This afternoon (March 31) I caught myself humming the 2010 Gorillaz song "On Melancholy Hill" -- and then I realized why. The song contains the lines, "Up on Melancholy Hill / Sits a manatee." I had just been reading an account of John Dee and Edward Kelley's 1584 vision, in which "The waters sank, and fell suddenly away, so that the Whale lay upon the Hill, roaring like a Cave of Lions." A marine mammal on a hill -- whether whale or manatee -- is certainly an unusual enough theme!
This evening after work, I checked Greg Carlwood’s podcast, The Higherside Chats, which the reader will have gathered I have been listening to fairly often these days. There was a new episode up, an interview with someone called Dr. Richard Alan Miller. For some reason, instead of listening to it, I suddenly had the idea that I should search the archives and see if there were any other interviews with the same guy. There was one, from March 28, 2016, and I started listening to it.
Dr. Miller turns out to be an extremely eccentric polymath who has been involved in all sorts of different scientific and magical projects, one of which involved trying to communicate with dolphins.
GC: Something I hoped you could elaborate on was your past with John Lilly, you were working with dolphins.
RAM: Oh, yeah, well that's a Carl Sagan project. Everybody watching dolphin and their clicks and whistles, even in the movie Our Man Flint, you had a language . . . being able to talk to dolphin. Our Man Flint, there's an old one, after James Bond! Dolphin, actually, their clicks and whistles are a more advanced form of language than even Hebrew. They brought me in, I was in Berkeley for, oh shit, maybe 10 days, and within 10 days I had been recording, had the sounds, and looking for structure in the cadence form using scopes and, you know, old shit like that. And I noted that there was encoding and code cipher within their language. Their language had less redundancy than even Hebrew.
GC: Wow.
RAM: Well, yeah. Yeah! You know, the Sepher Yetzirah and how you relate sounds to words. The dolphin are possibly 10 times more efficient in their language as a form of Clifford algebra. And because of the way they compress it in sonar, a lot is transferred in a burst, and a lot of information. And that's because their brain is actually physically bigger than man -- and who's higher on the food chain? Orca has a cerebral cortex that's twice the size of man, and that mammoth cetacean is actually firing 60 percent of it at any given moment, which by definition, we would say that that orca was God -- not our God, but that which cannot be known, as a definition.
That's right, he just said a whale was God. On another old THC interview I recently listened to, with Jason Louv in 2018, Louv had summarized Dee's experience thus: "And at one point they even meet God, and God is not an old man with a white beard up in the clouds. God is a whale covered with eyes from head to toe."
I didn't notice it at the time, but typing up a transcript for this post, I notice that, in the lead-up to his statement about a whale being God, Dr. Miller brings up James Bond out of the blue. What got me interested in John Dee in the first place? Hearing (also on THC, an episode from 2020) that John Dee supposedly signed his letters "007." (I've since been informed that this may have been made up by Dee biographer Richard Deacon, who was a friend of Ian Fleming's.)
RAM: And now I'm coming in as a biblical scholar, I'm a tzadik, Hermetic Kabbalism, and I'm a physicist, . . . and I am here to tell you we don't have a clue. In my opinion, there may be as many as at this moment at least four mammals that are more evolved technically than man. And when we talk about -- all four have bigger braincases. Turns out they're cetacean, and all four of them are better designed for their habitat than man is in his biosphere. So what does that suggest in terms of hierarchy and lifeforms? And here's the last piece of that curveball, when I have seen orca hunting dolphin. That means it's about food chain. How's that feel? Not food from the gods, but food for the gods!
GC: So you got dolphin and orca in there, what are the other two?
RAM: Well, your pilot whale and manatee. All four have, yeah, those four mammals, and now -- then you have gorillas. A gorilla doesn't have as big a braincase, but an elephant does. . . .
I paused the podcast as soon as I heard the word "manatee." That's when I realized I was going to have to type up a transcript and post it, and I wanted to note the time. When I pressed play again, the very next sentence mentioned "gorillas" -- for no real reason; he just mentioned them and then immediately switched to talking about elephants.
I sitll have no idea what the point of all this is, but the sync fairies are certainly pulling out all the stops!
