🐳 whale music with David Rothenberg + 2 poetry readings (including tonight!) 🐋
ESSAY NINETEEN: "UNDERWATER"
The call is always answered, even across incalculable distance.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
During my break from Drawing Animals and my life as an adjunct professor at NYU, I spent a month running new trails and roads along the Hudson River where I stayed with my family for the better part of December and January. I'd been reading Wintering by Katherine Mays, a book delivered to my apartment doorstep after winning a giveaway contest I forgot I entered. On my way out of the city for my time away, I stuffed the book in one of my overflowing bag.
I'd planned to use the time off to write, of course, and prepare a new season of guests for the podcast, and do a list of every other creative task I was convinced I needed to do to start the next academic semester off "right." But in reading Mays' memoir, I felt myself move settle into the sense of a fallow period. I stopped. I embraced the cold, the little bit of light left in each day. I put on my running shoes and ventured out into the icy wind. I let my cheeks puff with red and to go, and go, letting the wisdom of the Nordic countries she shared sink in:
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
I also went to the movies, alone, wintering in an oversized pleather seat with a smuggled can of seltzer. I saw The Whale, an absolutely beautiful story about the love of a father and daughter whose fraught relationship is healed over the act of writing, a story that echoed my own reconciliation with my own father who died at an age similar to the young girl in the film. He repeated throughout the film an essay she wrote when she was young recounting Moby Dick, the most famous whale story perhaps, rumored to be influenced, to an extent, by the murky mood of the Hudson and the author's life living near the river.
still from The Whale
When I returned to the city a few weeks ago and picked back up my life teaching and writing, I felt the things Mays promised in her book about embracing the winter: the song returns. It made me particularly excited to share my first conversation of Season 2 of Conversations with Animals with you: David Rothenberg.
photo from David Rothenberg's website
I first heard David sing and perform near the end of 2022 at a reading series in my neighborhood in Lower Manhattan.
photo of David Rothenberg
David Rothenberg has written and performed on the relationship between humanity and nature for many years. He is the author of Why Birds Sing, on making music with birds, also published in England, Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. It was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. His following book, Thousand Mile Song, re-released this month, is on making music with whales. It was turned into a film for French television.
Rothenberg has a podcast series called Soundwalker. His latest streamed concerts are on his Youtube channel. His 2020 releases include In the Wake of Memories, with Wassim Mukdad and Volker Lankow, and They Say Humans Exist, with Jacob Young and Sidiki Camara, named best jazz album of the year by Stereo+ Magazine in Norway. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, which has encouraged and supported all of his creative projects since 1992.
A recent article on Rothenberg’s cicada work appeared in the New York Times, along with an interactive feature on his whale music in National Geographic.
"I think most people around the planet live very close together with animals," Rothenberg shared. "We're really wrapped up in their lives. And now we're picky what animals we have with us."
Listen to the full episode of "Whale song with David Rothenberg" here!
READING LIST: WHALE MUSIC
"Whale song is an astonishing world of sound whose existence no one suspected before the 1960s. Its discovery has forced us to confront the possibility of alien intelligence—not in outer space but right here on earth. Thoughtful, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining, Whale Music uses the enigma of whale sounds to open up whales' underwater world of sonic mystery. In observing and talking with leading researchers from around the globe as they attempt to decipher undersea music, Rothenberg tells the story of scientists and musicians confronting an unknown as vast as the ocean itself. His search culminates in a grand attempt to make interspecies music by playing his clarinet with whales in their native habitats, from Russia to Canada to Hawaii.
This is a revised edition of Thousand Mile Song, originally published in 2008. The latest advances in cetacean science and interspecies communication have been incorporated into this new edition, along with added photographs and color whale scores."
I will be reading tonight with The Poetry Project at 8p.
And on March 19th at 8p as part of the launch of the print edition of Our Beautiful Reward is Reckoning’s brand-new special issue, edited by Catherine Rockwood, on the theme of bodily autonomy.
From Reckoning Press: "To celebrate Our Beautiful Reward‘s print release, we’re having a virtual launch party! Join us in March for readings by eight of our brilliant contributors and hear their fierce, furious, compelling, devastating work. The overturn of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. is an acceleration of repressive policies that limit rights to bodily self-determination all over the country. We see this in the deliberate erosion of access to abortion care, and in a recent surge in draconian bans on gender-affirming care for trans Americans. The same playbook is being tested the world over: from Italy to the UK to Afghanistan, authoritarian regimes exert brutal control over human bodies. It’s never been more important to seek out marginalized voices and new ideas on these issues. Join us and get an earful from the likes of luminaries Linda Cooper, Dyani Sabin, Juliana Roth, Julian K. Jarboe, Riley Tao, Marissa Lingen, Leah Bobet, and M.C. Benner-Dixon. We’ll talk a bit about actions we can take and organizations we can support resisting the erosion of the innate human rights to identity and bodily autonomy. Stick around and we’ll draw names and give away copies of Reckoning and Our Beauti'ful Reward, as well as prizes including Reckoning pins and t-shirts.