Oh Deer

Posted on by
Reply

In discussing our intertwined dynamic with nature, I think deer might be one of the most obvious and imperative examples. Obviously, they’re an animal pretty closely connected to man because we encroached so deeply into their habitats, and because they’re such a commodity in hunting culture. Not only have they become such a universal symbol of innocence, they are so engulfed with our language, the way we continue to discuss.

Deer makeup and costumes recently became quite popularized for their allegory to a loss of innocence. This connected to this overwhelming comparison of them as innocent animals, as incapable of harm. From Disney stories like Bambi, whose family posed no threat and became an easy target, to juxtaposing horror movies that make them the villains because it’s so unexpected by the audience. On social media, it became a trend to dress up as a deer, then utilize red makeup to portray a target directly in the center of their forehead, an ode to hunting and how deer are so often the desired outcome. It played on the same idea as so many people connected it to their experiences with losing their innocence, through grief, through sexual assaults, through abusive instances within their lifetime. In my mind, it connected deeply with stories like that of Melusine. Her experience with a “loss of innocence” of sorts when she’s forced to become this monster, and again when she experiences that extreme betrayal by her husband choosing to directly ignore her instruction to stay away on Saturdays. She goes from this youthful, gently-spirited woman, to a devastated woman who seems to lose herself; she transforms from the docile deer to the mutilated carcass at the hand of man.

When it comes to language, we utilize even the simplest phrases of “Oh dear!” or making it a pet name amongst people. While it all seems quite trivial, throughout our discoveries, it has become more and more clear that nothing about our choices when it comes to language could be considered trivial. Their gentle nature, their ability to be such peaceful creatures made them something people compare to loved ones, those they hold closely because of their inner beauty. It only emphasizes the idea of innocence when we look at the usage of it amongst parents; they consider their children so dear because they’re innocent, young and agile the way deer continued to be represented and perceived. The biggest language choice that stands out is that of “doe eyes”; it’s this label we use for that big, wholesome look in a person’s eyes, the one place it’s nearly impossible to hide emotion. The term comes with this connotation of sensitivity, of gentleness and represents how we view these people, speaking as someone who has been labeled by doe eyes my entire adult life. It truly rounds out this image, this belief in deers as this beautifully simple part of lives, and how we often forget this when it comes to the real thing.

The Ocean as a Battleground

Posted on by
2

In the short film Sirenomelia, Emilija Škarnulytė moves away from an anthropocentric view of the environment by using a mermaid to explore an abandoned military base to interlace history within the environment in which it takes place. Through this de-centering of humans, it removes human domination over historic narratives and gives other entities the agency to tell history from their point of view.

The use of a mermaid to explore the ruins of a military base from the Cold War helps rethink the notion that history is limited to humans by viewing the remnants of the base through a non-human perspective. Specifically, the scene of the mermaid swimming around structures connected to the base (Škarnulytė 3:50) showcases how human technologies often impact the environment around them. Rather than solely focusing on how human activities impact other humans, the film shifts perspective to another entity to show us that humans do not exist on the Earth alone, and that what we do is not limited to implications that just affect humans. Škarnulytė allows us to see history from a different perspective and how events like the Cold War make an impact on the environment around it. The militarization of the aquatic environment doesn’t just affect humans, but also the beings that exist in that environment, who now have to deal with the aftermath of these deteriorating structures. It is the mermaid that is in control of what the audience sees as we flow through the different settings with her. Humans become the spectators as we watch the mermaid swim through the decommissioned base, making the mermaid and the environment that surrounds her the main characters of the film. The environment is no longer a passive being as it illuminates the marks of human ambition that have been inflicted upon it.

This new perspective forces humans to reassess their ability to use the environment as they see fit since the environment and those who inhabit it are not immune to its effects. Simply because the sea has remained constant doesn’t mean that it’s not constantly changing below the waves and full of life. It’s not an endless resource that humans can utilize for their own benefit without any consequence. Having a mermaid display how nature is stamped with human domination gives the audience the capacity to rethink the belief that nature and all those who inhabit it are separate from human history and conflicts. Nature is not a submissive entity that is immune to these repercussions, as it showcases throughout the film how the human desire to pillage leaves scars on the environment and those who live within it. In turn, this complicates humans’ ability to view the environment solely as a resource because the film brings to light the idea that nature is alive, allowing it to feel the ramifications of human domination over the environment.

Remembered

Posted on by
1

In Gabrielle Tesfaye’s film The Water Will Carry Us Home the artist shows a vision of the people murdered in the Middle Passage during the slave trade as still being part of this world even after their deaths. As the ocean is often depicted as the void of Earth, the act of killing in this way left little physical evidence of the atrocities committed compared to the terrestrial that proceeded and followed the path of the Middle Passage. This film shows how those murdered are still part of Earth even when they are not part of the terrestrial plane.

Being stolen from their homes and land, Tesfaye depicted a life in the ocean where the water deities of mermaids welcome those murdered by drowning to a new home in the water. Many of the people in the film who are killed are pregnant women, with their deaths it shows the end of lineage that happened during the heinous act of enslavement.

Tesfaye included in her film not only the second or next lives of those murdered but the continuation of life in the ocean. There is love, community, and descendants; all of the things enslavers thought they ended by throwing people into the void of the ocean to cover their crimes. These murderers at the time viewed this as minor disruption to the surface world, but no matter what they believed the bodies and souls of those killed stayed in the world and are still part of it. These brutal acts are remembered and those lost are honored and live on in the world that they will always be a part of. Tesfaye also shows a person with white hair who is murdered by drowning, there is generational significance to this as elders are often the source of knowledge and explanation. Without elders’ generational exchanges, knowledge will be stopped and in turn strength in cultural understanding and beliefs. But Tesfaye shows that the knowledge was not stopped.

Tesfaye bookends this vision depicted in paintings and stop-motion with filming herself in spiritual practice, adding not only that there is a terrestrial remembrance but shifting the images away from the imagined images and grounding it in a reality that this happened to real people. She connects to the sand and water and can hear the voices of those whose next lives are within the ocean, showing the continuation that happened not only in the ocean but on land.

swallowing up

The vast ocean of the unknown

Posted on by
Reply

In the reading “The Ocean reader by Eric Paul Roorada and what in the passage what stood out is how much involvement of human beings are in the ocean and still has lots of mysteries that we don’t much about.

Roorada says about how humans viewed the ocean and its entirety is that “Those who have considered the watery majority of the planet on its own terms have often seen it as a changeless space, one without a history”(1).

This describes humans people who are just ignorant about our planet and were too busy to try to understand on why the ocean is an important part of our planet and essential to life as we know it to be. It is crucial to have knowledge of the ocean itself because it is a large part of life that is needed and lots of potential to be explored. Most people rather go and discover parts of our universe out in space rather than taking care of our planet.

For what the author puts a spotlight on how humans are seeing the ocean “Terracentrism, a term that is rapidly gaining currency, refers to people’s tendency to consider the world and human activity mainly in the context of the land and events that take place on land”(1). People tendency to dominate other people have been for thousands and what the environment has taken a toll from humans for quite a while and really needs to considered how resources are limited due to climate change.

The Seal Woman

Posted on by
Reply

I really enjoyed getting to celebrate Halloween in class with everybody who dressed up. As an homage to the origins of this beloved holiday, I chose to dress up as a Selkie from the legend in our Penguin Book of Mermaids. Upon reading these stories, which cover both Scottish myths and Irish legends, I was struck at the way these women, either as mermaid or seal, are taken against their will and forced to become mothers, especially in the case of Tom Moore and his Selkie bride.

Although this version ends with the seal woman kissing her children goodbye, and returning to the ocean, there are versions in which she drowns her children in her attempt to take them to sea. This reminded me of the story I grew up with, La llorona, about a weeping woman who is abused and abandoned by her husband, and in a sort of mercy killing, drowns her children in the river and herself. She haunts lakes and watery spaces and weeps for her children.

These two myths from completely separate parts of the world, position the water as both a danger to humans, and a power beyond our comprehension, that a mermaid could prefer returning to it, than to life on land. These stories discuss the limited options that women have in cases of abuse, forced marriage, or marital rape, which is to leave by any means. It deeply contrasts to the Grey Selchie (male) having custody of his child, but the mothers having to leave their children behind in an act of desperation.

I appreciated that in the Penguin version, when she leaves, her children and descendants are marked by webbed feet and the ability to swim. Through her, the Ocean becomes a part of their DNA. Their relationship with their mother becomes one with the Ocean. This physical mark of the relationship with sea creatures on humans bodies, reminds us of the deep connections with the Ocean we are capable of having, if we respect it´s autonomy.

Week 10: The History of the Ocean

Posted on by
3

In reading “The Blue Humanities”, I was very intrigued by the discussion of the unfolding history of the ocean, a place becoming more and more widely studied.

 “More is known about the dark side of the moon than is known about the depths of the oceans,” writes the sea explorer David Helvarg. Yet large numbers of people know the sea in other ways, through the arts and literature. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, fiction has been imagining undersea worlds that explorers were unable to reach.

This short passage from the preface to the text stood out to me in particular. We have been studying pieces of literature all year that have unraveled the history of how the ocean has been viewed for centuries. For a long time, fiction was all we had to tie ourselves back to the ocean from which we evolved at the beginning of time. Time after time, our fiction has been proven to be accurate in many ways. We discussed in class how Hans Christian Andersen’s description of a living sea floor was outlandish at the time, but almost completely accurate from a modern, scientific perspective. Now that we can reach these depths and have the technology to truly understand the sea and all that has transpired there, who knows what new fiction will be stirred up? I don’t believe that the scientific exploration of the seas and discovering the “true” history of the oceans will stop mankind from thinking up oceanic stories to enchant generations. Sure, we may know more about the moon than our oceans, but that hasn’t stopped the continuous flow of “moon media”. After all, even when we have explanations for, or seem to be able to grasp a concept or space (practically a non-human one), we still find ways to pull art and literature from them.

Week 10: The Ocean is big, but its resources are not infinite

Posted on by
2

After reading the introduction to The Ocean Reader by Eric Paul Roorada, one thing that stood out to me is how the author reminds us that humans are constantly exploiting the Ocean (with a capital O) and hurting its ecosystems, and wants us to become more environmentally aware of the Ocean due to its limited resources.

Roorada writes, “[T]he multifaceted Ocean … is an enormous and very complicated system. Humans interact with that system in many ways. They relentlessly hunt sea creatures, taking 90 million tons of fish from it annually.” (3)

This description of humans “relentlessly” hunting sea creatures shows how we take these gifts of Nature for granted. The Ocean is enormous, but it is not infinite. Like land, it is home to many resources that can only be found underwater. However, there is only so much that we can gather from the Ocean before it eventually runs out of said resources and we have to compete for it.

The author also sheds light on overfishing, giving us a statistic of humans “taking 90 million tons of fish from it annually.” Overfishing leads to a depletion in fish stock, which endangers marine ecosystems and harms human livelihoods. Because of this, it is important for us to consider what resources we really want and how much we really need, taking in mind how efficient we need to be with the resources we have. Limited resources cannot fulfill our unlimited wants.

Value

Posted on by
2

A particular line that stood out to me In The Blue Humanities by John Gills was “The focus was almost entirely on the ships and the skills of the men who manned them.” Gills explains the acknowledgement that the ships and skillful men received while there was a disregard for the foundation— the sea. The sea is the foundation for the ships and the sea is what the skillful men had to not only work with but obtain some knowledge about in order to be successful in their travel. So why was the sea undervalued?

Tracing this back to what our discussions about mermaids/sirens being considered dangerous and unfit for society, there is a similarity considering the sea was was also considered “…as dangerous and repellant, ugly and unfit for literary or artistic representation.” The value of mermaids have had a similar value that the sea had at one point. Gills explains “…and more attention was paid to extracting the wealth of the seas…” Humans extract the parts of the sea that is of importance to them because it is benefiting to them. There is a lack of empathy towards the sea, the only value that the sea held was in a form of travel, whaling, etc. Much like the mermaids, who offered knowledge, their beauty, etc. Ignoring the fact that there is more knowledge that was missed out on to understand the depth of the sea, much like the mermaids as a being.

Week 10: Ocean Reader

Posted on by
4

After spending a fair amount of time going through the vocabulary we use daily that is frequently centered around dry land (which I recall focusing on in the first weeks), it is only after reading the introduction of The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics by Eric Paul Roorda that I truly noticed the “anthropocentric” mentality humanity tends to have and just how senseless it sounds when the ocean “currently covers 71 percent of the world, a figure that is certain to rise along with sea level” (1). This advantage in regards to sheer size that the Ocean has over land and with that size gap increasing should be telling of the fact that humanity tends to ignore and neglect issues whether economic or environmental only until the damage has reached catastrophic levels which at that point, the problem is either irreversible or tremendously challenging to overcome.

Now, this dilemma involving living in harmony with nature is incredibly complex because at is mentioned in the reading, “Humans interact with that system in many ways. They relentlessly hunt sea creatures, taking 90 million tons of fish from it annually” (3). The interactions that occur between humans and animals are bound to have more disparities than similarities due to the evident power dynamic, but this is not to say that there is no hope or that humans are the only ones that can destroy or “save” the environment when it is also mentioned by Roorda that factors such as the ring of fire and the shifting of tectonic plates can significantly affect and alter Terra as we know it, and that is something we as humans can’t possibly control.

Week 10 reading post

Posted on by
Reply

“Beginning in the late eighteenth century, people began to come back to the sea in search for a quality they felt to be missing in the new industrial environment, that something called wilderness.”(John R. Gillis, HUMANITIES, May/June 2013, Volume 34, Number 3)

Humans crave nature because of the manmade world filled with fumes and concrete has deprived them of being in their natural environment.

The sea, for the most part, has been ignored by humans and just used transactionally, never acknowledging the sea as an “it”. When industrial revolution begins to rapidly spread across land, nature is being destroyed. The coexistence of land plants and animals lived beside humans, with a life cycle. Now, that technology is involved, natures life cycles have run short due to humans at fault. Some humans sensed that emptiness and crave an outlet of purity, which is the sea. Humans didn’t dare to enter the sea but watched entrancingly the waves come and go from a dry distance on their land. The sea has now become an “it” in their eyes, an embodiment of “wilderness” that no man can tame. Rather to admire from afar the power she has and no manmade revolution will harness her. Humans crave nature because we all came from the same place, water. The ginormous sea being at the edge of our land, alluring us to keep seeking for “wilderness” that will fill our missing pure/untarnished quality,we humans crave.