The idea that someone else can read your thoughts from how you move unconsciously is somewhat uneasy, but it can also inspire self-confidence. You can also take the initiative yourself and show apparently naive conduct from where you could fool a brutal attack.
But let me not be more complicated than I want to. A less highlighted version of body language is that which you experience of your own. However much you are capable of monitoring your own behaviour, you simply can't mirror your reflection continuously. In Holland this is known as the ‘Droste’ effect, mirroring your own reflection into the virtual infinite.
But we all ask ourselves from time to time, why am I doing this? Often this is a rhetorical question, but sometimes self-analysis leads to surprising discoveries. Like I discovered that – unaware – I had created body language in an object.
The body language of Dusty and her four visitors at White Strand on October 15th left no doubt. Except for the fun that manifold jumped out of the waves, there was clearly a huge male dolphin, that much to the admiration of Dusty, who at each towering jump came half out of the water, stated his overwhelming affection. The presence of the other three dolphins is somewhat quizzical. Perhaps they had come to assist the amorous approach of Dusty. She seemed, however, far from having to be convinced. According to Kate, whom she trusted closest, she reacted remarkably enraptured. I sat in the van, shivering and sweating from the swine flu, taking jump photos with the telelens.
That night I hardly slept. It may have been fever, but what tumultuously ran through my thoughts was the question if this would be the last I would have seen of Dusty. A firework farewell, followed by an endlessly empty ocean.
The next day, at 10.36am, she was back in the bay, alone. Almost instantly my reassurance was washed over by the question if she would be pregnant for real now. Dolphins mate in just a few seconds and do this under water. It could very well have happened, at least it looked like it.
Pregnancy in dolphins is hardly visible, even until the very last. The only clue could be in her behaviour and specifically in changes of it.
Meanwhile I have taken up whittling again. A tiny dolphin in a slice of boxwood. Cross-grained and therefore rock-hard. I had not done this in eleven years, for a single exception that was rather less intensive. I had diagnosed the neuralgia that frequently shot through my hands as a kind of rheumatism and did not dare to take on the torture. In the framework of my renal rebirth I, however, do not accept to limit myself any longer by Eventuality and, moreover, working with my hands suits very well to alternate working with the mind when typing.
Sculptors are supposed to be very good at drawing too. In that respect I fail utterly. But what I am pretty good at is the technical outlining on wood. Now the slice was roundish and I had the general idea of a small dolphin of which the snout and the fluke would somehow fit together. After I aboutisized the design on the slice with a soft pencil, peeling it down began. I have developed a certain methodology for that, which I won't elaborate on now. The technique of this is very intense and thereby the general shape of the piece is temporarily out of focus.
Who describes my amazement, let me do this myself, when in a moment in between I suddenly identified a dolphin in fetal posture. Out of focus into fetus. That was totally beside my explicit intention, not for a moment I had thought of the option of depicting a baby dolphin. And now you can go into critical butting, but you can also surrender to poetic reality. Was this fetus the fruit of a subconscious kind of wishful thinking or were my hands directed by a force of nature that we can see, yet fail to understand?
While I was whittling, Dusty, again, tested my confidence. She disappeared from White Strand and for a week I saw no dorsal fin. But I had drawn this little world around me in the bus, that shook in the wind and was hammered by cloudbursts, where I played recently retrieved jazz and blues CDs on the computer and cut and stabbed with razor sharp ground HSS knives and chisels in all kinds of rediscovered safety grips and with oddly little nerve pains, at my dolphin, shaving off paper thin flakes.
At this time of the year, Dusty will be away more often. The general idea is that she's topping up on winter fat. At the Doolin pier great shoals of sprat had been spotted. These are usually followed and eaten by mackerel and Dusty may well have been feeding on them there.
And then Trevor's text came in: 'Have you heard that our friend has been swimming with people at Fanore?'. And then everything took its own course. Willem confirmed that Dusty indeed had swum with Anna's grandchildren, Jane confirmed Dusty had been spotted at Fanore for several days and me, who ventured the theory that Dusty had come back to Fanore as she had spent three years of her infancy in the safe shelter of the Aran Islands and therefore wanted to give birth here, about four km from the meadow. There are numerous little coves here that can only be approached by humans at certain tides and weather circumstances. In particular because of the strong increase of hair algae the rocks are dead slippery, but as hard as ever before.
And even the idiot who wants to disturb Dusty's serenity with a boat will surely be wrecked upon the many reefs that submerge with the tide.
But let me not take the bit between my teeth. Dusty is a razor sharp girl and very likes to fool us people. Maybe she's in a rock jacuzzi right now, telepathically reading along with this story and sneakily grinning into her fin about what I have this time gotten into my head and brought into those of my teenage visitors.