A LESSON YOU WOULD RATHER NOT HAVE LEARNED
"Realistically it’s not about the sex, right? They're birds."
"The bottom half is birds."
"Still. It's gotta be about something else."
"Their song."
"But what on earth do the sirens sing?"
Tied up he hears her. Oh god her voice. Indistinct blur of sweetness. What trickles out of your fist when you squeeze ripe fruit.
Come closer, he begs, so I can hear you more clearly.
"Hello, famous Odysseus —" she sings " – Greece's pride and glory —"
Record scratch. He rolls his eyes and laughs.
"Wait, that's the big secret? That's how you guys seduce people? By complimenting them?"
The singing stops. When she responds, her voice is tart. "I wasn't trying to seduce you."
He laughs drily.
"I mean it. I don't wanna do all that stuff. I like you, and you’ve already been through a lot. It’s a long way from Ithaca."
"Yeah, right." He pauses. "Wait. You live alone on a desolate cliff in the middle of the sea. How do you know I'm from Ithaca? How do you know where Ithaca even is? How do you know who I am?"
"I know things." Her voice changes, gets milkier, though he doesn’t realize it. "I know you, Odysseus.
"You’re from a little town on a little island. Kindergarten class of 23 kids. Teachers pointed at you and said: the other children are cute, but this one is special. Your parents were flattered when they heard that. They're good people. Upper middle class, unambitious. Their money comes from sheep and goats. But you wanted glory, not money, and you dreamt not of gold but of eclipsing the dirty mortal stain of mediocrity. You knew that when your parents died, people would say who?
“You have a sweet tooth. You don't drink to excess. You like alcohol but you don’t trust the feeling. You know how to fight, you like fighting, but your favorite weapon has always been words. In debate your soft voice takes a sharp edge, unsheathed. When people complain about you they say you're arrogant. You are arrogant, but that's why they like you, too.
“The men of Greece are dogs over bones. The men of Troy are no better or worse. You know this, I know you know this, but I also know things you don't. I know why the war happened, and how to make sense of it. I know your purpose and the purpose of all that suffering. It seems senseless, I know. Stupid sad waste of life.
“I know what happens to the dead. I know what's going to happen to you. All your –" she trails off.
"Keep going," he says, his breath racing, catching on the end of itself.
She's coy now. "Well, I don't know if I should tell you."
"Why?"
"The knowledge will hurt."
"I don't care."
"Then come closer."
He yells at his shipmates to steer the ship deeper into fog.
Her voice is barely audible. Face drawn in low gray clouds. "All those men – your friends – they're going to die. Soon. They're going to die, and you're not going to be able to stop them. In fact you will lead them to their death. You call yourself their friend and their protector, but you will fail on both counts. Because you are cruel and selfish and worst of all incompetent. They'll die, and it'll be all your fault."
"You're lying," he says. Halfhearted riposte. He's afraid. He believes her. You can hear it in his voice. And then he can’t help it, he shows his hand: "How do you know?"
"Because I am not a human, I live longer, I can see things you can’t, because I am part bird, I can fly, and I can visit places you can’t, I can talk to the ocean, and the cliffs themselves, and the fish underwater, and they told me this, among many other things."
"What other things?"
"Come closer," she says again.
He shouts at his shipmates to let him off. They don't want to, but there's something in his eyes – a clawing desperation – so crazy that they obey him. They're scared he'll kill them if they don't.
His past and future lovers:
1) Circe, girlboss,
2) prudent Penelope, the weaver, who in many ways parallels the wit and practicality of her husband, who smells like clean soap and sometimes sweat,
3) sweet delicious Calypso,
4) various unnamed barmaids, shepherdesses, queens,
and now 5) the Siren.
Filthy woman it turns out! Unwashed hair! Dirt under her fingernails! Not even "unconventionally beautiful", just strange. So skinny that her joints stick out at angles. Hips and wrists and elbows making strange polygons. So she teaches him group theory.
"And now we see that there are ~6 ways of rotating or flipping a triangle which preserve its appearance. And we can generalize these forms of symmetry as groups. And then we begin to notice patterns of behavior."
Studying together at midnight. Her silver mind. The thrill of mathematics unfolding in real time. The suspense, the act of trying to do something that you don't know how to do. The surprises that become possible. And the participation in a tradition older than yourself, older even than religion or Greek-ness: the pursuit of knowledge.
This is how he falls in love with her. Not by looking at her directly, but by turning to look in the same direction that she's looking. Her long spine bent like a willow over her computer.
She feels his gaze, calm and cool, like a hand on her back.
"We can debug your code together too, if you want."
"Come with me," he says. “To Ithaca.”
"Stay with me," she responds immediately. Here.
Jesting with feathers. "Well, that settles it," he says lightly, "we can't be together."
He taps her forearm with his index finger. "You're too stubborn – "
"I'm NOT stubborn !!1! – "
"– and I'm too much of a brutish unevolved malebrained 2014 Jordan Peterson second-wave feminist fourth-wave misogynist to actually be with a woman who's smarter than me. I've put up subconscious posts against the possibility, it's literally 1200 BC, I'm a serial cheater, biologically wired against monogamy …"
"Please don't give me that shit."
"I really can't stay."
"Why?"
He hesitates. He’s trying not to hurt her, but he doesn’t want her to know that he’s trying not to hurt her, she’ll be doubly hurt if she knows that. "Maybe there are virtues more important than knowledge."
"Like what’s an example."
"Um… Empathy. Being a kind person."
"Sufficiently advanced knowledge is no different from the ability to understand others and to be understood."
"But what do you do, with all your knowledge and understanding, besides use it to accumulate more knowledge? And for what reason? To sit here on the rocks? To debug code and remember the sensation of wind against skin? I wasn't born to study all my life. My shipmates are waiting.
“And I think your prophecy is right, and it kills me, literally it kills me to think about their deaths. But we always knew that the stakes were our lives. We have no other ransom, nothing else to break or barter. Our choices, years, flesh and spirits are our chips at the roulette table. We play with what we have and recoup what we can.1”
She looks away from him.
“I knew that you would say this to me eventually. Just as I know that those sailors will die. Just as I knew that I would love you the first time I saw you tied up on the mast of that ship.”
For all her knowledge, she finds herself crying.
“But there’s probably another guy just like you out there for me. Statistically, there’s gotta be at least one more.”
He grins. “Yeah?”
“Yeah cuz P(guy∣evidence)=P(evidence)P(evidence∣guy)⋅P(guy).”
That’s my girl, he thinks. Even in her pain she is so bizarrely elegant and willful and brave. But he can also tell that she is exhausted and uncertain, and he leaves quickly, to be kind.
In the months after his departure she learns two more lessons which she could never have seen coming.
(1) Nothing imparts knowledge so much as a lesson you would rather not have learned.
(2) When one is suffering, they can step away from it not by intellectualizing it but by embracing it. A blues thing, a John Donne thing. Divert by wrestling, then sing.2
“Revolutionary Letter #1”, Diane di Prima, https://poets.org/poem/revolutionary-letter-1
“There is a force that breaks the body”, Dianne Seuss: https://poets.org/poem/there-force-breaks-body