Mermaids, Pools and Poetry

I was interested to see that Lord Bryon's family emblem is the mermaid.  This is very apt in the way of Fleams, because of the legend of the Mermaid's Pool.

Ella Campane, who did pioneering work at The Canholes Asylum for the Incurably Insane, worked with various inmates who were obsessed by the story of Mermaid's Pool.  She got them to write about their thoughts.  Here is an extract from one of Ella's case studies:

Case 9

This is the case of a lady with alternating episodes of mania and despondency.  She told these tales in our storytelling times and came to understand how to tend her hectic mind.

These are her words.

There was a tale when I was a girl: The Mermaid’s Pool.  It went like this:

If a young man went down that road, then up that hill, and followed that track he would find a pool.  This he had to do on a magical night.  He should wait through the twilight, until with the night a beautiful young woman would appear from the pool.  After spending the night with him she would either grant him the gift of poetry or take him back with her to live in her world at the bottom of the pool.

There was a similar story in a village over the way.  In that place they told the story like this:

If a young man left the village climbed the mountain up a track he would find a pool.  On that one magical night the pool became different; not the ordinary pool you could see any other day of the year.  He should find a cave by the pool and wait through the twilight.  Then with the night, a beautiful young woman would appear from the pool. 

She would take him into the cave and in the morning would grant him either the gift of poetry or madness or take him with her back to the land beneath the pool.

She sang the song of the siren:

Come hither
Come hither
And led him to the bottom of the pool.

That’s some of the ways they told the tale.

It seemed to me that tale was about the line you tread hungering for inspiration.  You stoke the fires of the imagination.  You make room for inspiration to come in.  You invite the muses to breathe into your mind.  You run with the creativity that grows from that breath.  But what if it runs out of control?  What if it runs into mania?  What if you are trammelled into train tracks of creativity?  Running down just one track over and over, over and over, over and over and you can’t get off?

But worse, what if you don’t get into the groove?  If you’re stuck, stuck, stuck, churning through the same thing again and again and again.  Trapped now, under the pool, can’t talk to anyone.