Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
THE SIRENS' CALL
Let us begin with a story from Odysseus's journey. In book twelve of the Odyssey, our hero is about to depart the island of the goddess Circe when she gives him some crucial advice about how to navigate the perils of the next leg of his voyage.
"Pay attention," she instructs him sternly:
First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in 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."
Odysseus listens as Circe provides him with a plan: stuff wax in the ears of your crew, she says, so they cannot hear the Sirens, and have them bind you to the mast of the ship until you have sailed safely past.
Odysseus follows the plan to a tee. Sure enough, when the Sirens' song hits his ears, he motions to his men to loosen him so that he can follow it. But as instructed, his crew ignores him until the ship is out of earshot.
This image is one of the most potent in the Western canon: Odysseus lashed to the mast, struggling against the bonds that he himself submitted to, knowing this was all in store. It has come down to us through the centuries as a metaphor for many things. Sin and virtue. The temptations of the flesh and the willpower to resist them. The addict who throws his pills down the toilet in preparation for the cravings to come, then begs for more drugs. It's an image that illustrates the Freudian struggle between the ego and the id: what we want and what we know we should not, cannot have.
Whenever I've encountered a visual representation of the Sirens, they are always, for lack of a better word, hot. Seductive. From Shakespeare to Ralph Ellison and down through literature, the Sirens are most often a metaphor for female sexual allure. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Bloom describes the man who has taken up with Bloom's wife as "falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties."
Given this, it is a bit odd to reconcile the original meaning of the word with how we use it today, to describe the intrusive wail of the device atop ambulances and cop cars. But there's a connection there, a profound one, and it's the guiding insight for this book and central to understanding life in the twenty-first century.
Stand on a street corner in any city on earth long enough, and you will hear an emergency vehicle whiz past. When you travel to a foreign land, that sound stands out as part of the sensory texture of the foreignness you're experiencing. Because no matter where you are, its call is at once familiar and foreign. The foreignness comes from the fact that in different countries the siren sounds slightly different—elongated, or two-toned, or distinctly pitched. But even if you've never encountered it before, you instantly understand its purpose. Amidst a language you may not speak and food you've never tried, the siren is universal. It exists to grab our attention, and it succeeds.
The siren as we know it now was invented in 1799 by Scottish polymath John Robison. He was one of those Enlightenment figures who dabbled in everything from philosophy to engineering, and he originally intended the device as a form of musical instrument, though that didn't take. What we think of as the siren didn't reach its current form and function until the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s, a French engineer and inventor who had created electric (and therefore mostly silent) boats, utilized electric-powered sirens that worked to prevent boating accidents. (He even had a boat called La Sirène.) In relatively short order, the technology made its way to land vehicles like fire trucks, replacing the loud bells they'd formerly used to clear the way.
The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens' call.
Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life. "My experience," as William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, "is what I agree to attend to." Increasingly it feels as if our experience is something we don't fully agree to, and the ubiquity of that sensation represents a kind of rupture. Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured. Our inner lives have been transformed in utterly unprecedented fashion. That's true in just about every country and culture on earth.
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