- Orde&chaos
- 27 mrt
- 4 minuten om te lezen
We nemen als mens slechts beperkt waar. Dat betekent dat er tal van werkelijkheden zijn waar we geen weet van hebben en die onze pet te boven gaan. Wat wij zien en ontdekken is interessant maar ik denk dat het belangrijk is om ook rekening te houden met hetgeen we niet waarnemen. Wat is het perspectief van andere levende wezens? Wat zien zij wat wij niet zien?
Ik wil graag een stukje met jullie delen uit het boek “Wild” van Jay Griffiths. Tijdens het lezen van haar verhaal, kan je luisteren naar the Song of Whales:
"The call of the finback whale carries over twelve hundred miles underwater and it is suggested that it could carry as far as twenty-five thousand miles-the circumference of the earth. There are in effect “channels” of sound formed by thermoclines, where the speed of sound is at a minimum and where sound tends to remain. Within such a “seep sound channel” low-frequency sound waves can travel hundreds or thousands of miles before dissipating. Whales, particularly finbacks, use this channel, broadcasting their mysterious music across the world.
Dolphins - blipping, clicking, chirping, rattling and barking - may be able to communicate their thoughts more precisely than we know. In company of humans, a dolphin will alter the frequencies of it’s voice, concentrating on the sound range humans can hear and, says Heathcote Williams, in his breathtaking hymn to cetaceans, they try to imitate the sound of human speech. They “listen” to one another’s bodies as well as their calls, to know how another dolphin feels. They are aware of menstrual cycles in women. They lament and express frustration and joy. They live in an oceanic synaesthesia where emotion is almost tangible, where movement is audible and song is felt, electric signals can be heard and dolphins can “see” in sound.
The supposed “silence” of the seas is a human untruth, told and believed because we can be so deaf to it’s music.
The calls of dolphins and whales, their squeaks and mews and deep moans, fill a range of sound far beyond the reach of human ears. If ultraviolet rays are light rays known to exist but invisible to the human eye, then this dolphin song is ultraviolet sound. Unfathomable to us. It is deep- altus- farther than the fathom of out hearing, and it is high- altus- beyond the topmost reach of our ears. The “infrared” mowings too low, the “ultraviolet” whistling too high.
The whales were there before us. We do not speak their language and should not presume that their messages are frivolous or resemble “infant babbling,” as one commentator alleged, which is like announcing that whale song has no meaning because the whales do not speak proper seventeenth century Castilian.
Pods of whales sing, jamming away for a lifetime, singing the truest blues, the mind of the ocean sung in ultramarine jazz, a true rhapsody in blue, in turquoise, a rhapsody in azure.
The seas are never silent, for though the surface may be calm, its wild true music is almost entirely expressed below. The sea’s surface-songs, the roars of the wind and breakers, are the least interesting of its sounds. For centuries, people have heard the crashes at the surface but missed the music of the underwater, rather like going to a concert and only listening to the coughs in the audience, the scrape of the chairs as the musicians sit down, the dull thuds and clicks as the orchestra unpacks its instruments. And missing the Mahler.
We have for too long ascribed meaninglessness to things whose meaning eludes us and there is a whole world of acoustics, beyond our hearing and beyond our understanding but not beyond our grasp of injure, for modernity, deaf to the sea’s music, has imposed a cacophony.
Mid-frequency sonar is known to cause mass beachings.
British, American and other NATO members are testing a submarine-detection system that employs Low Frequency Active Sonar, which reaches 240 decibels. They aim to use it across 80 per cent of the oceans within a few years. Even when the sonar’s source is hundreds of miles away, LFAS changes the song pattern of the whale; the tremolos and whirrings, skirling, chuckling and gyres of sound are twisted. Since they sing to one another for fun, for messages, for suggestive remarks in a croon, or information about food in a zipping ping, the effect on their breeding and socializing is not known- cannot be known-to us. We the idiot-thunderers are, in the words of Heathcote Williams parasites
Who view the whale only as an industrial resource,
And eat through their musical society like deaf maggots.
Perhaps, if we listened, we would be able to hear some of the blue whale’s anthems basso profound, lowing across miles and miles, now mewing, now moaning, a deep requiem for the singing oceans it used to know. Perhaps we would hear a cetacean Schumann driven mad, humming tunelessly to himself, a whale with eardrums exploded, a deaf Beethoven roaring with frustration. A Debussy moaning in pain, forced to listen to pneumatic drills and jackhammers at twenty times their volume.
Bernie Krause, advocate of wild soundscapes, has spent years recording the “biophony” of the world. In 1968, he comments, he could record fifteen hours of nature’s sound and about one hour would be free of human mechanical noice. By 2001, it took nearly two thousand hours of recording to obtain one hour of natural sound. The main cause is habitat loss and the second cause is the increase of human mechanical noise.
Where a wild soundscape is damaged by engine noise, animals are emotionally affected: in one study a biologist from Montana State University showed that stress enzyme levels in elks and wolves rose and fell in direct correlation with the rise and fall of levels of noise from snowmobiles.
Luther Standing Bear described the childhood of the Lakota peoples in the 1870’s, saying that children were taught “to listen intently when all seemingly was quiet. “ We learned that silences as well as sounds are significant in the forest and how to listen to the silences.
The Cree Indian people learn how to listen to the environment, to the wind, to the rocks. “We learn how to listen to everything”. Barry Lopez recalls asking a man in Anaktuvuk Pass what he did when he visited a new place. The answer: “I listen.”
(Stukje uit het boek “Wild” van Jay Griffiths)
