rss feedThe kraken
I think it was late in twenty thirteen or fourteen when the last of the Sperm Whales was found dying on a beach on Australia’s west coast. They said it had sang itself to death, beached itself from the madness of loneliness. Final miserable proof of intelligence if any where needed. Ironically it was the Japanese who shouted loudest about the horror of such a majestic creature being hurled over the precipice to extinction. It brought human awareness of what it was doing to the world’s ocean into sharp focus and mankind saw that it was on the brink of an extinction level event the likes of which had only occurred twice in the entire planets past. The difference was that this had been caused by mankind. By centuries of over-fishing we had culled the top-level predators for our own food, the marlin, the tuna, the cod, the hake, we had tipped the delicate aquatic balance. The fishing industry took an enormous hit as the memory of that last great beast of the sea moaned and baked in the hot antipodean sun, its peeling skin exposing first white blubber then red raw nerves to be pecked by gulls, it’s flukes pinched by crabs and rats alike. There was a televised twenty four seven candle-lit vigil for it. I remember watching it and crying sea-salt tears of my own.
