IMMORTALITY = NO MEMORY: MAURA STANTON’S SIRENS

John William Waterhouse,  Siren, 1900

 
A VOICE FOR THE SIRENS

Oh they came, their eyes blank.
I pinned their souls under rocks
wanting only their shocked flesh
as the ships broke up, again, again . . .
Years now. Unlike the others I remember
a hand, some coarse hair against my cheek.
Now I stare at the sea all day
singing about strange events
for I’ve passed through their souls
inadvertently, thinking them shadows —
their souls were particles of odd happenings
or geography or touch,
tainting my immortality with memory.

As the sea roiled around him, one sailor
dreamed of his wife’s tomb,
the steep, sweating walls and dead pigs
killed to entice away the worms.
Another rubbed sea salt into his eyes
as if it were home, the desert;
while the one i murmured over, sweetly
dead in my young, implacable arms
saw his father turn in another sea.
In this fairyland, their strenuous lips
only blub loosely like the octopus
crossing my feet with lank, amorous
tentacles; their fingers dissolve
into the sharp, familiar bone.

Sometimes I hear mariners’ wives chanting
over the water, like us, forlorn;
I remember the charmed wedding nights,
and each man’s last embrace snow-
flake patterned into his soul, now mine.
Yet I keep singing, my dangerous voice
joined in sad irresponsibility with those
on this rock who forget why
each time until the next ship crashes.
Into the haunted music I weave my warning
carefully, as if my language were decipherable.

~ Maura Stanton

I love persona poems. I love the leap of the imagination it takes to dream oneself as precisely as possible into someone else who’s become part of our psyche. And once we know the tale of the Sirens, it’s with us forever.

Homer’s Sirens were part birds, part women. It’s later that the current image of the Siren, with a fish’s tail, became standard. But in classical Antiquity, the image of Sirens was found most often in cemeteries. The concept of the Siren evolved away from the Homeric femme fatale toward something more akin to our notion of an angel.  The wings stayed, as well as the attribute of music. The most striking piece of art in the whole show was a funerary Siren: sculpted in marble, a lovely woman with large wings, playing a kithara, a string instrument resembling a lyre. It turns out that Sirens were believed to accompany the dead to the Underworld, consoling them with music.

Ultimately, the Sirens, who could impart mystical wisdom, also became a symbol of the soul yearning for paradise. As I said in my blog post, “The Sirens Still Sing to Us,” we lose the world but gain the song.

This poem, however, takes us back to the Homeric sirens. There is no competing with The Odyssey. Few people know about the later “angelic” Sirens; millions are familiar with the myth of beautiful women’s voices luring sailors to their death. Stanton makes the Sirens basically innocent, unconscious. They mean no harm; immortal, have no memory, so they keep on singing, unaware of the consequences until the next ship crashes.

I read somewhere that the only way eternity would be endurable would be without memory. If in heaven there is no memory, then each moment repeats the wonder of seeing the place for the first time.

But one Siren mistakes the sailors souls for shadows, and something astonishing happens:

Now I stare at the sea all day
singing about strange events
for I’ve passed through their souls
inadvertently, thinking them shadows —
their souls were particles of odd happenings
or geography or touch,
tainting my immortality with memory.

“Tainting my immortality with memory” is my favorite line.

Now the “memory-tainted” Sirens is full of the sailors’ memories — their wedding nights, their parents, the landscapes they’d seen, the memories of touch (and, I assume, smell — those remain for a lifetime).  She identifies with the bereaved wives. She knows her voice is dangerous, but she can’t simply stop singing — apparently she’s “hard-wired” to sing. She tries to weave a warning into her song, but her language, alas, is not decipherable.

(A shameless digression: I’d love this poem to start with the second stanza — “in medias res.” Then it would be immediately compelling:

As the sea roiled around him, one sailor
dreamed of his wife’s tomb,
the steep, sweating walls and dead pigs
killed to entice away the worms.
Another rubbed sea salt into his eyes
as if it were home, the desert;
while the one i murmured over, sweetly
dead in my young, implacable arms
saw his father turn in another sea.

“Pigs killed to entice away the worms” — who knew? Wait, was that really done? Regardless, it’s irresistible detail.

The part about the Siren’s immortality becoming contaminated by memory could come later, in flashback.

But never mind. The poem is magical even if imperfect. It’s magical because it creates an alternate reality vividly enough.)

Absorbing the sailors’ memories is somewhat like eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. You cease to be an innocent being — “innocent” mainly in the sense of “ignorant.” Now you know you cause harm. Alas, in some circumstances you can’t help it — and you end up suffering too, as Stanton’s Siren feels the grief of the bereaved wives. In a fascinating twist, those women at least on the surface become like the Sirens, also singing over the waters, forlorn, but cut off from love except as memory and longing. 

 Siren, 7th century BC vase, Corinth, on an old Polish stamp

THE SIREN AS FEMME FATALE; HOMME FATAL

A “siren” has become pretty much a synonym for a “femme fatale.” Any woman can find herself in a femme fatale situation without really being a typical femme fatale: any relationship where she loves the partner less than she is loved puts her in the position of power — and she may be uncomfortable with it, and feel compassion for her partner. The poem certainly presents the case of “I know I am alluring to you, but you are not alluring to me.”

And what woman hasn’t dreamed, at least for a moment, of being a Siren, a beautiful Lorelei, a femme fatale? Ah, the power to inspire devotion while not making any sacrifices! A femme fatale illustrates the “Ben Franklin effect”: we love those for whom we’ve done favors, in whom we’ve invested time and energy. Since we’ve waited for them for hours while they were unconscionably late for a date, they must be worth that kind of waiting, right? The more they abuse us, the more difficult it becomes to break free — that’s the pathology of it.

And of course there is also the “homme fatal.” In fact I suspect that much more often it’s the man who remains aloof, solidifying his power over the woman helplessly in love with him — until, proverbially, she’s ready to “do anything for him.” It’s what I call “the boss and the secretary” game. She does most of the work he’s being paid for while he enjoys long “lunch meetings,” and covers up for his professional negligence. Usually he’s too smart to become an actual lover — that promise is forever dangling, never fulfilled. A physical love relationship usually comes to an end; an unrequited love, if unconsummated, can last for decades.

Whether it’s a man or a woman abusing someone else’s infatuation, it’s dreadful, pathological. A normal woman quickly snaps out of her Siren fantasies, realizing she would not be really happy being loved — even madly loved — by someone she doesn’t love. She returns to dreaming about the Prince. If the dream is intense, it too can be destructive, but on the whole a woman’s nurturing side prevails and she can love actual people with their flaws.

It would be going too far to say that the speaker in the poem is a femme fatale with a heart of gold. At most, she feels sorrow, she weaves warnings into her song. A heart of gold would require that she sacrifice her immortality in order to save a sailor’s life. But perhaps it’s not within her power to do that. The Greeks didn’t traffic in free will. There was Necessity, or Fate.

 

 The Goddess Ananke, or Necessity

THE SIRENS AS ART

By the way, in Homer the Sirens don't devour the bodies of the sailors. That’s a common misconception. Those sailors who survive the smashing against the rocks starve to death, listening to the enchanting song.

Clever reader, have you predicted that the phrase “starving artist” will come up next? And the word “compulsive”? Need I connect the dots?

Not for those readers who are familiar with the creative process. It is devouring. Most artists never “make it” in terms of worldly rewards. They pay a price not only in terms of poverty, but also in terms of guilt over not giving enough to their partners — since, you guessed the next eternal verity, they are “married to their art.”

The human beloved is doomed to being second in importance. “It’s a lonely life” — unless the artist’s mate has enough life of her own, enough of other sources of affection and satisfaction.

One time I asked fellow poets and writers, “Would you want your daughter to marry a writer?” The answer was an instant and unanimous No. In fact, it was a horrified shriek of No! Yet such a relationship can work well if it’s a relationship equals — usually both of them work in a creative field. Or, if only one does, then the partner manages to have a rich, satisfying life of his or her own.

 Cezanne, Kiss of the Muse, 1860

BACK TO IMMORTALITY AS LACK OF MEMORY

But Stanton’s poem appeals to me precisely because it’s not “about” the Siren as an ice-hearted femme fatale. The Sirens don’t lure the sailors because they are evil. Stanton posits that they ply their trade because they are immortal: hence they have no memory. Having no memory, they learn nothing about the consequences of their actions. They are surprised to see amorous fingers turn to sharp bone.

The idea that immortality requires no memory reminded me of a chapter in Einstein's Dreams, No memory means that everything keeps happening for the first time. Here one of the Sirens becomes accidentally "tainted" with memory, and now instead of her happy innocence she carries the psychic burden of the sailors' memories — especially, it seems, their memories of love.

Immortality as lack of memory is an interesting inversion of the usual understanding of immortality as everlasting memory. But who’s doing the remembering? Not the object of “immortality,” but those who remember him in some manner. Immortality as being remembered — usually with the aid of rituals such as commemorating anniversaries, writing reminiscences, talking about the person — and, in the case of a writer, reading and discussing his work — this kind of immortality is “done” by others. It’s not personal immortality, which I suspect might indeed be unbearable after a few centuries — and which might require absence of memory.

Being human, we are much less “programmed” than animals. I think this is as far as I want to go at present without stepping into the eternal debate over free will versus determinism. We are mortal and have memory. We can learn from noting the consequences. I will leave it at that.

Closing Image: Paul Delvaux (1897 - 1994), Dawn in the Village of the Sirens. Note that their lower bodies here resemble tree trunks and roots. The trunks can be a reference to the Maenads, the worshipers of Dionysus who got punished for tearing Orpheus into pieces by being changed into oaks. So the Maenads too represent destructive women. But I am not sure if Delvaux intended this reference. I think that he simply morphed the Sirens into this shape, perhaps to indicate that they are rooted, locked, imprisoned in their behavior. 

Charles:

The Siren painting is the perfect image for A VOICE FOR THE SIRENS. In fact all the pictures are perfect for this blog.

The Siren on the Polish postage stamp could be 20th century especially with the background so I wonder if the background was added.

Learned so much from Femme fatale section.

What is the Goddess Ananke or Necessity holding?

My favorite part of Paul Delvaux’s painting is the breast in the mirror. To me implies that the Sirens also love themselves and are narcissists without memory so they constantly have to remind themselves who they are by looking at the breast in the mirror. But that’s probably not what the artist intended. Maybe he just liked breasts. LOL
Oriana:

Insofar as there are three kinds of men, with painters it’s easy to figure out which kind they are: just note how they paint women.

This is hard at first with Picasso, but eventually it also shows


 
That’s a very good observation about the Sirens: they have no memory, so they can’t love anyone (not even themselves, but the main theory of narcissism holds that a narcissist lack true self love), and they need to have a mirror to remember who they are.

The Siren on the stamp: the shape is authentic, copied from a really ancient Greek vase. And very early art can look surprisingly modern — it doesn’t try to be realistic, but is strongly stylized.

I think the bright colors and the background are probably a contemporary invention, but it would take an art historian with a background in vases to know for sure.

Ananke is supposed to be be holding a spindle — anything to do with spinning and weaving indicated fate. But in this image what I see is most likely a torch. A more brutal interpretation would be that since is the Goddess Necessity, she’s holding a club with which she hits poor humans, to impart the lessons of the “School of Hard Knocks.”

Glad the part on femme fatale provides insight. It took me a lot of life experience to figure out some of those “relationship dynamics.”

Hyacinth:

Made me think of my old poem “Hell” a short one that says hell would be “every dream remembered.”
Oriana:

Yes, remembering everything would be sheer hell — not just dreams but everything that ever happened.

Happiness depends on selective forgetting. Fortunately that’s just how our memory works. I don’t mean that we easily forget the bad things — but we tend not to “rehearse” those memories, meaning that we don’t reconstruct them over and over. A person in good mental health prefers to dwell on positive memories, selectively strengthening them. “Practice makes perfect” also when it comes to recalling happy memories.

Conversely, depression blocks the access to happy memories, so only the negative stuff is remembered. If depression continues long enough, you may find you can’t remember a single good thing that ever happened to you, absurd as that sounds. Even after depression ends, it takes a while to regain that access.

But even if immortality meant only positive recall, imagine how tiresome that would get after a few centuries. Immortality as lack of memory makes sense — then everything would be fresh and interesting.

Some Alzheimer’s patients experience precisely that. There is the tormenting, paranoid Alzheimer’s, and the “beatific” kind, when the victim becomes happy, cherubic.