I think I might have been around 16 years old, so my cultural indoctrination was well underway. For years, I had been a devotee of Jacques Cousteau and his beautiful young Frenchmen, who entered the sea with such tenderness and respect for its creatures — relatively speaking — and allowed us to come along on our television sets. Their love and courage were an endless inspiration, episode after episode. Does anyone remember them cuddling moray eels?
One of their projects was on the Amazon, where to my total astonishment they revealed the existence of the small pink river dolphins, which, of course, they swam beside and held gently, with reverence.
In that episode, which has vividly lived on in me, there’s a scene where old Jacques is hanging out with an indigenous elder. When he was young, the old man says, dances were held on the banks of the river. The pink dolphins were a big problem, because they would come to the dances disguised as men and attract all the women. He says the locals always knew who the dolphins were because they refused to take off their hats.
Jacques asks if the dolphins still come to the dances. “No,” says the elder, “the dolphins don’t come now because no one believes anymore.”
I knew then that what he said was not ridiculous — that it was important and unbearably sad.
That sadness, and a sense of profound loss, has been returning to me lately. It’s as if the elder’s words hold an unarticulated question of real importance for us now. I can only take a stab at expressing it.
The young woman I was then knew the tale wasn’t nonsense — although it clearly was nonsense. From my vantage point now, I can see the awful dilemma that she was in. Some part of her knew the tale was true, that the world is really that alive, that capable of transformation, that enchanted and incredibly fragile, and that dependent on human belief and imagination. (And, furthermore, she knew she would have chosen to dance with a man wearing a hat and gone with him to his watery home.)
But another part of her, which the culture had pretty thoroughly gotten its hands on through the school system and every adult she knew, told her in no uncertain terms that this was a fairy tale for children or “primitives.”
She straddled those worlds for decades but nowadays is putting all her money on the reality of enchantment.
The elder says that the dolphins don’t come to the dances anymore because no one believes. He lives in a world shaped by and inhabited by what is born of the relationship between what lives and what lives in us. His is a world in which human beings are capable of limiting possibility or of inviting possibility through what we cultivate in our own hearts and minds.
And for the whole history of humankind, until very recently, we all lived in that world. Imagine what matters in such a world and what doesn’t matter at all. Imagine the violation in such a world of assuming you know someone or something fully. How false it would be to put a limiting label on others or on yourself. How important and powerful words would become, and thoughts and beliefs. How carefully we would move around on the planet, around one another.
Maybe the world really has been kept alive by dreams and prayers and poems, by the humility of a love that always leaves room for new becoming. Maybe we are still here thanks only to the outlandish and holy imagination of our ancestors. Maybe we can learn from them and save something.
Perhaps the question is: who would you choose to dance with?
