Whale Song

Whale Song is a slim volume that offers enormous reading pleasure. This book isn't so much a straight natural history about whale song or whales as it is a thoughtful and playful exploration about what human fascination with cetaceans reveals about humans. 

The 1970 release of the LP Songs of the Humpback Whale signaled an attitudinal shift about the environment. Whales were no longer animals made to be hunted to line our corsets and fill our oil lanterns; they were now majestic creatures that, like us, vocalized, communicated, and felt deeply—or so their plaintive sounds suggested to us. However, as Grebowicz points out, "the antiwhaling movement and the subsequent growth of a culture of caring about whales was never just about the welfare of whales."

Our acknowledgment of cetacean intelligence certainly dovetailed with our Cold War–era imaginings about alien intelligence, and indeed Songs of the Humpback Whale was included in the space ship Voyager's Golden Record, the 1977 assemblage of human culture meant to explain ourselves to other intelligent life. Closer the present day, the viral social media phenomenon of 52 Blue, the whale vocalizing at frequencies beyond what any potential mates can hear, says more about our breakdown of community and intimacy, our own loneliness in the social media era, than it does about the actual whale's supposed inability to seduce a lady love.

We'd do well to consider other aspects of the context of our fascination with whales and dolphins, and more generally what our crazed consumption of cute animal videos via the emotional wasteland of social media says about us. Grebowicz reveals how the way we frame our research about cetaceans—our emphasis on and valuation of their curiosity and charisma—reflects our own impoverishment in these areas. 

Grebowicz also has fascinating things to say about language versus communication, about historical attempts of interspecies communication (including the famous human Margaret Howe Lovatt and dolphin Peter cohabitation experiment), about music versus sound (I confess she lost me a bit here with the metaphysics), and about the dangers of conceiving our oceans as empty/blank space beyond the reach by human activity or agency. I love how she compared the physical pollution of the ocean, the toxic buildup that never goes away, to "language garbage" on the internet and the vast and unwieldy digital archives growing like a cancer as we speak (this review being no exception!).

I found this short but wide-ranging book deeply refreshing, thought provoking, and intellectually engaging. If this volume is any indication of the quality and content of the other volumes in the Object Lessons series, I'm very excited to read them. Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the opportunity to read a digital ARC of this book. Be aware that material quoted here might differ in the final, finished copy of the book.

A simply enchanting view of the world of whales. Whale Song is a fascinating lesson in communication, intent and purpose and I will be recommending it to lots of my friends!

Despite its diminutive size, and relatively breezy beginning, Grebowicz's Whale Song is rich in complex, thought-provoking ideas, some of which may require a second or slower read to be grasped in their entirety. Much like a whale, Grebowicz's brain is a formidable beast capable of travelling vast distances, finding connections, among other things, between whale song and the Voyager probe, between the way humans think about the ocean and the way we think about space, and between the information overload and the oceanic noise pollution plaguing modern humans and whales, respectively. She makes pop culture references that go from Key and Peele to the 1997 film Contact to the sci fi novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. She even turns her attention to fuzzy animal videos and nature documentaries, which, in her view, accidentally deepen the divide between humans and nature (or, more precisely, create the illusion of such a divide), and thus paradoxically indirectly exacerbate environmental degradation. Things get bleaker and bleaker as the book progresses, with little in the way of optimism or proposals for how to be better beings. And perhaps it is the most intellectually honest thing, not to offer any hint at hope, especially after you've just critiqued the very things most likely to make people excited and hopeful about our relationship with other creatures--the "gee whiz" attempts at talking with dolphins, cat videos, my beloved wildlife documentaries, even Jacques Cousteau. In conclusion--whale song is a cerebral, depressing, but also stimulating, and Grebowicz's intellectual prowess is absolutely thrilling.