The Largest Brains, the Lowest Notes
Ask any kid about the largest animal and they will likely blurt "Elephant.” If a bit older, they could suggest that the dinosaurs are the largest creatures ever. Being grownups, mostly, we know that the blue whale (Balaenoptera Musculus) is the correct answer. Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant. At 100 feet long and up to 400,000 pounds, it is the largest creature in all of our planet's history. We could swim through its veins. They eat a quarter million calories in a single bite. Where do they live? Everywhere. In summers they feed near the poles and then winter and breed in the tropics. One of my brothers tells the tale of paddle boarding off Monterey and having a pod surface to swim alongside, blowing hot, snotty, fish-stinky plumes. He tells of a sense of safety and security with these massive mammals along on the trip, removing his paranoia about great white sharks in the area. As paragons of life on earth, whales rule. They sing to each other over hundreds of miles using frequencies that travel in salt water up to 10,000 miles. Their society is matriarchal. Read the scripts from divers and researchers and they all resonate with profundity, age, intelligence. Whales also experience menopause.
So do elephants. And humans. And great apes. What is that about? Human females biologically live longer than males. What is the evolutionary advantage of that? Elephants live in large family groups generally led by the oldest female. They age out of reproductive capability, but continue as the most experienced members of their tribe. They lead. Queen Elizabeth II ruled for nearly 70 years. The average lifespan of a blue whale is 95 years. My Aunt Dee is 100 years old and sharp as the proverbial tack.
Somehow the wisdom of the natural world decided that the hazard of death in childbirth was too great a loss to the communal intelligence. Menopause is the solution. Let's keep these grandmothers and great grandmothers around as long as possible and, forgive me if I'm overstepping, but it might be wiser for some of the current crew of older males to be demoted to the JV squad bench. Just observing the natural order of things, my friends. I'm far from an expert on pretty much anything.
Right? What do I know? Seems to me that some of the older males of our species should be paying a little more attention to the older moms. Might be a little less bombing and a little more day-care funding. Maybe AI will be able to sort out whale language and our global intelligence will expand. Research in this field is ongoing by impressively dedicated scientists dropping buoys with microphones into whale pods as fast as they can. Let's raise a toast to the humans working to understand the complexities, the languages and interdependencies in our biome. John Muir said, " When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
What does this have to do with art? Art fixes in one place some sort of a thing, whether it's colored goo on canvas, a group of sounds you love to sing with, an object out on the lawn that says "YO, pay attention!" Can't say it any simpler. My art is begging the viewer to recognize the insane capacity of us to perceive and comprehend electromagnetic frequencies in the human visual field, roughly 380 to 740 nanometers or, said another way, 405 trillion Hertz to 790 trillion Hz.
Blue whales can hear 7 Hz sound waves up to 220,000 Hz. Elephants don't have the benefits of water to carry sound but they can hear 14 Hz to 12,000 Hz up to six miles away. The lowest frequencies they can detect through their feet and trunk with enough precision to triangulate the direction of the sound miles away. I have shared repeatedly the specifics of our superpower of vision.
Art is a sustained chord. It is a monument. It is a distillation of information. It is what long term memory does. It captures information and holds it. It can be wisdom frozen to refer to again and again. What our grandmothers know and their parsing of the value of the information is the essence. Art is the fossil remains of data. Wisdom is functional art.
Biggest. Oldest. Fastest. Data.
Art is the storytelling behind the facts. Listen to the elders, especially the grandmothers. They know meaning more than facts. Old wive's tales are the basis of humanity's collective consciousness. Humans write, record. Elephants ponder and follow the wisest. Whales compose, rehearse and share.
So repeat your best stories until they become community understanding. Paint. Write. Sing. Call your mom. Thank your Nanna. And get outside and goof around in another amazing summer.
Go see live music outdoors right now.
Ciao,
B mac
