{"id":140962,"date":"2019-11-18T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T14:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=140962"},"modified":"2026-03-16T11:52:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T15:52:13","slug":"the-siren-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/18\/the-siren-song\/","title":{"rendered":"The Siren Song"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Gustav Wertheimer, The Kiss of the Siren<\/em>, 1882<\/p><\/div>\n

Four surfboards leaned against the wall in an unfamiliar room on the far edge of the city. I\u2019d woken up after two hours of sleep in a bed too small for two people. The concert the night before had been loud, the sound had come in not just through the seashell curl of the ears, but through the skin to the guts and the bones. It was December and before heading north toward home, we walked the beach\u2014it\u2019s easy to forget in the compression of steel and cement that the city touches ocean, too. We were quiet, tired, and stunned by the force of our recent collision. I squinted in the light, that unforgettable light, that pure, so-bright December light, there on a beach at the far rocky edge of the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cI need you to know that I\u2019m vulnerable to you,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have a power over me. Please use it wisely.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not what one wants to hear.<\/p>\n

Sirens sang at the edges. They sang on far rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean. The men who heard their song, it is important to note, were already at sea. Literal sea. Figurative sea. If you hear the Sirens\u2019 song, you have already unhooked yourself from life on land, from the familiar conventions and constraints of family and routine. If you hear the Sirens singing, it means you\u2019ve placed yourself in earshot, opened yourself to new music. It is important to note, too, that what looked like an edge to the men was the center for the Sirens. They sang, laughed, remembered to buy paper towels and to get the exercise they needed. What seemed so exotic to others, so enticing, was life as usual on the cliff.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Who were they, the Sirens? Let\u2019s look back.<\/p>\n

I spent some time with Ovid recently, and in his Metamorphoses<\/em>, the Sirens are not lurers, not mondo-babe seductresses. They were the girls in the meadow when Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and they went in search of their lost friend. All over land, high and low, they searched and sang so she might hear their song and sing out in response. When they couldn\u2019t find her, they asked Demeter, Persephone\u2019s mom, to change them into birds so they could extend their search and look for their friend over the ocean. Golden-feathered bird girls who sang to find their friend.<\/p>\n

In the Odyssey<\/em>, in Emily Wilson\u2019s translation, Circe tells Odysseus what\u2019s at stake: \u201cIf anyone goes near them\/in ignorance, and listens to their voices\/that man will never travel to his home.\u201d The words in ignorance <\/em>raise themselves off the page to me now, glowing and throbbing. They suggest that there\u2019s another outcome possible, that if a person were to approach in knowledge, with an understanding of the stakes, they might not smash into rocks or rot on the shore. What might happen instead? A new sort of knowing, an arrival, a return.<\/p>\n

The Sirens are explicit about what they offer. Not seaside sex, not carnality on the cliffs. The Sirens know <\/em>and they can tell you what they know. They can tell you anything<\/em>. They sing to Odysseus, roped to the mast, \u201cAll those who pass this way hear honeyed song, \/ poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy, \/ and they go on their way with greater knowledge.\u201d We know about what happened in the Trojan War, they tell him; in other words, we know your story, we know what you\u2019ve been through, we understand, \u201cand we know whatever happens anywhere on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

To have someone understand our story, to know what we\u2019ve suffered, experienced, endured, and to sing it back to us, isn\u2019t this, in the end, what we long for? Is this, then, the ultimate seduction? Is this what\u2019s so terribly irresistible? To have our own story told to us? As Daniel Johnston, another sort of Siren, sang, \u201cTo understand and be understood is to be free.\u201d It is to be released, unbound, to return to the place we belong.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the longing for this return, too, I think, that the Sirens speak to. A longing that\u2019s deeper and harder to know. Not just to be understood, not just to have your life story sung back to you, but to arrive back to an original home, way back, when there were no words, just the dim, dark, rushing echoes of sounds absorbed through skin, cosmic blood rush rhythm, whoom whoom whoom. This, I think, is the sound of the Sirens. It\u2019s the original sound. Approach in knowing and you can edge up to it, right up to the lip of the abyss, be absorbed\u2014with another, through another\u2014into the pure tissue from where we came. Listen. Closely. Can you hear it?<\/p>\n

The Sirens\u2019 song changed in time. They became different beasts entirely.<\/p>\n

James Joyce writes, in the Sirens chapter of Ulysses<\/em>, of barmaids and their \u201clongingdying call.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o\u2019er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the longingdying language of love. Joygush, tupthrob, and it\u2019s true, I love it. (\u201cI haven\u2019t cared for music any more,\u201d Joyce said after finishing this chapter. \u201cI see through all the tricks and can\u2019t enjoy it any more.\u201d) Longing and dying are jammed up against each other, and Joyce is onto something here. The longing isn\u2019t pouring forth from the mouths of the Sirens\u2014that\u2019s all in the ear of the beholder. But the men don\u2019t quite know it, or aren\u2019t brave enough to admit.<\/p>\n

Same thing in James Russell Lowell\u2019s poem \u201cThe Sirens.\u201d \u201cVoices sweet, from far and near, \/ Ever singing low and clear \/ Ever singing longingly.\u201d This longing dying call: it\u2019s the listeners becoming acquainted with their own longing. It\u2019s not the Sirens\u2019 who long, but those who hear them, who hear their own longing in the song they can\u2019t sing themselves. Maybe none of us can sing it to ourselves, maybe all of us need help to hear it.<\/p>\n

How easy it is to go off course, to want to put the power in someone else\u2019s hands. But then you smash on rocks, but then you waste away, but then you never get to touch again the center, or approach the abyss, or hear the song that was always sounding somewhere in your mind, too far away to reach. But it\u2019s always there somewhere, deep in. Inger Christensen knew it. From her poem \u201cSorrow\u201d:<\/p>\n

Find the concise
\nExpression for sorrow:
\na slug with its slime
\nand reflex mechanism
\nin meaningless order,
\nthe feelers out
\nin time, in time
\ndrawn in again
\nand inside the body
\nused precisely
\nas a pregnant siren
\nwhose falling tone
\nfalls and falls
\ndown through all
\norganism.
\nOh skin
\nmy outermost
\nradar screen<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Sirens\u2019 power is in knowing, but it\u2019s a power that can only be realized when approached with one\u2019s own power, with one\u2019s own knowing. Not, \u201cYou have power over me,\u201d but \u201cI see your power and I meet it with my own and let\u2019s see where we can go.\u201d There\u2019s fear in the approach, naturally, as there should be: it\u2019s the kind that signals something significant is at stake and there\u2019s no knowing what will happen. And if there is longing in the Sirens\u2019 song, it\u2019s for someone to come along and understand the stakes, to be ready for what\u2019s possible when, as Octavio Paz writes, our masks crumble, and \u201cfor one enormous moment we glimpse \/ the unity that we lost \u2026 the forgotten astonishment of being alive.\u201d Did you forget? Did you lose track of that astonishment? What happens when you hear something that reminds you of what you always knew without knowing?<\/p>\n

Listen. Listen. Feel it. The Siren lives inside you, inside all of us, right now, already, always, singing the song of our longing, singing a song without words that has been there from the start. Do you hear it?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not easy. It\u2019s there in the silence of the scallop shell which holds the ocean\u2019s echoes. It\u2019s there in the silence between two people, when words give way and the language of blood and heat take their place. It\u2019s there in the silence of an apricot, soft sunset flesh. It\u2019s there in the silence of the sunlight on a beach in December, lighting up our half-known longing for that song we know we know but can never, on our own, remember.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book, <\/em>Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, is on sale this week.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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