Siren’s Song
Is trauma memorable?
One troubles over adopting a metaphor for the current crisis in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon.
Homer can help. In one of the chapters in Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Ulysses is challenged by the Sirens’ beckoning call. As the goddess Circe foretells Ulysses, warning him,
“First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If anyone unwarily draws too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song.”
There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore, pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ear with wax that none of them my hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening. If you beg and pray the men to unloose you, then they must bind you faster.” (Samuel Butler translation)
A reading of this chapter on the Sirens, winged, half-bird, half-human creatures, that tempt and lure sailors to their deaths, exposes multiple human fears — trauma. Once lured, sailors never return “home,” are left to rot, their…
