Only the Animals (22 page)

The other animals who have told their stories here are not as burdened by previous and often foolhardy attempts at cross-species communication as I feel I am. We have a ridiculous history together, humans and dolphins, made more ridiculous each time a dolphin raises her head from the water and hams it up for the camera, or performs another inane trick for the sake of a tossed fish. Scientists have tried to transform us into serious objects of study, but even then there is something a bit off about what happens when they get down to work. Marine biologists start writing tacky utopian tracts about the possibilities of telepathic communication with us; animal behaviourists can't resist trying to get us to tap away at underwater keyboards to break codes. Science fiction writers generally use their poetic licence to imagine screwing us, which is unsurprising; we have long understood that we occupy a special place in the human erotic imagination.

So when I was first asked to tell my story, I thought,
Absolutely not.
But the brief became more interesting when it was suggested I think about a human writer who meant something to me, and let my thoughts of him or her infuse whatever I decided to say. I said I'd participate only if I could use the third person, to avoid becoming a parody of myself, the self-aware dolphin wielding ‘I' like a toy ball propped between my fins. But as it turns out, ‘I' is irresistible.

*   *   *

I began by rereading the work of your ex-husband, the British poet Ted Hughes, thinking I might be inspired by him. His famous animal poems were already familiar to me but I realised, as I read them again, that I had misunderstood them on first encounter. Back then, I had admiringly thought he was trying to understand the human by way of the animal, but now I can see that in fact he wanted to justify the animal in the human. I saw right through his mythologising of the poetic process, the animal as symbol of the poet getting in touch with his deepest, wildest, most predatory instincts. The poet as shaman, returning to primordial animal awareness. The poet saying, You have no idea how
alive
you can feel when you've been fishing all morning and fornicating all afternoon! Go forth, fish and fuck yourselves stupid, and you can thank me afterwards. We're animals, after all!

Hughes collected animal skins to put on the floors of the homes you and he lived in together, and I imagine he laid them out with great reverence, with not a hint of ironic kitsch. He justified hunting wild animals thus: ‘Do you know Jung's description of therapy as a way of putting human beings back in contact with the primitive human animal?' It was all a licence to behave badly. I've got nothing against bad behaviour per se, but men – dolphin or human, and here again we are similar – do tend to weave a web of intricate justification around any wrongdoing, and it's this that drives me nuts. Women behave badly and then, because we don't have the ego necessary to sustain the same justificatory web, die of guilt.

I turned to the animal poems Hughes wrote for children, fables that he claimed would help them understand their unconscious thoughts and feelings. This is going to make us money, he told you, his young wife, as he churned one out every morning of your honeymoon in Benidorm before settling down to his real writing. Let's sell them to Disney! You didn't mind, you were worried about money. But the poems didn't make much, perhaps because most of them are wholly inappropriate for children, full of lines about carving knives, murderous relatives, stiff brandy, shark attacks, and one rather bizarre bent hypodermic. The only poem that got it right, ‘Moon-Whales', which is both tender and off-key in the way children like, happened to be inspired by my own species (dolphins are toothed whales, but not many people think of us as such).
For a while I thought I might write my contribution from the point of view of his mythical moon-whale, the most magnificent of all the creatures he imagines living on the moon.

But still it didn't seem right. I wondered, What is it I'm resisting here? I turned to your own work – your journals, your poetry – at first to counterbalance the relentless maleness of Hughes's writing voice. And you helped me understand what it was. That human women need no reminder that they're animals. So why do your men keep shouting it from the rooftops as if they've discovered how to transform base metals into gold? Imagine a male dolphin who has to keep having epiphanies to remember he's an animal! But we're
special
, your men declare, we're a special-case animal, and part of what makes us special is that we ask the very question, Am I human or animal?

So I ask them in turn, Can you use echolocation to know exactly what curves the ocean floor makes in every conceivable direction? Can you stun the creature you would like to eat using sound alone? Can you scan the bodies of your extended family and immediately tell who is pregnant, who is sick, who is injured, who ate what for lunch? The tingling many humans report feeling during an encounter with us isn't endorphins, it's because we've just scanned you to know you in all dimensions. We see through you, literally. Special case indeed. Perhaps you should be asking yourselves different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and sometimes as humans?

*   *   *

I floated all this with a friend I've made recently out here, the soul of Elizabeth Costello, an author and philosopher of sorts. She was unimpressed by my ranting. She feels attacking Ted Hughes for harnessing animals for his primitivist poetic purpose is not doing him justice, and that it would be thoroughly unoriginal to take him to task for it.

‘It is an attitude that's easy to criticise, to mock,' she said.
‘It is deeply masculine, masculinist. Its ramifications in politics are to be mistrusted. But when all is said and done, there remains something attractive about it at an ethical level.'

When I protested, she cut me short. ‘Writers teach us more than they are aware of,' she said. She suggested I focus instead on what I want to say to you, Ms Plath. ‘Why a letter?' she wanted to know.

I explained that Hughes thought of letter writing as good practice for conversation with the world. I agree with him about that, though clearly not about much else.

Then she pointed out that despite my determination to get it out of the way early, I've been avoiding the issue of my death, and rather well too. It's harder to get around to than I thought it would be. In part, I think, because when I decided to write this letter to you, it had less to do with the way we both died and more to do with the connection I felt to you as a fellow mother. I have one child; you had two. You might not know that the Greek root of our name,
delphis,
means womb – we are the womb fish – but I think you would have liked the term, even used it in one of your poems.

By far my favourite parts of your journals and poems are the insights you share into the quicksand, joyous minutes and hours and days and weeks and years of mothering, and how you did not think of this experience as something that encroached on your other identities, but as something which enriched them. You were not a frustrated housewife forced to stick your head in the oven and turn on the gas because your desire to write had been subsumed by the mundane, miraculous hourliness of being a mother. You describe your priorities so poignantly in one of your journals as
Books & Babies & Beef Stew
; and for a while, you had the promise of all three – writing in the mornings, caring for your babies in the afternoon, cooking rabbit stew in the evenings if your husband had shot one in the woods, reading at night. Virginia Woolf, as you noted in your journal, described in her own diary receiving a rejection letter from a publisher and dealing with it by frying up a big panful of sausage and haddock in her kitchen. Though you vowed to go one better than Woolf:
I will write until I begin to speak my deep self, and then have children, and speak still deeper.

And that deep self spoke animal truths of which Ted Hughes could only dream. You took enormous creaturely satisfaction in food, in sex, in smells, in your own body and its workings. The smell of your pee first thing in the morning, the texture of your snot when you wiped it beneath a table, the feel of the sun tanning your belly brown and the fine hairs on it blonde, the ‘cowlike bliss' of breastfeeding your infant son by starlight. You didn't need any symbolic scaffolding to describe your experience as female animal. Hughes sometimes sounded jealous of animals, for being ‘continually in a state of energy which men only have when they've gone mad'. But women have that energy when they're mothering. If he'd observed you a little more closely instead of searching for his next Big Animal Symbol, he might have noticed this, and done justice to the animal with whom he was sharing his bed. I think this is perhaps what drew you to write about the bees you kept in the orchard of your home: their energy – the energy of a hundred parents keeping their brood alive – reminded you of your own.

Here I go again, letting my irritation get in the way of what I should really be saying. I don't think you will mind, Ms Plath – you understood the cathartic uses of a good cleansing female rage. But I must tell you how I lived, and how I died, in order to keep my place in this modern menagerie of animal souls.

*   *   *

I was born into captivity in 1973, a decade after you took your own life. My mother was proud of being one of the original bottlenose dolphins recruited for the US Navy Marine Mammal Program when it was first established. She liked to remind me of my luck at having been born in an elite military training facility. Her point was, I think, that I should be grateful I wasn't born into useless aquarium captivity. This is how she managed her guilt about bringing me into her world, a child who would never know freedom. Is it worse to have freedom and lose it, or not know what it is in the first place? I can't say I've missed it.

Back in 1962, when my mother was in the group of dolphins and California sea lions selected for training, they were kept initially at Point Mugu in California. The Navy trainers quickly realised that the dolphins could be counted on to return to them after being ordered to find or fetch objects, even in open water. The program was expanded and moved to Point Loma in San Diego, and a sister research laboratory was set up in Hawaii. One of the dolphins in the cohort, Tuffy, soon had a breakthrough experience. She successfully carried an important message and supplies down to aquanauts living in the US Navy's experimental habitat, SEALAB II, which had been placed in a canyon off the Californian coast, more than sixty yards underwater.

Tuffy used to keep my mother and the other dolphins entertained by mimicking the conversation between one of the aquanauts – who was about to emerge from SEALAB II after spending a world record of thirty days down there – and President Johnson, who had called to congratulate him. The aquanaut was in a decompression chamber, and the helium gas had made his voice high and squeaky. The President gamely pretended not to notice that he was speaking to someone who sounded like Mickey Mouse.

My mother was always bothered by the stupidity of the Navy's dolphin-naming policy: why recruit us because of our superior intelligence then give us dumb names like Tuffy? Her theory was that the Navy anticipated a public-relations disaster, and hoped that our goofy names might signal that we were not considered to be combatants, that we were not so different from Chuck and Loony at the nearest SeaWorld. But those in charge had the program classified through the chilliest years of the Cold War, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. We could have been given proper combat names or titles for those decades and the public would have been none the wiser. Instead, it was my mother's special fate to be called Blinky for her professional life, and mine to be called Sprout.

*   *   *

My mother's cohort, MK6, was trained to protect assets such as ships or harbour constructions by alerting human handlers to the presence of enemy divers in the surrounding water. In 1970 she and four other dolphins in her team were sent to Vietnam on their first tour of service, to guard a US Army pier in Cam Ranh Bay. They patrolled the area and warned their handler when saboteurs were detected nearby. Her team was subsequently credited by some for preventing the pier being blown up, though of course this was disputed. The program has always had more detractors than admirers.

In the stoic tradition of military parents, my mother didn't tell me much about her experience in Vietnam, but I could sense some of what she went through because of certain physical stress points throughout her body. She did say that the most difficult part was being transported there and back in a primitively repurposed Navy vessel. My daughter loved that story, and often asked her grandmother to repeat it. She couldn't believe how old-fashioned the vessel was, how basic the resources. By now, a decade after my own death, I'm sure my daughter is deployed to conflicts around the world within hours' notice, transported in the utmost comfort in some kind of fancy bio-carrier that fits into any type of Navy vehicle: ship, helicopter, aircraft, spacecraft. These technologies are developed faster than humans have time to assimilate what they mean – they outstrip men morally in the end, stunning them into submission, and they drag the rest of the world's species along for the ride.

Once my mother had finished her tour of duty and returned to San Diego from Vietnam, the Navy decided to breed some of the next generation of military dolphins within the facility. To that end, she was allowed to mate with her choice of partner among the males in the bachelor pod. Who my father was is irrelevant, as is usually the case in matrilineal societies. I was raised by my mother and the other females among whom I lived, and by my human trainer, Petty Officer First Class Bloomington. I loved him deeply, and not in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way as my mother sometimes teased. I think she was jealous of our bond. Her generation had been trained by men who were a strange blend of traditional and iconoclastic. Those men were attracted to the safe hierarchies of the military, but they were also caught up in the Zeitgeist that had been developing as post–Second World War certainties gave way to the unpredictable, boundary-pushing conflict with the Soviets. Fantastic rumours circulated about scientific and military advances the Soviets were making with the use of animals: bats that could detect weapons stockpiles; cats inserted with bugging devices; pigeons guiding nuclear warheads.