Dr Oliver Shaw

Part One, Again.

I had a dream last night that I was in a surfing competition, in a heat, and I paddled out too far and didn’t catch any waves — I knew that if I’d stayed on the inside I would have caught some good waves and surfed them well. I have these dreams all the time, they’re deep dreams, and they’re about my past when I was a young surfer competing in heats. I’m thirty-six now and I’m wondering how long the dreams will continue for and whether they are bubbles of unconscious trouble or prompts for me to act. Either way they bubble to the surface and stay with me but I don’t want the dreams and that past to feel like a struggle; I want to re-arrange it, like, I purposefully paddled away from those waves in that heat, not because I wanted to lose but because I wanted to turn away from that masculine environment of man versus nature; my connection to the sea has always been non-competitive, healing, and kind. It’s just another prompt, these dreams, toward self-loving and gentleness but there is, undoubtedly, some kind of action that needs to take place, and for now this writing will have to contribute to that.

In ‘Eating The Ocean’, Elspeth probyn, asks: I start by asking what the figure of the mermaid can afford against the overwhelmingly masculine framing of the relation between fish and human, where the latter is always male. What does she do?’ (104)

It might be helpful for me too to begin to think, and re-frame my oceanic and surfing experiences, with the mermaid. What does she do? What could she afford my consciousness to make peace with my ocean connection, my failure as a competitive surfer, and–I haven’t mentioned this yet, but it’s probably important–my fear of drowning. The latter, and my coyness about mentioning it seems reductively masculine; I want to celebrate this fear, I need to understand the mermaid, rather than my experience competing with human–men–and my Dad–man–who taught me how to surf and supported me to compete. My Mum wasn’t there for it; it was a very masculine period of time and I sense my withdrawal from it–I don’t really surf anymore–has to do with this, as I have gone more towards flowers, slowness, and painting but, the mermaid lives underwater, I think, holding her breath without fear, or becoming fish, she hides from man and moves her tail like a dolphin–and to understand her would be to understand that side of myself; to re-frame my understanding of the surfer inside me. The wave dancer, to borrow a phrase from current female world champion Caity Simmers.

It’s troubled water, this discourse, and far deeper than I could ever do it justice in a twenty minute sit down blog post. I want to avoid positing the mermaid as reductively ‘feminine’: ‘obviously, reducing women to nature is problematic, but equally there are several strands within eco feminism that have and that continue to be politically and theoretically relevant’ (106). To understand the mermaid and to understand myself and to pay ode to the depths that this knowing comes from (always from dreams, always unconscious) I want to try and get beyond gender binaries when I speak about the mermaid, if it’s possible, to go somewhere with Judith Butler who says that ‘gender is not a thing; it is a relation or more accurately a presentation of a relation’ (108). And these words are my presentation of a relation; between myself and the ocean, between mermaids and me; between my waking self and my sleeping self.

‘Fish, environment, ideas, people who become partners in research, memories. These forms of entanglement do indeed produce worlds that we don’t know yet, will never, fully know’ (111).

Is a mermaid simply a fish? A human fish?

‘Humans have long tried to understand how fish, especially salmon, home — that amazing capacity to return to the stream in which they spawned’ (111). In my own way, by writing this, I am trying to also return to the home in which I spawned; to entangle with that environment, ideas and memory – to understand the mermaid might help me to understand the self.

To be continued….

Oliver Shaw. Mon 16 Sep. 2024. 9:46 AM.