on selkies and shapeshifting coastlines

Things the cape resembles, a partial list

A comma.
A mammoth’s tusk, outstretched. (Its skull, a continent.)
A clenched limb with a trembling fist.
The ‘c’ of caput, Lat. for head. It’s a jawbone.
It’s Boston’s lockjaw.
A fiddler crab’s oversized claw.
(Or kaputt, from Ger., outmoded and destroyed?)
An ancient scroll unrolling.
You can turn the map around:
A womb.
More specifically, the cape is half a pelvis bone surrounding the bay that grows the
ocean’s babies.
A fiddlehead unfurling.
An acorn’s taproot.
The head of a bird with a probing beak.
The beached whale’s penis in a Netherlandish print.
Thoreau rode the cape’s flensed body, bareback, when it had fewer trees. They’d gone
to sea, as ships.
A hook to catch the fish that once sliced the sea with light.
An anchor with one protruding fluke.
A come-hither finger, beckoning the Arctic’s ice.

– Sarah B. Cahalan

Robin V. Robinson Threshold from the series ‘In the Liminal’

you sit at the mouth of the chesapeake bay, having a conversation with a selkie

Her eyes, black and open and drawing, and all the way down you feel a shiver: passed reaction, electricity through jellyfish, luminescence in the skin of a cuttlefish, tide. You feel the shiver from your head to your toes, and know it for what it is: recognition. ‘Wrong question,’ the selkie says, continuing a conversation you must have been having, but you cannot remember beginning. The sun doesn’t beat down so much as it beats up: a white force of reflection, tossed back at you from the sand, the surface of the sea, glinting. You raise a hand, cover your eyes.

‘How long have we been here?’ you ask.

She digs a single hand beneath a retreating wave, grasping for a swiftly disappearing fiddler crab. Gullcry, and somewhere, a flat-bottom boat, a baited line of pearlescent chicken necks descending into the waiting and pincered mouths of crabs. You’ve forgotten something: a way this is supposed to go, repeated refrain of stories that follow this trail, selkie-girls and bodies of water and the notes cascading towards familiarity: her coat. You’re supposed to take her coat. If you take her coat, she will stay, and you will never be alone. She’s human-shaped now, though uneasily: she wavers, her eyes mussel shells, her hair eelgrass, her lips parting and expectant. Her coat must be somewhere close. You look around for the slippery grey treasure, for whatever it is that is separable and would allow you to complete the rhyme hovering at the edge of your vision.

‘You won’t find it,’ she says.

You feign innocence.

‘My coat.’

You are innocent.

‘Fine,’ she says, ‘let’s see how you like it then,’ and she takes your human coat.

And you are wondering if this is how the selkie feels when she changes, as though being is not a noun but a verb, as though human-seal-selkie is all just skin, as though you have always been asking the wrong question and you are not a human, just something that once wore a human coat and you are not even a ‘you’ anymore breathe, breath wave, tide in out

you are not a you, but a bay. you are being a bay. you flow into shallow places, meet the soft curve of land as a lover’s arm, hip, the ready and waiting nook of a bed. in the shallows, you are warm, drowsed, a collection of sun-warmed goings on – eels weaving in tide grass, blue crabs selecting and moving in horizontal axes, the shimmering coordination of clouds of silversides and needlefish. footprints and padding – wading creatures from another world, half-seen and felt as displacement: these others, waist-shallow, seeing a different blue beyond. seashells tumble as you move, one way, then the other, one way, then the other, the pleasure of hair tossed over the shoulder,
swept into a bun. faint humming of engines, rumbling business, pockets of dank accumulation, the places where you are breached – you sink deeper. unmoving, you are less beige; more blue. settling, stillness, the cavernous quiet of the being unperceived. what are we, unwatched. what does the darkness imagine when they sleep. jellyfish bloom at the edge, wisping thoughts of currents, and at the core, a
compression. the gathering weight of what is above. deepening is a measure of allowing aboveness, allowing beings and movements to pass, uninterrupted and untouched,between you and the surface of you. you, as the space between seabed and surface waves,

you as multitudes contained, you, measured only in how far the light can reach. sounds here lose their edges: chords and resonance, the lull rather than the lap. blackness, eventually, a depth that becomes arrival. whalefall. waiting mouths. the rippling ghosts of plastic. occasional light, blue and translucent and creaturely.

the end of all things, which has never been an end or a beginning: just silence, pressure, and a vast distance. you are endless, and edgeless, and you are the opposite of alone.

‘I’ll give up mine, if you give up yours,’ the selkie says.

– M. Rose

IMAGES: (top and centre) Robin V. Robinson
Falling from the Womb and Threshold,
from the series ‘In the Liminal’
Unique gelatin silver prints from film using alternative photographic processes involving copper
bleach and lith developer
My series ‘In the Liminal’ includes images which explore the aquatic origin of human beings. We feel connected to water through our bodies – it is part of us – yet we have largely forgotten the ocean as our birthplace. The feeling of the water, the pressure ourrounding us, the sight of a sandy barren shore, all familiar, yet far from our land-bound mindsets. In our liminal existence, I feel a return to the primordial perspective of this watery place is important to our collective psyche

Robin V. Robinson is a photographer who honours the alchemical nature of Earthly elements in her Carmel, California darkroom. She explores our liminal existence in relation to deep time through in-water imagery of the mysterious aquatic world from which we were born. She exhibits internationally and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Monterey Museum of Art and the US National
Mariners’ Museum. robinrobinson.com

Seb Bradshaw
Selkie Shoes
Hand-sewn Hebridean kelp, fishing rope
The artwork imagines a Selkie, a changeling from Gaelic myth, coming ashore to investigate the changes taking place in her home. As both a woman and a seal, the Selkie can speak for both human and more-than-human worlds and perspectives. The fragile material and medium reference craft, feminine labour and impermanence, as well as, of course, the ocean.

Seb Bradshaw is an artist based in London. Her practice explores human occupation and entangled relations with land. Working primarily with drawing and textiles, she works from visual cues, including English and Gaelic folklore, to explore the way sites of apparent wilderness are inhabited and perceived by humanity. @artbyseb138