A Natural History of Love (40 page)

For the remarkable thing about mermaids is that seafaring men all over the world have invented them. They are not the mythic handiwork of one culture, exported like a religion, tantalizing cuisine, or new fashion. Men in Norway, Newfoundland, New Guinea, the South Seas, Mexico, Africa, Haiti, and other lands all have ancient mermaid myths. In these fantasies, women with long hair, large breasts, small waists, graceful arms—but fish scales from the hips down—enchant men out of their wealth, sanity, heartbeat, and soul. Yet they generally aren’t regarded as evil, witchlike, or savage. Quite the opposite. They are innocent assassins, feminine and alluring. Drugged by their dangerous sensuality, men long for them as a sort of sexual heroin, even though they know the romance will end badly. At best, they will be oddities in each other’s world and produce children fit for neither land nor sea. At worst, the men will drown erotically in the mermaid’s arms.

In the earliest religions, the world was divided into fire and water, with phallic lightning representing masculinity and the womblike sea representing femininity. Often the male gods held lightning bolts or scepters. Some of the oldest mermaid lust springs from tales of fish deities, such as the Semitic moon goddess Atergatis, whose very name steals one’s breath and sends one’s tongue to the front of the mouth. She had human arms and breasts and a beautiful human head; but, from the thighs down, a shimmering, golden fish’s tail. Though gifted with supernatural powers, she ruled by using so-called feminine wiles. She was beautiful, vain, proud, cruel, seductive, and yet utterly unavailable to the human men who fell in love with her. Some while later, Aphrodite—a goddess who also rose from the sea—became popular, and she had mermaid minions to serve her. The Greek Sirens were at times pictured as mermaids, too, and they added much to the notion that mermaids were a fatal attraction. Supernatural lovers who lured mariners to their deaths, they sang songs so eerie and rapturous—melodic waves upon sea waves—that sailors leapt overboard and swam toward the music. Or they hypnotized captains with their charms and sent ships crashing on the rocky shore. The Germans call a mermaid
tneerfrau;
the Danish call her
mar emitid
. The Irish
merrow
have small webs between their fingers. (What are we to make of otherwise normal women afflicted with webbed fingers?) The Finnish
nakinneito
have big breasts and long curly hair.

Breasts are a key element in all mermaid tales, but perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus, a physician with a devastatingly tidy mind and a passion for labeling, decided to name our class of animal “mammal,” which means “of the breast.” Not just any breasts, mind you, but the breasts of a mature woman who can suckle her young. This was understandably on Linnaeus’s mind, since he had watched his own wife suckle seven children and was privy to this most natural of acts for over a decade. There was a big to-do in his day about the developmental evils of wet-nursing. But by choosing a woman’s breasts as the official symbol of the highest and most noble class of animal, he wasn’t thought to be doing anything shocking. Breasts have always fascinated and obsessed men. (Freud says it’s because their earliest pleasure was sucking at their mothers’ breasts). However odd a sea creature might look—and some, such as the cleft-faced dugong, look powerfully nonhuman—it’s the womanly breasts that tip men off to their status as mermaids. “Look, she has breasts!” the sailors cry, and somehow ignore the flat, walruslike face of the sea cow.

Why do fish gods appeal to us as fantasy lovers? Look at Earth from space and we see that it’s mainly water, with small wafers of land floating here and there. Our planet is poorly named. We should call it Ocean. We ourselves are little lagoons in which fluids and jellies pour over a reef of bones. Our veins contain salt water, a hand-me-down from the primordial seas; our blood ebbs and flows; women have monthly tides. A fetus floats for nine months in a snug watery womb. We are born water creatures, true amphibians, mermaids and mermen, our bodies 97 percent salt water. That’s why we must drink water to survive. Water also flowed through our ancestors, and they sailed the arteries of the land. People navigated on water, raised crops with water, baptized in water. We slosh when we walk. Sometimes we can hear the fluids in our ears or stomachs. We are water sculptures, vessels of water. If you removed the water from a 150-pound human being, only about four and a half pounds of matter would remain. In that sense, the “essence” of a person is not so different from the essence of a flower, and personality is the perfume of being human. Small wonder that fishermen looked at the mysterious, unpredictable ocean, which nonetheless held their food, escape, and destiny, and assumed that deities ruled the waves.

Lapping at their lives, the ocean reaches a hundred tongues into the rocky mouths and harbors where men gather and drink. But I don’t think it’s just coastal men who have created mermaids as a sexy version of the earth mother. Mermaids seem, in part, to echo the conflict men feel about women in general. They are beautiful, mysterious, idealized creatures whom men long to possess. But they also arouse feelings that make men vulnerable, irrational, and crazed. They can enslave the most powerful men. And they don’t fight fair. The more beautiful they are, the more power they have, and when they know it, and act remote and unconquerable, they can be truly frightening. However weak of limb, they’re strong enough to send a man to his doom. That age-old idea of the gorgeous and deadly woman has powered much myth and art. Mermaids crystallize the fear.

In medieval times, Europeans assumed that mermaids were as common as fairies or sprites. They had magical powers, and lived long, but were mortals without souls. During the seventeenth century, fishermen frequently sighted mermaids off the coast, and travelers returned from foreign lands with much corroborating evidence. One of the most famous sightings was reported by Henry Hudson, and it caused quite a stir when it was published in London in 1625. While searching for the Northwest Passage, he jotted down the following in his diary:

This evening [June 15] one of our company, looking overboard, saw a mermaid, and, calling up one more of the company to see her, one more of the crew came up, and by that time she was come close to the ship’s side, looking earnestly on the men. A little after a sea came and overturned her. From the navel upward, her back and breasts were like a woman’s, as they say that saw her; her body as big as one of us, her skin very white, and long hair hanging down behind, of color black. In her going down they saw her tail, which was like the tail of a porpoise, speckled like a mackerel. Their names that saw her were Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner.

Despite the eighteenth century’s passion for reason, people adored mermaids, which captains were forever encountering, and monarchs believing in. Each age adapted the mermaid to fit its notion of femininity. In the age of chivalry, the mermaid was depicted as a princess; in the early nineteenth century, a romantic ideal; in the twentieth century, a femme fatale.

European mermaids are often shown carrying combs and mirrors, because they pass endless hours sitting on the rocks and combing their long hair in the sunlight. Hair has always been a sexual symbol, one of the mermaids’ lures, and by letting it fall loose and ostentatiously combing it out in front of men, they are advertising their sexuality. They rarely speak, but they can sing sounds more emotional and penetrating than mere words. In some Celtic legends, they grow monstrously large. They delve in magic herbs. They crave human lives, frolicking near coastlines and ships to provoke humans who cannot resist their sensuality. As a result, sighting a mermaid came to be an omen of storm or disaster. How to overpower a mermaid: steal one of her possessions—a comb or belt will do. Then hide it; the mermaid will live subserviently with you. But if she locates her lost belonging, she will regain her powers and return to the sea. In myths, she rarely stays with a man, because neither can live in the other’s world, far from friends, families, and familiar ways.

There have been mermen, as well, especially in the legends of Scottish fisherfolk, who called them “Silkies.”
The Arabian Nights
offers “The Tale of Abdullah and Abdullah,” in which a poor fisherman named Abdullah finds a benefactor in a merman also named Abdullah. Legends from such unrelated places as Ireland and Syria tell of mermen who came ashore to take human wives. In Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman,” the wife dooms him to the utmost despair. Queen Atergatis had a male consort, Oannes, who was also half-fish, half-man. As an outsider, he had the perspective to teach humans how to be more human. He was generous enough to give humans insight into their arts, sciences, and letters. At first, he was depicted with a man’s head beneath a fish-head cap, and he wore his fish scales as a cloak; but that representation soon evolved into a creature that was man from the waist up, fish from the waist down. In early myths, he was associated with the sun, an important deity for Paleolithic people. He crawled onto the land at dawn and plunged back into the sea at night. In between, he offered civilization. But Oannes was worshiped in a godly way by the ancients, not pictured as a love object. Historically, women have not been much turned on by the idea of fish-men. Men, on the other hand, have been obsessed with fish-women. In the mermaid fantasy a man can penetrate a beautiful woman-child, and through her the entire ocean, which she represents. He can step outside human manners and society, which play no role in her world. She will believe everything he tells her, do whatever he asks, be his sea-geisha. As innocent-looking and beautiful as a mermaid is on top, she is a wanton animal below, untroubled by guilt or inhibition, eager for his pleasure.

Drawn on maps, tattooed on sailors’ arms, printed on cans of tuna, carved on figureheads, painted on pub signs, the mermaid blurs the distinction between human and animal. Strictly speaking, she offers little reward: not enough woman to love and too much fish to fry. In a sense, she is monstrous, but hers is a sweet monstrosity, like love. For men of the sea, mermaids combine the self-destructiveness of the ocean, to which they are nonetheless wedded, with their loneliness for the women they’ve left behind. They find the ocean—fertile, curvy, womblike, velvety, tempestuous—all female. Its rhythms are ancient and mysterious, as are a woman’s. It has monthly tides and an eternal languorousness. Rolling its hips, first one way then another, it turns gently as a sleeper does: the ocean is a woman dreaming. A man enters the water as he enters a woman, giving himself up to the liquefaction of her limbs, losing himself willingly to her soft, lucid grip. The ocean becomes mortal and embraces him, just as a loving woman, when she embraces him, in that moment becomes horizon-less as the sea.

SEXUAL CHIC: PERVERSION AS FASHION

Many lessons about whom and how to love, and what’s sexually chic, bombard us from the media. Whenever I open a magazine these days, I half expect steam to rise from the pages. Perfumes war in the visual Amazon of the ads. To make their zest more potent, one rips a slit open, smears the all-but-invisible, exploded beads of scent along one’s wrist or inner elbow, and inhales the aroma. We crave sensory experiences. In that, we’re no different from most peoples. Locals visiting the voodoo market in Beiern, Brazil, would feel at home on the first floor of Bloomingdale’s. True, they wouldn’t find heaps of river-dolphin vulvas, or rhinoceros-beetle horns (indeed, they wouldn’t be able to identify much of what they saw), but the phantasmagoria of color, smell, and texture would delight their senses; and the bustling crowd caught up in the idea of “market day” would be perfectly familiar. World is extravaganza enough, one might think. Why add to the sensory uproar? Yet humans do, obsessively, creating art, cuisine, fashion, myths, and traditions, adding even more sensations to the spectacle of living. Advertisements are only flickers amid that mania.

But what is one to make of all the recent ads offering unsubtle sex and bondage? Opening up an issue of
Details
, for instance, I find an ad showing phallic-looking shoes, and a woman down on all fours, tongue out, getting ready to lick them. In another ad, a tattooed man wearing a leather bracelet is performing oral sex on a woman outside a city building. Then the same pair are shown apparently having intercourse on the rooftop. What product is the ad selling? Shirts? Skirts? At the end of the magazine, a forty-six-page advertising pamphlet is devoted entirely to Request jeans. Most of it shows sultry, sneering, half-naked men and women caught in a film-noir escapade while enjoying miscellaneous erotic encounters with one another—straight sex, bisexual, ménage à trois, violence, bondage. Jeans don’t appear in all the photos, but we do find lots of stiletto heels, fishnet stockings, leather, skirts with whiplike fringes, and phallic champagne bottles. In one shot, a man wearing underpants, boots, open shirt, and a cowboy hat sprawls on a bed with his legs wide apart, a bottle arranged like a huge erection at his groin. He is grasping it suggestively with his left hand. One full-page photo shows the back of this same man, his face turned to us in a savage snarl, as he urinates. You can see that his trousers are open and the ground in front of him is damp. In the final photo, the bare-chested man (wearing Request jeans, of course) is pegged out with ropes, his face contorted by pain, his crotch offered to the viewer, as he prepares to die in the desert sun.