The myth of the Selkie woman

Once every quarter as I was growing up, a glossy illustrated hardcover book would 'arrive'. My mother would look it over, hem and hah, show me a page or two, and then secure it at the top of the cupboard for me to read when I was older. Older being when she had decided I could decode the stories told by more realistic generations and artwork drawn by artists raised in Bluebeard's cavern. She forgot though that I could climb to the top of any tree, fence or wall with appropriate handholds and so a cupboard where my Christmas and birthday presents were also kept, meant only that I needed to get her out of the room.

The Rape of the Sabine Women

The books were a series of mailorder titles labelled 'Myths and legends'. My mother had begun ordering the series because I was fascinated by myth from around the world - and not the sanitised Disney forever-after myths. When my mother realised the titles were a bit, um, dark, she held onto them as an investment. They were hardcover with dark green and blue dust jackets with gold, embossed lettering. The pages were illustrated and full-colour with commissioned and licensed artwork: The Rape of the Sabine Women by Pietro da Cortino and Ophelia by John Millais.

Ophelia

Myths and legends are advice passed down from one generation to the next using symbolism. (Symbolism being far more effective than straight-out telling someone something. An authority figure says don't look in the cupboard? Like Bluebeard's wife I look in the cupboard. Now, if I had heard the Bluebeard tale first, I might have thought more carefully about what might be in there.) We all internalise social mores on an implicit basis, otherwise advertising that holds no relevance to a product would not work.

Illustration by Edward Dullac from an earlier version of the Little Mermaid. At the end she dissolves into foam.

I am all for scaring children a bit. I would rather my child didn't go into the forest or be nice to darkly handsome men, and deal with the emotional scars later. Generations upon generations of children listened to these stories (best told by a scraggly spinster with a talent for voices and sound effects around a crackling fire), were terrified to the point of wet pants and sheets, and lived to tell the stories in their old age.

Our real deficit I think is losing those old people to old-age homes. And our general disrespect for age and its knowledge, which we imagine is a return to juvenilism.

These stories taught that reality is brutal. Things happen for no discernable reason except that they happened, and a useful way to exorcise them is to turn them into moral tales or allegories. The stories change to adapt to changing dangers, unless they are written down and instead of adapting them we just read them verbatim. Because wolves soon cotton on that if they run across a girl in a red cape, they will wake up with a belly full of stones.

Disney spoke to a post-war and then consumerist society, where the ills were no longer hunger and shelter, but happiness, which remained elusive. Happy endings were maybe not so much a warning as a substitute, and a veil against the pyramid of class sinking into the mud. Our more post-modern Pixar nods at the brutality of life, although it ultimately convinces us of the benefits of living in society because life outside of society is wolves and most importantly loneliness. Wall-e is a beautiful movie, that like movies before it, ultimately confuses the desire for love with its necessity.

Don't get me wrong; animated films as contemporary myth are natural adaptations to the old myths (apparently there are only 10 plot lines but infinite manifestations). The adaptation is just a refusal to accept the brutality and sugarcoat it, sometimes literally, with proclamations about identity and love that, according to smart people, only sprung into being roundabout Shakespearian times. (Also the innocence of childhood, which maybe invalidates my entire argument here, but every argument is inherently flawed, else we wouldn't bother to debate.)

I think I have blogged about this before, but contemporary readers have short attention spans (you), which I am relying on.

This depressing monologue was sparked by the legend of the Selkie. Selkies were seals who concealed living breathing men and woman beneath their coats. Every so often a Selkie would 'unzip' her coat and do a few stretches, and if you caught her coat then you could keep her. So far the social more appears to be mysoginism. But this is a 'real' myth and the empathy you feel for this woman is about to be challenged and complicated.

She lives with her captor as his wife for years, because maybe he captured her from loneliness and is actually not so bad. They are kind to each other and breed some human children. One day he goes fishing and she steals back her coat. She swims out to her first, Selkie family. Husband number 2 is furious, so naturally he hunts down and kills her Selkie husband and children. In her rage, Mrs curses every man in and around the village to die in her ocean.

Yikes. Neither partner is exempt from judgement here, or from our empathy. Even society is implicated in the tragedy, by implicitly enabling this theft of a woman's rights. The consequences are vicious, but although there is a lesson, there are no dichotomies.

In another version, Mrs kills her landlubbing children and husband, and then lies weeping in a stream of his blood. This sounds like a Guy Ritchie film.

The Selkie story comes from varying cultures in northern Europe: Inuit, Celtic and Nordic, although the Celts lay claim to it. This is the type of myth depicted in those hardcover books so expertly hidden from me. Boiling, furious oceans, enraged and tragic characters, no hero or villain, or many heroes and villains, trails of blood and curses and life and death. I internalised these messages because they seemed more genuine. C'mon, even Barbie in an ivory tower must be able to see that Cinderella makes no sense, because someone's story never ends and it certainly doesn't continue for forever after.

Is a brutal mythology a sign of more brutal times? Is it an 'uneducated' peoples attempt to describe their reality? And is it paranoia to suspect that nothing has changed? That life and death are inexplicable, but that they are brutal and they do not always sit easy even when you reconcile yourself to these facts. That it is the trauma we need to be wary of: the curse of the Selkie woman. That we are both the hero and the villain, but that sometimes we are only the villain in someone else's story.That maybe children and adults could stand to be a bit more scared.

The internet is like a swamp and other metaphors

The internet is a fickle thing. (Could I have come up with a more inane opening line? The alternative is to lead straight into my point, like a news article, but I prefer to string you along. Also this is not news.) So is language, really. Once, our teacher started a game: the class was to create a long sentence by working together. Each person in the chain had to add one word to the phrase - then clause - then sentence - then complex sentence - then mass of meaningless statements.

I have written myself into a patch of swamp. Because if the internet is like that game, my blog is a handful of mud. On the bright side, rather that than one of those deep-sea eyeless fish.

What I mean is that - oh gosh, here's another swamp - the internet is in a sense (note the catch-all disclaimer, folks, and that includes third-party insurance) a demonstration of democracy. Listen before you start throwing things. The game was also a bit like democracy. Everyone adds their two cents with minimal censorship. (I mean, if we'd started adding swearwords, I guess the teacher would have stopped us. Maybe washed our mouths out. Is that even allowed nowadays? Because it was pretty effective.)

In about 2009, Penguin Books hosted an international experiment. They were going to enable internet users to write and edit a novel, and they would publish it. There were forums and guidelines and some limits (otherwise a user could stop sleeping and eating for three days and pound out the bulk of the novel, in theory. Less than theory, in my books (har har) - have you met some of these internet junkies?) All intellectual property rested with them.

The experiment drowned in the swamp of the internet. (And media studies grads everywhere yelled, Told ya' so. We love being right. Because it happens so rarely.) Perhaps they overestimated internet users or language or democracy (there, I said it). Proof that James Joyce didn't just pound out random strings of words, two out of five of which make sense. (It's more like four.) That's not the point though.

The writing was a mash of meaningless statements, that were over-edited (or under-edited depending on how you look at it). Forums were filled with sensitive writers (we're all sensitive) whose work has been 'completely decimated'. (I never partook of the experiment FYI. I prefer to stand on the sidelines and criticise. Constructively. And then feel guilty.) We all became commentators and the project shut down ahead of deadline. Penguin sent out a press release saying they wouldn't publish the novel, but it was there on the website to look at, because we had all learnt valuable things about publishing and the internet.

Now, I can't find the site or any references to it, despite a creative assortment of keywords and Google's ability to know what I meant to search rather than what I did. And I can't remember the name of the darn thing. I have just learnt something about the internet: you can delete all trace of something embarrassing - contrary to the logic that the internet remembers everything and that Google is the set of neuron receptors that lead to the memory.

Hence the internet being a fickle thing, and language too. And James Joyce a genius. (Stop throwing things! Huh, at least its a bushel of broccoli rather than - nevermind.)

Perhaps the experiment would have worked if Penguin had retained its role as a gatekeeper, as it would with print novels. For example, you could have gradings of editors, determined by a series of tests and their editing of the manuscript. They could operate as a hive, with a mediator at the top, verifying the above. Hang on, that's how Distributed Proofreaders, which does the OCRing, editing and proofreading for Project Gutenberg, works and have done for years (I started volunteering in 2005).

Hmmmm I feel there is a lesson here. I can't quite grasp it through the mud. No wait, I'm just heightening the suspense. I always know where My Point is. Always. Always. Always. Does democracy in practice mean anarchy? If you want to destroy the system, be prepared for the backlash. And I say this as a sympathetic anarchist. Even challenging the system and redeveloping marshland where the capitalist gatekeepers built their monuments needs project management. Else you're going to be left with half-demolished building in a pool of mud, like in Planet of the Apes.

Now, I'm always telling you that I'm the dictator here and so I can say and do as I wish (I can't but anyway), but I am just a handful of mud in the swamp. No one quotes me in essays and other such vaguely objective things (heavens above, please don't. Although I'd like to be a credible source one day, I'd prefer if you don't quote me using mud as a metaphor. Rather follow me on Twitter and like my posts). And I abide by Blogger's rules, some of them imposed by the design, others by mediators. (But apparently not on spambots.)

Now that I have gotten to My Point (which I always knew was here. Always. Always. Always) I am not sure I agree with myself.  Rules and processes develop for a reason (mostly through trial and error), though some rules and processes have passed their expiry dates and deserve to be broken. Often it takes a skilled gatekeeper to know the difference. Honestly, I'd prefer to have a gatekeeper there to stop children from wandering off at night, and thieves and such wandering in.

But back to business: an experiment requires an hypothesis, guidelines, a process and a placebo. Without these, what do you expect to get except chaos? Do you actually expect to get chaos? Or is this an experiment in chaos? Do you mean to prove that gatekeepers are necessary? Why then has the internet erased all trace of such experiment?

I am overthinking this. Luckily, you probably haven't been able to keep reading through this ridiculously long post. So I can say without recrimination that the democratic nature of the internet sometimes just encourages meaninglessness and chaos. (You get the hint that the same applies to true democracy.) And that this shouldn't always be encouraged or even just played with. I wonder whether, had some more vigorous rules been applied, and perhaps withdrawn in stages, Penguin might actually have come up with something publishable, as well as some useful information.