What Do the Sirens Sing to Ulysses?
In Canto XII of the Odyssey the goddess Circe receives Ulysses and his men after their return from Hades and, after feasting them generously, warns them of the dangers they will have to face on their next voyages on the way to Ithaca, the first of them the Island of the Sirens, “You will have to pass near the sirens who enchant all the men who approach them. Mad will be he who stops to listen to their songs, for never will his wife and children celebrate his return home! The sirens will enchant them with their fresh voices. Pass without stopping after plugging the ears of your companions with soft wax, so that not a single one hears them! You alone may hear them if you wish, but with your feet and hands tied and standing upright on the mast step, have yourself lashed to the mast to savor the pleasure of hearing their song”.
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Contributing author: Jose Carnicero Ortiz de Solorzano, |
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In Canto XII of the Odyssey the goddess Circe receives Ulysses and his men after their return from Hades and, after feasting them generously, warns them of the dangers they will have to face on their next voyages on the way to Ithaca, the first of them the Island of the Sirens, “You will have to pass near the sirens who enchant all the men who approach them. Mad will be he who stops to listen to their songs, for never will his wife and children celebrate his return home! The sirens will enchant them with their fresh voices. Pass without stopping after plugging the ears of your companions with soft wax, so that not a single one hears them! You alone may hear them if you wish, but with your feet and hands tied and standing upright on the mast step, have yourself lashed to the mast to savor the pleasure of hearing their song”.
Odysseus and his people set out to sea and, on approaching the Island of the Sirens and its flowery meadow, obeying the goddess’s advice and after smearing freshly melted wax in the ears of his companions, he orders them to bind him hand and foot to the firm mast. On noticing the presence of the vessel, the Sirens intone their sonorous song, prefaced with tempting words, ” …Stop your ship and come to hear our voices. After delighting in them, those who heard them go away happy, knowing many things they did not know, … we know all that happens on the fruitful earth”.
It is Ulysses himself, in his account to Alcinous, who tells of how the encounter was, “Then my heart desired to hear them and I ordered my companions to release me, making signs to them with my eyebrows, but they leaned forward and rowed, and then Perimedes and Eurylochus rose and tied me with more ropes, binding me even tighter”.
Homer tells us nothing more of this fascinating crossing, what was the nature of the irresistible song, how its music was and what the sonorous voices spoke of, but the mere image of that song that could have hurled to death -warned in advance by Circe- the supremely ingenious, the cunning Ulysses, had his companions not held firm to the order he had given beforehand, has never ceased to fertilize our imagination.
What words have the force to illuminate the world with such a flash that to go on living becomes unnecessary, or is it perhaps a certain rhythm, a specific sonority that has the capacity to awaken in us the desire to dissolve into nothingness and abandon the projects and hopes that until then sustained our days?. Because if the foundation of the sirens’ song were truth, would this then be in essence an assimilation to chaos, a beyond of the principle of individuation?.
Callimachus tells that, after reading the Phaedo, the Platonic dialogue on the soul, Cleombrotus of Ambracia threw himself from high walls into Hades, eager to die in order to begin to live in the immortality that Socrates promised to his friends. It could then have been this promise that incited Ulysses to throw himself into the arms of certain death, but I am more tempted to think, as Heidegger stated in one of his lectures on Nietzsche, that the living being approaches essential knowledge not as if it floated above life and at which one could occasionally glance or refrain from doing so, but rather that its contemplation already sustains life in the only way that is adequate to it, beyond itself and becoming itself rule and pattern.
Accordingly, the sirens would be transmitting in their song this essential knowledge in the certainty that no man could occasionally glance or refrain from doing so, but rather that listening to it would bind them in their lives as an irrefutable order, the only adequate way.
Although goodness, truth and beauty form the triad that sustains knowledge in the Western metaphysical realm, each time the image of Odysseus chained to the mast and struggling to hurl himself into the sea comes to my memory, I cannot help thinking that what that song spoke of in essence was love, that son of Poros and Penia -abundance and poverty- who with their words and perhaps for an instant restore us from the original fragmentation and thereby make it unnecessary to go on living.
– What Do the Sirens Sing to Ulysses – – Alejandra de Argos –
