Storm and Sea thoughts today
Once again, I am in a hurry to work. I resent this 12-hour workday schedule. Just a quick thought. I was reading in a book called Eye of the Whale that some tribes in the PNW have a story about how the Thunderbird created the world, and was the only creature who could feast on the whale, thunder coming from the interaction between them. This is the parallel I have been looking for. Condors are the only major bird or animal to eat dead whale meat routinely, are the closest representation of thunderbird, and are widely known in lore across North America. During the Pleistocene, condors were more widespread across North America, eating dead megafauna like mammoths, bison, and ground sloths. The receding of the ice age left them in the southwest and west coast, where the high cliffs, big game, and marine mammal carcasses provided a sweetspot for their survival. Thunderbird is widespread in native american myths. Thunderbird and whale are the American Western analog of the storm god and sea dragon. Coincidentally, the condor and humpback whale are the animals with the most significance in my imagination. Condor is the bird of eber, of over, of transcendence, of ubermensch, of hebrews, of Yahweh, vultures eating the dead atop ziggurats. Whale is the creature of immanence, of being, of complexity and convolution. Birds have a pattern psychology—they act on patterns. Whales have an ontological psychology, they ruminate and reverberate, they are not thrown into patterns, they throw out patterns, generating them, genesis. Condor and humpback whale are not enemies, per se, but a story is lying latent inside the gorges of Cone Peak, above and below the water. The two sages of Big Sur: Condor and Whale, Thunderbird and Leviathan.