Cynicism is a whale fall
I often dream of Lutīyā the cosmic whale.
Image Credit: NOAA
I watch a ribcage shiver and crumble. Writhing eels and skittering crabs angling and feeding; a thousand Lovecraftian forms acting as substitute viscera and sinew.
Bacteria seethe and false sunlight paints the greyed cartilage.
In the gloom I see the whale shift to stare back at me. For the ocean giant still lives and breathes.
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Spirits staring over the rim of the world. Spiralling down below the clouds, careening through dandruff and dandelions, whales and mice. A soul cavorting for an age in between lives and with the critters under the sea. A newborn rife with a million years of history.
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I twirl and spin in thought. Gripping fleeting memories of smoke and salt-water and teenage bravado as they dervish within my skull.
A walking homunculus for muscle memories and experiences forgotten.
Icy water grips my bones at the bottom of the sea and nostalgia slipstreams in after. One form watching its predecessor putrefied and festered. Two earthlings or one.
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I often dream of Lutīyā the cosmic whale. It is believed, in some versions of mediaeval Arabic thought, that the Earth is carried through space by a giant whale. In Earth’s oceans a baleen whale may live as long as 80 years, and after its death its carcass can support an entire ecosystem for just as long; marine biologists dub this a whale fall. Now, I’m subscribed to no veil of piety, but I’ve always suspected that life may just be the party festering on Lutīyā as she sinks towards her big sleep on the ocean floor.
The Mobile Scavengers
In 2019, out of Monterey Bay California, a group of marine biologists discovered and recorded — what I believe in every capacity to be — the most beautifully macabre video on the internet. Personally, I’m no stranger to the morbid and ghastly. Reared on the internet’s Creepypastas and shock sites, there is very little that will stick with me in any meaningful capacity. However, what I didn’t expect, watching that whale fall video, was for the absolute glee and fascination that this skeleton would inspire in those four marine biologists, to stay rattling in the back of my head for months.
Mortality is a terribly macabre and stigmatised concept in Western culture, which makes sense when you consider how brutally terrifying it is. Considering it mathematically, 100% of our existence is spent in a milky abyss, (99.99% repeater rounds up — that’s just maths). So, watching four experts in their field practically double over in excitement over this carcass, and the life it was attracting, was a truly weird oxymoron to consolidate into my brain. Thanatology, the study of death, is an awfully compelling field for those into religion and international culture, and it's something that has acted as the subject of my 3am wiki dives for at least half a decade now. Everyone must at some point but,
How can anyone hope to grasp the void?
The Enrichment Opportunist
According to sociologists Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera, religion seems to be the ‘answer’ for at least 93% of the world’s population. For as long as written word has been around, religion has been a functional backbone for communities across the globe. From Jesus of Nazareth, to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, to the scribing of the Qurʾān’ in Mecca and Medina, ‘life’ has always been posited as a stepping off point for the infinity of the afterlife.
Looking at the whale fall on my second monitor now, I watch seemingly hundreds of squid and crabs and critters sustaining themselves off a whale’s skeleton slumbering on the bottom of the sea — one life propagating another. It’s one spirit for another, and I can’t help but ascribe it to a kind of reincarnation, or in Buddhism, saṃsāra. Buddhism considers this cycle of reincarnation as a perilous journey towards the extinguishing of craving or ‘moksha’. Without this awakening one spirit will follow one life then the next and the next one after. The thought that this life is one in a sequence of infinity before and infinity after seems comforting for those 520 million people around me, but it still leaves me here.
So, I ask again, where does that leave the final 7%? Where do you find solace if death is an end?
The Sulphophilic Stage
Living f&%king loudly is how. I believe that everyone on the street is experiencing their own whale fall. Sunk to the ocean floor, rotting quietly. Listening to those marine biologists again and looking at the hearth of life these whales harbour both living and dead, it’s hard to imagine that as a bad thing.
Epilogue
“I believe in a world that doesn’t care but in people who do” — Scott Benson
As Lutīyā perishes on the cosmic sand of the ocean floor I can’t help but think that our existence is just her saṃsāra. As we thrive and live and breathe on this whale fall of a planet, fragments of some godly creature, I can’t help but fall in love with the oxygen in my lungs and the grass under our feet.
We’re all whale falls and there could be nothing more perfect.