Seal songs and legends

 

Stories about selkies are ambiguous, evocative, sad.

            This is largely because of the way seals themselves affect us. Bobbing curiously up around boats, they seem to feel as much interest in us as we feel for them, and there is something human about their round heads and large eyes. Basking on sunlit rocks they are part of our world, yet are also natural inhabitants of an unseen, underwater world in which we would drown. For most of our species' co-existence, only in imagination could we follow them there.

My mother used to sing a lovely song called Song to the Seals (words by Sir Harold Boulton, music by Granville Bantock) about a sea-maid who sits on a reef calling the seals in a lilting, melancholy refrain: ‘Hoiran oiran oiran eero… hoiran oiran oiran eero… hoiran oiran oiran ee la leu ran…’  You can listen to it here, sung by boy treble Sebastian Carrington.

And the sheet music includes a introductory note: ‘The refrain of this song was actually used recently on a Hebridean island by a singer who thereby attracted a quantity of seals to gather round and listen intently to the singing.’

            With so much inter-species interaction and fascination going on, it’s no wonder there are many legends and songs about selkies: seal-people who can cast off their thick pelts and appear in human form. The ballad of The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry exists in a number of variants, but the earliest was written down in 1852 by Lieutenant F.W.L. Thomas of the Royal Navy, and it was dictated to him by an old lady of Snarra Voe, Shetland. The ballad tells the tragedy of a woman who has borne a child to a unsettlingly Other selkie man, ‘a grumlie guest’ who brings a waft of salt-sea terror as he appears. ‘I am a man upo’ the land, he announces,

            ‘An’ I am a Silkie in the sea;

 And when I’m far and far frae lan’

            My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie.’ 

As Lieutenant Thomas explains: 

The story is founded on the superstition of the Seals or Selkies being able to throw off their waterproof jackets, and assume the more graceful proportions of the genus Homo… Silky is a common name in the north country for a seal, and appears to be a corruption of selch, the Norse word for that animal. Sule Skerry is a small rocky islet, lying about twenty-five miles to the westward of Hoy Head, in Orkney, from whence it may be seen in very clear weather…

And he tells of coming in from the cod-fisheries on a foggy, windless morning, rowing ‘for nearly a mile through the narrow channels formed by a thousand weed-covered skerries’ and hearing the seals’ ‘lullaby’: ‘groans and sighs expressive of unutterable torment… followed by a melancholy howl of hopeless despair’.

A few years ago, wandering the fractured rocky shore of Longstone Island off the coast of Northumberland, I too became aware of this eerie sound. Keening, moaning, huff-huff-huffing – hooting like children who make long quavering ghost noises – a group of twenty or so seals were crying to one another as they lay on a ridge at the edge of the tide.

The unnamed woman in The Great Silkie is destined to lose both her half-selkie child and its selkie father: the Silkie predicts she will marry a mortal man, ‘a proud gunner’, who will shoot them while they play together in the bright summer sea.

The Sule Skerry selkie is male, but the best-known selkie tales tell of a seal-woman captured by a fisherman who sees her dancing on a moonlit beach. He steals her discarded skin, preventing her from changing back into seal form. Such stories generally end when the selkie bride recovers her hidden sealskin and returns to the sea, abandoning her human husband and children. ‘I loved you well,’ she sometimes calls, ‘but I loved better my husband and children in the sea.’ Unions between humans and faerie creatures rarely turn out well. These are disturbing tales of constraint and capture, power and powerlessness. And they are haunted by loss: the selkie’s longing for her own element and the heartache of man and children left behind.

I was thinking about this story while I was writing Troll Mill, the second of my fantasy trilogy for children set in a Viking-Norway-that-never-was, and I found within it a metaphor for post-natal depression. (That’s not to pin it down; folk and fairy tales are open to many interpretations.) But the thought gave me the heart of my book. Kersten is a seal-woman stolen – and named – by Bjørn, a fisherman. She lives with him in apparent content until one stormy evening she finds her sealskin cloak, races to the shore and thrusts her new-born child into the arms of the young hero Peer, before hurling herself into the sea. Left literally holding the baby, Peer cannot catch her; he yells a warning to his friend Bjørn, who runs to intercept her –

And Kersten stopped. She threw herself flat and the wet sealskin cloak billowed over her, hiding her from head to foot. Underneath it, she continued to move in heavy, lolloping jumps. She must be crawling on hands and knees, drawing the skin closely around her. She rolled. Waves rushed up and sucked her into the water. Trapped in those encumbering folds, she would drown. ‘Kersten!’ Peer screamed. The body in the water twisted, lithe and muscular, and plunged forward into the next grey wave. 

I wanted there to be an element of doubt. Is Kersten really a selkie, or is it simply a story the other characters make about her, in an attempt to explain what she did, and why? Years earlier, the daughter of a friend and work colleague of mine had killed herself in the grip of post-natal depression, and a great part of the book – I realised after I’d written it – turned out to be about motherhood and what it does to you, and the different ways people cope or don’t cope. I didn’t plan this, it simply came out that way. There was Kersten, the mother who goes missing, lost or dead. There was Gudrun, older, capable, hard-working, the nurturing but sometimes short-tempered mother. There was a troll princess, drama-queen mother of the kind of spoiled brat other mothers dread. And there was Granny Greenteeth, my version of the dangerous English water-spirit Jenny Greenteeth who drags children into the green depths of the stagnant water she inhabits. She claims the motherless half-selkie baby, Ran, as her lawful prey even though the child will drown. She is the destructively possessive mother. 

Peer saw her, or thought he did: Granny Greenteeth in human form, sitting at the bottom of the millpond with Ran in her arms. A greenish light clung around them. Granny Greenteeth’s hair was waving upwards in a terrible aureole and she bent over Ran, rocking her to and fro. 

Granny or Jenny Greenteeth is a fresh-water spirit, a nixie not a selkie, and her origin in English folklore is likely to have been as a bogey to frighten children away from dangerous ponds. Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology (1835) says that the Danish water spirit, the nøkke, wears a green hat and that ‘when he grins you see his green teeth’. Grimm adds that ‘there runs through the stories of water-sprites a vein of cruelty and bloodthirstiness which is not easily found among daemons of mountains, woods and homes… To this day, when people are drowned in a river, it is common to say: “The river-sprite demands his yearly victim,” which is usually an innocent child.’

Unlike nixies, selkies are not cruel, though they sometimes take revenge on those who have mistreated them. They are not spirits but creatures of flesh and blood like ourselves, as the Shetland and Orkney islanders who told selkie stories in the 1940s to David Thomson for BBC radio (and published later in Thomson’s book The People of The Sea) knew full well. One story Thomson heard in the radio age was told by Shetlander Gilbert Charlson, and it couldn’t be plainer about the physicality of the selkie race. A band of men land on the Ve Skerries (the ‘Holy Skerries’) to stun the seals there and skin them alive: 

‘Ye’d no sooner stun your seal than you’d set to and skin him, you understand, for if you left him there he might come back to life and go back into the sea while you turned around. T’was hard to be sure if they were dead or no, for it’s very hard to kill them…’ 

The tale was already over a century old, for it is also found in Samuel Hibbert’s Description of the Shetland Islands (1822). Hibbert’s account is just as graphic: 

They … stunned several of them and while they lay stupefied, stripped them of their skins, with the fat attached to them. They left the naked carcasses lying on the rocks, and were about to get into their boats with their spoils and return to Papa Stour, whence they had come. 

As they prepare to leave, a huge swell rises; the men all leap for their boats… The Ve Skerries are the very ones through which Lieutenant Thomas RN rowed in the 1850s  coming back from his cod-fishing expedition, and he described them as “almost covered by the sea at high water, and in this stormy climate, a heavy surf breaking over them generally forms an effectual barrier to boats.” So the men are swift to leave: but one is left behind. Unable to bring the boats close enough for him to jump, his friends give up and row for home, knowing he’ll be washed away.

            And now the seals return to the skerry, moaning and crying for the deaths of their kin; crying even more for those still alive, who without their skins can never return to their home in the sea – this glosses the truth of actual, living, skinned seals still writhing on the rocks... The the one crying the loudest is a female selkie called  ‘Geira’ – or ‘Gioga’ in the older version – for her son Hancie has lost his skin and must now be forever exiled. 

            Seeing the shivering, stranded fisherman fated to die from exposure or drowning, Geira offers to carry him on her back all the way home to Papa Stour, if in return he will find and restore her son’s sealskin. The man is willing, but he is desperately afraid of the turbulent waves. So he asks her permission to cut slots in the thick sealskin of her shoulders and flanks, two for his hands and two for his feet, so that he can hold on firmly ‘between the skin and the flesh’ and will ‘no slip in tae the sea’. So dear is her son to Geira that she agrees, and carries the man away through the storm and all the way back to Papa Stour. The story ends: 

‘And this man went across the island in the night, when he landed. He walked down by the Dutch Loch and on to Hamna Voe. He made sure his comrades were sleeping. And he went there to the skeo [a little stone house used for the curing of fish]. And he chose out the longest and bonniest skin out o’ a’ that lay there and took it to the old mother selkie, Geira. It was the skin o’ her son, Hancie, and away wi’ that she swam.’

            David Thomson: The People of the Sea 

So there’s a tale of co-operation between human and selkie, even though the man was part of a team slaughtering and skinning the seals. The relationship between the two races is not an equal one. The men prey upon the seals in order to live – to sell the skins, and make shoes and garments from them. They use the seals, and also they depend upon them: they owe them. And they’re uneasy about it, uneasy about killing these creatures who seem so much like…  people. One more quotation from The People of the Sea, from eighty year-old Osie Fea: 

‘It’s no wonder they were thought to be like us,’ he said. ‘For the seals and ourselves were aye thrown together in our way o’ getting a living, and everything we feel, they feel, ye may be sure o’ that.’

            ‘I wouldna care to be near them,’ said Margaret Fae.

            ‘I have watched them,’ said Osie, ‘as near as I am to you. I have seen a mother out by the Seal Skerry when the sea was full o’ wreckage. There was a ship wrecked out by and it was rough, and this wreckage was tumbling her young one about so he couldna win ashore. I could see the anxiety gazing out o’ her eyes like a woman’s. The very same. The very same as a woman’s.’ 

It is surely from this sense of identification, of empathy and of guilt, that the stories were born. 

 

 Picture credits:

The Seal Woman of Kopakonan, Faroes. Read her story on the Faroes website at this link

The Seal Woman of Kopakonan: photo by Annebjorg Andreasen

The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry

An airthlie nourrice sits and sings,

And aye she sings, Ba lily wean!

Little ken I my bairnis father

Far less the land that he staps in.

So begins the old ballad of 'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry'. As Laura Marjorie Miller discussed a few weeks ago in her guest post here, most selkie tales – or at least, most of those familiar to a modern audience – concern a seal woman who is captured or taken to wife by a mortal man, usually a fisherman who spies her dancing in mortal form on a moonlit beach and steals her sealskin robe, so preventing her from returning to her kindred in the sea.

In Margo Lanagan’s thought-provoking ‘Sea Hearts’ (UK title 'The Brides of Rollrock Island’), the men of the island take beautiful, passive, mournful selkie brides in preference to ordinary human women, but this communal act of selfish, sexual exploitation rebounds upon them. The men cut themselves off from genuine relationships, and they and their children suffer from the seal women’s terrible, unspoken grief.

My own 'Troll Mill' (the second part of 'West of the Moon'), opens when a fisherman’s wife, Kersten, thrusts her newborn baby into the arms of the young hero, Peer, and flings herself into the sea. Hampered by the baby in his arms, Peer tries to stop her:

Rain slashed into his eyes.  His feet skated on wet grass, sank into pockets of soft sand. She was on the beach now, running straight down the shingle to the water. Peer skidded to a crazy halt.  He couldn’t catch her. He saw Bjørn, bending over the boat, doing something with the nets. Peer filled his lungs and bellowed, ‘Bjørn!’ at the top of his voice.  He pointed.

Bjørn’s head came up. He turned, staring. Then he flung himself forwards, pounding across the beach to intercept Kersten. And Kersten stopped.  She threw herself flat and the wet sealskin cloak billowed over her, hiding her from head to foot.  Underneath it, she continued to move in heavy, lolloping jumps.  She must be crawling on hands and knees, drawing the skin cloak closely around her.  She rolled. Waves rushed up and sucked her into the water. Trapped in those encumbering folds, she would drown.

‘Kersten!’ Peer screamed. The body in the water twisted, lithe and muscular, and plunged forward into the next grey wave.

Writing 'Troll Mill', I found myself exploring various themes of possession – can one possess a child? – a wife? – another person? – and motherhood. I wanted to explore the paradoxical selfishness of a ‘good’ and likeable man, Bjørn, who has used love as an excuse for trapping the woman he wants. And I saw the selkie’s return to the sea, abandoning her child, as a metaphor for post natal depression.

'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry' differs from the ‘selkie bride’ legends insofar as the selkie in question is not female, but male. The earliest known version was collected by Captain F.W.L. Thomas of the Royal Navy, who heard it sung by ‘a venerable lady of Snarra Voe, Shetland’ some time around 1852: he sent it to The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.  Later in the century it made it into Child’s Ballads, number 113, and an original tune for it was collected in 1938 by Professor Otto Andersen on the island of Flotta, Orkney, who heard it sung by John Sinclair:

Sadly I can’t find a recording. The best known tune for the ballad was written by James Waters in the late 1950s (sung below by Joan Baez).

As with most stories of human/otherworldly liaisons, in 'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry' things have gone wrong from the very start. The ballad opens with the ‘airthly nourrice’ – the mortal woman nursing her child – lamenting that she doesn’t know who his father is. ‘Little ken I my bairn’s father, far less the land that he dwells in’. It’s easy to let the beautiful tune sweep you away into a pleasant mood of romantic melancholy. But stop, stop and think!  What does it mean, when a woman doesn’t know who her child’s father is? How can that happen? It can happen if that woman has been raped.  There’s a lot of rape in ballads, much of it quite casual, probably reflecting everyday life.

So here’s this woman, this unnamed woman, rocking and nursing her child, not knowing who his father is, and then something fearful happens.

Then ane arose at her bed-fit

And a grumlie guest I’m sure was he:

‘Here am I, thy bairnis father,

Although I be not comelie’.

‘One arose at her bed foot’ – in her home, in her bower, into the safe place where she’s nursing her child, there emerges, surges up like an apparition from the foot of the bed, this grim, rough creature which once forced itself upon her. (The illustration by Vernon Lee, above, powerfully suggests the uncanny terror of the moment.) And he acknowledges her child as his. And he tells her the terrible truth: he’s not even human, and if he has a home at all other than the wild sea, it’s only a tiny rock far out in the North Atlantic, far from land.

I am a man, upo’ the lan,

An I am a silkie in the sea,

And when I’m far and far frae lan

My hame it is in Sule Skerrie.’

The woman reproaches him.  ‘It wasna weel,’ she says, ‘That the great Silkie of Sule Skerrie should come and aught a child to me.’ But in response, this happens.

And he has ta’en a purse of gold

And he has put it upo’ her knee,

Saying ‘Gie to me my little young son

And tak thee up thy nourris-fee.’

He’s paying her off, flinging money into her lap. ‘Pick up your money and give me my son.’ It’s like a blow to the face; his indifference to her is chilling. This is not a happy story, and the selkie, being a supernatural creature, has the gift of foreseeing how it will all end: badly.  One summer day, ‘when the sun shines hot on every stone’, he will take his little half-mortal son ‘and teach him how to swim the foam’. But by this time the woman will have married a man who can shoot with a gun. (I wonder if when this ballad was new, guns were new too?) At any rate, either by accident or by design, he will shoot both the selkie and his son.

An it sall come to pass on a simmer’s day

When the sin shines het on evera stane

That I will tak my little young son

And teach him for to swim the faem.

An thu sall marry a proud gunner,

An a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be,

And the very first schot that ere he schoots,

He’ll schoot baith my young son and me.

What was the point of it all, then?  If it was always going to end in such tragedy?  Why did the selkie take the woman in the first place, why did he father her child? You might as well ask, ‘What is the point of “Hamlet”?’  The ballad is a song, a poem, and if it’s about anything it’s about the harshness and unfairness of the world, and the brevity and beauty of life.  The best moments are in the last-but-one verse: it’s full of light: the glorious heat of the sun on the shoreline stones in the short, bright northern summer, and the sensuous joy and tenderness of the bond between the selkie and his ‘little young son’ as he teaches him to ‘swim the foam’. Those are the moments that make the story bearable – and surely, the ballad says, those are the moments which make human life bearable, however brief it may be.

 Joan Baez' haunting version of 'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry', tune by James Waters.


Picture credit:  Vernon Hill's illustration of the tale. From Richard Chope's 1912 collection Ballads Weird and Wonderful

Sea Lion Woman: A Selkie Story for a New Millennium - by Laura Marjorie Miller

Harbor seal at Seal beach, La Jolla, California. © Ralph Pace

I am delighted to welcome Laura Marjorie Miller to the blog. Laura writes about travel, Yoga, magic, myth, fairy tales, photography, marine conservation, and other soulful subjects. She is a regular columnist at elephantjournal.com, contributing editor at Be You Media, and public-affairs writer at UMass Amherst, and has a feature forthcoming in Yankee magazine. Her work has appeared at Tripping, GotSaga, and Dive News Network, in the Boston Globe and Parabola. She is based in Massachusetts, where she lives with a cat named Huck. 

In this thoughtful piece, Laura considers the tragic beauty of the selkie legends, and wonders if it's time to find a new way of retelling and interpreting them.  The wonderfully moody photographs appear by kind permission of Ralph Pace, http://www.ralphpacephotography.com/ and the magical illustrations are courtesy of Scottish artist Kate Leiper www.kateleiper.co.uk.  Many thanks to both.

My favorite place in all of Boston is outside the harbor seal habitat at the New England Aquarium. The seals, shining silver-grey, their thick oily coats spattered with inky speckles, glide back and forth by the glass. Sometimes they barrel-roll to soar on their backs, navel slits to the sky, flippers folded like wings. Sometimes they bob vertically in the water like corks, serene expressions on their faces.

Every time I’m in Boston, no matter where in town I am, I’m aware of their presence. I am pulled to them, the shredded iron filings of me to the steady strong magnet of them. One doesn’t even have to pay admission to the aquarium to watch the seals, but can view them from outside, so once I park my car, I race there along the pavement of the harbor wharf. It is all I can do in public not to break into sobs at their beauty. I stand by the glass, weeping silently with longing, undried tears coating my cheeks with a rime of salt water, but also smiling with unaccountable joy. I want to be with them. I am a river running to their ocean.

I love seals, and because I am a woman who loves seals, and loves mythology and folktales, merfolk and sea songs, I love selkies. I love them not for the tragic nature of their stories but because they are both human and seal.

Part of the utter core of the traditional selkie story is that the selkie, in the end, leaves. So naturally, my boyfriend, knowing I love both selkies and stories, started to become alarmed, thinking that I would leave him the same way. I told him our story was different, because I choose to be with him.

And that was when I realized that we all need a new selkie story, that our myths can guide us but not lock us: that there can be a new, variant myth, not to replace the old, but to give a sense of possibility, both for the relationships between lovers, and also humans and animals: to shine in the world in its newness.

The old selkie story has a basic, archetypal framework. Details swirl around and modify these fundamental components: a fisherman sees a mysterious woman emerge from a sealskin, at night on a beach, perhaps to dance with her kin under the moonlight or perhaps in her own private reverie. He falls in love with the sight and idea of her, and knowing by lore that she is a selkie, a seal woman, he knows that if her pelt is in his possession then she is under his rule. Without her skin she cannot return to the sea. So he steals and stashes her skin.

When she realizes her skin is missing she is distraught. He then reveals himself to her. She follows him home to be his wife. She apparently has no choice.

 

Whether the woman is attracted to the fisherman or not, we are never told. He begets children on her, and they live a pleasant enough existence, but there is always something melancholy about her, an absence, a way of gazing yearningly towards the sea. One day, one of her children will discover something like an oilskin raincoat in a trunk in the attic, or stuffed into a notch in the eaves. Her son or daughter will ask her what it is. Her eyes will go wild with joy, and she will snatch her skin from him, clutch it to her breast, and say hasty farewells as she races to the beach. She cannot run fast enough for herself.

A Selkie Story © Kate Leiper 2009

Sometimes afterwards the selkie will keep watch on her family from the water, following their boats in the form of a seal: generations of descendants with webbed phalanges and distant expressions. Sometimes she is gone forever from the story, her husband pining away in regret.

But what if there were a new selkie story? One in which she chooses the man? One in which the man courts her, makes himself loveable to her, that she wants to come to him; that he loves her for being what she is, part seal, and knowing that, loves the wild part of her? And when she needs to, she runs to the ocean, pulls her skin back around her, swims with her family. She comes to back to land. Back and forth, as seals do anyway. While she is gone, he does man things.

The story has drama, just not the inevitability of failure. The crux of the new story is its inner quarrel, the bit of resistance in the man, her uncertainty with him, and the back-and-forthing within them that gives way to purer love. Such would be a new possibility, and a new way.

The old selkie story is both about the relationship between lovers, and our relationship to the wild. In the way that sometimes humans in our weakness try to control our loved ones, through manipulation, through emotional blackmail, sometimes even through abuse and coercion, because we fear that their independence means they will leave and betray us, or that their self-sovereignty implies faithlessness, in the same way we have been doing things wrong in regards to animals, and so have trapped ourselves: keeping animals in tanks, in enclosures, jars, bowls, corrals. We seldom do this out of purposeful cruelty, or even sheer profitable callousness, but so much oftener out of misguided love. So since the story is made of love, it is malleable, it can be reoriented, rewritten, redeemed.

What we love in wild animals is their wild nature, their otherness, but for some reason that is the first thing we want to take away from them. In our infancy, both historical and personal, we wanted to contain it. I don’t think we always took animals from distant lands and kept them in iron enclosures with concrete floors solely to display our dominance over the exotic and oriental: maybe that was part of it, but not all. Knowing what I know of humans, I suspect it is because we wanted to marvel at their beauty, and have it close by, without fully understanding that separating them from their environment would eventually kill them. A child who puts a mantis in a jam jar does not do that out of an impulse to dominate: she does it because she loves it, she wants to keep it, to behold its angular alien elegance under the holes she has punched in the jar lid. She does not know otherwise; her curiosity is ignorant of consequences, and she wants to hold the moment of that joy forever. She does not want it to be over.

We fear the moment the creature leaves us. We fear we will be left behind, that it will not choose us.

So instead of courting the selkie as a decent man would, the fisherman traps her. He takes away her ability to choose him and so his story ends tragically, because he stole her life. But if he had taken a chance of not being chosen, of being patient, of allowing her to come and go, she may actually have come to love him, and he would have continued to behold her in her true nature, not in a diminished form.

A Selkie Story © Kate Leiper 2009

Compelling is bad magic no matter how it’s done. Any savvy and sensitive magic-user knows that love-spells, with their undertones of binding, come with a price: which is their success. Their success is their curse. If you get what you think you want, you will never know whether you are freely loved, whether that person would have chosen you if you had not forced them. Forever, while you are with them, something gnaws at the underneath of you, the wrongness of what you have done, taken their free will, stowed their skin, and stolen a love that should have by rights been freely given. Although in my life I seem to insist on learning things the hard way, this sounds so utterly miserable for both parties that I have never even been tempted to test it. I have heard enough tell of those who have.

Forcing something against its nature is the dark side of tameness. If you have seen the children’s-book-like French movie Le Renard et l’Enfant, The Fox and the Child, you know that it is very frank about wildness versus tameness, and arguably the opposite of the fox-taming discussion in The Little Prince. The little girl grows to befriend and love a wild fox, but over the course of the movie you feel the dread of the inevitable drawing nearer, as the girl’s affections start to close in on the fox, like the collar-like scarf she puts around the fox’s neck. We sense what will happen when the protagonist finally lures the fox in her house. But again, like the fisherman in the selkie story, the girl does what she does out of yearning, out of wanting to keep.

In our culture, we used to collect nature without an afterthought, to stick it in iron cages, to make its sensitive and articulated paws walk on flat concrete surfaces, so that we could possess it. Increasingly, to do this seems so absurd, as though we are suddenly shaking ourselves awake: ‘What are we doing?’

In the last several years, and rising faster and faster, there has been an upwelling of consciousness, through the movies The Cove and Blackfish, about the high cost of keeping marine mammals in captivity: in human casualties and injuries, but also, quite spectacularly, awareness of the cost to the animals themselves: the trauma to their families, emotionally bonded in ways that we can only begin to comprehend, so much that their families are their very selves and taking someone out of the unit is like ripping off a body part, an unspeakable psychic torture that goes on and on. The collapse of their mighty bodies, visible in their sagging fins, which in the wild are pirate-masts of their spirits. The torment of imprisonment with strangers from other whale tribes who may bully and harass them and they have no means of defense or escape. The mockery and misuse of their might by being forced to do clown tricks. The acoustic torture of being trapped in a featureless concrete pit, the walls of which bounce their echolocation, meant to travel for hundreds of miles, back again and again into their sensitive ears. The torment of endless loneliness and utter isolation, unbearable except it offers no choice except to be borne.

Yet I sense that something is changing, and rapidly so. I don’t know quite what caused it, this waking-up, this critical mass, but something is indeed happening that can’t be denied anymore, or stopped: human people have begun to care more about animals for the animals’ own sake, through recognition of their intelligence and consciousness, and the implications of those. We are seeing them increasingly as other peoples, their own and different tribes, with their own perceptions and languages. A zoo mentality is giving way to a sanctuary mentality, a rehabilitation mentality. There is an urgency and impatience now for change. The change has already happened, and like the River Isen when the Ents break its dam in The Lord of the Rings, and release the river, consciousness comes rampaging through and cannot be re-contained. What has seen cannot be unseen, and what is known cannot be unknown.

All that remains is for reality to catch up with it. Rachel Clark, in a stunning essay in Psychology Today  calls Blackfish a bellwether presaging “more than cetacean freedom. It foreshadows an urgent global uprising to set things right everywhere. We are seeing an international frenzy for justice.”

The selkie story calls out to us for justice in territories of personal and natural concerns, in both cases about power. And that is why we need a new story. One that explodes the old model of grabbing and holding and stealing life and freedom just because one wants it. One that celebrates the sovereignty of other beings, human or non-human. One that is a ballad of justice.

Myths live in us, in response to us. So the new selkie story is this: that we trust whom we love. That we try to win their love so that through their own agency they choose to be with us. That we be brave enough to gamble our fear of loss. That we accept that just because we want to possess a being, no matter how badly we want to keep it, its right to be sovereign over its own life will always outweigh our desire to possess it. That freedom will always trump desire. That we are responsible for protecting that freedom in one another, that it is never ours to take, by any means.

We can write a new selkie story, to coexist with the old. The old will continue to exist as an instruction manual of what not to do, a sorrow, a caution. We can chant this new one by driftwood fires, and the seals in their wildness can spyhop to listen, dark eyes regarding us from the night ocean. Or they can ignore us altogether, as is their right. But one thing is sure: except for their own private and tribal reasons, seals should never be sorrowful.

As I am standing by the seal tank, a little girl next to me says to her mother, ‘What are they dreaming about in there?’ Her mother answers, ‘I don’t know; what do you think?’ ‘I think they are dreaming of being back in the ocean,’ the little girl says firmly.

The new selkie story is already being written. The new world has already begun.

 

Harbor seal, © Ralph Pace

Postscript: A song for pinnipedal people, seal and soul, clan and clade, Otariidae, Odobenidae, Phocidae, for all who have an ancestor who grabbed her sealskin and ran toward the waves. For women and men, and all other wild creatures:

Feist, ‘Sea Lion Woman’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l7xfuu8ja8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chcc_Ci36Vw