On Whales and Language
Newly pregnant for the first time, I was overcome by nausea. Taking advice from friends, I carried sucking candies around in my bag so that I would be ready when the feeling struck. The candies did nothing and soon the sight of the bag itself became intolerable. I ventured out less. Spending most of my time on the couch, I started looking through a coffee-table book, Among Giants: A Life with Whales. This was not my typical reading material, but I wasn’t really capable of reading. Pictures of the huge creatures buoyed by their surrounding medium were deeply comforting. In one photo, a humpback calf nuzzled alongside its mother’s flank. In another, a pod of minkes swam along, bodies aligned and evenly spaced in the blue water. The word “pod” itself implies the enclosure of the whole family group within a protective surrounding. I think I wanted to feel my own pregnancy and role as mother — which was still a looming question or unformed image — enclosed in such a surrounding. I needed a pod. As it turned out, I also needed an anti-nausea medication.
When my sister was pregnant with her second child, I took my six-year old son and four-year old daughter to Los Angeles to visit. It was no surprise that she wanted to go whale watching. We embarked from Long Beach on a windy day, the small boat chugging up and down the swells. My brother-in-law, ashen and silent, sat hugging his daughter in one arm and my son in the other. After quite a while of this, some passengers took to lying on the benches, hands over their faces. An expert at managing a queasy sensation, I spotted objects in the distance. My sister preferred to stand, knees bent to get under the belly. She seemed mostly amused, mostly patient. My daughter stood face into the wind for the whole voyage. We sighted dolphins and sea lions but not any whales before it was decided that we turn around.
But whales were there, somewhere below or at a distance. With enormous bodies that travel under their own power twice yearly from the Arctic to Mexico, the whales’ sense of “near” and “far” must be unique. The filmmaker Tom Mustill has said that while swimming above a singing whale, the vibrations of its song caused his whole body to ring “like a bell.” He asks, is this what it is like to be an infant inside its mother, feeling the sounds of the world passing through her body? In the presence of whales we become mothers; we return to infancy. It is their overpowering hugeness, their gentleness, their intelligence — also their mammalian nature, cast into relief by their aqueous surrounding. “They bear live young,” we learn at school. They nurse their babies — as if to remember this a female is called a “cow.” As modern, educated people, we make a point of acknowledging that whales are not fish. But are they birds? In their relationship to the seafloor, which ascends in mountains higher than any on land, their movement resembles flight.
In How to Speak Whale, Mustill asks us to set aside our claims for the superiority of the human mind, believed since ancient times to be uniquely capable of rational thought, in order to consider the possibility that whales (and other animals) have language. He points out that in scientific circles, where anthropomorphism is rigorously banned, the word “language” is never used, but only “animal communication system.” Sperm whales communicate in sets of clicks and gaps called “codas” which, he says, “are thought to be the glue that holds their cooperative lives together—vital in keeping close, hunting, navigating, and protecting one another.” I am struck by this vision of language enabling cooperation and how much it differs from the theories of language that I encountered in literary studies, in which the arbitrary signifier was the first principle against a backdrop of “no poetry after Auschwitz.” In the story of Babel, the plurality of languages is understood as a curse that is closely related to humans’ need to dominate one another to the point of murder. In attempts at imperial domination, the invading power makes the colonized culture’s language illegal, as the English did in Ireland and the Japanese in Korea, or brings the speakers to silence through near-extermination, as in the United States.
The superiority of the human mind, as evidenced in its unique possession of language, has since ancient times justified humans to treat animals as property, their bodies as raw material. In the modern era, the superiority of the scientific mind has been asserted through the banishing of simplicity, sentiment, and the childlike from the domain of the intellect. Historically and also persistently, women have been denied education specifically in order to keep them fit company for children. Mustill points out that one outcome of the deeply entrenched scientific obligation to distinguish its sphere from domesticity is that scientists who study animal communication are incapable of using their own pets as evidence.
To cite a piece of evidence from my own domestic sphere, in Mary Poppins, the books by P. L. Travers, infants before they learn to speak are able to communicate with animals, but also with the sun. In these stories, the inauguration into verbal language is anticipated by babies as a bitter loss. I read Mary Poppins to my daughter before she goes to sleep at night, the length of her body snuggled into mine, because my mother read it to me and her mother to her. (In fact, my mother’s insistence that we all must read it led me to avoid this work for years, until my daughter fell in love with it.) My son, now eleven, sometimes has trouble sleeping. I embrace his recumbent pre-teen body and, as a joke, tell him to count sheep. One sheep. Two sheep. Shhhh. Shhhh. When he had been in the womb for only a few months, I was shown a photo of his face and told that this somber alien was the resident in me. After he came out, after he lay on my chest and I looked into his dark, watchful eyes, the first thing we said to him was “shhhh, shhhh.” His father held his swaddled body and bowed over it, bobbing up and down, recreating vocally the sound of my rushing blood.
Let us imagine for a moment that simplicity of content might not automatically rule out a communication system as language. Imagine creatures who experience grief — hence also love — who protect one another, who travel together across great distances and many years. Who play occasionally and also most of the time have to labor in order to survive. Who are driven to survive — as we are — in community and who must struggle and cooperate in order to do this. Community, on the one hand, and the glue that holds it together: communication, language.
In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin imagined the world’s different languages are like the shards of a broken vessel. In his account, translation participates in fitting the pieces back together. When I was a child, if a bowl was ever broken, my dad would gather the curving pieces, squeeze a line of glue around their edges, carefully fit them together, then bind them with rubber bands until the glue had dried. This bowl could not be used for soup but it had other uses. It is significant in Benjamin’s image that the pieces do not become each other. The dissimilar languages fit together to comprise a whole. It is a whole with a hole, a whole that holds. After two strokes, my dad is now largely unable to talk, but he continues to carve sculptures out of wood and stone. There are many exchanges in which all that can be conveyed is “yes” or “no.” He tries to tell me something that happened earlier in the day. “The ma-, the ma-, the ma-, what am I trying to say?” At which point I start filling it in. “Was it someone you saw at the market?” He expresses frustration and we express patience: I am still with you.
Benjamin theorized that although languages struggle to exclude one another, there is an “innermost kinship of languages.” In his words, “languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.” The translation of a sentence from one language into another was one of the early goals of computers. Today, neural network machine translation operates by encoding languages into vector maps (is this “what they want to express”?) and finding congruency between areas in the maps. The maps occupy more than three dimensions so they cannot be pictured, but presumably, the congruency is often partial. As Mustill reports, the technology behind Google Translate will now be applied to mapping whale language, in the form of project CETI, which will focus on 25 families of sperm whales that regularly converge at a reef to the north of the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, the translation industry considers DEEPL (and not Google Translate) to be the most accurate machine translator. In other words, Google Translate’s rendering of sperm whale language, while astonishing, may be rather clunky. At the cutting edge of computer science, animal behavior, and linguistics, project CETI does not (yet) undertake to analyze the songs of humpback whales, which have the widest vocal range of any creature, or the calls of blue or fin whales, which can traverse entire oceans.
Sperm whales — also dolphins — communicate with clicks, which they also use for echolocation, to gauge the size, position, and other properties of objects, whereby their voice and hearing become like a combination of sight and touch. Ed Yong in An Immense World reports that dolphins can discern the shape of objects, but also their material, by echolocation, even when the objects are buried in sand. He cites the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who used the word Umwelt (literally, “environment”) to refer to the world an animal experiences through its specific sensory faculties. A human’s five senses, and the ranges of these senses, by no means convey “the whole picture.” As Yong demonstrates, the world presents itself quite differently to creatures who see ultraviolet light, hear subsonic tones, or feel the tug of magnetic fields. Hence, in order to understand whale language, it will be necessary first to understand whale context. Through microphones on the seafloor and cameras mounted on “soft robotic fish,” project CETI will analyze sperm whale communication within the scenarios in which it is produced. Biologist David Gruber, describing the project in his TED talk, says that sperm whale communication does not sound like “harmonious song” but more like “digital data transfer.” (In fact, sperm whale clicks can be thunderously loud, up to 250 decibels). Computing power will allow gathering “tens of thousands” of codas and annotating them with respect to the behavioral situations in which they are produced. A specific focus will be placed on interactions between mothers and calves, hence, on language coming into formation. During his talk, filmed in his living room during the pandemic, Gruber shows a video of a mother whale spiral-rolling her body against her child’s body as if expressing “this is my whole self” through the medium of touch.
The semiotician Thomas Sebeok defines communication as the basic function of life, beginning with information transfer on the cellular level, to the function of a body’s organs, as in the immune system or the brain’s neurons, to communication between individuals. Among all animals including humans, “the default mode of communication” is nonverbal. All living beings create semiotic maps that determine their reality. Indexical signs, which point out what is here in the present, and iconic signs, in which the sign resembles what it stands for, are shared between humans and animals. In the woods on a path strewn with sticks, when I say to my dog “get your stick” and point to a specific one, he takes it — this is an indexical sign. Having tied him up while I’m in the grocery store, when I come back out, he trots his front paws up and down to signify “now we can go” — this is an iconic sign. While I stand at the kitchen counter preparing dinner, he smacks his jaws lightly to signify that he would like a bite of what I am cooking: “yum.” This approaches a verbal iconic sign.
Sebeok demonstrates convincingly that iconic signification is shared with insects and indexical signification, with bacteria. There is an evolution of signification from iconic signs to symbols, that is, to words or nonverbal signs that relate to what they signify through convention. This evolution occurs through the development of life on earth as well as in child development. Thus we start to talk to our babies by naming animals by the sounds they make. We point to a dog and say “woof-woof.” In this way they come to understand that the sound I am making with my mouth refers to the animal that makes the same sound, and more generally, that the sounds we make refer to specific things. When my niece was first being fed at the table, if she wanted more food she would say, “I yum some.” Some amount of iconic signification persists in mature verbal communication, to the fascination of poets and the disdain of serious scholars. Sebeok goes further: “iconic signs suffuse humanity’s communication codes, verbal no less than nonverbal.” To put this in simpler terms, we are constantly communicating with our bodies, and making signs that in some way resemble what they signify. According to Sebeok, among all creatures, nearness of bodies in physical space represents closeness of relationship.
To understand what an animal’s experience might be like requires an act of creative empathy. One must imagine the animal’s supra-human capacities along with its simple motivations. In order to communicate meaningfully with animals, we have to set aside the fantasy in which they become “just like” us. At the same time, we have to humble ourselves in acknowledging the simplicity of our own most important motivations. The question of animal language is a question of what meaning is significant. Is it possible that as a species we suffer from excess meaning? We talk a lot. Of all the words spoken, what do we remember? With all our words, what do we do?
I visited my sister after my forty-fifth birthday. It was my first trip to LA alone since my son had been born. Her daughters, four and seven, were sick with coughs and it rained torrentially, so that in spite of my attempt to have a weekend “about us” we mostly stayed in the house and took care of kids. Before my sister came down with the cough herself, we managed to get away for a shopping trip in the hip neighborhood where she had lived when she was single. We bought earrings and tried to go out for lunch, but the line was too long outside the restaurant — Angelinos huddled in the entryway clutching their cell phones. So we pursued our fallback plan: we sat in the car, ate leftovers from the day before, and as the rain pounded on my dad’s old Accord, we talked on about our friends, their families, the long stories we have continued unfolding for each other over the years.