This week we had to watch a video called Sirenemelia, a six minute video of ominous clips of icy lands, dark waters, and a mermaid-like creature swimming around. There was no audio or much context to go off of. One thing I did pick up was that we do not know much about the ocean and its inhabitants so that feeling of not knowing what the video was about or it having context may have been trying to emulate that same lack of knowledge we have with the water. When the mermaid showed up in the short film, I thought about the mystery or mermaid and that highly debated question of if they truly exist or existed at some point. I feel like when you watch this video someone might feel uncomfortable by it or even a bit scared of the water or unknown, but instead this video made me curious. While watching this video, due to the lack of structure and context, I let my mind fill in the gaps and began to relate it to a TikTok I saw the other week; it was a video of a preacher going back and fourth with a woman in the crowd as to why she should believe Jesus was resurrected if there were no medical records to prove it. His rebuttal to her was that “they did not keep medical records in the first century.” She then exclaimed how convenient that was there was no such thing back then. the preacher than uses her frustration and flips it explaining how it was “convenient” I’ve her to create a condition that she knew was impossible to meet in order for her to become a believer of Jesus’ resurrection. He then goes on to name many well known philosophers, such as Helmer, Aristotle, Sophocles, and so on, that she provide medical records for them. He argues how historical knowledge is not based on medical records, but instead trustworthy eyewitness testimonies; that those philosophers really did live because there’s historical evidence that says that they did therefore the historical evidence that says Jesus resurrected from the dead should be treated with the same willingness to accept as truth. Although I am not trying to equate legitimacy of Jesus and Christianity with mermaids, I thought that the idea of eyewitness testimony from days where there were no records or film to capture information to pass it on, poses the idea that maybe there once was real mermaid and sirens but society just all agreed their literary records were made up entirely. We accept some things as truth in the old dusty books we read, yet other information that is too unfamiliar we deem untrue, but what if it was all real? I say all of that to say that the SIrenemelia video made me revisit the idea that our society as a whole knows very little about the ocean and what may reside in it; perhaps the image of the mermaid was constructed for human beings to learn from and she is made up to fit an agenda, or maybe someone really did see a mermaid or siren at one point and shared that knowledge through books and eyewitness testimony.