rip king

Whales have been evolving for fifty million years. To our one million. A sperm whale’s brain is seven times the size of mine. It is more complex in a number of ways. I have What If fantasies: what if the catalyst or the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale? They have this incredible mental apparatus and no one has the least notion what they do with it. Lilly says that the most logical supposition, based on physiological and ecological evidence, is that they contemplate the universe. Suppose God came back from wherever it is he’s been and asked us smilingly if we’d figured it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, “By the way, where are the whales?” And we said: “Well, we uh…” And he said “…yes?” And we said: “Well. We used some of them for axle-grease and fertilizer and the rest of them we fed to the dogs.”