I began to notice this animal dimension in my own speaking – conscious now not only of the denotative meaning of my terms, but also of the gruff or giddy melody that steadily sounds through my phrases, and the dance enacted by my body as I speak – the open astonishment or the slumped surrender, the wary stealth or the lanky ease.  Trying to articulate a fresh insight, I feel my way toward the precise phrase with the whole of my flesh, drawn toward certain terms by the way their texture beckons dimly to my senses, choosing my words by the way they fit the shape of that insight, or by the way they finally taste on my tongue as I intone them one after another.  And the power of that spoken phrase to provoke insights in those around me will depend upon the timbre of my talking, the way it jives with the collective mood or merely jangles their ears.

Such was the linguistic dimension into which I was borne by that meeting with the lions of the sea – an initiation seared into my memory by the shock of being swamped by a humpback whale, and by the exchange of fetid breath with that wild intelligence.  I now found myself more porous to other shapes, to smooth – surfaced desks and motley dogs, more aware of the conversation my animal body was carrying on with the other bodies around it, how it tensed in certain office buildings and loosened in dialogue with adobe walls.  I noticed the skin on my skull tightening under the hum of fluorescent lights, and – once while cycling  - felt my shoulder muscles open and expand as a red-tailed hawk took wing from a passing telephone pole.  I heard more keenly how much my voice borrowed the rolling lilt of the person I was talking to, or took on the staccato stiffness of her syllables, and I noticed that she, too, was infected by the inflections of my voice, such that each conversation was also a kind of singing to one another, like two black –birds trading riffs between the cattails – or like two humpbacks sending their eerie glissandos back and forth through the depths.