Jeffrey, what an odyssey. This is an exquisite, fully realized and utterly magical essay. I think it’s the best piece of your writing I’ve read. That’s a very high bar.
From the suburbs of Tokyo - where even the most disturbing sounds can still be seen as “curated” and polite - through the still corridors of the British Museum, the concert hall where Varese is played (thank you for introducing me to this work!); the cinema of the 60s; ancient Greece; Renaissance Italy; the England of Tennyson, Joyce, Eliot, WW II; 1970s Seattle and Canada: so skillfully presented. The moving and dignified scene of your mother’s death, as the ambulances arrive in silence. Then back to Tokyo, and the question of whether or not you should stop up your own ears. It makes me think of all the alarms sounding around us in our time, and how we are to respond.
My goodness, Mary, how kind you are, and what an attentive reader! I will cherish this comment forever. Your brilliant summary surpasses my essay! You've brought out the sense I was feeling of sirens haunting us, from Homer to Varèse, from the horrific wars of the 20th century to the more peaceful suburbs to which many of us have retreated. My humble thanks to you for your generosity. I am one of many, I'm sure, who look to you as a brilliant essayist whose level we aspire to. Your generous words will serve as an inspiration to me. Thank you again!
And then there's Joyce's Ulysses, Sirens: "Shrill, with deep laughter, after gold, after bronze, they urged each to each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter with laughter. And laughed more. ... Between the car and the window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered hero."
Who’d have thought to link the screams of an emergency vehicle with Odysseus, Varese and climate change? I’ve come to know you will make the connection and tie it to a human moment, as you do here at the end. A rare gift.
Thank you, Rona. It was fun how Varese's sirens started blaring at me again after all these years. How to bring the different elements together is something I try to learn from the best essayists on Substack, very much including yourself.
The leaps you make in this essay have the feeling of jazz made more leisurely by summer heat. To add to the improvisational riffs, my neighbor texted me while I was writing to you earlier (before I read this) about a fire on the hillside just across from us. She’d gone out when she heard sirens. (Evidently, they stopped it swiftly. I saw only flashlights on the hillside checking for lingering hot spots.) You also remind me of living in Manhattan years ago. Sirens, sirens - the night music of a big city.
Thank you, Tara. Yes, the sirens of the big city are relentless, aren't they? It's almost as if the cities are haunted by their own emergency services.
A beautiful essay, Jeffrey, as we’ve come to expect. A.S. Byatt has a theme of sirens in her wonderful book Possession, and introduced me to the legend of Melusine. My belated condolences on your loss, too. Losing a parent is hard.
When I visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, in the Classical sculpture section there were ancient marble funerary statues of sirens. They had the head and bust of a woman and the wings, tail, and legs of a bird. The siren statues were somewhat disturbing to look upon. The refined Classic Greek sculpted lines of head and bust blended into a rather stark and crude rendering of a bird's body. Proportionally, the head was far too big for the body.
I did not linger long over the sirens, preferring to examine the funerary relief portraits of actual people in marble. The represented deceased - husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and children - were often surrounded by family members depicted as reaching toward them. The attitudes of the little groups of relief statues appeared dignified and reserved, yet one could still sense the sorrow and sense of loss in the artistic depictions. There is a similar sense of quiet sorrow in your recounting of the loss of your mother.
Thank you for sharing these experiences and reflections, Holly. JW Waterhouse's painting of Ulysses and the Sirens used a similar, unsettling image of the Sirens. Very different from the mermaids we have grown accustomed to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_and_the_Sirens_(Waterhouse)
My goodness, your final personal note really struck me. You’re so right, a silent siren, or an ambulance without its wail, is even more haunting than a brash one. The slow, quiet journey through streets almost like a procession. Thank you for sharing this thought-provoking piece.
I hear police sirens daily. And ambulances going up the nearby main road to a major hospital. The police sirens also come from motorbikes that escort the Governor General everywhere he goes (insert eye roll emoji). He lives near us. They make the dogs howl.
Jamaica is a very noisy place - and Kingston even more so. We have relative peace on weekends. Oh, and our police have microphones as well: "Get out of the way!" or words to that effect.
Coincidentally I’m writing about sirens in the self help aisle and your title lured me in! I don’t know why but I didn’t make the connection of the word with ambulance sirens or those used during war. There is another painting that you may find interesting: Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse.
Welcome, Priya - I'm happy to have lured you! Yes, that Waterhouse painting is powerfu, isn't it? I used it as my "teaser" Note for this post. I was fascinated to read that his inspiration for portraying the sirens as half birds came from an ancient Greek vase.
Aw, Jeffrey, love this multilayered take on sirens—the chaos of rescue, the trap of misunderstanding, the freedoms of women’s ownerships of their own voices. Just lovely. Thanks for sharing the Margaret Atwood poem! LOVE her!!
Your eloquent essay resists easy interpretation & will remain in my thoughts this week as I contemplate the thought-provoking questions you raise regarding the struggle we all face in projecting resonant voices—whether they are drowned in the shrill sounds of actual sirens or if we struggle to put words to our most intense emotions in humbling vulnerability —perhaps even to ourselves.
I am getting ready to teach the _Odyssey_ followed by Margaret Atwood’s _Penelopiad_. This unforgettable work recasts this classic epic from Penelope’s perspective. Brilliantly & strikingly, the power of the Sirens is transferred to the murdered maids in the Underworld, but this power is not to destroy but to force ethical accountability in those who saw their lives as women as disposable & unworthy of validation or respect. Their final lines both move & convict with the force of awakened moral authority:
Thank you for this wonderful and thought-provoking response, Alisa! And I've added Atwood's Penelopiad to my list of books to get. I wish I could sit at the back of your class to listen in and learn!
Well, you are welcome to visit any time—and attend Jane Austen as well with a group of female majors who have definitely learned to project their resonant voices! Suffice it to say, I think you would add a great deal to the conversations! 😉
Love this reflection on la sirène and how, listening through women's ears, we may finally take agency over ourselves and our songs. Thanks also for sharing Margaret Atwood's wonderful poem, Siren Song. I have been reading her book, The Penelopiad, where Penelope tells her own story from the Underworld. A different picture of the world of Odysseus through the eyes of the wife he abandoned to be lured by the siren song of adventure. Recommend!
Jeffrey, what an odyssey. This is an exquisite, fully realized and utterly magical essay. I think it’s the best piece of your writing I’ve read. That’s a very high bar.
From the suburbs of Tokyo - where even the most disturbing sounds can still be seen as “curated” and polite - through the still corridors of the British Museum, the concert hall where Varese is played (thank you for introducing me to this work!); the cinema of the 60s; ancient Greece; Renaissance Italy; the England of Tennyson, Joyce, Eliot, WW II; 1970s Seattle and Canada: so skillfully presented. The moving and dignified scene of your mother’s death, as the ambulances arrive in silence. Then back to Tokyo, and the question of whether or not you should stop up your own ears. It makes me think of all the alarms sounding around us in our time, and how we are to respond.
Thank you once more for your beautiful work.🙏
My goodness, Mary, how kind you are, and what an attentive reader! I will cherish this comment forever. Your brilliant summary surpasses my essay! You've brought out the sense I was feeling of sirens haunting us, from Homer to Varèse, from the horrific wars of the 20th century to the more peaceful suburbs to which many of us have retreated. My humble thanks to you for your generosity. I am one of many, I'm sure, who look to you as a brilliant essayist whose level we aspire to. Your generous words will serve as an inspiration to me. Thank you again!
I mean every word. Gorgeous work.🙏
Seconded!
🙏 So kind of you, Nicola!
🙏🙏🙏
Mary, you are right: "what an odyssey".
Indeed! I like the way she is portrayed in this painting - powerful and in control. A saint, maybe, and certainly no fool.
And then there's Joyce's Ulysses, Sirens: "Shrill, with deep laughter, after gold, after bronze, they urged each to each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter with laughter. And laughed more. ... Between the car and the window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered hero."
Thank you for sharing those beautiful lines, Mary!
Who’d have thought to link the screams of an emergency vehicle with Odysseus, Varese and climate change? I’ve come to know you will make the connection and tie it to a human moment, as you do here at the end. A rare gift.
Thank you, Rona. It was fun how Varese's sirens started blaring at me again after all these years. How to bring the different elements together is something I try to learn from the best essayists on Substack, very much including yourself.
How Penelope managed to wait so long for Odysseus and then not give him what for when he finally turned up, I shall never know. The woman was a saint.
The leaps you make in this essay have the feeling of jazz made more leisurely by summer heat. To add to the improvisational riffs, my neighbor texted me while I was writing to you earlier (before I read this) about a fire on the hillside just across from us. She’d gone out when she heard sirens. (Evidently, they stopped it swiftly. I saw only flashlights on the hillside checking for lingering hot spots.) You also remind me of living in Manhattan years ago. Sirens, sirens - the night music of a big city.
Thank you, Tara. Yes, the sirens of the big city are relentless, aren't they? It's almost as if the cities are haunted by their own emergency services.
That sounds like the beginning of a story. ;-)
A beautiful essay, Jeffrey, as we’ve come to expect. A.S. Byatt has a theme of sirens in her wonderful book Possession, and introduced me to the legend of Melusine. My belated condolences on your loss, too. Losing a parent is hard.
Thank you, Michelle. It's hard indeed!
When I visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, in the Classical sculpture section there were ancient marble funerary statues of sirens. They had the head and bust of a woman and the wings, tail, and legs of a bird. The siren statues were somewhat disturbing to look upon. The refined Classic Greek sculpted lines of head and bust blended into a rather stark and crude rendering of a bird's body. Proportionally, the head was far too big for the body.
I did not linger long over the sirens, preferring to examine the funerary relief portraits of actual people in marble. The represented deceased - husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and children - were often surrounded by family members depicted as reaching toward them. The attitudes of the little groups of relief statues appeared dignified and reserved, yet one could still sense the sorrow and sense of loss in the artistic depictions. There is a similar sense of quiet sorrow in your recounting of the loss of your mother.
Thank you for sharing these experiences and reflections, Holly. JW Waterhouse's painting of Ulysses and the Sirens used a similar, unsettling image of the Sirens. Very different from the mermaids we have grown accustomed to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_and_the_Sirens_(Waterhouse)
Waterhouse's sirens are disturbing, but the Pre-Raphaelite style has a slightly softening effects. This is one of the funerary statues in the museum: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Funerary_statue_of_a_Siren_at_the_National_Archaeological_Museum_of_Athens_on_7_May_2018.jpg
Thanks for sharing, Holly. I see what you mean about their being a little disturbing!
My goodness, your final personal note really struck me. You’re so right, a silent siren, or an ambulance without its wail, is even more haunting than a brash one. The slow, quiet journey through streets almost like a procession. Thank you for sharing this thought-provoking piece.
Thank you, Kimberly! Yes indeed, almost like a procession, that's just it.
I hear police sirens daily. And ambulances going up the nearby main road to a major hospital. The police sirens also come from motorbikes that escort the Governor General everywhere he goes (insert eye roll emoji). He lives near us. They make the dogs howl.
That sounds like a lot of noise, Emma!
Jamaica is a very noisy place - and Kingston even more so. We have relative peace on weekends. Oh, and our police have microphones as well: "Get out of the way!" or words to that effect.
Coincidentally I’m writing about sirens in the self help aisle and your title lured me in! I don’t know why but I didn’t make the connection of the word with ambulance sirens or those used during war. There is another painting that you may find interesting: Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse.
Welcome, Priya - I'm happy to have lured you! Yes, that Waterhouse painting is powerfu, isn't it? I used it as my "teaser" Note for this post. I was fascinated to read that his inspiration for portraying the sirens as half birds came from an ancient Greek vase.
I didn’t know that. Somehow depicting them as birds makes them appear more powerful!
I agree! I wonder if (male) artists have tended to depict them as mermaids to make them less threatening...?
A wonderful survey of sirens, ancient and modern - and always denoting danger.
Aw, Jeffrey, love this multilayered take on sirens—the chaos of rescue, the trap of misunderstanding, the freedoms of women’s ownerships of their own voices. Just lovely. Thanks for sharing the Margaret Atwood poem! LOVE her!!
Thank you, Holly! I'm really glad you enjoyed this one.
This was quite a magical journey! I also enjoyed your retelling of part of The Odyssey. I think when we retell, we add a new layer to the story.
Thank you Kate!
Your eloquent essay resists easy interpretation & will remain in my thoughts this week as I contemplate the thought-provoking questions you raise regarding the struggle we all face in projecting resonant voices—whether they are drowned in the shrill sounds of actual sirens or if we struggle to put words to our most intense emotions in humbling vulnerability —perhaps even to ourselves.
I am getting ready to teach the _Odyssey_ followed by Margaret Atwood’s _Penelopiad_. This unforgettable work recasts this classic epic from Penelope’s perspective. Brilliantly & strikingly, the power of the Sirens is transferred to the murdered maids in the Underworld, but this power is not to destroy but to force ethical accountability in those who saw their lives as women as disposable & unworthy of validation or respect. Their final lines both move & convict with the force of awakened moral authority:
“we had no voice
we had no name
we had no choice
we had one face
one face the same
we took the blame
it was not fair
but now we're here
we're all here too
the same as you
and now we follow you,
we find you
now, we call
to you to you”
Thank you for this wonderful and thought-provoking response, Alisa! And I've added Atwood's Penelopiad to my list of books to get. I wish I could sit at the back of your class to listen in and learn!
Well, you are welcome to visit any time—and attend Jane Austen as well with a group of female majors who have definitely learned to project their resonant voices! Suffice it to say, I think you would add a great deal to the conversations! 😉
Thank you! that would be so great. But I'd be firmly in listening mode...
And that would be fine as well, Jeffrey! I hope this week provides you with meaningful inspiration for your upcoming writings.
Love this reflection on la sirène and how, listening through women's ears, we may finally take agency over ourselves and our songs. Thanks also for sharing Margaret Atwood's wonderful poem, Siren Song. I have been reading her book, The Penelopiad, where Penelope tells her own story from the Underworld. A different picture of the world of Odysseus through the eyes of the wife he abandoned to be lured by the siren song of adventure. Recommend!
Thank you, Robin! and I will look out for The Penelopiad.