. Five thousand people drown. In Doha, the Climate Negotiators can’t hearit.
Boom. This is the sound of the ice, the infrasonic rumble as
it begins to fracture. Listen. Listen now. The rumble of the deep. Listen. Here it comes, gathering speed. Can you hear it? Can you feel the ground move beneath your feet? Here it comes, opening its jaws. This moment, when the rumbling gathers speed. Louder. It gets louder now. Yet louder. Can you hear…?
Butno.Youareinyoursoundproofedhallsofpower.Youare meeting in Doha, capital of the richest per capita nation in the world,whoseeverycitizenreceivesanannualsubsidyfromtheoil youextract,oilthatwillbetransportedinpipes,inships,belching smokefromtheirstacks,toplantswhereitwillburntomakemore light. So the earth can be seen from space, so the efflorescence of its light can delineate the littorals of its most developedcountries, of its cities bathed in street light so bright they can be seen at night from outer space, sending out its SOS: We are burning. We areonfire,thefire,whichiswarringwiththeice.
Youtoo,lineupinrows,protectedbehindthenamesofyour countries here in Doha where the hostess of this global gala has dropped your nation’s names like place cards. You cannot hear it. Earphonesblockyourearsasyoutakeinthesimultaneoustranslationinyour country’s language.Youcannothearitasyouprepare to speak. You cannot hear it under the factory lights of the great hall in which you sit sowing deception anddelay.
Boom.Theoceansarerising.Thefourthrankoficegoestoppling,smashingintothedeep.Boom.
The night of space does not hear. And behind their place names, the delegates wrap their heads in their earphones, sitting beneath industrial lights whose power is generated by coal-burning, oil-burning furnaces that turn turbines that make the power that guarantees that they won’thear,so that they won’t see the infinitely small moment of cinematic* time when, amidst thecascadingicesheets,awhaleheavesitshugebulkintothelighttofix usearthlingswithitsgreataccusingeye.
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| Photo by Frances Makower |
The book is available from the publisher, WingsPress, www.wingspress.com, bookstores and online booksellers.