The Sirens Sweetly Singing

 

One of my favorite songs by the rock band Cream is Tales of Brave Ulysses, which features some terrific guitar playing by Eric Clapton. 

In the last post, I pointed out that sensation is the mast of our ship, which we need to be tied to. The analogy is broad and the allegory is flawed: it's meant to serve only as a picture of us standing upright in the middle of life, in a fixed position, like the man in the center of the trembling dervish movement with the prayer book. This movement, by the way, has everything to do with what I said in the last post. 

The Cream song is equally incorrect. Ulysses wasn't brave.

You’ll note, in the Odyssey, that Ulysses is unable to resist the attraction of the Sirens voluntarily; he's too unconscious. He wanders through the world lost because he hasn’t developed a personal center of gravity. 

In the end, of course, he gets home and commits depraved acts of violence — the only way he knows how to be. He lives in an encompassing contradiction where he wishes for security on every shore he's cast up on, yet has made his whole life a process of waging war, murdering, and pillaging. When he has the power, ships, and men, he lands in foreign countries, disembarks, slays, and seizes women and treasure; but when he is powerless, naïvely — like a child — he wants the kings of the nations he stumbles into to shower him with gifts and praise. 

I think we can fairly say that he's no hero, but just a slave and a fool of the ego, acting out through all its conceits and rage. 

He has no center of gravity. He asks others to do his work for him; others to tie him to the mast.

We need to tie ourselves to our own mast.

Bravery involves courage; encourage comes from the heart. In the midst of the Corona pandemic, as I encounter folks who feel bereft and perhaps even desperate, alone and isolated — everyone is going through some kind of emotional reaction related to this — I've often told people, especially the younger ones, that we need to have courage. 

The word courage itself means “of the heart.” We must come to our lives not just from a fixed position, but with feeling — from the heart. This means that in addition to having a solid sensation of ourselves which unifies our Being, we need to bring our feeling, our care, up against that sensation and join them intimately. “I am” has this quality. We can’t just say it with the mind; we must also say it with the body in the wordless action of sensation, and we must say it with the feelings in the wordless action of care.

Meister Eckhart says, in sermon 95, “The powers of the soul, which are so many and far-reaching, he must transcend—even those that operate in thought, although thought can work wonders in itself. But this

thought too must be transcended if God is to speak to the powers that are undivided.”

In this way we begin to understand, perhaps, that “I am” transcends words. He goes on to say, a little later in the sermon, “the soul does not know itself except by likeness, but angels know themselves and God without likeness.” 

What this means is that in the true “I am,” we know ourselves without likeness. We are not like this or like that; we are. 

This is the fixed position from which the Sirens cannot lure us; it is the place of knowing ourselves that comes from the heart, an infallible compass. 

We cannot be bound there by the crew of our ship; for the binding to be effective, we must bind ourselves.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.