Listening Erosically with Whales
Written by Marie Comuzzo and Marianna Ritchey
To envision a world beyond what is, is to intently desire for something different. Erosic Listening starts here, in the space between what is and what could be, as an infinite 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 Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde’s centering of anger and eros as transformational practices for collective change, erosic listening is an introspective practice of listening with and attunement both within ourselves and with others.
“Erosic” contains both the ancient meaning of Érōs, a word Socrates used to describe generating something new and beautiful; and “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 (including law, as specifically discussed in The Symposium).
Erosic Attuning insists that whales, forests, tempests, oceans, rivers, and humans, carry erotic force within them that sometimes also expresses itself through sound and that this force must be reckoned with through our bodies. Embodying Érōs and thus desire is here not a selfish pursuit, but rather, a moral compass. To erosically attune 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 listening and 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. 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 what is.
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 animals, a process only possible if we stop perceiving ourselves as exceptional, superior, and entitled, and instead start relating to the other as an important co-creator of an ecosystem of being.
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.
Deep in the ocean, where light doesn’t reach, whales keep in touch through sound that travels through vast distances. Whether it is language, music, poetry, laughter, echolocation, prayer, or asemantic sounds—we simply don’t know—their voices reverberate in the ocean as much as ours do in our human culture. We use, manipulate, rethink, transform, mix these sounds and use them in countless ways: from evocating awe for the more-than-human world, to bringing us to rest, or to communicate the urgency to change our ways, whale songs have become an anthem of our ability to transform when faced with the destructive power of economic greed.
Opening to Grief and Erosic Attuning in Practice
Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely’s concept album WAILS: Songs for Grief is an invocation, a portal to descend into the uncomfortable, open to the grief, and bathe unapologetically in our sorrow. Living in the water, the ocean, and the rivers of untapped tears, WAILS is a profound call to action, which also translate in collective grieving rituals.
Inspired by Francis Weller’s five gates of sorrow, the album opens with a call to “Dive.” The first beings we hear are the whales, singing openly, calling, and then silence, followed by the ahlay’s lone voice inviting us to step into the darkness, to start our dive:
“My darling, everything you love, you will lose.
You may accept this, or you won’t. You chose.
Everything is a gift. And yet nothing lasts at all.
This is a painful truth. This is a painful truth.”
The album portrays matriarch Orca Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf Tali for seventeen days, and her mourning was not only shared by her pod, which helped her carry Tali in a long procession across the sound, but also shared by the large human community in the San Juan islands and beyond. As we listen with whales in WAILS, we are reminded that we humans are not isolated but live in a continuum with the more-than-human, a continuum that reminds us the share political force of grieving together loss. To erosically attune to whale grief, ecological grief, human grief, is to also rise as protector, to work alongside each other to do better. It destabilizes the colonial fantasy that separates human suffering from the suffering of all others. This recognition generates ethical responsibility.
Practicing to erosically attune means to listen within and beyond reason, and let sound reorganize the body: letting it 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 lets the personal and collective sorrow emerge, which in turn, can transform into a political force for change.
Ahley’s album also reminds us that grief itself becomes an act of protest. In her layered soundtracks of hundreds of voices, ocean and whale sounds, lone violins, and more, a robust, insisting choir intones “WE DID NOT CONSENT TO THIS.” In this way, erosic attuning becomes a political practice. By allowing whale grief and more-than-human grief to reach us, we are called to move beyond ourselves and move towards multi-species solidarity. Grief becomes the connective tissue that keeps us together, as we listen to sound in bone-deep connections, in water as well as in air.
Diving and Rising with Sperm Whale
Alexis Pauline Gumbs also offers a way of erosic attuning to whales, by reminding us that opening to grief is inseparable from creating a safe balance between surface and depth, going and returning. In Undrawned, her teaching through listening with Sperm Whale reframes the breath, the depth, and the re-emergence as technologies of paced transformation. “Breath. Hush. Listen. Come Back” Her instructions (find here the whole piece) position depth as something the body learns to hold and go into by practice, not something that one simply falls into.
one. breathe.
two. take responsibility for your forehead.
three. hush.
four. be flexible.
five. be specific in your actions.
six. listen.
seven. come back.
Sperm whales dive more than a mile beneath the surface, allowing pressure to reshape their lungs, their bodies, and their breath to hold them alive as they dive deeper and deeper, until the time to remerge comes. Erosic attuning follows that rhythm: to erosically attune to and with whales, and our feelings as we do, is to accept the temporary unmaking that grief requires, to let something break and change, while also cultivating the necessary practice of re-emergence.
Thus, erosic attuning is not just about feeling what is, it is about cultivating the capacity to know when to stay and when to change, and practice finding the ability to garner the energy needed to bringing forward the change. To erosically ettune with whales is also to learn when to go deep and when to emerge, when to be alone and when to be together, and how to find the nourishment in the depth and carry that knowledge to the surface.
TO BE CONTINUED….