Women of Seals - Tales of the Sea

Who are these women who wander the oceans at first with spirit and then with doom? Where are these women from and where will they go?

At dusk, the boat draws closer and although we are all blank and tired something about this shed emerging from the water starts to fill our minds. I know that this is what we are all thinking, but out here, after many days that I care not to look back into, a shed unknown, mysteriously placed in the discomfort of nowhere takes precedence. A shed overrules my previous consciousness. A shed is an open door.

Up close its true self is revealed. It is long and high and made from aluminum. The water composes a repeated echo and the small hand like waves which push to touch each edge, softly clap perhaps at the marvel of this shed. This shed which is vast and sonorously guileless.

Not yet inside, we look in and the prevailing countenance is heavy and quiet.
There is a conveyer belt appearing from a large double door leading directly out, it turns sharply left before disappearing somewhere much further along, firstly into the gray, and then into the darkness.

Something seems strange, feels strange in all this stillness.

From the shade comes a much darker red. It is blood my friend whispers.
The blood is no longer fresh, but in its preservation, we are shown but a fragment of a much larger story and the blood which lays in a series of intervals has turned the color of bruised plums. The blood follows the path of the beltway in smears, drops and prolonged splashes and the feeling of the shed becomes more intensified. There is the smell of darkness and damp and the story begins.

Suddenly a deep sound can be heard, like an engine of some kind. The deepness is ominous, it is blunt and mechanical and I fear that whatever may emerge from these doors will steal our speech while relentlessly holding the sight from our eyes.
Then without introduction or ceremony, a seal came into view, followed by another. They stood on the belt slowly moving yet completely still. Then out of nowhere, a sword appears and swoops down to slice their heads off with no restraint, with no warning! The body jitters in the aftermath, spurting blood in slashes as it continues along the pathway. We are witnesses to this continued stream of executions, slice after slice, the seals are taken and not a word is spoken, no reason given, no comfort of explanation.

We are hypnotized by this endless stream which when reduced becomes a sequence of swift severances. It is now all about the sounds. The waves are clapping louder, as if more excited by this surrendering. As for the seals themselves? Who knew anything about their place before, now and after here. But if I was to describe anything to give me the smallest trace of their consciousness I could only say such lack of opposition was a sign of undoubted acceptance. Who knew at which point they had resigned themselves to the slice. Who knew if they had feelings at all.

Hours later after our departure, I sat alone at the bow of our ship. It was night and the others were all inside keen to drink rum and forget. The massacre of seals had set upon some of the women a chill. They had taken on board a severe emotional reaction which had clung to them and as someone who had lived with these women for months, I knew their minds to be places of complex imagination. We wouldn’t have survived being out in this oceanic wilderness without it. But now, the very tool which had fueled our late nights and moments of solitude at sea was an instrument of torture.,

I, on the other hand, refused to forget. I needed and had to find a way to make sense of it and I very slowly came to a possible solution. In resignation, there can be peace. And even as the knowledge of unavoidable death looms, in acceptance there comes the wisdom that for some circumstances there is no need to fight. Something’s can not be changed and the dignity which arises can be one’s final impression.