Never Forget…….
Day 99 10/2/13: Ten Terrible Shark Jokes
Who knew there was such a genre?
Shark Jokes for the erudite:
Q: What was the shark;s favorite James Joyce novel
A: FINnegan’s Wake
Q: Who was the shark’s favorite Norwegian painter?
A: Edvard Munch!
Q: Who was the shark’s favorite 20th century art figure?
A: Marcel DuChomp
Here’s one for the scientific crowd:
Q: What do shark trees consist of?
A: Elasmobranches!
Film geeks might like these:
One of several versions of the painting “The Scream”. The National Gallery, Oslo, Norway. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)ally stupid:
Q: What is a sharks favorite Dustin Hoffman film?
A: Midnight Caudal
Q: Who is the shark communitys favorite 1950s film actress?
A: Dorsal Day
One for the playground:
Q: What is a sharks favorite kinda sandwich
A: Peanut butter and jellyfish!
Just stupid enough for me:
Q: Why aren’t there any shark puppeteers?
A: They have no hands!!
Q: Why did the mommy shark and daddy shark get divorced?
A: They no longer loved each other.
Q: What was the shark jazz musician’s favorite illegal substance?
A: Reefer!
Day 98 10/1/13: 10,000 Walrus
One of the many dire inevitabilities of the climate crisis, so the 
experts tell us, will be an increase in refugees–probably from the world’s poorest countries—which will be hardest hit by rising seas and soaring temperatures caused by the world’s most developed and prosperous nations.
But the refugee situation is already well underway. Consider the thousands of walrus that have come ashore in Alaska, no longer able to use the summer sea ice as a place to give birth or as a diving platform to hunt for food.
I feel guilty, ineffectual and ashamed to be human. But I am human. It’s inescapable.
So I try to justify my existence. I go round and round in circles. I show these pictures to students:
Look, look! (the urgency of the first grade primer)
Don’t be paralyzed, I say (although I feel paralyzed.)
Don’t give in to despair (even though I often give in to despair)
You can do something ( I believe this)
It’s not too late (part of me fears that it is)
The whole lecture is really some inner pep talk. As I warn them about graphic images, I can barely contain my own dread, even at the most familiar documentaries and exposes. As I rally students to change the world, I tell myself: At least don’t shut your eyes. At the very least, keep going.
Whale Shark Steals Lunch
Day 97 9/30/13: Thinking Like An Animal
Nearly busted with pride when a student who’d done the extra credit assignment on “Blackfish” told me she was going to a protest at SeaWorld in October. She felt a little cautious. “My friends said people get arrested there.” I reassured her about not ending up in the slammer, but I hope she doesn’t get turned off by any weirdos. Last year, another young attractive student of mine attended her first “Fur-Free Friday” in Beverly Hills. She had a great time, aside from “this old creepy vegan guy” hitting on her. Gross.
All the day’s teaching blurs into one extended conversation on animal consciousness with a few diversions into fragments and run-ons. We discussed a great essay called “Fear in the Shape of a Fish” about, among many other things, shark attacks in Hawaii and the clash between the native people for whom the shark represents an ancestor spirit and the hired shark hunters. The writer (forgot her name, the book is in the car) investigates her own “intellectual sympathy” with the sharks as well as her fear, which she ultimately transcends without ever sacrificing her awe at the mystery of these fish, and the impossibility of any shaman, hunter or scientist of ever really knowing their true nature.
Presentation Mindmap: Networked Consciousness (Photo credit: inju)
In another class, in another school, taught an essay about animal consciousness called “Cats, Bats, Crickets and Chaos” by Lewis Thomas. I asked the class to meditate to appreciate the “wisdom of emptiness” that Lewis discusses–the no-thought-enlightenment that humans can hardly ever attain and animals probably achieve just by being.
One shy, smart kid in the corner totally got it: “I went into a trance,” he said. For many of them five minutes of stillness was unbearable, they laughed or didn’t even close their eyes. I grew impatient and found myself scolding students for saying things like “I can only meditate in the mountains or at the beach.”
The more I lectured them (in reality only a minute or two), the more coarse and human I became. Gone was the fleeting bliss of no thought, my tenuous link to animal consciousness. I felt as alienated from the reality of nature as the wizened vegan trying to coax the lovely college girl into bed by appealing to her compassion for helpless animals. Gross.
Manannan mac Lir
Day 96: 9/29/13: Between Breaths
Back to the pool today to review some safety procedures after last week’s debacle at sea.
Thoughts I had while trying to achieve neutral buoyancy at the bottom:
1. Tried to remember the name of the guru who said, “My religion is breath.”
2. Yoko and John’s fabled first encounter at the Indica Gallery in 1966: She handed him a card that said “Breathe.”
3. What my brother told me about coming home from a recent road trip to Vermont with a bushel of sweet “wild apples.” The beauty of those two words together healed something in me.
4. How the peace one feels underwater is a kind of addictive silence, like the silence of meditation. So many kinds of silences, far more than there are kinds of apples.
5. What a strange honor it is to be with someone while they take their last breath, their last taste of the world.
6. My father and I used to race our horses through an apple orchard. The horses had white apple foam on their lips. At a certain point, I crossed some invisible, unspoken line and he stopped letting me win each race.
7. The fundamental law of diving and of life: don’t hold your breath.
8. The curved forms of the free divers that swim with sharks. They know how to move so as not to appear threatening. Their bodies are lithe, beautiful. They are seeking, it seems to me, some impossible form of communion.
9. Manannan mac Lir is an Irish sea deity. He is a clown, a beggar, and a psychopomp who guides souls to the underworld. He’s associated with the Isles of Apple Trees in the next world. In a painting I saw once Manannan mac Lir took the form of a breaking wave of horses. I remember the fury of the foam.
10. My dive teacher takes the regulator out of his mouth. He lies on the bottom of the pool and blows these crazy rings of air to the surface–huge and perfect. They shiver and break apart. I immediately think of my father smoking cigars while he watched 60 Minutes–the hazy rings, not weird and futuristic silver water rings, but earthly like the rings of a tree. What good does it do to remember so much? My teacher gives me the signal: Are you ready to ascend? I have almost forgotten where I am. I nod. Yes. I am ready. I look to the surface. I breathe.
Day 95: 9/28/13: The Price of Existence
Check out the trailer to Skyler Thomas’s new film “The Price of Existence” about the complicated world of white shark preservation, research and exploitation. You can help Skyler’s project by purchasing one of these fun shark shirts or making a tax-deductible donation. I purchased this super eerie-cute image of a surfacing white shark.
An intelligent
film that helps sort out the pseudo-science of OCEARCH from the efforts of true shark advocates is long overdue.
Can’t wait to see this!
Day 94 9/27/13: In Praise of The Condemned
I just noticed how dusty my bookshelves have become and this saddens me. Writing a blog while bemoaning the changes technology hath wrought, seems sort of hypocritical, but I guess what I am really bemoaning (if that’s the right word) is that my attention is so much more fractured than it used to be. I almost need to teach myself to read for sustained periods again. I find myself trying to download something, sign a petition, comment on a post, and I always forget what I am doing, where I am going. Several windows obscure my desktop. Tabs abound. Yet in my mind I see the same simple images: a blue road snaking into the woods where I grew up. A kind of automatic pilot mourning process that unfolds while I am busy typing and clicking and forgetting the myriad tasks and distractions of the present.
For weeks, I have been talking about doing more for sharks, for the environment and today I signed up for some lectures to learn more about using blogs and social media, so that is a step forward. I feel like I am on the verge of understanding how to combine literature, writing, activism, etc. into some sort of non-profit project. I talked to some man just as I was leaving campus today. We stood on the pedestrian bridge. Below workers and machines excavated a new construction project. He pointed out two native oaks–I believe they were 100 years old or more—that were condemned. Diseased. “It is sad, but they must come down.” I understand that trees get sick. I still dream of trees that perished from Dutch Elm and the salt damage from winter roads.
But as I gazed at the distant pair of elms waving slightly in the breeze near the duplication office, I wondered how any tree could really be condemned. And I thought of all the things those trees had seen. All the history that would die with them. After so many months of heat and stillness, I am alert to the breezes and to the wind and how they animate the trees and people alike. I don’t know what this has to do with taking classes on blogging, or with sharks except that sharks, I believe, are older than trees and that this project has sharpened my sense of all that is beautiful and all that’s vanishing and how intertwined those two things often are.
English: Dutch Elm Disease strikes Badingham One of our larger trees a couple of years after being struck down. Now (2008) hard to see where the tree was. (Photo credit: Wikipediat
1962 Shark or (“Tiburon”) Roadster
The front of this impossibly stylish car recalls the innocent, open-mouthed wonder of the whale shark.
(Thanks Brandy Rosenberg!)
Shark Dreams 