Thanks so much, Tyler.
Thanks everybody for being here.
Ander, thanks for the awesome broadsides.
Beautiful, just love them.
So I'm going to read a few pieces
from this new collection.
I'm going to start out in a pretty dark place,
but I think if you're talking about the situation of animals
on the planet, if you don't go somewhere dark,
you got your eyes closed these days.
But we'll come out on the other side
with a broader range of emotions touched this evening, I hope.
I've just come down from Atlantic Canada.
I thought I'd read this piece about a finback whale.
It'll connect-- in a while--
with Susan's really interesting work with the market.
"The Finback." The finback whale washed ashore
on the blond sand at Herring Cove.
The research team used knives and hammers to cut him apart--
a perfect, black, dorsal fin lay here on the beach.
A slab of black skin lined with fat lay there.
A pile of dim intestines rested atop a segment
of severed spine.
The flesh was meat red, a red so deep it seemed black red.
Long slices of flesh revealed three inches of white blubber,
like a thick quilt between the skin and muscle.
The animal's decomposition had stained
the air all along the beach.
Some of us who had come to witness the spectacle
covered our mouths and noses with sweater sleeves,
or lifted sweatshirts to turn them into masks.
The park rangers quietly kept the crowd
of 20, 30 people at a distance while the team
climbed on the carcass, their polyvinyl rain
suits smeared with blood from feet to shoulders.
One man kneeled on a bloody bench of meat
to saw loose some hunk of the animal.
The dense, white organ of its inner ear
that keeps the whale's balance.
One woman labored to pull her hacksaw
through a vertebral gap.
They were assisted by a backhoe, ropes,
and chains so that the tonnage they pulled apart piece
by piece seemed as light as paper maché.
One man carried a meat hook hanging from his hand
as he stood watching, another man
leaned toward the closed eye and eyeball bigger
than the man's fist.
Difficult to see there was an eyeball there
between the dull soft folds of gray flesh.
The man inserted a small disposable syringe
to draw a sample of the vitreous humor.
The whale had been spotted offshore two days earlier,
already dead, floating, beginning to break apart
from decay, its tongue protruded grotesquely
like a gigantic balloon wider in circumference
than the whale's body.
It looked unnatural, that billow of flesh
puffed up with gas from the whale's decaying.
It was horrible, and everyone wanted to see it.
The whale's blood was too far gone
to further the science of its death,
but evidence could still be drawn
from the fluid in the eyeball.
Even this procedure may have failed,
as the syringe man shook his head,
discouraged after pulling out the needle.
He did not bother to sheath the needle
and it seemed that even here, in the sealed
globe of the Leviathan's eye, the process of disintegration
had progressed too far for much to be learned
about how the animal had died.
The stink was horrible.
It coated a person's nostrils and throat.
The smell of life and death mingled all at once.
Acrid, rank, and iron-rich, undeniable.
The research team, four hours into their labor of necropsy
were habituated to the stench.
Not one covered her mouth or nose.
Not one gasped for breath or turned away.
Though they bent to their work inches away
from the putrefaction.
The spectacle made me think of the old whaling days.
The hard labor of men at sea harvesting whales and rendering
blubber--
the whaling industry's liquid gold,
sold to make soap, shampoo, lipstick, paint, and lamp oil.
Whale oil made some men wealthy.
Banknotes from the 1850's were drawn on the whaling
bank, or the merchants bank.
The bills bearing the engraved image of a sperm whale.
Whaling made some men free.
An escaped slave could not be arrested from a whale ship.
Whaling made some men citizens.
The industry brought immigrants from the Azores,
who knew the sea and boats.
They landed in New Bedford and never went home.
After a maniacal century or two for the Dutch, English,
and French, the Americans took dominance in the trade.
Whale ships dotted the Pacific like whitecaps,
as men hunted the diminishing stock, then moved
north for bow heads and their baleen,
harvested as a plastic material before plastics,
for corset and collar stays, for umbrella ribs.
Thinking like this made me feel the comfort
that the animals brought to people through those products.
Comfort welcome in their dark homes,
at a time when no one could have known that such abundance would
cease.
Endangerment was not a threat--
was a threat no one had seen.
Am I too kind?
Had people not already seen the slaughter of the bison herds,
pelts piled up like raked autumn leaves?
Still, the hardship and heroism can make one blind to victims,
can make one think of those difficult years
at sea, three to four years at a stretch,
searching the oceans for the 20 or so whales
a ship would capture and render into oil before sailing home.
Work done by hand, and oar, and blade, the reek, and blood,
and grease coating everything.
The brutality taken on with courage and prayer.
The finback's upper jaw was released from the body,
and the backhoe hoisted it and swung it
to a clean, dry stretch of sand.
The baleen shone like a halo-- a partial halo, at least,
rimming the upper jaw.
Dark cuticle grew from the gums and splintered
into golden bristles that took the place of teeth.
Monstrous gulps of seawater had been
squeezed through the bristles.
At least a ton of minuscule krill and copepods
filtering into the finback's great belly every day.
Details whispered up from the ranger, or the looker-on.
The whale was a juvenile, maybe five or six years old,
about 40 feet long.
No visible signs of injury, though for an animal
that might live 90 to 100 years, such an early death
raised questions.
Its endangered status makes every loss
a cause for concern and investigation.
Quietness of the scene, the intensity of the team's focus
while handling the dead whale was a form of devotion,
and iteration of the archaic human
wish to let no death go unmarked.
The animal was sanctified by human touch and caring,
though those words were not likely to be
noted in the research protocol.
Science has a method for feeling its way through the world's
wounds and trauma.
And why had we come?
All of us in town that day who had
been planning to take a walk, or have a picnic,
the gardeners who planned to till the dirt,
and the writers who planned to face their desks, why had we
come?
Those of us who heard the news on the radio,
or from a neighbor, and wanted to see the horrible whale?
Why did parents bring their children,
or the old man wearing his veteran's colors
who could not walk the distance from parking lot
to stranding site, why did he stand at a distance
and ask passers-by for details?
What are they using to cut that thing apart?
Surely, we all wanted to see the thing up close,
to see it whole.
An animal like that we're lucky ever
to glimpse as it passes a whale watch boat
and turns its massive contemplative
eye upon our vessel, then steaming forward and down,
flukes flicking up as it dives.
The finback is as sleek as a greyhound,
elegant as a little black dress, and swift as a cormorant.
For two weeks, I've been writing about animals
in my Provincetown studio.
Why have I been writing so many dark stories?
I asked myself, when I wanted to write about love?
I've written about murdering a rat,
and harvesting a pig, about anthropogenic Pleistocene
extinctions, and the surplus killing
behavior of spotted hyenas.
Hardly the stuff of the Friends of Heart animal gift
store I've walked past on Commercial
Street with its doggy pillows and kitty
throws, bellies up ceramic chihuahuas
wearing rhinestone collars, and tabbies
sprouting angelic wings, each bit
of cloying kitsch celebrating the sweetness that animals
provide in people's homes.
But I avoided all the salt water taffy,
heading without clear purpose into the sorrowful,
and bitter, and now down into rank purification.
Perhaps, I'm like the drunk who needs
to hit bottom before turning the trajectory from freefall
to recovery.
Perhaps I'm like the moviegoer who
likes to watch the apocalypse happen again
and again, car after car, city after city,
overturned and destroyed, preparing the ground
for the happy ending of symphonic love.
Perhaps I want to pay respect to the dead.
To attend the viewing of the corpse,
a practice that my pragmatic and agnostic relatives
have long abandoned for the sake of
tidy and practical cremation.
Perhaps something in me knows that if I
can't stand the sight of what disgusts me,
I haven't the strength to love anything
in this difficult world.
Perhaps I have an appetite for suffering.
Something in me that likes to be tested by empathy.
"It is impossible to know war," writes Chris Hedges
in a New York Times Book Review, "if you do not
stand with the mass of the powerless caught in its maw."
This finback is no victim of war,
unless I call the undeclared and unremitting assault on Earth's
bounty a form of war.
By this logic, it's fair to claim
that for centuries, our ancestors waged war
against cetaceans in order to gain their oil.
And that war, like the recent ones
fought in Iraq and elsewhere, renders certain merchants
wealthy, while the mass of citizens living in war zones
suffer nothing but destruction and chaos.
Imagine, a whale that has lived 100 years.
It carries a body of experience that includes assault
by spears, carnage of its clan members, the terror of battle,
the bloody silt of death drifting slowly
down from the water's surface, as sunlight will do underwater,
making a ghostly light that dissipates as it reaches deeper
into the ocean's enormity.
Sometimes, a survivor carries the assault weapon
like a combat veteran with shrapnel lodged in his neck.
Late in the 1800s, innovators in the trade
developed an explosive device whalers
fitted to the tip of a harpoon.
100 years later, a bowhead whale carcass
was found with this device, absorbed in its flesh,
like a tree that swallows a bullet, or kink of barbed wire,
as it grows.
I recently dreamed of a woman who
was holding a cougar, a cougar kitten in her arms,
its head resting beside her cheek,
as a mother would carry and comfort a human baby
with unbridled tenderness.
She was a no-nonsense woman with close cropped hair and khaki
clothes, the kind of woman who might show up on television
to introduce zoo animals to a population starving
for animal beauty.
In the dream, a group of friends or colleagues were in the room,
some were surprised to see a cougar in their midst.
Another said, "Oh, yes.
They walk through this yard all the time."
Another replied, "Well, sure.
But you know, they're endangered."
The woman cuddling the cougar said,
"I don't think I will miss them when they were gone."
The dissonance between her actions and her words
woke me from the dream.
I wasn't angry at her, and I did not
judge her for the statement.
I knew her life was full of many concerns that took precedence
over imagining such a loss and holding it close.
The cheetahs are gone from North America.
The jaguars are nearly gone, except in Mexico.
The American Lions are gone.
And while cougars are thriving in some regions of the United
States, their increasing interaction
with human populations makes them increasingly vulnerable.
The whales still have the seas and the pleasure
of their graceful rising and diving
in the continual embrace of water.
But their numbers are diminished.
Their habitat is defiled.
Their prey is dwindling, and some of their own species
are going, and will not return.
Those that remain glide through an impoverished homeland.
Animals with brains inclined, as with elephants
and human beings, toward community.
How quiet the deep ocean must have grown for the whales
since the time of their greatest abundance.
Animals who sent sonic messages hundreds of miles
through the deep to connect with their kind.
How those cetacean messages meet one another,
how they register in the bodies of whales
as music registers in our bodies is a mystery and a marvel.
Do they feel a sense of intangible nostalgia
for a past they intuit was somehow richer
than the present they know?
What does desire feel like in a cetacean body?
Arousal quickening out of nowhere,
as their flesh glides down through cathedrals
of light and shadow into the solemn depths.