Gee, I hear that Rush Limbaugh is dead of lung cancer…
…couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy!
“What’s wrong with America today? Well, folks, that’s easy, I can tell you in one word. I’ll spell it out for you, in case you had a public education:
L-I-B-E-R-A-L-S!
Yes, those Commie-mollycoddling, lying, cheating, left-wing Maoist-Lenninist leaning, Clinton-loving, Negro-embracing, Hillary-voting, Obama-electing sellouts, those traitors, those political degenerates, those CLOSET SOCIALISTS! Why, I hate them worse than I hate the Russians, and why shouldn’t I? They can’t even make good vodka, and they don’t smoke Havana cigars, like me! And if you heard a paradox there, tough. Get a life, snowflake!
Yeah, I’m Rush, and with Newt Gingrich, I almost single-handedly weaponized Republicanism and turned it from a party of common-sense conservatives into a party of vicious, frothing hate-mongers, people who would kill their own grandmother and be happy about it if she voted for a Dumb-O-Crap, people who would spit on anyone who wasn’t white, or at least didn’t agree with me, and do you know what?
THAT WOULD BE THE RIGHT THING TO DO, BECAUSE I LOVE AMERICA THE WAY IT WAS BEFORE 1860, WHEN A WHITE MAN WAS STILL KING AND DIDN’T HAVE TO CURTSY TO FEMINAZIS AND BOW TO COLORED FOLK OF LOWER RANK, AND IF YOU DON’T, WHY DON’T YOU GET THE HELL OUT AND MOVE TO SOMEPLACE LIKE NORTH KOREA, WHERE THEY APPRECIATE PEOPLE LIKE YOU, YOU FAGGOTY SCUMBUCKETS! SUCK MY DICK, LIBERALS, AND YOU BETTER SMILE WHILE YOU DO OR I’LL MAKE IT EVEN WORSE FOR YOU THAN I ALREADY HAVE.”
(I made this up, but it’s pretty typical of Limberger’s, I mean Limbaugh’s, screed. He was too smart to use curse words or profanity, but you knew what he meant… dog whistle, anyone?)
I don’t believe in gods, an afterlife, or hell…
…but right now, I wish I did! Some ice water, Rush? Looks like you could use it… you’re sweatier than a pimp watching a pole dancer… oh, sorry, they don’t allow that here! Have some “blood with burning turpentine,” as the Black poet Vachel Lindsay described, and you better enjoy it, motherfucker, ’cause that’s all you’re going to get for all eternity.
SOURCES: “The Ballad of Simon Legree,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlV0ZQ8u7DU, and Theodore Robert as the character Simon Legree in the 1927 silent film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, directed by Harry A. Pollard.Photo of Limbaugh, AP/Julie Smith, Buffalo News
I keep track of interesting, relevant or stupid bumper stickers I see. Here, randomly selected, are the ones that have drawn my iPhone’s attention in the past year.
The stickers on the tailgate of a neighbor’s truck. Funny guy!
by Malcolm J. Brenner, bachelor of freaking arts, Communications!
I am told by a friend who hangs out in such places that my 1971 experience with Dolly the dolphin is one of those topics that ultimately comes up when guys get together in their local bar, lounge, club, etc. and the talk turns, as it inevitably does, to sex.
“Yeah,” somebody will eventually say, “but how about that guy who had sex with a dolphin, huh? How about that, man? I mean, wow, sex with a dolphin, how weird is that?” And so on.
(For the phrase “had sex with,” please insert your favorite crude euphemism into whatever orifice is unoccupied.)
Now, let me point something out: IF NOBODY HAD EVER HEARD OF ME OR DOLLY OR WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN US, NOBODY WOULD EVER BE UPSET ABOUT IT, OR WITH ME. Because nobody cares about things they aren’t aware of. Duh!
Therefore, I rightfully conclude that most people are NOT unhappy with me because Dolly and I made love (which is how I always describe our experience); no, they are not.
They are unhappy with me because I had the nerve to write and self-publish a goddamn book about it (and get reviews, give interviews, make a movie, etc.)!
To some, this admission or confession of bestiality is so shocking that they want to kill me by various gruesome methods, maim or torture me, castrate me, lock me away forever, but to date, NONE OF THEM HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO PAY MY PSYCHIATRIC BILLS, which kind of indicates where their heads are at. They express real and sincere anger at me for speaking out about my experience of interspecies love and communication, of which making love was the peak, although not the final, experience. They accuse of me “romanticizing it,” to which I answer:
What else do you call it when a dolphin you’ve just had sex with rests her snout on your shoulder and stares into your left eye with her left eye, taking a full minute or twoto tell you things that we humans have no words for?
Look, members of the marine mammalogy community, I think John C. Lilly had feet of clay, was exploitative/abusive of those around him, did not always treat his dolphins well, abused recreational/psychiatric drugs — I’ve been around enough to know most (but not all) of the stories about him are true.
But let me point out something important to you, which you seem to be unaware of:
John C. Lilly is DEAD!
He died 19 days after the attack on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa.in 2001.
Rumors of his impending resurrection
have been somewhat exaggerated!
Dead, dead, DEAD, finito, muerte, morte, passed out of this vale of woe, dearly departed, in the next world, bit the bullet, he’s knocking on Heaven’s door.
SO:
The question becomes,
“Why are you still blaming him whenever you have difficulty getting the funding you think your research deserves?”
ANSWER:
HE MAKES A GREAT WHIPPING BOY BECAUSE HE WAS SO CONTROVERSIAL!
Hanging out in sensory deprivation tanks? No. Cracking animals’ skulls to probe their brains? No. Taking lysergic acid diethalymide, or giving it to dolphins? Nope! Tripping in deep space-time? Nah. Teaching underwater basket weaving at Esalen? No, not even that!
Here’s the REAL problem people have with Dr. John C. Lilly: He didn’t really give a shit what you thought about him! And, when necessary, he didn’t hesitate to let you know it, point-blank.
I will recount a scenario which I witnessed with my own eyes. To tell it briefly, Lilly was being interviewed by a radical leftist writer on assignment from PENTHOUSE, and since we both showed up about the same time, Lilly invited us into a trailer parked outside his house in Los Angeles. The writer set up his micro-cassette recorder and began the interview, but right off he adopted an unnecessarily confrontational attitude towards Lilly’s experiences in “altered states,” such as he wrote about in Center of the Cyclone.
It only took the radical writer (crap, he was wearing a leather jacket and driving a Porsche, for godz’ sake) about 10 minutes to start really pissing Lilly off, and when, in deep frustration, he asked where Lilly stood on the subject of – gasp! – NUCLEAR WAR, the neurophysiologist gave him an answer he didn’t want to hear.
“I don’t know,” Lilly said. “Maybe our energies here are needed on some other planet?”
<<<BOOM!>>>
That was just too much for Mr. Leather Jacket! He and Lilly both stood up, and, after a brief face-off, Lilly told him to get out, and if Lilly felt like it, the writer MIGHT come back and finish the interview tomorrow!
The writer didn’t let the door him in the ass. As the sound of his Porsche’s pancake engine faded, Lilly turned to me, a bemused smile on his lips. “I’ll tell you something my father passed on to me,” he said. “You should never lose your temper with anyone, but you should always be able to make it look like you have! What did you say your name was…?”
Out of all the pieces of advice I have gathered from learned and sage individuals over the years, that is the funniest, and truest and the most useful!
AND I THINK IT SHOULD BE KEPT IN MIND ABOUT ALL ENCOUNTERS WITH JCL.
So, marine mammalogists of the world, and especially the USA: If your research doesn’t get the funding you think it deserves,
FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO BLAME,
because John C. Lilly is dead, and probably will remain that way for the foreseeable future, thank you.
This concludes Malcolm’s message to the the marine mammalogists of the world. You may now return to your regular duties.
(Note: When I was upset and angry with a certain old-time dolphin researcher three weeks ago, my daughter persuaded me to express my feelings by writing “Adios, muchacho Randy, via con delfines!”by citing this story she wrote, her most popular pieceto date. Thanks for letting me reprint it here, Thea!)
It was a regular Thursday afternoon, and the south sidewalk of Mid-Market near Chai Cafe was busy as usual. I, like many San Franciscans on any given day of the week, was quietly enjoying some delicious noodles. However, unlike most San Franciscans, I was interrupted when a complete stranger decided to spit at me. You.
This isn’t even me. This is some other pigeon, which you would know if you didn’t think we all look alike. (via Wikimedia Commons)
How do I know you’re a tech bro? Besides the statistical likelihood — you were a 20-something clean cut blond with a messenger bag walking from a place that specializes in chai but doesn’t have a single Indian inside, in the direction of Twitter headquarters — I can recognize faces. You probably didn’t know pigeons can recognize faces. We can. I see you every day hauling your laptop around and looking put upon because you’re almost 27 and you’re not a billionaire yet. Sorry San Francisco has been such a disappoint for you.
Would you even recognize me if you saw me again? I was that brilliantly colored iridescent bird with a noodle hanging out of my beak. Oh wait, you probably thought I was some kind of dark gray color because all humans are colorblind. Compared to pigeons, anyway. You probably didn’t realize that I can see millions more colors than you can thanks to my superior wavelength discrimination. You don’t even have a hexidecimal code for my most boring hues, bro.
Maybe you hate my kind because you think we’re “rats with wings.” Yeah, don’t think I haven’t heard the expression. I have. We all have. The rats aren’t crazy about it either, because it’s a double insult. You may be interested to know that, while we pigeons have a number of things in common with mammals that other vertebrates lack, like a four-chambered heart, a milk-like substance that we feed our young, and unshakeable noodle cravings, it’s convergent evolution. We came up with that shit on our own. My ancestors were ferocious predators bigger than your two-thousand-dollar-a-month SoMa studio while yours were scurrying through the underbrush eating beetle larvae. We’re not “rats with wings.” We’re dinosaurs with wings. You’re rats with messenger bags.
Or perhaps you hold a grudge against anyone who you deem useless to society. In case you haven’t noticed, no one’s hiring pigeons right now. But that hasn’t always been the case. Hopefully you’re not so ignorant that you haven’t heard of carrier pigeons, who dutifully carried messages around for humans for centuries. That’s right, bro. Facebook is like pigeons for computers. Your heroes aren’t sounding so innovative now, are they?
Speaking of heroes, pigeons have been decorated war heroes, often sacrificing their lives to defend your freedom. Think about that next time you spit at someone just because they eat their lunch on the sidewalk. They might be someone who literally risked their life and sanity so that you could code your still-no-Android-version app in English instead of Nazi.
I don’t know what the basis of your grudge is. But I do know that spitting at me would be a punishable offense if I were a human. It’s legally considered assault. And violent behavior toward animals is a known precursor to violent behavior toward your fellow humans. So maybe now is a good time to check that. Meditate on how humans and pigeons both have loved ones who worry about them when they don’t come home. (You probably didn’t know pigeons mate for life, either.)
So CTFO bro. Smoke some weed. Take your frustration out on your bug report, not on the fellow beings you share a sidewalk with.
PS. If you want to atone, you can donate time, money or noodles to Palomacy Pigeon & Dove Rescue. These normal, mentally healthy Bay Area humans actually help pigeons instead of spitting at them.
With apologies to famous Hollywood feature director Frank Capra, who joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps in WWII (the same branch my father, a radar operator, and Ray Harryhausen, a stop-motion animator were in) and made a series of seven documentaries collectively called “Why We Fight,” which are studied to this day in film classes as brilliant, virtuous pieces of propaganda, unlike Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 Berlin Olympics documentary “Triumph Of The Will,” which everyone agrees is a brilliant, evil, racist piece of propaganda, because we won. Right?
“Dad, if only you’d use your super-powers for good instead of evil!” — my daughter Thea talking to me on the phone about this problem, in so many words. She always gives me the best advice!
There are some people that you meet but never get to know, or maybe only superficially. Say you eat lunch together, have some interesting chatter a couple of times and think, “Gee, what a great girl/guy, I’d really like to know him/her better.”
With these people, if they are semi-public figures in entertainment or the arts or the sciences, their reputation may precede them. They may be important people in their institutions, even leaders, and their time is precious because of (whatever-it-is) they do. You recognize this, and you appreciate every moment they spend with you.
Such was my relationship with Randall Wells, PhD., and director of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. We’ve known each other since the 1968-69 school year, when we both took a marine biology elective at Riverview High School, a school where they painted a yellow line outside the cafeteria that you couldn’t cross, but the next year you could be wading through the rice paddies of ‘Nam carrying your M-16 over your head and praying it would fire when needed. That was all American high schools in the late 1960’s, by the way. And they all sucked a big wet one.
Now, Randy’s parents, a couple of pretty nice, normal people to hear him tell it, owned a couple of rental properties, and one of them they rented to a marine mammalogist named Dr. Blair Irvine. Dr. Irvine worked under a contract with the U.S. Navy to find out if he could train a bottlenose dolphin, in this case a bull named Simo (Latin for snubnose) to protect S.C.U.B.A. divers from shark attacks. Working at the old Mote Marine Laboratory at the south end of Siesta Key, he used a ring-pool, like half a donut, that had been set up by somebody else for shark research earlier.
Dr. Irvine needed somebody to stand atop a tower next to the pool and run and re-load the 16mm Bolex camera that was recording the shark-dolphin interactions, and hearing that young Randy and an interest in sharks, Irvine asked him to do it. I don’t think starry-eyed Randy needed much parental encouragement to leap at the chance!
(We skip over, here, the toil of Dr. Irvine’s experiments with Simo, which may be briefly summed up thus: In a donut-shaped 30′ diameter pool from which it cannot escape, a male bottlenose dolphin will gleefully pursue, ram and batter any non-dolphin-eating species of shark. Simo did it so vigorously, Dr. Irvine had to make him a rubber snout booty so he didn’t rub himself raw on scaly shark skin! That was only on non-dolphin-eating sharks, however.
When faced with confirmed dolphin-killing species of sharks, which are also man-eating species, Simo was so frightened he shit himself and leaped out of the donut-shaped pool! I have this on good authority. Where was P.E.T.A. back then? Or Cleveland Amory, a famous animal-rights campaigner in the 1960’s and 1970’s? And why has this film never been released? This was supposed to one of the triumphs of human dolphin training, I know lots of people who would LOVE to see that footage! Where is it, and who owns it? You, the American taxpayer paid for it, and I don’t see why it should be classified. Is it still with the SDRP or did the Navy grab it, lock stock and barrel, like they do with UFO gun-camera tapes, and make it disappear?)
JUMP CUT TO 50 YEARS LATER
Dr. Irvine has become very famous for his dolphin-in-a-donut experiment, even though the information it returned was utterly useless to the U.S. Navy. (You can only learn so much from a dolphin in a donut, after all.) In 1970 he started the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program with Randy as his apprentice, and it has become, through Dr. Irvine’s and Dr. Wells’ hard work and dedication (and a fucking lot of patience from SarasotaBay’s dolphin population, who refrained from skewering them like shishkabobs when they were captured for testing, which is not often mentioned), the baseline standard for the health and behavior of all bottlenose dolphin populations, everywhere! And Dr. Irvine is living serenely in retirement, while Dr. Wells handles the exhaustive SDRP paperwork, fondly recalling the days when he actally got in the water with the dolphins. He enjoyed that aspect of the job!
And then… and then… along comes me. Little ol’ me, with a silly story…
“Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” — Goldfinger, 1964 Photo by Keithen Martinez, a good photographer but a lousy match for my daughter, I’m glad she ditched him for the guy she’s now hitched to.
… about how, one cold March morning 49 years ago, Dr. Irvine, in response to my casually mentioning Dr. John Lilly’s name in a conversation, WENT APE-SHIT ON ME, BEHAVED VERY RUDELY, TOLD ME LILLY WAS EITHER CRAZY OR 50 YEARS AHEAD OF HIS TIME, and left me colder than before I’d met him.
I now realize Dr. Irvine expected me to read his mind that morning, but I didn’t know that’s what he expected, so I didn’t. Not like I can read many human minds anyhow, I only claim to be an occasional telepath, not a goddamn side-show psychic! I didn’t telepathically import that Dr. Irvine had worked briefly with Dr. Lilly, found him personally irritating and thought his research was unscientificcrap.
This from a guy who puts dolphins in donut pools with dolphin-eating sharks! Hey, Dr. Irvine, did you ever think of working in the Roman Coliseum? I hear they’re having cash-flow problems, the lions are eating up all the prophets! Yuk yuk!
You must understand, Dr. Lilly had to work very hard, for two decades, to become the most widely-hated man in the world among marine mammalogists. It’s not like it was easy for him, oh no! He was a neurophysiologist at the National Institute of Mental Health (N.I.M.H.) back in the 1950’s, wiring cat and monkey brains and discovering their pleasure centers. He was also spending a lot of time in a device of his own invention, the sensory isolation tank, under contract from the U.S. Air Force, who wanted to know what would happen to a weightless astronaut who was cut off from all contact with Earth. Lilly found that in such a situation — dark, zero-G, isothermal — the mind rapidly expands to fill the available space… all of it! In such a state, Lilly could apparently go anywhere, do anything, become the ultimate Astral Traveler. He began wondering what a creature who spent a lot of time in such a state would be like.
You must further understand that for about two centuries, since anybody other than a whaler bothered to look at whale guts, or whale brains, the field of marine mammalogy had been a sedate backwater of science, a veritable slough of semi-talented individuals in which a few, like Dr. Alexander Agassiz, a knowledgeable individual, stand out. Marine mammalogy was about as interesting as a bucket of warm spit, and marine mammalogists liked it that way, until the 1930’s. That’s when Marineland curator Arthur McBride began to suspect that dolphins possessed something like the faculty of man-made SO.N.A.R (SOund Navigation And Ranging). But, with WW2 looming on the horizon, McBride was smart enough to keep his suspicions under his hat. Anything he could learn about dolphin sonar, he figured, might improve the Axis Powers’ sonar! So nothing happened there. Yes, a few pods of dolphins got blown up by new, errant sonic-homing torpedos, but it takes time to work all the bugs out of these things…
… And nothing much happened until the early 1950’s… when Dr. Lilly switched subjects. And things in marine mammalogy would never be the same! And the marine mammalogy community would hate him to this day for it! Because Lilly’s musings in the sensory isolation tank had lead him to a species that was living in the same conditions — dolphins.
You see, before, when marine mammalogists looked at dolphins’ brains (and in one gruesome vivisection I read of, they sawed a poor dolphin’s skull open while it was still alive), they saw a lot of folds, or wrinkles, on the cerebral cortex. Those folds increase the surface area for the “gray matter,” or neurons, that mostly exist on the outside of our brains (it’s a better view, there). So the more folds, the more neurons, and the greater the presumed intelligence.
However, scientists everywhere assumed this only applied to Homo sapiens, because let’s face it, dolphins never really did anything useful, like chipping flint spear points, or mastering fire, or inventing alternating current, or typesetting The New York Times, or exploding The Bomb. So they couldn’t be very intelligent, could they, or our marine mammalogists would surely know of it — wouldn’t they? Those cortical folds in dolphins? Don’t mean a fucking thing, honey. Go back to bed and stop dreaming.
“The bottlenose dolphin is somewhere between a dog and a chimpanzee in intelligence. We think this is the most complimentary statement that can be made about any mammal.” — David & Melba Caldwell, famous marine mammalogists.
“Excluding you, I presume? You are both mammals, right?” — Malcolm J. Brenner, to David & Melba.
The first time Dr. John C. Lilly saw those cortical folds, he was amazed. This brain is a first-class thinking machine, he optimistically thought, and set out to prove it by killing 5 dolphins at Marineland, where Dr. Forrest Wood, a U.S. government flunkie who would later write a whitewashed memoir titled Marine Mammals and Man, which never once mentions, or even hints at, the guard dolphins who patrolled Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam for the U.S. Navy, worked as head veterinarian.
Of course, Lilly didn’t MEAN to kill any dolphins! No sir, no sirree! He was just trying to anesthetize them so he could do some brain-probing with implanted electrodes, and he found, to his horror, that as the anesthetic took effect… the dolphin stopped breathing and just died! Unlike all land animals, dolphins had no “breathing reflex” that kept air flowing into/out of their lungs if they went unconscious. FOR DOLPHINS, IT SEEMED, SURFACING TO DRAW A BREATH WAS A CONSCIOUS ACT OF WILL AND DELIBERATE FOCUS!
So he cut back on the anesthetic… no good. And back… no good. And tried different anesthetics… no good. And began to build a dolphin respirator… and by the time Dolphin #6 went under the knife, all was well, and it survived the surgery. But Dr. Forrest Wood was by now mad enough to kill Lilly, and he stayed that way for the rest of his life. You can’t claim Wood wasn’t attached to his charges!
Lilly went on to found the Communications Research Institute in the Virgin Islands, and that setup was pretty good for the dolphins, with a tide-washed pool. And it was here he began his most controversial experiment, the co-habitation of a young kindergarten teacher, Margaret Howe, with Peter Dolphin for six weeks to see if Peter couldn’t learn a little English. What happened has been the butt of countless nasty jokes and a Saturday Night Live skit. It also turned Margaret into a hermit who wouldn’t talk about her experience with Peter to anyone for the next 49 years, until the BBC persuaded her to.
The Nub: To get any work done, Margaret found that she had to manually masturbate Peter every now and then, since he was in isolation with her and had no female dolphins around to “shake hands” with. (“Dolphins have sex the way humans shake hands.” — the late Dr. Ken Norris, the godfather of open ocean marine mammalogy.) It wasn’t sexy for her, she said, but it was sensual and loving. And she didn’t realize how deep Peter Dolphin’s attachment to her was growing… and growing… and growning…
A female trainer holds a male dolphin’s erect penis as part of training for a medical procedure, obtaining semen for artificial insemination. The male dolphin can erect or retract his penis at will.
…and when the experiment ended, and Margaret, who had grown really fond of Peter even though she couldn’t teach a goldfish to swim (just listen how frustrated Peter sounds in Lilly’s tapes, released on Windham Hill Records, Sounds and Ultrasounds of the BottlenoseDolphin), went home to catch up on some rest before coming back to continue the work… Peter committed suicide. He held his breath until he went unconscious. With nobody around to re-start his breathing, he asphyxiated. Of course, studious dolphin researchers claim a dolphin doesn’t possess sufficient self-awareness to realize it can die, but fuck them, it happens all the same. Dolphin trainers all over the world report the same phenomena: You walk away from a dolphin at its peril. The transition from a familiar trainer to a new one must be made gradually.
When she heard the news, Margaret was devastated, and blamed… John C. Lilly, of course. Of course! When he had to shut down his CRI lab, Lilly moved the surviving dolphins to a water-filled bank vault in Miami, hardly an ideal enviroment in anyone’s imagination, except, apparently, Lilly. One man who worked for Lilly in the early 60’s, Ted Nelson, describes the crowded conditions there (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONhnEmoSRfk). There, former Creature from the Black Lagoon diver-cum-monster Ricou Browning wrote me in a personal letter, he saw a dolphin in a plexiglass tank, and all the flesh around its neck looked black and rotted. But he offered no pictures to back up his observation, and here the dolphin looks fine.
John C. Lilly with a dolphin in a plexiglass tank… hey, I’m not telling you something you already know, am I?
OK, is it really necessary for this to go on? Is it apparent why people hated Lilly, who could also be austere, demanding, demeaning, stiff, outspoken, and severe? He was also, by this time, combining his trips in the tank with the wonder drug LSD, guaranteed to liven up any hippie Happening! A couple of sources say that that Lilly got turned on to acid by movie producer (Flipper, Namu the Killer Whale) Ivan Tors’ wife, but not Lilly, and why, I wonder, would you waste money on street blotter of questionable provenance when you, as an M.D. and scientist, can obtain the pure stuff in ampoules straight from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland?
A Bolex, the Swiss 16mm camera used to shoot the surfing documentary “The Endless Summer,” Dr. Irvine’s dolphin experiments and many other classic films.
(Ha! Film that with your Swiss-made Bolex, Randy! Hey, did Blair buy you an electric motor for that thing, or did you just yell for the shark and dolphin to hold it while you cranked up the spring-wound motor every 35 seconds?)
Lilly finished up the work for NASA by writing a nifty little book, Programming and Meta-Programming in the Human Biocomputer, which is one of the best instruction manuals for using your brain creatively I’ve ever encountered. But shooting LSD nearly did him in (he got a stroke after he accidentally injected a tiny air bubble with it), and it certainly did in his career! Dr. Joel Elkes, a prominent psychopharmacologist and my mother’s second husband, knew Lilly and had worked with him at N.I.M.H. when he still seemed relatively sane. Years later, when Lilly was deep into acid, Elkes met him again at a psychological conference. “He cried ‘JOEL!,’ threw his arms around my neck, put his head on my shoulder and cried for ten solid minutes,” Dr. Elkes later told me in personal conversation. “Then he just said ‘Bless you,’ and walked away.” ?????
Is it any wonder that such wild, unproven, radical-sounding ideas as dolphins actually talking to each other,plus the time in the float tank, plus the drugs, plus the near-fatal embolism, plus a broken marriage, turned the stolid, staid, scientifically orthodox marine mammalogy community against Lilly? Hey, research grants for anything having to do with dolphin sound production WERE SUDDENLY VERY DIFFICULT TO GET, and that pissed a lot of marine mammalogists off! They had to go and study elephant seals or vaquitas or tusk-beaked grunge whales (OK, I just made that last one up. So sue me), but “talking dolphins”? DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH! That was what that crazy egg-head Lilly was doing, and look where he is now! Down the drain! Hiding under a rock! Teaching sensory exploration classes at the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, California, where nobody can understand him but everybody knows he’s just so goddamn smart!
But I drift. Back to my problem… with Dr. Blair Irvine.
So, reader, now you know why every marine mammalogist on the planet, and maybe some others too, hated John C. Lilly. Here’s some of the complaints they have about him:
• “He was high on drugs all the time!”
• “He killed more dolphins than Star-Kist Tuna!”
• “He kept dolphins under terrible conditions!” (Sometimes true. You can’t always get what you want.)
• “His so-called ‘research’ was rotten science! He should have determined if dolphins have their own language before trying to teach them English!”
• “That female assistant of his, she fucked the dolphin, you know!” (NO EVIDENCE OF THIS EVER, FROM MARGARET HOWE-LOVATT OR ANYONE ELSE.)
• “He fooled around with his female assistants!” (Some reports of mild flirtation, but Lilly, AFAIK, stayed loyal to the last woman he married, Antoinette Oshman or Toni, for short, until she died of cancer.)
• “He wasn’t even a marine biologist, let alone a marine mammalogist! He had no experience in our learned field, and was out of his depth — Yuk! Yuk!”
• “He had sex with his dolphins! His dope dealer told me so! My God, what a degenerate!” (I really heard this! Not like Lilly needed a dope dealer, and why should I believe a dope dealer over Lilly himself, who never mentioned having a dolphin jones?)
• “I just didn’t like him personally. Working with him wasn’t very rewarding. He was fussy, critical, and demanding.” (By far the most common complaint against him. True, but more so in his early years. By the time the 1980’s roll around, Lilly was out of dolphins but thinking about getting back in, and a much more mellow, laid-back person than he was in 1960.)
Dr. Irvine, having worked with Lilly for only a brief time I gather, was personally familiar with some of these problems. The real ones, anyhow, which were quite enough without the gossip and slander.
And, in response to Dr. Irvine’s not-so-casual question to me on that cold March morning, “What have you read?”, I answered “All of John Lilly’s stuff…”
Let me make this clear: I can take criticism. I can take corrective instruction. What I cannot take, and will NEVER take, is being used as SOMEONE ELSE’S TOXIC WASTE DUMP, and that is what Dr. Irvine did to me that morning. He took his problems with Dr. Lilly, AND DUMPED THEM ON ME! Did this reduce his problems with Dr. Lilly? No, it didn’t discharge them, it just spread them around thinner! And it caught me horribly by surprise, like being sucker-punched by a guy wearing a 3-piece Armani suit and tie.
What it turns out is, “You cannot be the servant of two masters” means it’s very difficult to live with as much cognitive dissonance as I have about the two Dr. Blair Irvines. On is a kindly, nurturing scientist who mentored Randy Wells, the other the asshole who insulted me outside the fish freezer at Floridaland. AND I CANNOT GET THESE TWO MUTUALLY-INCOMPATIBLE IMAGES OF DR. IRVINE TO ALIGN, OR EVEN OVERLAP. HE’S EITHER A NICE GUY INSIDE OR HE’S NOT, AND I SUSPECT HE’S NOT. Why? Because it takes one to know one, and I’m really clear about my own sociopathic tendencies. They were quite apparent in my behavior when I was little. I’m much better at covering them, and imagining their frightening consequences, now.
I’m 69, I’m sick, and I’m tired of fighting the whole goddamn world. I thought I could take on Dr. Irving without harming the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, but I can’t; mind you I did think it wasA VERY STUPID IDEA for Dr. Irvine to use a personal e-mail account to accept donations for the SDRP, and I didn’t suggest he do that. I mean, anybody with half a brain knows you should set up a separate account for donations, because then it’s not associated with you and isn’t hauling whatever baggage you have around for you. Which the SDRP was definitely doing, with me; every month, when I got alerted that my $10 donation came out of PayPal, there would be his name on the email address, staring at me, reminding me of his unwarranted rudeness and anger, over and over and over again…
I JUST COULDN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE, OKAY? I just couldn’t.
And since I can’t change Dr. Irvine, or Dr. Wells, or the SDRP (although apparently I did influence that awkward, sudden change of Dr. Irvine’s address, which I know is going to cost the SDRP a hell of a lot of trouble that it doesn’t need, and possibly some donations which it does) the only sensible, rational thing is to cut them all off, end my emotional attachments, and let them go. Which, with this message, I am.
So long, Randy, it was good knowing you, and thanks for all the fish those great lunches we had together, that you paid for. I owe you, but I’m probably not going to be able to return the favor, ever. You never expressed any doubt or nasty opinions when I told you my improbable story about Dolly. I honestly wish you and the SDRP nothing but success, but please let me know when Dr. Irvine dies, so I can be sure to piss on his grave!!!
Adios, muchacho Randy, y via con delfines! Aiieeeee!
Above: Portrait of Dr. Blair Irvine, courtesy GulfBase. I think he has the eyes of a sociopath, but hey, what the fuck do I know? I’m just some guy he used one morning as a TOXIC WASTE DUMP, and he thought he’d never hear from again. Wrong bet, Dr. Irvine, wrong bet. And yes, karma IS a bitch!
(Overnight, Dr. Blair Irvine, former director of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Project, changed his email address, so he couldn’t get any more emails from me like the one he received yesterday! Since this is the address at which the SDRP has received its donations, your next donation to them, if you make one [and I heartily endorse the SDRP, in spite of my personal feelings about Blair], don’t be surprised if it bounces back to your account. Unless you change it, which is troublesome, I admit. But hey, I didn’t tell him to change his freaking email address! I must have really gotten to him if he went to all that trouble! Well, as B. F. Skinner said, any acknowledgement, positive OR negative, can be perceived as a reward by the subject! It would have been better to DO NOTHING, but then again, I shouldn’t have to tell Dr. Irvine, who I am sure is a confirmed behaviorist, something that well-known and simple. Another chink in the armor of a “great scientist.” Yeah, right.)
WAKE UP, DR. IRVINE, WAKE UP!
IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE! MR. BRENNER HAS POSTED HIS LETTER TO YOU ON malcolmbrenner.com/news, HIS WEB SITE! SO THE WHOLE WORLD NOW KNOWS HOW RUDE YOU WERE TO HIM, WHAT POOR CONTROL YOU HAVE OVER YOUR ANGER, AND HOW IMMATURE YOU SECRETLY ARE UNDER THAT FAÇADE OF EMOTIONAL CONTROL YOU SO PROUDLY SHOW THE WORLD! WASN’T IT NICE OF HIM TO WARN YOU? YOU SHOULD THANK HIM FOR BEING SO THOUGHTFUL, THERE WAS NO WARNING FROM YOU WHEN YOU TURNED ON HIM AND VERBALLY MUGGED HIM BECAUSE HE MENTIONED dr. Lilly’s DREAD NAME!
I HATE TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU, BUT MR. BRENNER SAYS HE IS PREPARED TO DO THIS EVERY MORNING, UNTIL YOU ANSWER HIS VERY REASONABLE QUESTION ABOUT WHY YOU TREATED RANDY WELLS SO NICELY, AND TREATED HIM LIKE SHIT. LIKE SOMETHING SCRAPED OFF YOUR SHOE, AFTER YOU WALKED AWAY.
YOU WERE VERY UNSCIENTIFIC, WHEN YOU LET YOUR PERSONAL FEELINGS ABOUT DR. LILLY OVERCOME WHATEVER TRIVIAL RESPECT YOU MAY HAVE HAD FOR MALCOLM AS A PERSON. YOUR INTEREST IN HIS WORK WAS VERY SHALLOW, AND MALCOLM SUSPECTS YOU ARE A SOCIOPATH, AND WONDERS HOW YOU COULD HAVE KEPT IT SECRET FOR SO LONG, IF YOU ARE. HE ALSO WONDERS HOW MANY OTHER UNHEARD-FROM PEOPLE ARE IN THE SAME POSITION HE IS, HAVING BECOME YOUR VICTIMS ON YOUR WAY TO THE TOP OF THE DOLPHIN WORLD?
OH, AND BTW, MALCOLM SAYS, “HEY, DO YOU OR THE U.S. NAVY OWN THE FILM OF SIMO? WHY DON’T YOU PUT IT ON THE WEB, DR. IRVINE, AND SHOW US WHAT A FUN TIME SIMO HAD, BEING CHASED BY AN AGGRESSIVE BULL SHARK! IS IT TRUE HE JUMPED OUT OF THE TANK TO AVOID IT?”
PUT THE FILMS ON THE WEB, AND LET US SEE FOR OURSELVES! I’LL BET YOU’VE STILL GOT A PRINT IN THE SDRP ARCHIVES, DON’T YOU? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? LET US BE THE ONES TO JUDGE WHAT A BRILLIANT SCIENTIST YOU ARE!
AND HERE’S A “VALID SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT” FOR YOU: WE PUT YOU, NAKED, IN A CIRCULAR TRACK YOU CAN’T GET OUT OF, AND WE RELEASE A 500-LB. (that’s 228.6 kilos, Malcolm knows you scientists like to do things in metric) TIGER INTO THE TRACK WITH YOU. BUT DON’T WORRY! WE’RE GOING TO GIVE YOU A ROCK TO THROW AT THE TIGER AS IT LEAPS ON YOU, AND IF YOU’RE A DEAD SHOT AND HIT THE TIGER RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES, YOU’LL KILL IT! AND A BELL WILL GO OFF, AND YOU’LL GET A LOVELY FOOD PELLET AS A REWARD… THIS IS THE POSITION YOU PUT SIMO IN, ASSHOLE!
WHAT DO YOU LEARN ABOUT THE BEHAVIOR OF REAL DOLPHINS IN THE WILD WHEN YOU PUT A DOLPHIN IN A CIRCULAR TANK IT CAN’T ESCAPE FROM AND RELEASE A DOLPHIN-EATING SPECIES OF SHARK WITH IT?
NOTHING! YOU LEARN NOTHING ABOUT HOW A DOLPHIN BEHAVES IN THE WILD, WHERE IT HAS ROOM TO MANEUVER, TO GET UNDER THE SHARK, TO GET OUT OF ITS WAY, TO PROTECT ITS MATES AND YOUNG, OR REQUEST AID FROM ITS FELLOWS. BUT HEY, IT LOOKED GOOD TO THE O.N.R., AND GOT YOU A GENEROUS GRANT TO LIVE OFF OF! SO MALCOLM PAID FOR YOUR RESEARCH WITH HIS TAXES, TOO, ASSWIPE!
YOUR EXPERIMENT WAS A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT, ALL IT TOLD THE U.S. NAVY IS HOW DOLPHINS BEHAVE IN A DONUT TANK, AND IF I AM NOT MISTAKEN, SUCH TANKS RARELY EXIST IN THE OPEN OCEAN. RELEASE THE FILMS AND PROVE MALCOLM WRONG!
LIKE I SAY, MALCOLM PLANS TO DO THIS EVERY MORNING, UNTIL YOU ANSWER HIS VERY, VERY REASONABLE AND RATIONAL QUESTION. MALCOLM SAYS HE CAN HOLD OUT LONGER THAN YOU CAN, OR UNTIL YOU CHANGE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS, WHICH EVER COMES FIRST. AND MALCOLM WOULD HATE TO SEE YOU CHANGE IT, IT’S SUCH A BOTHER, YOU KNOW?
HAVE A FUCKED-UP DAY, DR. BLAIR! THIS HAS BEEN A WAKE-UP CALL FROM YOUR CONSCIENCE, AND IF IT’S HARD FOR YOU TO HEAR, DON’T BLAME ME, TURN UP YOUR HEARING AID YOU IDIOT, I’M SHOUTING AS LOUD AS I CAN! — dr. Blair Irvine’s conscience
The famous graphic artist R. Crumb expresses well my sentiments.
October 12, 2020
Dear Dr. Irvine,
Please forgive me for not reading your mind on that cold morning in March, 1971, when the head dolphin trainer at Floridaland, Robert Corbin, introduced us. I’m really, really sorry I said something that upset you so much, but only dolphins and a few other “lower” animals have given me the privilege of mental telepathy with them, and you just weren’t on my short list that morning. What can I say, at this late date, to make it right with you?
I’m sure you have long since forgotten the incident, but I haven’t, not only because you treated me like a non-person, but because you implied I was also very stupid, even though you had only met me for about 2 minutes. Let me jog your memory. You had run out of fish for Simo, the poor dolphin trapped in your worthless circular tank shark experiments. (More on that, and why your reputation is undeserved, later.) So you came down to Floridaland, where I was pursuing a independent study project at New College photographing the dolphins for a proposed book about them. And our paths chanced to cross outside the freezer shack, where Robert kept the fish.
Robert introduced us. I had, of course, heard of the experiment you were conducting for the US Navy at Mote Labs; everybody in town had heard about it, following your efforts to tag dolphins by burning holes in their dorsal fins and affixing plastic plaques, a rather crude and ineffective technique. Robert mentioned that I was a student who was very interested in dolphins. I told you a little bit about my project, and you seemed very enthusiastic about it at first. I remember you — oddly, in view of what happened — actually smiling, but it might just have been indigestion making you wince. A long time has passed, hasn’t it? Far too long for anybody except a real weirdo, like me, to still resent it, but I do.
Those first impressions, they are a bitch, aren’t they? It works both ways, Dr. Irvine. Both ways.
And then you asked the fateful question: “What books have you read?” If I had been able to read your mind then, I would not have given the answer that I did. Please believe me on this, is was the lack of clear, decipherable telepathy with you that ultimately let me down. I failed nobody but myself, there.
The answer I gave you was unfortunately honest, forthright and sincere. “Well, all of John Lilly’s stuff…” I started to say, preparing to explain how New College had a lousy library and it was difficult to get research papers there. But I never got a chance, because, as cold as it was that morning, the air between us froze, and you, in an instant, on a dime, in a New York minute, turned from a friendly, somewhat fatherly researcher with an interest in my work (admittedly a liberal arts approach to dolphins) into a lethal polar bear, moving in for the kill. The smile on your face disappeared, to be replaced in an instant with an expression of profound disgust, as if you had just stepped in dogshit — Great Dane dogshit. Something I’d said had obviously triggered you, and this was decades before pop psychologists began abusing that term. What could it be?
Could the mere mention of Dr. John C. Lilly’s name…? Could it? Really? How misfortunate for me, to mention the ONE NAME that would trigger you that morning! And how doubly misfortunate not to have read your fucking mind before hand, so that I’d be forewarned and not make the one mistake that would send you plunging off the end of the dock, dragging me with you! It was there, in the air over your head, clearly flashing red letters that said WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T MENTION JOHN C. LILLY’S NAME TO THIS MAN, HE’LL FREAK OUT — and I chose to ignore it. Or I just didn’t see it. I certainly didn’t mean to provoke you, we’d only just met!
When you spoke, even your voice was different. There was an edge of threat or menace in it when you said “That man is either 50 years ahead of his time, or crazy, and most of us think he’s crazy! Good day!” By “us” I took it that you mean marine mammalogists at large — speaking for the community as a whole, I guess you were — and there may also have been something in there about you having worked with him, and that’s how you knew. Then you pivoted on your heel, got in your truck and drove away, and I never even had a chance to finish my sentence.
I will not describe how I felt as you drove away; instead, here are some of the things I thought about you: • Rude, inconsiderate • Abusive, abrupt
• Talks down at me, thinks he’s superior
• Explosive intermittent disorder (this is the modern diagnosis, I suffer from it too)
• Intolerant • Must be hard to work with, being around a person so critical with a hair-trigger temper
• Doesn’t want to listen, close-minded
• Sociopath, only likes people who can help him out• No empathy with others… and so on. This is an incomplete list, but I’m sure you get the general drift.
As a result of that unfortunate meeting, I THOUGHT YOU WERE A REALLY FUCKED-UP PERSON, PERSONALLY, AND THE WAY YOU TREATED ME CAUSED ME TO HATE YOU. And I don’t like to hate things, it’s a waste of energy. But I do hate you, and I find I’ve hated you for 50 fucking years now. That probably says more about me than about you, and I admit I have anger management problems. But since then I’ve learned something important, and puzzling.
Somebody else gave you the same information, and you reacted differently to him than you did to me. So I think I’m justified in asking “What did he do right that I did wrong?” or, “What was the difference in Dr. Blair Irvine’s approach to me and this other person?”
Dr. Randall Wells, as I’m sure you’ve heard, has been an acquaintance of mine since we met in a marine biology class at Riverview High School in Sarasota in 1968 or ’69. I had a lot of social problems in high school, but Randy wasn’t one of them; he was just a nice, affable, intelligent guy, and he didn’t seem to get picked on much, so we talked a bit. Over the years, my esteem for him has only grown, and I now donate monthly a small amount, all I can afford in my current circumstances, to the SDRP, because I know that 90% of that money will go to benefit the dolphins of Sarasota Bay, and the other 10% to buy beer for the boat crew worn-out from chasing, netting, examining and logging them all day. (Just kidding!) So it is Randy’s compassion for the dolphins, and the excellence of his research, his personal friendliness toward me over time and a belief in acting locally, that make me want to donate to the splendid organization that you and Randy created together.
Now, here’s my problem, Dr. Irvine, and it consists of two words you may have heard before: COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.
You see, Randy is an exceptional person, and I do not see him mentoring, or collaborating, or getting papers published, with somebody who was rude to him, browbeat him, talked down to him, insulted his intelligence, and dismissed him with a wave of your hand, all of which you did to me that frosty March morning. When Randy came to you with John C. Lilly’s name on his lips — he proudly displayed a copy of Mind of the Dolphin on the SDRP podcast last week as his first dolphin book — you reacted differently, very differently, to him than you did to me.
Was it the fact that you were renting your house from his folks that made you feel indebted to them and caused you to moderate your self-righteous anger with the lad, or did I see a side of you you don’t show to others in your profession? The sociopathic side, the side that steps on unsung grad students to get research published, the side that curses the dolphins for struggling when you burn holes in their dorsal fins to tag them? The side that decided I WAS A NON-PERSON SO YOU COULD TREAT ME LIKE SHIT THAT MORNING BECAUSE I DIDN’T READ YOUR MIND AND REALIZE, SOMEHOW, BEFORE THE WORDS LEFT MY MOUTH, THAT ME SAYING DR. JOHN C. LILLY’S NAME WOULD TRIGGER YOU INTO A RAGE OF BARELY-CONTROLLED ANGER?
What was it, Dr. Irvine, that made you react differently to Randy than to me? A short-term circumstance, I hope, something like “Sorry, I hadn’t had breakfast that morning,” or “Sorry, I didn’t get laid the night before.” Those would be comprehensible, if not excuses. Something like “My mother died the day before,” that would be an excuse. I don’t know, and for 50 fucking years your behavior toward me that morning has been like a big grub, festering in my brain, and it doesn’t go away, and if it does, I always come back to it eventually.
What you did, I should point out, was also bad news from a scientific point of view. With Randy you were apparently able to hold a polite discussion and explain to him what was wrong with Lilly’s work. He listened, learned, and grew from it. Me, you told to fuck off, and I hate you for it.
So there’s my cognitive dissociation, Dr. Irvine: which human are you? I cannot make the two images align, or even overlap: are you a kind, nuturing scientist that gets along with his colleagues or the rude, abusive (yes, ABUSIVE, when did you stop beating your wife abusive), short-tempered person I encountered that morning? And more importantly, for reasons that apparently have nothing to do with you, WHY ME? When open scientific discussions such as I presumed we were having get SHUT DOWN because someone dropped a name he wasn’t supposed to, that’s not science, that’s prejudice and bigotry. Let me remind you, you never got a chance to explain your POV to me either, and if that wasn’t your fault, it sure as hell wasn’t mine.
So all in all, Dr. Irvine, I don’t think very well of you, but I allow that I might be mistaken, because Dr. Wells likes you, I mean, you are his mentor and everything, and I don’t think, as I have said, Randy would work for very long with somebody who abused him. I am quite confused as to who you really are, and I hope you see fit to clarify the situation for me, as I find it very difficult to go forward with my own work like this, unable to rectify two polar-opposite views of you. So please tell me, if you will, why I saw the unpleasant side of the distinguished scientist that morning, and why Randy did not.
I’ve decided not to critique the famous experiments with Simo that Randy filmed for you, although I will say, in passing, that dolphins do not in nature swim in 6′ deep donut-shaped pools, and any evidence acquired thereby can only be applied to the behavior of dolphins in the wild by a rather thinly stretched interpolation.
In closing, Dr. Irvine, I hope I have expressed myself clearly, and that you now know the reason for my impertinence in mentioning Dr. Lilly’s unspeakable name to you on that sorry morning. It WAS totally my fault that I failed to read your mind, and for that I can only offer sincere, if abject, apologies. Let me finally say to you the words that I have been wanting to say for 50 long, sad years: EAT SHIT AND DIE, YOU WORTHLESS WASTE OF PROTOPLASM! FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON. I THINK YOU’RE A BUNKO SCIENTIST, AND IF YOU WERE CRUEL TO ME, WHO ELSE WERE YOU CRUEL TO? WHAT OTHER NON-PERSONS DID YOU STEP ON TO GET WHERE YOU ARE? I am sure they remember the encounters, even if you don’t.
Thank you for reading this letter. I will continue to donate to the SDRP because I believe in and trust Randy, not you. I hope I have made myself clear, and have a really fucked-up day.
Most sincerely, Malcolm J. Brenner, author of Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover and other books.
Can you tell I’m a little bit excited with the interview I just recorded for Dick Sunday, a new podcast by Jennifer & Stephanie Smith, alias “the Smithsters,” which is based on the premise that at least one day a week you should bitch about dicks? I mean here the attitude, not the very apparent feature of masculine anatomy (did you know that lizards and snakes have two, but most birds lack one altogether?).
The sisters, a pair of housewives in North Carolina, introduced themselves to me via e-mail, and asked if I wanted to be on their show. Previously, it being their first, Stephanie asked Jennifer if she had any gripes, and Jenny brought up all the stories about dolphins being rough: Male dolphins herd females and beat them up. Male dolphins kill young dolphins so the mothers will come into heat again, like lions. Some dolphins even kill porpoises for sport!… and so on, a veritable calvacade of dubious dolphin disasters.
I’m sorry, something has come up, just go to the link and listen to the podcast, will you? It’s really pretty good, and I’ve got to attend to something else that has just come up. Thanks.
(With apologies to the late August Derleth for modifying his story title.)
Dear daughter, brother, sister & friends, terrestrial, aquatic and otherwise, On Sept. 23, it was reported in major news outlets that a Cuvier’s beaked whale had managed to stay submerged for 3 hrs. 42 minutes, or, in metric terms, 3 hrs. 42 minutes. Yeah, really!
The NYT wrote:
Dr. Quick’s latest paper, published Wednesday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, documents the whales’ most impressive observed descent to date: 3 hours 42 minutes, trouncing the previous record by over an hour. The new record is nearly seven times longer than scientists expect the mysterious mammals should be able to dive, based on scientific understanding of their body size and metabolic rate.
“This is just so beyond what we’ve seen before,” said Andreas Fahlman, a physiologist at the Oceanographic Foundation of the Valencian Community in Spain and an author on the study. “They’re not supposed to be able to do this, but they do.”
Based on the whales known metabolism, which I presume was recorded by some kind of suction-cup-attached recording device, scientists could account for only 33 minutes of dive time. The whale (actually a big dolphin, very little is know about them) beat that by +7x. These creatures also hold the record for the deepest dive recorded, to 10,000 feet, almost 2 miles or 3,048 meters!
With this fact recently on my mind, I was astonished to hear tonight, during an Ian Gordon reading of the H. P. Lovecraft short story “The Temple,” written in 1920 and first published in 1925, Lovecraft describe dolphins, the common Delphinis delphis, accompanying a submarine at great depth for over 2 hours without breathing!
The story concerns the nasty Prussian captain of a German U-boat in WW1, when the weapons had just come into widespread use. He sinks an Allied ship and shoots the lifeboats with his deck gun, but one of the dead, later found clinging to a rail, sports an oddly carven ivory head in his pocket that drives its owners mad. The sub suffers a catastrophic engine failure that leaves it adrift in the currents. After murdering a rebellious crew (how do you shoot someone in a submarine?) and having his #2 commit suicide, the current sweeps the sub and the Prussian, now solo, to a submerged temple… cue the theremin music! (I won’t spoil it for you, but in typical HPL fashion, you won’t leave the theater humming the themesong.)
This is what HPL had to say about the dolphins:
We often cast a beam around the ship, but saw only dolphins, swimming parallel to our own drifting course. I was scientifically interested in those dolphins; for though the ordinary Delphinus delphis is a cetacean mammal, unable to subsist without air, I watched one of the swimmers closely for two hours, and did not see him alter his submerged condition… (13:00-13:20)
…His mind was tired, but I am always a German, and was quick to notice two things; that the U-29 was standing the deep-sea pressure splendidly, and that the peculiar dolphins were still about us, even at a depth where the existence of high organisms is considered impossible by most naturalists. That I had previously overestimated our depth, I was sure; but none the less we must still be deep enough to make these phenomena remarkable. (15:55-16:25)
Now, Lovecraft did intensive research for his stories, including scientific articles; I read an analysis of The Color Out of Space citing several scientific articles published before the short story came out, that include reports of lighting hitting a fallen meteor, for instance, which he mentions in the story! But what was he thinking when he fantasized that the minions of C’thul’hu dolphins could hold their breath for so long, or dive so deep? Was he venturing in forgotten dreams into the weedy Sargassos of some time-lost realm of the great sea-god Nodens, or just fucking around? Only C’thul’hu knows… but I’m not brave or mad or stoned enough to ask him. You first, Indy!
Mr. Jones displaying his affection for National Socialists.
Here’s the web site for the story, it runs just under an hour, and Mr. Gordon is a wonderful narrator. Enjoy his sonorous voice and oblique delivery! https://youtu.be/OBtxU2K9oGk
“The Cult of Cthulhu is active, not reactive. It’s about the Great Old Ones, unspeakable oaths, unquiet voids, hideous sanity-shattering secrets, and magic as black as the yawning gulfs beyond time and space. Our religion has no limitations. That makes it demonstrably superior to Satanism.”
– Venger Satanis, high priest of the Church of C’thulhu
Malcolm J. Brenner 