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.

Bibliolatry: an exploration

You're mouthing out the words still. Bib-lio-la-try with a jump and slide from 'Bib' to 'lio' so that 'lio' sounds like 'leo' and two quick rehearsals to get the accent (as in ' not your native drawl) correct, then the easy part: 'la' and then 'tary', except you double-check whether it is 'tary' or 'try' or 'tarary' (common mistake, I say, blushing), because when you run all the sounds together, you still put the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first, and 'try' becomes 'tary'.

If it were easy to say, it wouldn't be such a wonderful word.

It means to idolise books, before you ask. You knew what it means? Five smartie points to you who couldn't pronounce the word a paragraph ago. I'm comfortable admitting I didn't know the word until yesterday. Did you know then that the connotation of 'idolise' here is religious: literally to worship an idol? Only bibliophiles could conceive a word about their obsession that has religious connotations.

Who oh who would worship a book, you-who-aren't-bibliophiles-and-are-living-vicariously wonder. No, you don't. Because then there would be no blog post and you wouldn't be reading it, and this clearly is a blog post and you are reading it, so the answer is me - and perhaps you, too.

Blasphemy! Heresy! But listen here, ours is a quiet and solitary idolatry - we're not exactly sacrificing animals to our bookshelves. Just time and a few trees. If anything, we should be at the mercy of the environmentalists, except that they're busy raising money and protesting conferences and reading.

This whole blog is devoted to my bookshelf (with regular deviations into metaphysical crises, as befits a reader. And a writer. Ask yourself which of these you are). It's an altar. I admit it. An altar, not The altar, because I brush my teeth and eat my vegges on the other side of this page (which is incidentally the same side of the page that you are on). Sometimes I don't read. Don't cry. I read a lot. I just don't read all the time. Although, nothing else is quite as satisfying.

Devoted. Did you notice that? This blog is devoted to... Now I'm not the only one engaging in blasphemy! My blog is too! Like a plague it travels. This digital world mimics its backbone of hidden 0s and 1s. It is ordered and logically structured. Maintained by the pulsing of keyboards. It is to blasphemy what the gutters were to the Black Plague.

Don't abandon me yet - I promise I am not contagious. Although who's to say I didn't catch this from you?

The wallpaper of this blog is a black-and-white shot of a railway bridge. It looks as though it is three-dimensional, but it isn't. It cannot be. Even if Google Glass succeeds in displaying a world so convincing that you try to reach for a book, you cannot. (You will reach through the bookshelf, but don't worry, you can't get stuck. I think.) This whole digital world is one-dimensional and, to some extent, an illusion. (I don't really sit with my head propped to the side like that. Sometimes I change my clothes, too.)

Now that I think on it, the photo tells you what to expect from this blog: nuances, shadow and light, and hints of other things. A snapshot without a supporting landscape, where the viewer is two-faced (the photographer and you - oh and also me, since I chose it), that you cannot touch or walk into to find out what those hinting things hint at. And all so hipster-ish-ly black-and-white cool. We see what the photographer selects for us to see. You read what I select for you to read (granted, sometimes things slip from the edges of my fingers and perhaps you catch them).

To get to business now, my thanks to Barthes and Derrida and even Descartes for providing the argument I can't argue against but others can by burying it under the word 'extreme'. Meaning is lost, well, it was never there, I protest fists in air (on behalf of those oblique writers), blah blah, stop rolling your eyes. Can I then truly idolise anything? Yes!

Let me explain. Words are in on it. The whole business. Words are wind, Jon Snow. In Ragnarok (mixed references but you understand), the god Loki values nothing. He turns everything inside out and upside down to understand it and make metaphors of it. He's the one worth trusting when Odin's looking at you with his one good eye and the other eye that sees more, and suddenly you do not know who you are. He is also very serious and not much fun. I'd run for Loki's camp any day.

Words pretend, a lot, just like the trickster god . They gain your trust, though notice they never ask for it - the gullible lot we are, we just assume. Not gullible, no, just hopeful. Hope springs eternal, to complicate the barrage of sayings I'm throwing in the hopes that you'll agree with me just because you're too overwhelmed to fight back. (See what I did there?) But when you uncover their disguises, they laugh, shrug their shoulders and say it was all a hoax anyway.

Don't cry (again. You are an emotional bunch). When the one-eyed and all-seeing god is staring at you, it is very reassuring to know that it is ok to know that you don't know and that not-knowing can be discovery.

Discover. Discovery. There we go! Bibliolatry is idolatry of a tricksy creature - creatures - that laughs at itself and you (and you at you) and then leads you down the winding path. Paths. This blog is one path, and because the 1s and 0s (and our attention spans and our capacities to process information) say so, it can only be one path with one view, even if we can meander to create a beaten track from which we see the one view from different perspectives.

So, we're not blaspheming, if only because our paths are too convoluted for you to capture and prosecute us.

Byatt's fairy stories

An open-air mall lined with cheap boutiques and stationery shops, and headlined by a supermarket. Next to the greengrocer (trails of trodden lettuce leaves) is a second-hand bookshop. Outside, a tray of 'cheapies' (proclaimed, in yellow) - dog-eared paperbacks, the spines so bent you can't read the titles. Inside, shades of brown that conceal you from the sensual frenzy outside. Dun brown carpet, streaked and scratched wooden bookshelves, lacquered brown counter, yellow pine chairs.

You remember - when you were young and starting out in your career, you were a bit... naive. No, not naive - you just don't know any better (there's a difference). In varsity, where output was graded and critiqued and the marker had a marksheet, every A or B stroked your ego. You deconstructed the state of your industry, on at least three different premises, and you read the thoughts of future peers. Deep down you believe you represent a gestating revolution in the industry and you are eager to learn how to hatch the darn thing.

I can't speak for yours, but in the local media industries, management is often first seduced by and later annoyed by the eagerness of 'newbies' (a grand Thursday night story, told into glasses of wine). See, they think 'eager' means 'exploitable' (and 'expendable') and 'young' means 'cheap'. If you are lucky, management empathises with you but shrug their shoulders because that's just the way it is. If you're unlucky, you get management who have been through the same thing and would like to carve you a matching chip.

Six months in to working with one of the latter, I was off sick with sinusitis. (Note that I do not get sick, that is, without a psychosomatic stimulus. Do not scoff. Whenever and with whatever I am sick, I suffer from some degree of 'sight impairment'. Yip, turns out acute sinusitis can temporarily infect the optic nerves. Partial blindness in one eye.) I was off sick and I was horribly sad. So I wrapped myself up and drove myself (squinting) to the shops to get a movie and a magazine.

Instead, snivelling and with a wad of tissues in hand, I detoured to calm my soul among ceiling-high bookcases, yellowing paper and the promise of treasure. A good rule is to only buy books you have been looking for. Or to buy a bookshop. What would I find? Rushdie? Fowles? Calvino? Mitchell? Or the classics - James? Forster? Woolf? Some poetry?

A black spine, about 15 cm high. The title set horizontally in a thin white font. AS Byatt. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five fairy stories. I pulled it from between its taller companions, forefinger behind the top furl of the cover - it was hardcover, with the dust jacket in perfect condition because it had been neatly covered in thick plastic. I knew then, but I'll tell you more.

The dust jacket is jewel green, with yellow text, the colours outdated now. The inside endpapers are the green of an evergreen shrub. The illustrations are taken from historical collections: a Persian musician, a jewelled peacock and a pious woman. The paper is thick but unvarnished, and textured in the type of grain you can see in brown paper. Each story begins with an historical black-and-white etching.

Mrs Byatt has been one of my favourite authors since I read Possession during my internship. (Damn straight I remember when - the book was thick and heavy, and the writing equally impenetrable.) I feel as though, under her primary author's voice, I can hear another, more tender one, always wondering. How does this work? Why? What happens when I pull this or that? Something sadly empathic under more academic toing and froing. Since then I had collected every secondhand book of hers I have 'unearthed', to build a collection of different editions.

This treasure is by far my favourite. It is my favourite because it represents the ideal of the secondhand hunt. It is my favourite because I was so sad and just holding this book in my hand... I can remember how overwhelmingly reassured I felt. Books like that are the reason I write and the reason I publish. When I think back, I can remember seeing it on the shelf, holding it and buying it, in a room made of blocks of browns. But perhaps that is just my sensory memory gratifying my emotional memory...

I have pulled out the book now and placed it next to me, to the left of my computer. Next to it is my next read: Ragnarok, also by Byatt. I found it by accident the other night, browsing the science-fiction section of the library. The book is thin - less than 200 pages - and a paperback. The yellow spine was pushed back into the shelf, so it was obscured by the tall and thick hardcovers around it. Is this how I am always to discover Byatt's allegories?

Voile! The value of art

Art is escapism, right? It whisks you from your mundane or burdened world and plonks you into someone else's. You cringe at 'plonk', I'm guessing (I do), because it feels such a crude rendering of the sense of release you feel at your escape. (Escape?) Such a smooth, elegant, longed-for release. I'm out of adjectives to describe this sense and none of the ones I have used feel right.

Tell me, what are you - the specific you, reading this post, and not the general you of all readers - escaping from? The complications of modern life? Its mundaneness and routine? Or something more sinister?

There are the more fantastical escapes - sci-fi and fantasy, historical what-ifs - and then the escapes into the complications of other lives. Which do you prefer? Does it make a difference? What would you do face-to-face with a dragon or in another skin or faced with a perfect Prince or Princess Charming? (Can we know?)

Following on from the previous post, when I was about seven (young enough to be called innocent but able to read), my mother subscribed to a Reader's Digest series of hardcover books about legends and fairytales, on my behalf. Each new one would arrive every six months. The more... disturbing... she would hide, saying I could read them when I was older. Nothing stays hidden from a seven-year-old for long.

I adored the ones I wasn't supposed to read, probably because I wasn't supposed to read them, because the stories and illustrations were threaded with an illicit thrill, and because ala previous post, isn't that the intention? Both the stories and illustrations were violent, harsh, dark, possibly disturbing. But they were more 'real' to me than glittering fairies and happy endings.

They were an escape.

But... but... but... An escape is from, not to, the real; isn't that what I said, oh, 15 lines ago? So fickle is the blogger, such an hypocrite, abusing the impermanence of the online space.

No, wait! Why is George Orwell's 1984 one of The Great Novels? Why does it resonate when it is our world but not? Why do Terry Pratchett's novels have so much to say about the ethics of leadership? Because they are like telescopes: they cast a circular limit around a point and, with some fumbling, focus and magnify the point. They give us the distance to see ourselves.

For me, literature is about burrowing into myself - beyond the superficial landscape of the imagination - with a backpack of symbols, ready to inflict my magnifying glass on anything that latches onto one of the symbols, like an enzyme in my intestines.

Does this mean you can continue to judge a person by the books on their shelves? Perhaps; I confess I do. You won't know what that book represents to that other person, and chances are you won't get a satisfactory answer if you ask them bluntly. But maybe your judgement says something about you and your inner world, and perhaps that's enough.

In this vein, my favourites by a wide margin are Possession by AS Byatt and Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz. Make of that what you will.

The innocence of fairytales

When did we decide that children were too innocent for fairytales as they have been told for generations? Instead of the little mermaid sacrificing herself and becoming foam on the green green waves, the wolf dying of a belly-full of rocks, the evil stepmother dancing to death in a pair of heated iron shoes... we have - well, you know how it goes. When did we decide that children needed to be lied to?

As a child, my favourite fairytale was of the selkie wife: a seal who could change into human shape. A fisherman stumbles upon a group of selkie women dancing. He steals one of the seals' coats and holds it hostage, forcing one of the beautiful woman to marry him. He locks her coat in a chest, so she is indentured to him for years, even having having children with him, while her selkie husband and children wait for her. One day, the man forgets the key to the chest at home and she frees herself, escaping back to her family. So what does her second husband do? Of course he kills her selkie family, and in return she vows to kill every man in the village.

Every fairytale is a moral tale, whether you can verbalise this moral or not. That's what I love about the original tales: the rich symbolism, which as a child I would puzzle over - I could feel the meaning (almost literally taste, smell, touch, those underappreciated faculties) but still not explain or even construct a thought about that feeling. The anxiety, the suspense, the unforeseen and foreseen twists and turns, the bad choices, the beautiful tragedy - and of course the illicit pleasure in the sense of fear that is the heart of any fairytale.

The best equivalent I can think of is Hamlet - most will have read Shakespeare and some will have enjoyed the plays. In the end, our hero is the cause of his own destruction, as are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and Othello. The initial event just sets them rolling down that slope. Macabrely we wonder: Would Hamlet have destroyed himself anyway? Could he have dug his heels in and stopped mid-roll? What is it that makes this type of hero curl into a ball before their enemies have even aimed a kick? Most importantly for this post: Why do we enjoy watching them roll downhill? What are our minds distilling behind the scenes? The answer rolls like a sweet in our mouths.

Fairytales make our conscious mind shudder and our unconscious mind shiver. They warn that nothing is what it seems - that the unwary will suffer - that we must mete out punishment ourselves, because there is no one to appeal to - that bad people do good things and they do bad things and so on and so on. They warn that life is not fair, but sometimes you get lucky, and another but: you have to work for what you want and stay away from anything that so much as touches trouble. Do you think these stories are primeval? No they are not! They attribute happenings to people. They recognise that some events have no rhyme nor reason. They warn us about wolves and evil stepmothers and vicious men, but they also hand us a set of tools with which we can understand the less obvious menaces of nature and human nature, even if only on an unconscious level.

They prepare us for life.

What sparked this meander? The movie Red Riding Hood, which is really just a mishmash of Grimms' and Perrault's and Angela Carter's versions, with some movie studio rep's meddling. Even a sanitised version - imagine: the wolf is re-released into the wild (because international law forbids wild animals being housed in zoos), and the 'girl' and the woodcutter live (here it is, folks!) happily ever after - would have been less offensive. Actors with more than one facial expression would be preferable but perhaps that's taking the hand when you're offered the finger.

Illustration in Old-time stories (1921) New York: Dodd, Mead. Perrault, Charles, 1628-1703; Johnson, A. E. (Alfred Edwin), b. 1879; Robinson, W. Heath (William Heath), 1872-1944, ill

For anyone who would argue differently (and if so, I'm offended that you're reading this blog) consider these conventions of romantic cinema: the love triangle wherein Bella - I mean Valerie - has to choose between the good boy and the bad boy, the unveiling of a family secret, another unveiling: of the bad boy as a good boy (unlocked by love's virtue) and the good boy as a good loser, finally, the resolution of the lovers' trial - and, again... The conventions of the plot masked by a red cape set in relief by black and/or white. (By the by, we've been through the bad-boy-needing-to-control-his-dark-side in Buffy, Mrs Meyer, with not a whiff of abuse in seven seasons.)

What do our sanitised fairytales teach children? That life is fair, that there is a clear line between good and bad, that bad is just bad, that these people will be punished by their own plots turning back on them, that the reward for good behaviour is a picket fence (or moat), that the happiness (or sadness) of a moment will define your life, and that wealth is woven in there somewhere. Is life just less harsh nowadays that we don't need more severe warnings? Are these the things we should strive for - do they have a moral value I have overlooked? I still prefer the original tales. I like to think they taught me a few things. When I stumble, I don't fall on my ass and ask 'Why?' I regain my balance. Because I know there are far worse things to watch out for than skinned palms.