No Mermaid (Sinead Lohan)

Here's more mermaid content, a delightful hodge-podge of items/ideas left over from my googling for M's birthday party post - the essay below is a long-time favorite...


Where do the Mermaids Stand? by Robert Fulghum

Giants, Wizards and Dwarfs was the game to play. Being left in charge of about 80 children 7 to 10 years old while their parents were off doing the parenty thing, I mustered my troops in the church social hall and explained the game. It’s a large-scale version of Rock, Paper and Scissors and involves some intellectual decision-making. But the real purpose of the game is to make a lot of noise and run around chasing people until nobody knows which side you are on or who won.

Organizing a roomful of wired up grade-schoolers into two teams, explaining the rudiments of the game, achieving consensus on group identity– all of this is no mean accomplishment, but we did it with a right goodwill and were ready to go.

The excitement of the chase had reached a critical mass. I yelled out: “You have to decide now which you are—a GIANT, a WIZARD or a DWARF!”

While the groups huddled in frenzied, whispered consultation, a tug came at my pant leg. A small child stand there looking up and ask in a small concerned voice, “Where do the Mermaids stand?”

Where do the Mermaids stand? A very long pause. A very long pause. “Where do the Mermaids stand?” says I.

“Yes. You see, I am a Mermaid.” ‘ There are no such things as Mermaids.” “Oh yes there is, I am one!” She did not relate to being a Giant, a Wizard or a Dwarf. She knew her category, Mermaid, and was not about to leave the game and go over and stand against the wall where a loser would stand. She intended to participate, wherever Mermaids fit into the scheme of things, without giving up dignity or identity. She took it for granted that there was a place for Mermaids and that I would know just where.

Well, where do the Mermaids stand? All the Mermaids—all those who are different, who do not fit the norm, and who do not accept the available boxes and pigeonholes?

Answer that question and you can build a school, a nation or a world on it.

What was my answer at the moment? Every once in a while I say the right thing. “The Mermaid stands right here by the King of the Sea!” (Yes, right here by the King’s Fool, I thought to myself.)

So we stood there hand in hand, reviewing the troops of Wizards and Giants and Dwarfs as the rolled by in wild disarray.

It is not true, by the way , that Mermaids do not exist. I know at least one personally. I have held her hand.

SONG: No Mermaid by Sinead Lohan

BOOK: A Mermaid's Tale: A Personal Search for Love and Lore by Amanda Adams

POEM: Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

QUOTE: "But if I don't have my voice, how can I...?" ~ Ariel