There is a game in Mexico called Loteria. It is bingo with pictures instead of numbers. Each block has different icons or representations of people and objects, one of which was a mermaid.
I remember sitting around the kitchen table playing this game with my family. While the mermaid in the game is a bit fleshier than my rendition of her, if you find the game you can see the resemblance, albeit with my own Dia de los Muertos twist.
For me the mermaid has always been a representation of mythic places and persons. Not necessarily something unreal, but something unknown. When shown in her full skeletal form, she shows that the experience of death, while also unknown to those of us living, is not unreal. In “La Sirena” ,a skeletal mermaid swims with a few skeletal friends in an ocean without boundaries showing that we never travel alone and while there is an appearance of seperateness, I believe that instead of taking this seperateness as a fact we are meant to see through it and see how we are all swimming in the same ocean.
Whatever stories or concepts we have of death, we must learn that we are part of the story. This makes all ideas of death inherently incomplete – because our part in its mystery remains unknown.
Nov 1, 01:14 PM
I learned so much about Day of the Dead.