Sailing has its paradoxes and polarities. Even the shortest trip can switch between restful tranquility and anxiety provoking squalls. No matter how much you practice, do maintenance, carry out drills, employ the latest navigation aid, in the end you still offer yourself up to the sea. It’s as green a form of transport as you could imagine but as a leisure pursuit it is horribly carbon intensive. Glass fibre boats are literally congealed oil and my son, Samuel, refers to ours as the ‘toxic tub’. Yet sailing is part of my identity. It is a source of pleasure, of fellowship, of personal growth, of elemental connection to a larger whole. Sailing with the tide literally involves seeking a favourable planetary alignment. Sailing is at least as big as the solar system, as big as the galaxy if you navigate by the stars. And those stars themselves are mapped on to figures from mythology. Our very psyche stretched taut across the heavens.
Yet I had nearly resolved to give up sailing. Partly because I sensed the subsonic rumbling of our systems on the verge of imploding. Also because I felt increasingly sickened at the living underworld of horror that powers my lifestyle. There are tricks of thought I buy into to dodge the shame. By the logic of the middle classes privilege is a deserved outcome education and career. Having money is itself a mark of being entitled to the trinkets that money can buy. By earning and spending we fulfill a sacred duty. However, beneath this veneer of cultural legitimation are the unpalatable truths of exploitation, extraction and ecocide that are barely disguised at all if only we care to see them.
In the end my resolve slipped. I had prevaricated and promised myself one last season of on the water. Then, seemingly out of nowhere the first waves of collapse broke over us in the guise of a pandemic. I thought I was in some way prepared for this unravelling to the extent that I had become a little smug and self-satisfied. I imagined I’d learned to accommodate the dual realities of slow motion breakdown and life as normal, and that when collapse became more imminent I could just hop into this different reality fully equipped. However, the arrival of Covid made an embarrassment of my preparations and now I realise what I thought was deep and transformative work was mostly superficial. I’m just as lost as everyone else.
But I’m not sure that I’d really been preparing at all, but just letting this big balloon of anxiety well up and push against my normal life, like a tumour compressing a vital organ. I was alive to the emergency, but lacked skill to work out what steps I needed to take and the courage to execute them. Or perhaps I’m being unkind to myself. None of this is easy for anybody, although it is certainly much, much harder for many. Those confined with their abusers. Those facing financial ruin. Those crushed by some governments’ edicts carelessly tossed out as unsolvable riddles: Stay at home and starve, circulate and spread death.
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Have you heard seals sing? They make an eerie, mournful sound. We first heard them as we sailed towards Inchkeith island close-hauled on a summer’s evening. A ghostly moan floating through the air with no obvious origin. In our predictable world it’s rare to encounter something so unfamiliar and uncanny. We speculated it might be the cry of a seabird, an exotic visitor happening upon the estuary. I joked to Samuel that I should be tied to the mast in case I might leap recklessly into the water. The story of Odysseus and the sirens warns us how easily we can be beguiled into danger. It reminds us that monsters use the energy of our desire to lure us into their bidding. Hearing those moans unsettled me. It felt like a veil was being drawn back and everyday certainties slipping away, as if we had sailed right out of the modern world into another, more uncertain, realm. As it turns out, that realm was never so very far away.
Seals are mysterious creatures who also have their own mythology. In Scotland there are tales of selkies – seals that transform themselves into humans by stepping out of their skin. The story goes that a fisherman fell in love with a selkie. For fear of losing her he hid her skin to prevent her becoming a seal once more and stealing away into the sea. Somewhat short of options the selkie was compelled to marry the fisherman. While they got on well enough, even having children together, she remained desperately unhappy, feeling caged and hungering after her carefree existence in the ocean.
This is a reversal of the myth of the sirens where the wild spirit of the magical creature is confined and defeated by human desire. And I’m not sure what kind of love it might be that would so ensnare its object? Is this a metaphor for the unhealthy relationship we have with our wild kin, all possession and control, sometimes in the guise of love, sometimes entirely unmasked violation? Although at the same time in this tale there is a flow between human and animal characteristics which acknowledges the seal’s needs as a person, her legitimate desires, her ability to feel injustice. Perhaps it speaks of a time when we were closer to our wild kin. Knitted. Interdependent.
A selkie steps out of its skin to leave the ocean and walk on the land. In Sumerian mythology, the goddess Inanna is challenged to give up her royal garments one by one as she passes through seven gates to gain entry into the world of the dead. In mythology at least, it seems that transiting between realities involves sacrificing something precious.
Inanna wishes to comfort her recently widowed sister Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, who sits on a throne of compost and bone lashed together with strips of hide. Ereshkigal is steadfast in her duty to the dead and so on hearing of her sister’s intention she sets in place the seven gates in order to obstruct her. But Inanna is persistent, even though she feels her authority and pride draining away with each of the garments she surrenders. By the time Inanna passes through the final gate and into the underworld she is naked and bewildered. Ereshkigal does not soften at the sight of her sister, if anything she is even further enraged at her temerity. She give Inanna a death stare and displays her corpse on a hook denying her any dignity at the last. For some reason this final image reminds me of how a mole-catcher pins slain moles to a barbed wire fence as evidence of his labour. The myth of Inanna goes on to tell of a resurrection, but I’m not ready for that part of the story just yet. It feels to me as if our descent still has a long way to go.
I imagine that I am accompanying Inanna in her descent, but I’m not sure what’s happening as she discards her royal garments and I discard my more mundane attire. Are the garments what make us, or what hides who we are? Are they our identity or our mask? When we remove them are we stripping away layers of ourselves until nothing remains, or are we shedding our defences one by one until our true selves are fully revealed?
I ask myself what would I need to surrender to pass through those gates? What do I cling to most? Choosing a tangible thing, that would be my boat, or it’s less tangible counterpart, my identity as a sailor and the fellowship that brings. I would have to let that go.
What habit would I surrender? That would be my aloofness. My objective coolness. My dampened emotional responses. My way of shrugging off awful occurrences as expectable given the evidence of how people are. My numbness to it all. My unwillingness to feel. My defences.
As I write this I’m inhaling the odour of a decaying mouse. Probably one discarded by the cat. We can’t find the carcass, and so live with its repulsive must pervading our domesticity. Death as commonplace. As a fact of nature.
I’m reflecting that it’s strange to be in the midst of a crisis yet have no connection to anyone who is ill. We stay at home and hear the deaths being casually tallied on the news. Some reports are harder to listen to. Those of ravaged care homes in the UK, mass graves in Brazil, uncollected corpses in Ecuador. Of news of death being broken to relatives by video call where the three-dimensional expanse of compassion and tenderness fails to squeeze through the internet wires and two-dimensional computer screens. Of how epidemiologists use the word ‘harvesting’ to refer to the way the old and vulnerable perish in an epidemic. A grim harvest indeed. A harvest of souls.
This is death that is both obscenely public and heart-breakingingly impersonal. Death without rites to soften its trauma. Death unappeased and unresolved. Death amassing reckoning as a shared yet unpayable debt. I think of all those agitated spirits pouring into the underworld and wonder what they might make of me as a visitor? Now I feel that I better understand Ereshkigal’s anger at her sister in daring to enter this sacred domain.
I’m uncomfortable with taking the moment of the pandemic to optimistically re-imagine the future. There’s a tangle of politics and privilege at play in imagining a resurrection when so many are being scythed down. There are 50% more deaths from the virus among the poorest in the UK and among people of colour. Now there is a flurry of reports of deaths in mental hospitals and a refusal to reveal many people with learning difficulties or autism have died. The virus exposes inequality as deep wounds, the trauma of which we do our best to ignore. Since everything has slowed many clamour to maintain the peace we have reclaimed – but this is the peace of the grave. The paradox is this: If we don’t re-establish the economy, put ourselves back in the harness, re-kindle the bustle of the city and roar of the planes, people will die then too, because we have no other way right now to sustain everyone. But if we re-start the machine then the danger is we will cling to its familiar oily scent and false promise. So we have a fraught and complicated mission. Overcoming our revulsion we have to set the machine running again. But then, as soon as it is running, slowly, and with care for all caught in its mechanisms, we have to set about the task of dismantling it for good.
This piece was written as part of an online writing workshop run by Sandy Ibrahim (https://www.facebook.com/thesovwoman/). The workshop ‘Writing in the Liminal, Journey to the Underworld’ took as its inspiration the myth of Inanna’s descent. I can highly recommend that you join one of Sandy’s workshops if you get a chance to do so. She has a gift for holding a safe space to allow deeply personal writing to emerge.
The image is a seal depicting Inanna and her friend Ninshubur. In is a Wikimedia Commons image contributed by Saiko and freely shareable under an Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.