SWIM
'The Politics of Splashing'
A Review by Graham Saayman

Bruce Bott's brave book "Swim" rekindles the aura of wonder and discovery initiated in the 1970s by the first systematic studies of the family of dolphins and whales in the maternal sea. His passion for personal contact with free-swimming killer whales was born of a vision quest. At a critical period in his life, the answer to the question, "What is my true destiny?" came in a dream. A dream messenger, an early ancestor of the human race, instructed him: "For the truth you seek go into the sea.”

In the dream he descended into a grotto beneath the surface of the primordial ocean:

In the centre, there was a volcano-shaped formation standing chin high. A profound curiosity to look inside its crater overtook me. To do so, I had to reach forward and grip the rim with both hands, extending far beyond my centre of balance. Thus prone, I was committed to peering into its depths. There I saw our planet from outer space. What a wondrous gem! (p. 75).

Responding directly to this vision of ecological symmetry, he trained as a scuba diver and went to sea in a sailing boat in search of personal experience of killer whales in the coastal waters of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Somewhat paradoxically, that era launched his country, the United States, into the Vietnam War and down the slippery slope to moral bankruptcy, economic disaster and exponential environmental catastrophe. Bott captures the blunting of the capacity for caring relationships in images of the everyday life of that time:

There were two guys I knew from school, hold outs from the grease era, now wearing their army uniforms. Gassed up on cheap wine, they became increasingly brash, boorish and given to bragging about their murderous exploits in Vietnam. They removed their shirts to show off a dozen dry, shriveled, 'gook ears,' sported on bootlaces that dangled appallingly from their necks. They attempted to festoon a couple of recoiling girls with these grisly garlands, as if their trophies were some kind of turn on and might help them get lucky (p.62).

His Native American ancestral history — his paternal grandmother was a full Plains Cree — further intensified his abhorrence of war:

One book The Long Death grabbed my full attention. I read it cover to cover. The title referred to the genocide of Indians across what is now the United States of America. The book chronicled each and every engagement of the U.S. Army in its war against the Indian: old people, children, men and women. It revealed through government records just how this campaign of extermination and internment had been conducted. It left me sickened, and more determined than ever to resist the devils we had always been taught to trust (p. 66).

He refused to be drafted as a combatant to Vietnam. Hounded by the United States Armed Forces, he insisted, persisted and resisted until a series of maneuvers, some hazardous, some quite comical, took him to sanctuary in Western Canada.

Following his dream, he mastered the skills of scuba diver and sailor and entered the lunar consciousness of shamanic experience with the oceanic gladiator, Orcinus orca — the largest species in the dolphin family. With 50 conical teeth designed to seize and dismember prey and bulls weighing up to 12000 lb, killer whales are formidable hunters in the water world with no natural enemies apart from humans.

His first encounter with the orca, rather like the first images in a series of archetypal dreams, had a powerful, ethically-toned emotional charge, mythological motifs and sketched the scenario for the future potentials of the work. He plunged into the sea to rescue a white orca calf, entangled and drowning in a net set by agents of the entertainment industry intent on displaying the unique specimen in the lucrative marine park arena:

Upon eye contact, she ceased to call out. Her writhing body stilled and became an expression of total relaxation ... I took one big breath out of the atmosphere and dove back down to the white orca, taking a position just over her head, my knife held above it, cutting downward. Her mother glided watchfully alongside me and stopped two feet away. Wisps of her daughter's blood from the net chafe swirled into our faces. If ever an attack on a human by an orca was warranted, this would have been the time ... I cut the last shroud of net and spread the incision over her head and body. With a swift thrust of her tail, the young white orca was free to the air and her family (pp. 89-90).

Bruce Bott, writing this account with the authenticity of personal experience, earns the reader's deep respect. Demonstrating courage and spiritual generosity, he clearly has a significant message for the human family at this time.

The narrative chronicles the collection of accurate records of acoustical communication in free-swimming killer whales. Carefully documented observations provide objective, feeling-toned descriptions of the behavioural repertoire of these long-lived, large-brained marine mammals in the natural habitat.

We ... were graced with the sight of a large pod of orca swimming swiftly towards the cliffs. The time had come for a filmed underwater meeting ... When the moment of truth arrived, I felt no need for an exit strategy and, flippers sprung dropped into the turbid water, landing on an exposed ledge. Jim O'Donnell positioned on the cliffs above, watched me film the first underwater footage of free orca ever obtained.

A mother and her calf came to within two metres of my camera. When our eyes met at the apex of their approach, our very essences mingled for a moment, and a great wave of inner tranquility washed over me ... I considered it auspicious that the pod allowed a mother and calf to be their emissaries, particularly within the aim of the camera. Trust was the mantle between us ... That day, we understood the enduring bonds of peace (pp. 134-135).

Kenneth S. Norris, distinguished Professor of Natural History, University of California, Santa Cruz and member of the National Scientific Advisory Committee to the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, endorsed the scientific merit of these pioneering studies (p. 137).

Indeed, Swim is of historical interest to the science of Socioecology, as well as to the environmental movement. Delphinid social systems are complex, flexible and extensible, offering an appropriate model for the nomadic hunter-gatherer societies of human ancestry. The brain-to-body-weight ratio and complexity of the dolphin brain, the large association areas of the neocortex in particular, may well support qualities approximating the executive functions of the human brain. These include learning by observation, planning, forming intentions, taking initiative, monitoring outcomes and respecting traditions, ethics and morals.

Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.), together with chimpanzees, meet criteria for the emergence of self-consciousness. Following Piagetian procedures for assessing cognitive development, they demonstrate perceptual and imitative capacities resembling those of two-to-five-year-old human children. The potential to reflect upon "I" as distinct from "Other" is a necessary condition for two-way communication and for making conscious choices. This includes the principle of negation, the capacity to say "No!" to confinement in custodial care or subjection to undisclosed experimental, medical or psychiatric procedures.

If the international legal system aspires to the highest standards of professional practice, then the ethical imperative of Informed Consent must apply not only to human children capable of the higher order cognitive processing required to communicate conscious choices, but also to the great apes and cetacea.

Somewhat predictably, neither scientific evidence nor philosophical considerations have adjusted the ethical standards of modern culture, Killer whales are still held in captive conditions that in no way accommodate their specialized acoustic and psychobiological adaptations. The commercial slaughter of whales continues unabated in the oceans of the world. Little has been achieved to redress these inequities since the International Whaling Commission debated these issues at a Meeting on Cetacean Behavior and Intelligence and the Ethics of Killing Whales at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. DC in 1980.

Needless to say, aspiration to such ethical niceties is futile in the context of declining global resources and the collective regression to the barbarism diagnostic of modern times.

Nevertheless, Bruce Bott, reaching beyond the metatheory and methodology of conventional science, has some comforting observations about the nature of cetaceans. He suggests that a primary function of cetacea is to educate humanity as to the survival value of spiritual generosity. In support of this theory, he articulates some well-documented behavioural traits of dolphins and whales:

Epimiletic behaviour or their self-sacrificing propensity to heave to and assist conspecifics in dire need of succour and support, a predisposition exploited by the whaling industry to lure the more valuable adults into the range of the harpoon by first maiming and immobilizing the vulnerable young.

Mass strandings and the inexplicable tendency of, especially sperm whales, pilot whales and false killer whales, to "commit suicide," strand en masse and die on the beach despite human efforts to return them safely to the buoyancy of the sea.

Bott suggests that cetaceans, recognizing their own survival in spirit form have little fear of bodily death, a terror characteristic of humans. Consequently, self-sacrifice following the paradigm of Chiron the Centaur, Wounded Healer of Greek mythology, is integral to the cetacean psyche. He argues that some cetaceans are not only self-conscious but also predisposed to self-sacrifice in order to capture the attention of humans and educate them in the best interests of sustainable global ecology.

They are dying in order to teach you. This is to demonstrate the imbalances that humankind is creating within the earth at this time. It is an attempt to bring awareness to what you are doing (p. 265).

In this context, Bott presents this extraordinary observation of a group of captive killer whales, made with his customarily meticulous description of facts and details unblemished by speculative theoretical elaboration:

The only sound in the night was the slight stirring of five orca poking their heads up from the water, grouped tightly, rubbing shoulders with one another in the centre of the holding pen. I followed their uplifted gaze toward the source of the flooding light. The shoreline was steep and heavily treed with Douglas fir and cedar. A luminous elliptical disc about 60 feet across hovered alongside the first row of tall trees. It glowed with a pure white light, perhaps one third of the sun's intensity. I was dazzled and yet in complete repose. I became aware that I had been engulfed by the same profound calm which I experienced upon eye contact with the white orca.

From the 'womb' of the mysterious, vaporous light, a disc of coloured light, perhaps 12 feet in diameter emerged, then another and another. These slowly formed a column of multi-coloured light. This manifestation transmuted sequentially through the chromatic spectrum as it descended upon the orca who continued to gaze upward, their heads bathed in coloured light. I would expect it immersed their very depths as well.

Violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. Say it as a mantra in your head (p.92).

Readers familiar with the neurophysiology of the chakra system and the therapeutic efficacy of energy psychology techniques will recognize these colours as characterizing the six major chakrums from brow to root.

For those concerned with depth psychology and the structure and dynamics of the psyche, concluding chapters review the role of cetacea in mythology associated with the origins and evolution of consciousness:

... Apollo, the Greek prophet and the son of Zeus, assumed the tile of Delphinois (Dolphin God) while establishing the site of the Oracle at Delphi. Delphis means 'womb' and denotes a feminine principle. Dolphins symbolize the living womb in the 'Sea of Creation' ... Greek legends reflect a pantheon stabilized and nurtured by dolphins. Greek law called for punishment by death for anyone killing a dolphin. They were regarded as the conveyers of life, and the transporters of souls into the afterlife (pp. 229-230).

The book is richly illustrated with paintings and colour photographs, including an Appendix with examples of the author's sculptures entitled Neo­Paleolithic Spirit Art.

Graham S. Saayman 

Graham Saayman trained as a behavioural scientist at McMaster University and the University of London and as a family therapist at Chedoke-McMaster Hospitals. He has more than 30 years of experience as a clinical psychologist. Interested in the evolutionary origins of the family system, he pioneered socio-ecological studies of baboon and dolphin social systems in the 1970s. As Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town (1974-1989), he studied the relationship between dreams, meditation and imaginal processes in individual, group and family therapy and developed one of the first systematic Jungian approaches to dream appreciation in a group context shown by a process and outcome study to be both effective and benign. He was elected an Honorary Member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology in 2001. His book Hunting with the Heart: A Vision Quest to Spiritual Emergence reflects his interests in spiritual emergence and highlights the survival value of spiritual generosity.