Mara maids

[Jane]

>From Moby-Dick, "The Blacksmith"

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange
Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities
of the
immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored;
therefore, to
the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in
them
some interior compunctions against suicide, does the
all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread
forth his whole plain
of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life
adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the
thousand
mermaids sing to them- "Come hither, broken-hearted; here is
another life
without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders
supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury
thyself in a life
which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed
world, is
more oblivious than death. dome hither! put up thy
grave-stone,
too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry
thee!"
  Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early
sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul
responded, Aye, I
come! And so Perth went a-whaling.

AND 

>From "The Life-Buoy" 

At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it
were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep
darkness that
goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky
islets;
the watch- then headed by Flask- was startled by a cry so
plaintively wild and unearthly- like half-articulated
wailings of the ghosts
of all Herod's murdered Innocents- that one and all, they
started
from their reveries, and for the space of some moments
stood, or
sat, or leaned all transfixed by listening, like the carved
Roman
slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The
Christian or
civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and
shuddered; but the
pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman-
the
oldest mariner of all- declared that the wild thrilling
sounds that
were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.
  Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey
dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him
by Flask,
not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly
laughed, and thus explained the wonder.
  Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of
great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost
their
dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen
nigh the
ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with
their
human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of
them, because
most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about
seals,
arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress,
but also
from the human look of their round heads and
semi-intelligent faces,
seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the
sea,
under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been
mistaken for
men.   But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive
a
most plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their
number
that morning. At sun-rise this man went from his hammock to
his
mast-head at the fore; and whether it was that he was not
yet half
waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a
transition
state), whether it was thus with the man, there is now no
telling;
but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch,
when a
cry was heard- a cry and a rushing- and looking up, they saw
a
falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little
tossed heap of white
bubbles in the blue of the sea.
  The life-buoy- a long slender cask- was dropped from the
stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring;
but no
hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon
this cask it had
shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that parched wood
also filled
at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed
the
sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though
in sooth but a
hard one.   And thus the first man of the Pequod that
mounted the mast
to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own
peculiar
ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep. 

Hear now my will, ye craven winds! [Isolde begins by
singing]

come for th to strife and stess and storm (Anna Freud?)
to turbulent tempests' clamour and fury!
Drive from her dreams this slumbering sea;
wake from her depths all her envious greed!
Destroy now this insolent ship,
let its wreck be sunk in her waves!
All that hath life and breath upon it, 
I leave to you winds as your prize!

>From Love in the Western World, "The Tristan Myth"

When I was a Sea Bee, I had a contract, they had to fly me,
no ships.  But to get off that rock in the middle of the
Indian Ocean I
would have  strapped cocoanuts to my beard with  sceaming
agony, but
instead, I settled for  a butterfly tattoo.