1. Beasts fear them, and the gods shun them. Is this why the Sirens sing out to passing ships from their island? By their song, they would reach the others, like them, who are feared and shunned. Why then do they seek to kill them – why do they try to wreck their ships on the rocky shore of their island?
I think Odysseus learned their secret, he who refused, like the others, to plug his ears with wax. Lashed to the mast of his ship, he endured what his sailors could not, and heard the Sirens sing of the pain of their immortality, and knew why they cried out to the only ones, like them, who were exiled from both nature and Olympus.
For the Sirens, death was a homecoming, the return to what could not live. How to discover the path home? In their loneliness, their exile, they sought to destroy the ones whose pain could come to term.
Agony. Odysseus cried out, and joined his cry to theirs. They fell silent. What had they heard: that the ones who could die also endured the inability to die, that this mortal, was, like them, immortal. For doesn’t pain bear with it the impossibility of pain’s cessation? Isn’t the agony of dying what does not cease to die?
2. His cry is also their song, and their song what cries out in all human pain.
3. There is pain, there is singing: how to speak of a pain that will not end, and a singing that does not cease?
It is not by our relation to death that we retrieve our humanity, but by our relation to pain. Relation? The shattering of relation. Death turned outside itself and wandering without cease. What is song but the Sirens’ song, that seeks a term for the indeterminable, to exchange immortality for death?
Lars Iyer's Blog 