It is a story well known. Jonah: the reluctant prophet. Called by God, an Israelite to preach love to his nation’s rival Assyria, a country rancid with violence, crime, brutality, and disorder. Racist and resistant to the divine impetus—why should those psychopathic monsters be given a second chance, be seen as equal persons?—Jonah flees in the very opposite direction of the Assyrian capital Ninevah (located in modern-day Iraq): he embarks on a journey toward “Tarshish” (which was probably Spain; and if it wasn’t, most biblical commentators agree it was definitely in the opposite direction of Ninevah. Think of the emphasis implied in Jonah paddling straight across the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibralter and perhaps beyond those gates. Imagine him thinking of retiring to a nice seaside cottage on the Azores, or settling down along the Portuguese coast, or of finding a Morrocan village to recline and hear the sunrise of Edvard Grieg’s famed “Morning.”)

Along the way, a mighty tempest brews upon the waters, stirring up its waves to great soaring heights. The small vessel bashes against the unbridled waters writhing like serpents, it struggles to stay afloat. Captain and crew begin tossing weight overboard, to appease the gods.

Meanwhile below deck, Jonah hides curled between the remaining cargo, sleeping as it were. His thoughts:

It will pass soon enough. If I keep my eyes shut, I will doze off.

It is only a superstition, this is a natural storm.

I am too superstitious, and I live among a superstitious people. To actually believe that God is speaking and really concerned with the affairs of men—how could I have been so obtuse to run all this way, from a voice in my head? I suppose it will be for the best. Israel has always bothered me anyway, it’s too hot, too many silly little rules.

I can always return later to deal with my assets.

Jonah fades fast asleep.

Then the captain comes and declares to him: “What are you doing sound asleep! Are you out of your mind? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us.”

Reluctantly, Jonah climbs up on deck. The wind howling roundabout, sails fluttering like little butterfly wings. The men, gathered around with lots, staggering and rocking. “We shall see who here is causing this.” The ship mounting and splashing. Cold spray. The lots: all eyes turn on Jonah: “Who are you? Why is this happening to us?” He explains. They revise their look on him, terrified.

“What must we do to you to make this stop?” More waves. “Throw me overboard.” More waves, bigger now. Nevertheless, they rowed hard back toward shore, which apparently was close enough for the attempt. No luck, too strong. “God, don’t kill us.” Jonah, obligingly, plops into the raging steam. His bobbing head and frantic treading slip further away, and he grows weaker. Like a wave sweeping over, a “great fish” comes to swallow him up. The waters are stilled to a glass, the Sovereign of the Seas having relented and returned to Sabbath upon his chair, now his eyes were watching Jonah. Sailors send prayers aloft as sails. Jonah, meanwhile, is plunging into an unfathomed abyss.

It seems better and more conventional in Sunday schools to consider the “great fish” a whale. Some have told of small men being swallowed by grouper fish, only to be vomitted a few days later, their skin bleached white from stomach acids. If a grouper is not believable, perhaps a whale shark or a basking shark. A whale belly would seem more believable, considering most men too large to fit within a fish, and the lack of a robust taxonomy for marine life in ancient times to carefully identify between icthus and cetus. Now in talking like this, it is not to assert that the truth of the story rests on its being literal fact; it does not, the truth is in the vision of reality it portrays, as for all stories. I am not here attempting to verify the biblical narrative through conjecture. But to leave the discussion at mere fantasy is not only less interesting, it is callous toward the grand possibility that magic might actually happen.

A fish belly would allow for interpreting Jonah’s free fall into the sea creature as an analogous entrance into the core of the Assyrian man-fish god Dagon (whom twenty-seven centuries or so later H.P. Lovecraft memorialized), so that by being consumed he gained the understanding of Dagon and the power to release others from his predatory depths. A whale belly, on the other fin, has other interesting implications, which I will get to in a moment.

But first, I want to say that, either way, Jonah had to be breathing the gases released by or somehow sealed stewing within a large, acidic, salt-water stomach, presumably in a comatose state, requiring low metabolic processes. In other words, Jonah was deep in his consciousness, deep in the ocean, passively being transported by a creature greater than he. He was experiencing the vehicle of night, of deep self. He knew not where he was going, who he was, everything about him was brought down to a quiet and lightless restlessness where, slowly, his underlying frames of reality, his most basic instincts and drives—his will—appeared before him, rising in the murky tar in thick gooey bubbles. Gazing into that abyssal sludge, being transported not where he freely willed, but where his unconscious will willed him, he started to see it. His vocation as a spirit started to seem tenable and desirable. Three days and three nights passed.

Say this is a whale he is in. A whale is a mammal, meaning it has the capacity for deep affection and social relationships, as most lactating animals do. We mammals have a limbic system in our brains, through which we are especially inclined to bonds, imagination, emotions, feelings, memories. Fish, reptiles, etc. do not have a limbic system. Whatever bonds birds make with their partners or mama crocodiles make with their unhatched eggs is attributable to the mental function of love being multiply realized. (Long story; not here.) What I want to say about the whale is that they have enormous limbic systems. Like apes and hominids, cetaceans have a relatively large brain with an advanced cerebral cortex, which is where complex thought and reasoning seems to happen, mostly. Unlike us, however, their limbic system is a far larger part of their gray matter, 40% larger than ours, and instead of being a clearly defined structure, it actually merges with the cortex as an additional lobe in the brain. Moreover, their neocortex has many folds, significantly more than ours has. This suggests they have a much more advanced ability to process, convey, and act on their feelings. A good article on the topic says:

“This unique evolution of the cetacean’s entire limbic system, which is a combination of multiple structures in the brain that deal with emotions and the formation of memories, suggests that cetaceans have the ability to process more complex thoughts and emotions than humans. Since the system is so large in cetaceans, and the unique paralimbic lobe merges with the cortex, it is believed that the lobe may create a mixture of both emotional and cognitive thinking. The paralimbic lobe is also believed to be a continuation of the sensory and motor areas found in the supralimbic lobe in human brains. For humans, projection areas are widely separated from one another, meaning anything we perceive from sight, sound and impulses must travel along fibre tracts with a great loss of time and information. The cetacean’s paralimbic lobe brings this all together in one, processing information rapidly with a richness that we cannot understand. For example, there are strong possibilities that cetaceans can project an auditory image that replicates a sonar message that they may receive. So a dolphin wishing to convey an image of a fish to another dolphin can literally send the image of the fish to the other animal – it’s similar to a Star Wars hologram, or sending an image via Facebook Messenger.”
(Reference: Oliver Jarvis, see bottom)

It is my opinion that the human brain structure inclines us to an object-oriented linguistic structure, but that this must be reconciled with the intrinsic difficulty of presenting our deeper intuitions in such specified forms as concepts of language. This is the human condition, underlying all our spiritual brokenness. In contrast, the whale brain structure seems to incline them not to a codified language structure, but to a deep innate lexicon of auditory meaning which can be expressed without strict form. This is why our scientists cannot crack the cetacean code—the whales aren’t using a formal language at all. Their communication is casual and, as it were, comprehensible to them by its being emotionally charged. What they are saying, if we could ever approach translating their meaning, can only be understood in the way that an abstract painter speaks to us, not in the way of a logician. This is why cetaceans do not have civilization or technology—it is not because they aren’t sentient or intelligent, but because they just plain don’t care for formality.

What the whales are saying must be coherent because they have regional dialects, hold transoceanic conversations with individuals they never meet like pen pals, have names for themselves, and are capable of group strategic planning in hunting. It is just incoherent and alien to us because all our efforts to understand them are basically rational. If we are to understand them someday (and I think it is possible!), we must learn how to convey information between our own modes of rational and figurative communication. If we can find the key in ourselves, and then modify that translation factor to match the rhythms of whale communication, then we might be able to track their syntax and match it with behaviors. I think that whale language is primarily syntactical, not conceptual. It is the same for how we listen to music. It is not any particular note that means something, but the unique patterns between them that holds the important information. Understanding music is our best bet for speaking to whales. Maybe we could ask them why they keep beaching themselves, or ask them to be our friends. Maybe we could learn how to solve our inner discord between our rationally produced ideals and our emotional content, which is the source of our idolatrous compulsiveness and our superstitiousness. And maybe we could help them by making technology and forms on their behalf, writing their songs, making things for them. They could be our teachers and we could be their toolmakers. Given their playful and relational nature, I seriously doubt we would ever have to worry about them wanting to go to war with us. They would, without a doubt, prefer enjoyment, apathy, and observation to avarice, since avarice is produced through conceptual reasoning (not a paralimbic system), rational ideas providing the temptation of something simple and perfect but existing nowhere in real life. They don’t use that conceptual reasoning at all, and as such pose no theat to us. The reverse is true, however. They have us to fear. We are the monsters, the Assyrians. We could stop having so many problems if we learned from them, repenting of our false duality. I digress.

If Jonah was in a whale, he was submerged in the bosom of a foreign dialect involving an unbroken synthesis of concepts and feelings. Darkened far away from the beats and sounds of routine human existence, Jonah was forced to listen to this strange, deep music welling from the bottom of the soul, from the belly of the spirit, within this majestic creature. Slow songs, high clicks, sharp turns, low low frequencies. Loud. Smooth and swirling sounds. The synthesis of thought and feeling surrounds him, changes him, reprograms him to see that secret deep bridge existing within him he had shut out on dry land. He had cast off God, but this whale’s spirit-filled voice instilled him with the memory of his own presence in the world as a rational agent capable of bringing forth the good within out into the environment. No pessimism remained at bottom, he sees his empty idols, the Spirit’s refilling, gives thanks, and the creature bequeathes him onto dry land.

He goes to the Ninevites, preaches minimalistically of destruction coming, resenting them all the while, and the whole city instantly repents, caring for even the smallest children and animals. Then Jonah, frustrated, wanders off into the depression desert, the wilderness dry and waste, hoping to see God pummel the terrible city with a Sodom-and-Gomorrah nuclearesque oblivion. Nothing happens, God gives him a shade plant from the searing Iraqi sun, then withers up the plant.

This story is not a justification of antipathy, a story with the conclusion the mere opposite of human wishes is the divine will. It is an illustration, a case study of the reluctant prophet complex, and the process of reinfusing the uptight pessimist’s mind with a lovingkindness. The divine will is not the opposite of the human will, it is the opposite of humanity’s spiritual discord. It is almost perfect that Jonah could barely show the mercy he preached because of. It shows that this kindness can only be learned through kindness, it is not something mechanistically switched on or off, but is lost through long disregard and can be absorbed by resting in the long, low-tone songs, patiently lulling our soul’s breath, the need-to-rise awareness, and then surface, something only accessible to us in the deep dark ocean waters in which the Spirit is stirring incomprehensibly, humming, murmuring a melodic heavenly hymn fit for a buoyant world. It is cloistered in a whale belly that our minds find their axis mundi.

https://oliverwjarvis.com/2017/01/23/the-intelligence-of-cetaceans/


April 4, 2020
San Luis Obispo