Leviathan or The Whale

larboard side to breathe; unlike humans, whales must make a conscious decision to respire, otherwise their dives would be impossible. With all the force of its massive lungs, it expels exhausted air with the pneumatic sound of a finger held over a bicycle pump. It is a profound exhalation, rather than a spout of sea water; a visible condensation, like human breath on a frosty morning.
    From its organ valve nostrils, the whale shoots out one hundred gallons of air in a second, each cloudy discharge creating its own rainbow in the sun; then it repeats the process again and again, charging its body with oxygen until it is ready to dive once more, an act of internal transformation. Collapsing its lungs–a special mucus prevents the organs sticking together–and folding in its ribs along joints on the sides of the body, all remaining air is driven into ‘dead spaces’ within the whale’s skull. This technique, and the lack of nitrogen in its bloodstream and air in its bones, prevents the animal from suffering the bends. More subtle than any submarine, the whale is a miracle of marine engineering.

    With a last plosive
whoosh
as it fills its lungs, the finback shoots out a mixture of air and salt water and a little whale phlegm, its shiny blowholes closing in an airlock as it prepares to dive. The spume hits my face like a fishy atomizer. I have been breathed upon, and it feels like a baptism.
    It is difficult not to address whales in romantic terms. I have seen grown men cry when they see their first whale. And while it is a mistake to anthropomorphize animals merely because they are big or small or cute or clever, it is only human to do so, because we are human, and they are not. It is sometimes the only way we can come to an understanding of them.
    Nothing else represents life on such a scale. Seeing a whale is not like seeing a sparrow in a city tree, or a cat crossing the street. It is not even like seeing a giraffe, dawdling on the African veldt, batting its glamorous eyes in the dust. Whales exist beyond the normal, beyond what we expect to see in our daily lives. They are not so much animal as geographical; if they did not move, it would be difficult to believe they were alive at all. In their size–their very construction–they are antidotes to our lives lived in uncompromising cities. Perhaps that’s why I was so affected by seeing them at this point in my life: I was ready to witness whales, to believe in them. I had come looking for something, and I had found it.
    Here was an animal close to me as a living creature–one that shared my heart and lungs, my mammalian qualities–but which at the same time was possessed of a supernatural physicality. Whales are visible markers of the ocean life we cannot see; without them, the sea might as well be empty for all we know. Yet they are entirely mutable, dreamlike because they exist in another world, because they look like we feel as we float in our dreams. Perhaps, without our projections, they would be merely another species, another of God’s creation (although, of course, some might say that’s just another projection in itself). Nevertheless, we imbue whales with the improbability of their continued existence, and ours. We are terrestrial, earthbound, dependent on limited senses. Whales defy gravity, occupy other dimensions; they live in a medium that would overwhelm us, and which far exceeds our own earthly sway. They are Linnæan-classified aliens following invisible magnetic fields, seeing through sound and hearing through their bodies, moving through a world we know nothing about. They are animals before the Fall, innocent of sin.
    But they also have bad breath, and shit reddish water. They eat day and night without discretion. They are super-sized animals, ‘charismatic megafauna’ in the zoologists’ dismissive phrase. They cannot, like the old joke, be weighed at a whale weigh-station, although they once were placed on scales in pieces, like legs of lamb. Out of their element, they collapse under their own weight, lacking limbs to support themselves, pathetically incapable of self-preservation despite, or because of, their great size. (One soon runs out of superlatives when writing about whales.) For all their physical reality, they cannot be encompassed, or even easily described. We may stand around in awe and pick apart their carcases, but in the end all we are left with to show for our curiosity are bones which give little clue to the true