The Music Of Dolphins Quotes

I don't know what I am thinking. But I am alone. I am trapped in the net of the room. In the net of humans. I think maybe I am drowning in the net of humans.

In every colour there's the light. In every stone sleeps a crystal. Remember the Shaman, when he used to say: Man is the dream of the dolphin

Imagine a dolphin dancing in the sky. Let it dance with joy. Think of yourself at the bottom of the ocean watching.

I make music for whales, dolphins, ducks, and deaf people. Using only sign language and silence, my songs are meant to swim in your ears using the same power that allows the moon to create the tides.

It is not just humans who are musical. Animals, too. This should be obvious in the thousands of birdsongs I have spawned, or the clicking of dolphins, or the moaning of humpback whales.

When I dive in water, my body is streamlined like the fuselage of a jet, and then I glide effortlessly like a dolphin swims. In that moment, I am a featherless duck.

Maybe eagles marvel at dolphins, and dolphins marvel at eagles.

To spin like everyone else was the key to fitting in, and if she could only hear the music of the ocean like everyone else, she too would be able to tune in and do it.

The taste of fresh orange juice. A fig. the sight of a flower. The sound of music. A slab of sunlight on floorboards. Cats and dogs and goats and lizards and dolphins. Harrison Ford’s face. Imagine if you were from a planet with none of those things. Imagine how full of wonder everything would seem. How unjaded we would be by everything in front of us. How a picture of a sunset would never seem corny again. How a simple walk in an orchard would be utopia. How a cool breeze on a hot day would be a lottery win. How each and every bird song would be a symphony.

A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us. . . . Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled the flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy0scented water. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak – and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted. “Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises.

… but not a single one of them is more or less remarkable or ridiculous than everything already here. The taste of fresh orange juice. A fig. the sight of a flower. The sound of music. A slab of sunlight on floorboards. Cats and dogs and goats and lizards and dolphins. Harrison Ford’s face. Imagine if you were from a planet with none of those things. Imagine how full of wonder everything would seem. How unjaded we would be by everything in front of us. How a picture of a sunset would never seem corny again. How a simple walk in an orchard would be utopia. How a cool breeze on a hot day would be a lottery win. How each and every bird song would be a symphony.

Dolphins are strategists. They’re also highly social chatterboxes who recognize themselves in the mirror, count, cheer, giggle, feel despondent, stroke each other, adorn themselves, use tools, make jokes, play politics, enjoy music, bring presents on a date, introduce themselves, rescue one another from dangerous situations, deduce, infer, manipulate, improvise, form alliances, throw tantrums, gossip, scheme, empathize, seduce, grieve, comfort, anticipate, fear, and love—just like us.

Consider, for example, how little we know of how ultraviolet light looks to a finch; of how echolocation feels to a bat, or a dolphin; of the way that a red fox, or a homing pigeon, experiences the Earth’s magnetic field. Such uncharted experiences exist in minds much less sophisticated than our own. What experiences, possibly of immense value, could be accessible, then, to minds much greater? Mice know very little of music, art or humor. Toward what experiences are we as mice? What beauties are we blind to?

Now let me tell you something. I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things. But— All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

I am nothing--nothing--nothing. She was clinging to that, she found, as to a sort of anchor, because it kept her from having to face the terrible possibility that God Himself was not, and the realization of God's nothingness would be the final horror that could not be borne. Yet as time passed she knew that that possibility, too, must be faced. She must let go of the very last thing left her, the knowledge of her own nothingness, and face it. And she let go, and looked around for God and did not find Him; and then there was nothing, except the dark night. But there was the dark night. Very slowly she became conscious of it, and then she found that she was hugging it to her, wrapping herself in it as though it were a cloak to hide her in this hour of her humiliation. For a long while the night was all that she had, and then suddenly, like a sword stabbing the darkness, came a trill of music. It was a bird welcoming the dawn. That, too, was added. She drew back one of the curtains of her bed and saw a patch of grey light where the window was. That also. During the hours of the night she had been completely stripped, and now one by one a few things were being handed to her for the clothing of her naked, shivering, humiliated soul. For a few things one must have to make one decent if one was to step forth again upon the highway. For that, obviously, impossible though the task seemed to her at this moment, was what she had to do as soon as the full day came, because there wasn't anything else that she could do. She had to go on living and serving, with the living and serving stripped of all pleasure...But there would be something. There would be darkness and light, night and day, both sweet things, and music linking them together. The full glory of the dawn chorus seemed all about her...it was full day by the time she pulled back the muslin curtains that covered her window and flung it wide and leaned out, the scent of the spring earth rushing up to meet her. That also was given back...By whom?

In any group of dolphins you’ll find cliques and posses, duos and trios and quartets, mothers and babies and spinster aunts, frisky bands of horny teenage males, wily hunters, burly bouncers, sage elders—and their associations are anything but random. Dolphins are strategists. They’re also highly social chatterboxes who recognize themselves in the mirror, count, cheer, giggle, feel despondent, stroke each other, adorn themselves, use tools, make jokes, play politics, enjoy music, bring presents on a date, introduce themselves, rescue one another from dangerous situations, deduce, infer, manipulate, improvise, form alliances, throw tantrums, gossip, scheme, empathize, seduce, grieve, comfort, anticipate, fear, and love—just like us.

The dolphin, they live for today. But I am human. To be human is to live for tomorrow. Why does tomorrow matter? What is important is now.

At the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, the dolphins developed stress-induced ulcers. Shopping malls are enough to drive most individuals insane, given enough time spent in them. For Edmonton’s dolphins, though, there was no escape. Every day was the same. Shows were performed twice a day. The water tanks never got any larger. The light always remained artificial. The crowds of shoppers never stopped coming. The enervating elevator music never stopped playing. So it was hardly surprising that all four of the mall’s dolphins suffered from stress-related afflictions.

He was standing so close that she could feel the heat from his body and smell his musky lavender scent. She kept her gaze on the floor, afraid that if she looked up her eyes would betray her feelings. ‘I dedicated it to the god Neptune,’ she said. ‘As thanks for sending his dolphin to save me from the shipwreck.’ ‘A dolphin saved you?’ ‘Yes. When our ship ran aground in the storm.’ ‘You must tell me about it,’ he said and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You poor thing. Even the memory of it is making you tremble.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I will tell you about the shipwreck and the dolphin after we have played lullaby music.’ She moved away. It was not the memories making her tremble. It was his touch.

Humpback song has clearly had its effects on human culture—influencing both our music and whaling practices—but what of our interest in whale culture? These discoveries are particularly important for us because there is only one way large numbers of animals can sing the same song that evolves over periods of time that are much less than an individual’s lifetime: culture. Genes

The characteristics of the dynamics of humpback whale song, evolution at a rather steady rate, with occasional revolutions, match those of human art, music, and literature. In his 1990 book, The Clockwork Muse, Colin Martindale shows that trends over time in human art and music fit with laws derived from what we know of human psychology and the principles of cultural evolution.

Oh, the inimical echo of this world of men and women alone! Where be the feet of goats? The wings of butterflies? The buzz of bees? The raging fire of bulls? The dolphin’s foamy music and the whale’s divided temperance? The arachnid’s stalking! Nay; they are all but shadows of wisps, but reflections inside the memories of trees!

In the dolphin family, if one is lost, all are lost.

Dolphin mothers whistle memorable tunes to their babies, while passionate soul mates twiddle and twirl to melodies they’ll remember a lifetime. So it is with the dolphin – they communicate with music.