sea devotional

selkies, Nereids & mermaids

Lovely as the flowers, angry as the sea. The girl is angry as the sea.

— Gil Vicente, from Collected Plays & Poems of G. V.; “The Girl Is Angry,”

The very fact of the sea invites worship, and I have done it many years now. (I say this with all the arrogance of a city-dweller.) I have spent every summer since I was a baby on the Scottish coast, a minute from the water. 

The sea is the most familiar and the most unknown entity in the world. 

In fairy stories, the sea is always feminine. See the selkies, the seal-bodied women, sun-laze on the rocks (avoid the fate of that farmer who stole her pelt, trapped her on land). Think of the perils of the siren song, sailors’ superstitions come alive, the Japanese tale of mermaid flesh granting deathly immortality. There are sightings today, every day, if you know where to look.

Think of the eternity contained in Freud’s ‘oceanic feeling’, of the individual subsumed into the collective, of the mystical and erotic. All of my truest revelation has been at sea. It is so easy to turn priestess, here. ♱ 

antique mid-18th century (1750) sterling silver dutch teapot, finely chased with maritime decorations and mermaid finial

Liquid demands liquid — pour your libations from the nautilus cup. The sea is full of blood — that of the moon, cold and silver, that of Ariel, who replaced her tail with feet that ‘felt as if they were pierced by daggers’. My shrine honours the sea-birthed pearl, cradled in its shell, and Aphrodite, rising from seafoam. Exalt the idols of Alexandre Cabanel’s and Botticelli’s Venus.

Name the Nereids, the sea-nymphs of the Iliad: ox-eyed Halie, Actaea and Limnoreia, and Melite and Iaera and Amphithoe and Agave, fair-tressed Amatheia, Glauce and Thaleia and Cymodoce, Galatea, Clymene and Ianeira and Ianassa, Maera and Orithyia, Amphinone and Callianeira… All ride the chariot drawn by the hippocampus.

Dream of Herbert James Draper’s mother-of-pearl painting, A Water Baby.

Her skin was as luminous as the finest sea shells, with a pale pink glow to it.

— Anaïs Nin, from “Delta Of Venus,” originally published c. August 1977

salt-encrusted pieces from the “lots’ wife” collection by isreali sculptor sigalit landau, shoes submerged in the dead sea

You go out onto the water in a small, slight vessel, made for one person, gently held to the body of the sea. The bay fills with the tide, swallowing the sheep-grazed land, and then creeping further, threatening the roads, the white-stone houses. The water is so clear that you see right to the seabed, the crabs and fish and your own hours-old footprints — feeling the whole vertiginous, twenty feet drop. It is an unearthly, other world.

Once the currents brought in hundreds of moon jellyfish to the bay. Once I was almost swept out to sea. The white horses caution you, loving and deadly at turns.

♱ ˚⋆𓇼˚⊹ 𖦹 ⁺｡°

I have told the sea all of my secrets — and my daydreams, and resolutions, and heartache. I mean this absolutely literally. If apart from water they would be entrusted instead with the moon, the puller of tides. When I find it hard to sleep I match my breath to the imagined sounds of the waves coming in and out, in and out. I listen to the mewling cry of the oyster-catchers through the ear of the conch shell.

As girls, did we not all play mermaids in the pool? diving as deep as you could until you entered a world of your own, where sound, submerged, became eerie and thin, and you felt a fish tail flick.

captiuma thurman as venus/rose in the adventures of baron munchausen (1988)

via @bebemoon, kristen mcmenamy as a mermaid for “far, far from land” for w magazine. ph. tim walker

No two people can know the sea the same way.

— Mahmoud Darwish, from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi)

Here is a passage from a fairy tale I wrote years ago, of a girl abandoned to the highlands:

The girl knelt down, into the pooling tide, and splayed her fingers in the firmament. She watched. She watched the water unfurl spirals of sand made by occult, underground creatures. She watched a crab, a tiny, delicate skeleton, bury and unbury itself. She watched the movements of this universe, infinite, unfold.

In the story the girl offers her slippers and her hair to the sea, and in return she is granted protection.

When the tide is out you go rock-pooling, collect the shells of the oyster, mussel, cowrie, and resist the urge to keep walking, walking until the water splits and reforms above your hair, until you drown or are given new life as mermaid or calcified into a whelk. Called by the allure and terror of the whale, the gleaming lantern fish, the delicate tendrils of the anemone, the sea-snake.

The sea gave us a wedding ring
The sea kissed us

— Alexander Blok, A Trilogy of Lyric Dramas: Sailor’s Song

via @bebemoon, kristen mcmenamy in “far, far from land” as a mermaid draped in vera wang for w magazine. shot by tim walker

The sea sustains the body and the soul. I am so very grateful to it.

with love —

Anna Giselle ♱ ˚⋆𓇼˚⊹ 𖦹 ⁺｡°

Her eyes are extraordinarily pure and beautiful, but she has the cold quality of a mermaid. I am sure you would like her. She scares me to death.

— Tennessee Williams, from a letter to Donald Windham c. July 1947

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