WHERE DO THE MERMAIDS STAND?
“Where do the mermaids stand?” asked the mermaid in Robert Fulghum’s tale about some sort of wild children’s party. And on being told that “There are no such things as mermaids”, the mermaid replies, “Oh yes [there are], I am one.” What more proof do you need! Someone else has written, in reply to the question, “Are there mermaids?”
“Of course there are, I used to see them
in shabby seaside towns,
with their forked blue denim tails.
They were perilous to meet –but worth it!”
These were a rather different class of mermaid – more of an updated version of the Sirens who Odysseus encounters on his epic homeward voyage and who lure sailors to their doom with their beautiful singing.
E. M. Forster wrote a short story about the Siren in which a tourist meets a local Sicilian diver. They are on a beautiful beach “like powdered turquoise”, and the diver remarks, “In a place like this one might see the Siren.” The tourist replies, “She comes out of the water, doesn’t she…and sits on the rock at the [cave] entrance, combing her hair?” But the diver replies, “How can she? The priests have blessed the air, so she cannot breathe it, and blessed the rocks, so that she cannot sit on them. But the sea no man can bless, because it is too big and always changing. So she lives in the sea.” There is no room in the world for Sirens, for mermaids, except in the depths of the sea. And maybe there won’t be room for them even there before too long.
A few weeks ago there was a news report that the dugong has been declared “functionally extinct” in China. Now the dugong – meaning the ‘lady of the sea’ - is a gentle herbivorous marine mammal that lives in tropical coastal waters from east Africa, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, through the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago, to the South Pacific and northern Australia. But it no longer lives in Chinese waters, at least, not in sufficient numbers for the species to survive there. And why has this happened? Primarily because its habitat has become so polluted, so damaged by coastal ‘development’, so despoiled by shipping and by wasteful, destructive fishing practices, that the dugong can’t survive there any more. In particular it has suffered from the devastation of the sea-grass beds that are – or were – its principal food source.
So what has this got to do with mermaids? It is said that dugongs and their close relatives, the manatees, are the original mermaids of myth and legend, as reported by ancient mariners. It must be said that these animals bear little obvious resemblance to that seductive creature – half fish half beautiful maiden who sits on a rock combing her hair, but those sailors were probably getting pretty desperate after many months at sea! But the gentle dugongs and manatees have a charm of their own as they graze through the sea-grass beds, threatening nothing and no-one. And yet the threats they themselves face are one more example of our wanton destruction of marine life, and indeed of the natural world in general.
Manatees exist in several species and subspecies in the coastal waters of the West Indies, the south-eastern United States – notably Florida, West Africa, and the rivers of the Amazon basin. Although legally protected in some places, they nevertheless face the same sort of dangers that have wiped out their cousins, the dugongs of China. The loss of sea-grass beds to coastal over-development is probably the greatest threat, but by no means the only one. The clearance of mangrove forests deprives them – and much else too – of shelter from the storms and hurricanes that are increasing in number and intensity as the global climate spirals out of control. In Florida manatees are often killed or terribly injured by the proliferating speedboats and other leisure craft of the state’s residents and visitors.
So where do the mermaids stand in our world of climate change, of polluted seas and industrialised, overdeveloped and urbanised coastlines? And manatees and dugongs are still actively hunted in some places, or turn up as by-catch in fishing nets. They increasingly find themselves at risk from human activity – and only human activity, as they have few natural enemies. Like the Siren in E. M. Forster’s story, and like so many other species of animal and plant, there is less and less room for them in this world thanks to us. As in Forster’s story it was officious and intolerant priests who had driven Sirens from the rocks and from the air, so too often have some brands of religion failed to appreciate the earth and its wonders, failed to stand up for the natural world, for the divine creation, on which our own survival is totally dependent.
In Robert Fulghum’s little story, the mermaids stand for “all those who are different, who do not fit the norm and who do not accept the available boxes and pigeonholes”, and so they represent a pattern that “you can build a school, a nation, or a world on.” Of course, Fulghum was referring here to building a compassionate, kind and inclusive human society – and that is something we desperately need in a world blighted by war, injustice and poverty. But that idea extends to the original mermaids too – to creatures like the manatees and dugongs, which are not conventionally beautiful or ‘cute’, not to mention things that we regard as dangerous and downright unpleasant. They take their place with what Genesis calls “great whales, and every living creature, that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly…” (Gen. 1: 21). All are precious, even it we don’t always appreciate it; all are vital components of this planet’s tapestry of life, and the loss of any of them to humanity’s destructive activities is not only a tragedy, it is a threat to the tapestry itself. We are not only impoverished by the loss of any species, we are also made more vulnerable ourselves, for should the tapestry finally unravel we will go with it.
Extinction is a grim reality in our world today, and although it has not yet overtaken the manatees and dugongs as entire species, there is one species of the same family that has been entirely wiped out by human persecution. This was the Steller’s Sea Cow, which features in Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘The White Seal’. As Kipling describes the Sea Cows, “They were between twenty and thirty feet long, and they had no hind-flippers, but a shovel-like tail that looked as if it had been whittled out of wet leather.” But Kipling never saw a living Sea Cow himself. He was writing in the late 19th century, by which time Sea Cows had been extinct for a hundred years. In their home range, the cold waters of the Bering Sea and the north Pacific, they were an easy target for human hunters. The Sea Cows were a source of blubber, oil and meat and their slow and gentle ways left them defenceless.
Kipling makes the Sea Cows guides through a submarine tunnel that leads to a hidden sea, a refuge surrounded by cliffs that no man could climb down, even if there were any men there. This is the place where, in the story, the Sea Cows have gone to escape human rapacity, and they lead there other species which are similarly threatened. In Kipling’s day these included the Fur Seals, of whom the story’s central character, Kotick the white seal, is one. Fortunately, despite being slaughtered in enormous numbers for the fur trade, the Fur Seal survived, but it wasn’t looking that way in Kipling’s day. This is why the Sea Cows guide Kotick to the hidden sea, which is a sort of after-life for extinct animals like the Sea Cow.
It sometimes happens that species thought extinct are re-discovered in some remote refuge but the Sea Cow hasn’t been one of them. Increasing numbers are going the way of Steller’s Sea Cow and our world is the poorer for it. Maybe in the 18th century those hunters had no real conception of what they were doing. They didn’t set out to exterminate the Sea Cow, but they did it all the same, seeing the natural world as something to be plundered and exploited without thought for the consequences. Today we know better, although that doesn’t stop all too many people from doing it anyway, be that through desperation, greed or simply not caring. We know that the world is in danger of losing so much of its fragile web of life; that we are in the process of wrecking the climatic system and of reducing the earth beneath our feet to lifeless, infertile dust. And we know how to stop all this – but can we do so in time? And will we, so long as lesser matters take priority?
We have traditionally believed that the earth is a sacred place, created by God and filled with a wonderful complexity of living things. We are its stewards and its creatures are now in our care, and that is true whether we see it in religious terms or not. It is a responsibility that we neglect at our peril. Do those living things include mermaids? Maybe that depends on how you see dugongs and manatees! But if we are asked where we stand, let it be with the multiplicity of wonderful, beautiful, astonishing, fascinating and altogether mind-boggling creatures of air, land and sea. And if that includes the mermaids so much the better.