On whales

I just read this wonderful article in the New York Times' magazine section, provocatively titled "Watching Whales Watch Us". I don't enjoy directly interacting with animals, but otherwise tend to be sympathetic to their plight, and am especially fond of intelligent mammals—bonobos, elephants, dolphins, and whales. One of the highlights of a recent trip to the British Museum of Natural History was seeing their life-sized model of a blue whale in a room full of extinct and surviving (but likely soon-to-be-extinct-or-endangered) terrestrial mammals. It's common knowledge that the blue whale is the largest living creature on earth, but such cold facts do little to convey the gargantuan enormity of its size: the blue whale in the museum is larger than a small herd of African elephants.

The elephant is regarded as a symbol of enormous strength, majesty, and wisdom in Indic culture, and whales would probably have been too had they been well known enough. (If you know more about whales and Indic culture, let me know!) Some species of whales are extraordinarily long-lived (just like elephants), and recent research mentioned in the article suggests that whales are capable of learning and teaching, of identifying and communicating with one another, of using tools, of cooperating in groups to tackle complex problems, and of perpetuating what can only be called culture. This list of achievements is as impressive as anything achieved by our closest simian relatives, and it's quite possible there is much more below the surface (no pun intended).

It is therefore a tragedy of Himalayan proportions that we humans have callously and, yes, inhumanly devastated global whale populations and altered their environments beyond recognition. Oceanic noise pollution is unlikely to be something that's on top of our list of things to be concerned about, but it's in fact a huge problem that is exacerbated every year by the growing number of vessels plying the seas. For creatures such as dolphins and whales whose clans are scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles of deep sea, sonar is an absolutely critical tool for navigation and communication. But oceanic noise pollution plays havoc with sonar-based communication, disrupting their complex social structures and severely impeding the animals' ability to navigate or seek prey. And this devastation wreaked by us is but a by-product of sea-based economic activity that's not even targeted at whales. I'm not going to bring up the unspeakable cruelties of large-scale whaling; I don't have the stomach for it. 

Thank goodness we're finally coming to realize exactly what it is we nearly wiped out from our oceans. It's refreshing to read that cetaceans are finally being understood as socially sophisticated, intelligent, emotional creatures that are as curious about us as we are about them. Let's hope we abandon our well-honed whale slaughtering skills and treat these gentle giants with the sympathy and respect they deserve.

To close, an excerpt from the article about one hominid-cetacean interaction that ended happily:

A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose.

For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale’s mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same.

Introductions and such things

śarad-indu-sundara-ruciś cetasi sā me girāṃ devī |

apahṛtya tamaḥ santatam arthān akhilān prakāśayatu ||

Well, I've done it after all. After initially dismissing blogging as an essentially narcissistic activity—what arrogance, the assumption that one's writing and one's thoughts are important enough to be read by the world at large!—I have succumbed to temptation and created my own blog.

I don't know precisely why I'm doing this. Part of it is simply the fact that my instinctive reaction to blogging has given away to increasing admiration for the stellar bloggers whose work I've been following since the last US Presidential election, in particular Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. (I need hardly say it's highly unlikely that my posts are going to be quite as interesting or as thought-provoking or (sadly) as audience-attracting as his!) Since I often email blog posts and articles accompanied by my comments to my unfortunate friends, I figured that starting my own blog would be a good way to consolidate such posts and my responses to them. This blog would then have the secondary function of allowing me to flesh out my own opinions by providing me with the space to articulate more clearly my responses to external stimuli, so to speak. The goal of such essays (in the original sense of the word) is not to attain some arbitrary level of clarity of opinion, but to continue to explore and to record, through debate with myself and with others who (I hope!) will choose to comment on my posts, the evolution of my own thinking. It is to be hoped that such debates will serve not just to refine my thoughts but also to sharpen the implements that shape good thoughts—close reading, logic, analysis, and rhetoric.

Since this blog is meant to be a collection of my thoughts, I don't promise that there will be any common thread binding the various posts, or that all the posts will be interesting to everyone; after all, these are my own reflections and there is no a priori reason why they should be of interest to anyone but me. However, should any of my ramblings interest you or upset you or infuriate you, Gentle Reader, feel free to hammer away at the comments; I do promise to respond to and sustain engaging conversations through these posts and comments. Be forewarned that I have never considered the lack of a partner to be an obstacle to good conversation, and hence there may be cases of my commenting on my own posts in the scholastic fashion.

(As an aside, I'm quite surprised that I unconsciously chose to begin in this fashion, by attempting to sketch out a telos of sorts for this blog. As they used to say in classical India, prayojanam anuddiśya na mando 'pi pravartate ("even a fool doesn't proceed without pointing out the purpose [of a work]").)

Now that I've drawn classical India into this, I may as well proceed along the same lines. I've chosen to open my first blog post with a famous Sanskrit verse (in the upagīti meter, for those who care about things like chandaḥ) dedicated to Sarasvatī, the Goddess of Words. Seeing as this blog is supposed to be an intellectual endeavor, it's probably not a bad idea to get a few divinities on my side right from the start!

The invoking of divinities before beginning any major endeavor is, of course, a very old practice, and I'm pretty certain that virtually every book ever written in classical India or the Middle East began with an invocation to the divinity of the author's choice. (The only two exceptions that come to mind are the openings of the Diwans of Hafez and of Mirza Ghalib, and due to my ignorance I will say nothing further on the matter!) The verse above dedicated to Sarasvatī is the opening benediction of the Sāhitya-darpaṇa, a major text on Sanskrit poetics written by Viśvanātha, and a translation of it is the epigraph to the enjoyable Dropping the Bow, a translation of Sanskrit and Prakrit love poetry by Andrew Schelling. Word for word, the verse goes:

autumn-moon-beautiful-radiance'd in-the-consciousness she of-me of-words goddess |

having-carried-away darkness eternal meanings entire may-[s]he-illuminate ||

(Gotta love Sanskrit verse!)

Don't be surprised by the awkwardness of the literal English translation; the original is easier to understand despite its free word order, thanks to Sanskrit's extensive case system. The entire verse is a single, heavily scrambled sentence, whose subject is the very last word of the first line (devī) and whose verb is the very last word of the second line (prakāśayatu). The poetic weight falls on the very first word, a compound rather unwieldy in English but quite magical in the original. Acting as an attribute of the goddess, this compound, like most poetic Sanskrit compounds, can be parsed in slightly different ways, each one casting a slightly different light (no pun intended) on the meaning of the verse: "she whose radiance is as beautiful as the autumn moon", "she whose beautiful radiance is [like that of] the autumn moon", "she whose radiance is as beautiful as the autumn moon's". Immediately, the choice of verb stands out more brightly. Pretty, isn't it?

The elaborate attribute's real punch comes in the second line, thanks to another of Sanskrit poetry's strengths—homonymy. The word tamaḥ literally means "darkness" and is almost certainly cognate with the Russian тьма, but it is frequently used figuratively to mean "ignorance". The word artha has a multitude of meanings, including such things as "meaning", "desire", "object", "motive", but in the context of the verse it makes most sense to consider just two: "meaning" and "object". One interpretation of the verse is straightforward and follows directly from the grammar of the verse: "may the Goddess illuminate entire meanings, having carried away eternal ignorance." But what of the autumn moon evoked at the beginning of the verse? Why compare, of all things, the radiance of Sarasvatī to, of all things, the autumn moon? Well, the autumn moon's bright rays do destroy the (literal) darkness of the night, and they do cast light upon the forms of objects (and by doing so, they destroy the ignorance and misperceptions that cloud our consciousness).

Hmm, it seems the simile is more elaborate and more meaningful than it initially seemed! It's no longer simply a comparison of the goddess's radiance to that of the autumn moon, but includes an indirect comparison of the effects of the two sources of illumination, and perhaps, if we use some poetic license here, even an implicit comparison of the manner in which the moon and the goddess go about their respective jobs of illumination. The moon destroys darkness and illuminates objects effortlessly, merely through its presence in the night sky (let's ignore what we know of modern physics and astronomy and eclipses for now!); further, it does so without being limited by the number of objects it illuminates or by the number of people who benefit from its light. Maybe, just maybe, the verse suggests that the act of illuminating meaning is just as effortless, just as natural for Sarasvatī, and maybe she is as gracious in sharing her blessings as the moon is. (I daresay the poet would disagree that Sarasvatī's blessings can be obtained effortlessly, even without prayer, just as the moon illuminates objects for everyone! If that were the case, then literature would be plagued by a major free-rider problem.)

What seemed to be a routine benedictive verse has turned out to be a more complex beast after all. It's sorely tempting to see the "entire meaning" referred to in the verse as being a comment on the verse itself inserted by a too-smart poet testing his audience! Anyway, enough theorizing, and here's a fairly free translation of the verse (I'm trying to find a good way to use lines and spaces to reflect the multiple allusions that Sanskrit pulls off using grammar alone, and any comments / advice / critique would be immensely appreciated):

May that Goddess of Words,

whose beautiful radiance, like that of the autumn moon,

destroys eternal darkness,

illuminate objects completely

in my consciousness.

<UPDATE>

Imagine my surprise upon finding a reference in John D. Dunne's Foundations of Dharmakīrti's Philosophy to the verse fragment

I cited above! The verse is apparently verse 55 in the sambandhākṣepaparihāra section of Kumārila's Śloka-vārttikā, and reads:

prayojanam anuddiśya na mando 'pi pravartate |

evam eva pravṛttiś cec caitanyenāsya kiṃ bhavet ||

(footnote 72 on p. 48, Foundations of Dharmakīrti's Philosophy)

</UPDATE>