The Little Mermaid, part i

The Siren, John William Waterhouse

continued in parts ii, iii, iv, v, & vi

From your perspective or mine, bobbing on a nearby ship, the place would either look like a small rocky outcropping, or like nothing more than a patch of sea, depending on the tide. But to the mermaids it was a mountain. Lewis has said best how “the sea-people feel about their valleys as we do about mountains…It is on the heights (or, as we would say, "in the shallows") that there is warmth and peace.” Indeed, to the mermaids this mountain was a union of the sunniness of the near-surface & the stability of the seafloor, and its grottoes pierced by sunlight were the mermaids’ palace.

Mermaids have two great arts: music & architecture. The music is for us, but the architecture is for them, and it is largely an architecture of light. Over the millennia, long-lived generations of mermaids had carved or enlarged openings in the caves, to let in light according to the days and seasons. They had polished the facing surface to each such window to a high reflectivity that illuminated whole caverns with a blue or emerald glow, and had arranged their most glittering treasures such that at a certain day and time all of their golden and ruby hues would be visible—colors that, to them, are most unheimlich (the English word unearthly doesn’t quite fit, obviously, but the experience is parallel), colors belonging to a different and strange plane of existence, colors hidden at most times by the refraction of the underwater light that turns them to a ghostly silver.

And where did they get their treasures? From shipwrecks, of course, which is to say, from us. Fireless, they cannot refine or forge. This is where their art of music serves them. They climb to the edge of the surface and sing to our passing ships, promising us anything that will seduce us. To a few they promise knowledge, earthly or transcendent, but to most, they offer themselves.

And they do it so beautifully that few of us have ever resisted. We jump into the sea and drown, or, better yet, sail our ships into the rocks. But from the mermaids’ few survivors we know what liars they are. When the siren sang to Dante that she, who drew Ulysses from his wandering way, wholly satisfies those who come to her, Dante is fully enchanted by her song. But we, who are merely reading the transcript, and not hearing her, should be sober enough to remember that we only know that Odysseus met the sirens because they did not manage to draw him from his wandering way at all. And that should set us on watch for their other lies. They are incapable of the sexual satisfaction that they promise.¹ When you notice this, why believe in the knowledge they offer either? The siren’s line about satisfying men is just as much of a lie as her line about Odysseus. They cannot satisfy, they can only seduce.

At the time of this story, six sea-sisters lived in this magic mountain, and the youngest one was just reaching the stage when she would be maximally seductive to sailors. Very young mermaids are never seen by human eyes, so I don’t know if hers was a metamorphosis much like human puberty, or if something far more fishlike had transformed, its scales smoothing to skin, its fins lengthening to arms, recapitulating human evolution from the waist up. But in either case her sisters celebrated, because she had the most musical talent of any of them. They anticipated her sharing her great catches with them—if not the treasure, then at least (always shared, because it rotted underwater too fast to be hoarded ) the flesh.

But this youngest sister had a certain perversion, which to the other mermaids would have seemed as foul as bestiality, had they known. In her most secret grotto, where she kept her treasures, there was a marble statue of a man, “gleaming in all its power, and glistening like a wild beast’s fur,” as the poet says. This statue recalled to her mind a moment in her very early youth.

She had never seen a man before. He had looked so mermaidlike, yet so unlike a mermaid, that she did not know what to think of him. Her eldest sister held his hands as she pulled him down, the same inviting gesture she used to draw the littlest mermaid into the sisters’ games. In the blue light of her eldest sister’s cavern, his flesh had looked as silver as marble. She didn’t know then that he was drowning. She didn’t know yet that they would eat him. For that moment of ignorance, he was simply a wonder. Then her sisters began to rip him into shreds, his blood clouded the water and its taste sharpened her hunger.

While she was still small, this moment hardly troubled her, she didn’t think of it often. But on the verge of her maturity, she found the statue. Perhaps she had seen it before and her eyes passed over it as something of little interest. But suddenly, the statue was very salient, and it reminded her of the man, and the memory felt different somehow. Certainly the marble was more beautiful than the man had been. But she began to forget that. She couldn’t come up with a name for what she felt when she circled the statue, secretly examining it. It was like the love for treasure, and it was like the love for light, and it was like the love for meat, and it was like the love for sisters, but it was none of them. But when she felt it, she wondered about the world of air. And perhaps it was this wonder that lent such beauty to her music.

Her sisters agreed that the time had come for her debut. They were just waiting for a worthy ship. And soon one came.

part ii

1. This is the point in the story where everyone says, “What about blowjobs?” The funny thing is that women say this more than men. Well, I personally would not put that in a mermaid’s mouth.