On seeing Orcas in Burra Sound     steel Orcadian sky salt morning wind steady chug of diesel.   All the talk had been of death - empty boat tied up in Stromness young pilot shrouded in night; a local son lost to the irreducible complexity of the sea.   Then: “Whales!” “Whales!” halfway to Hoy, the cry went up the rush to the rail, pointing fingers bisecting the moment’s gift, timely, Nietzschean metaphor made flesh. Yes!   Yes! Quick fumblings in cases and handbags; the clicks and whirrs of attempted capture. I caught with no camera Other than that which evolution bequeathed.   There they were: not just whales, but Orcas five…six…seven! Adults and young flying in formation, feeding perhaps… their yin yang bodies glistering, massive, arcing in sinusoidal motion through air and cresting sea just a few boat lengths away.   I recollect the tingle in my primate spine, soundless swelling in mammal chest; a narrative sense – how unique to be here? At this point in space. At this point in time.   “I have been crossing this stretch of water for twenty five years,” said my travelled friend “and have seen nothing like this before.”   Later, the Orcas behind us sparkling the grey, we approached the jetty, saw the seals    - a hundred or more – huddled in the shallows, backs to the shore, bobbing like buoys, brown eyes fixed outwards in primal terror. Fixed on the black and white conquistadors.   Who, there and then, on that boat - children all, of our postmodern and multiply - linked -    world - did not make the Attenborough connection? Sly, sliding Orca, taking seal from the beach? Or, far out at sea, playing with bloodied pup like a kitten with its toy?   All the dichotomies were present and correct in that ensouled, singular drop of time: the mediated and unmediated, contingency and synchronicity, the wild and the civilised world, man and beast, death and life.   The planet moved again in its orbit one and a half times around the sun.   None of us had seen anything like it before when the crunch came. The bubble burst; the very kings of the world stood in line to be saved by the alms of the poor, and the hard won gains of working folk - who’d feed a family for the week on what a Master might pay for a lunchtime bottle of wine - were mortgaged to the futures of the comprehensively obscene.   It was both absurdity and an augur I think – no, nothing much has changed…yet. Stocks are up, heads are down, the dole queues longer and longer. Big Brother box still squawks and squawks, keeping most - most of the time - corralled in baitballs, or listless in the dull and limited pools. “Work to live! Live to work! arbecht macht frei consume, consume, consume,” then, emptied, die.   Killers still rule, and sing their songs, in our primordial waters.   When you are born We will eat you When you swim We will eat you When you hunt We will eat you When you love We will eat you When you are old We will eat you We will suck on the marrow Of your bones and your soul And spit and piss it out   Still, it moves…   What is a single life worth? And how should it be lived? All of politics and philosophy unbounded in a nutshell.   steel orcadian light steady thrum of diesel salt spray, spattering.   That first and final camera inverts the world; and re-invents a still young dream. Other masses, purposeful and sleek, that play, feed, sing, and break the circle of the sea.   In time, other seas in which to carouse; limitless rainbow valleys and unseen mountains; Other melodies keened amongst the bubbles and stories writ in turquoise corals - but patience: All crossings take place in real time.   Enough now to glimpse   the mere beginning:   Consider again, conquistadors and prey, seen through the rain and distances of grey.   Past epochs spent, great flukes rising and crashing; They pod pressed in fear; Their compass narrowed and sheared to shallow water; Their backs to the wall of the shore;   And we Leviathan.     Steve Arnott August 2009