Erosic Attuning with whales
Written by Marie Comuzzo and Marianna Ritchey
How to cite this page: Comuzzo, Marie and Marianna Ritchey, “Erosic Attuning with Whales,” Listening With Whales, 21 September 2026, https://listeningwithwhales.org/erosic. Cover image: Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, “I Weave My Grief Into Yours,” Embroidery thread on hand-tinted photograph showing the orca, Tahlequah carrying the body of her dead calf in 2018, courtesy of artist.
Erosic Attuning
To envision a world beyond what is, is to intently yearn for something different. Erosic attuning starts here, in the space between what is and what could be, as a space of possibilities that lives, at first, within. It is a practice and an ethos that embraces anger, grief, and discomfort as a powerful practice to find direction, meaning, and the will to let erode what needs to fall apart.
Grounded in the work of Black feminist scholars such as Audre Lorde, centering anger and eros (desire) as transformational practices for collective change, as well as First Nations, Indigenous, and Aboriginal animist cosmologies that center reciprocity and kinship, erosic attuning is an introspective practice of listening both within ourselves and with others.
“Erosic” contains both the ancient meaning of Érōs as a force generating something new and beautiful; and of “erosion,” a slow and persistent transformation of even the most seemingly immutable landscapes. Érōs as this ancient force is something that can be felt, but that the mind or intellect (Lógos) cannot quite grasp, and thus it is an embodied ability to desire something different beyond what already is.
By erosic attuning with whales, forests, tempests, oceans, rivers, and humans, and the erotic force they carry, is to practice allowing bodily feelings to guide a certain pursuit of knowledge, of ourselves and others. It necessitates a confrontation with feelings of anger, rage, grief, and other internal states we are taught (in Western societies) to repress in favor of “positive thinking,” “spiritual bypassing,” or indifference.
Erosic attuning enables us to connect with networks of kin and care that stretch beyond our species. This in turn helps us work toward collective change and grow our political imaginations and communities. Our ability to stay and step into the discomfort of not knowing how to move forward, but at the same time, holding the possibility of a better future, enables us to imagine creative solutions beyond the minor reforms we are promised by politicians in exchange for our votes.
We developed erosic attunement as a theory and practice of whole-embodied listening that requires the ability to not only stay with the discomfort – including heavy emotions such as anger, despair, grief, and suffering – but to also reach beyond ourselves and humanity, into a space of attuned animality. Doing so, we practice becoming better more-than-human comrades, a process only possible if we stop perceiving ourselves as exceptional, superior, and entitled, and instead start relating to others as important co-creators of an ecosystem of being.
Erosic attuning is related to Kinning, or perceiving the more-than-human world as kin is something First Nations and indigenous communities have been relentlessly teaching about, and thus, this practice is also rooted in the shared wisdom of many different cultures who—albeit differently—ultimately advocate for an interrelationship with the world that is reciprocal, giving, and regenerative. Kin as a verb was specifically theorized by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Practicing erosic attunement means listening both with and beyond reason, and letting sound reorganize the body: letting the body rock gently, softening the jaw, loosening the pelvis, letting tears emerge and letting the river of sorrow flow freely. By becoming porous to grief and letting the sound, the holding, and the collective extra-temporal work of grieving with we can let personal and collective sorrow emerge. This practice is developed with the intention of using grief and rage as a conduit for creating new political actions aimed at dismantling existing institutions and power structures in active efforts to change the world.
This kind of practice is not new, and despite it being antithetical to settler-colonialism, we suggest that forms of it continue to circulate even here. We suggest for example that the people who were ethically transformed by attuning to Tahlequah’s grief and to their own as they witnessed her mourning rituals, as well as the earlier generation of people who were similarly transformed by listening to Songs of the Humpback Whales, and through it more purposefully attuning to the anguish caused by the relentless extermination of entire whale populations by the whaling industry, were practicing a form of erosic attuning.
We also think it important to emphasize that acts of cross-species comradeship have always been occurring and may be taking on steam again. For example, in 2024, in a historical treaty led forward by Māori people and signed by leaders of Aotearoa, Tahiti, Tonga, and the Cook Islands, whales obtained legal personhood, an ongoing process that is significantly changing approaches to nature’s rights. This is a culmination of intergenerational work seeking to grant legal rights to beings other than humans. In this example, the sought-after legislative reforms are not just rules to reduce boat speeds or create “sanctuaries,” but rather epistemic challenges to the whole legal framework of liberal democracy, where personhood is so inextricable from the right to own property, and is furthermore understood as a domain exclusive to certain humans.
The full article, “Erosic Attuning and Grieving with Whales: Towards Ecosystemic Comradeship,” co-written by Marie Comuzzo and Marianna Ritchey is forthcoming in November in TRACE: Journal of Human and Animal Studies. Email us if you’d like to be notified when it does.
Grief, more than any other mode of listening and attuning, emerged as a through-line across all categories of listening, revealing how porous these categories are, and thus is found across all the pages. Find it in the genetic code that still hold the collective trauma of commercial whaling; in the touch of dying whales and the creation of a new keening ritual; in the holding words of poets; in the developing of a historical ear; in the music emerging in commercial whaling countries since the 1970s; in the collective grief sparked by orca Tahlequah’s loss; and in longstanding ancestral connections.
“It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes—the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons—and the elusive autumn aroma.”
Dr. Anna Tsing
The Mushroom at the End of the World
If there is a whale you carry with you, or one you are grieving with. This current can hold a poem, an artwork, a song, a blessing, or simply a word for them.
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