'Seiren' (Demester and Persephone: A Reorientation' Exegesis

The writing of ‘Seiren’ was inspired by several interwoven factors: the etymology of ‘siren’ in the Greek seiren, in its turn from seira (‘rope’, ‘cord’), with a probable literal meaning of ‘binder’; the excluded voices of the three nymphs who are with Persephone at her abduction; and the power of reflection to taint the past with emotions that could not have been present at the time. Finally, inspiration was taken from two passages of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, one of which is partially reproduced in the opening sentence: section 182 (In solitude): ‘When one lives alone, one neither speaks too loud or writes too loud, for one fears the hollow echo – the criticism of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude!’, and the first verse of his poem ‘Sils Maria’, which in the first draft served as an epigraph: ‘There sat I, waiting, waiting – yet for naught,/transcending good and evil, sometimes caught/in light, sometimes caught in shadow, all game,/all sea, all midday, all time without aim.’ Drawing on these sources, I began to envision what one of the nymphs would feel, cursed solely for her powerlessness to act, unable to save one she, at the very least, may have considered a friend, if not more.
From this basis I considered several differing factors: the shift in the portrayal of Persephone before her abduction and her later role as the Iron Queen of Hades, the fact that some or all of the Sirens were said to have cast themselves onto the rocks following Odysseus’ escaping of them, this second act being a denial of the one purpose given to the sisters in life after their weakness. I therefore shifted my focus from a bitterness at an unjust fate to one of incredible guilt and loneliness, and also of a perhaps requited love for the maiden goddess cruelly snatched away. The nameless siren continues to sing because it is the only thing left to her, her words are a lament of her lost love and her guilt at the inability to aid the object of her affection when she needed her most, both during and after the abduction. She reports hearing of the rescue of Persephone, but having no part in it, as if her power to act has been stripped away and she can only watch in silence, while continuing to sing.
But the siren’s singing also gives her a sense of purpose, and a purpose which prevents her from confronting the lost object of desire. Unlike her sisters, who were (in her mind) guiltless, she cannot cast herself onto the rocks because she cannot stand the thought of meeting with the one she led, unwittingly, to her destruction. As such there is a strong sense that her curse is not, in her mind, unjust: the fact she has become merely an instrument for leading others to their demise, to the palace of her first ‘victim’ has a certain poetic justice to it. The siren sees herself as cowardly and selfish, but perhaps ultimately it is that she has lost any sense of self. The nymph is no longer a person but a tool of nature, and though she can say ‘I’ she no longer has a name.
Ultimately, my ‘reorientation’ of the Demeter and Persephone myth wanted to explore the potential feelings of an otherwise voiceless character, and in doing so it excluded elements of the myth which may be conceived as important, notably the perspectives of Persephone and Demeter themselves. The siren is not a main character, but her role in the original tale is instrumental: without her, would Persephone have been in Enna to be abducted? Originally present solely in her silence, a silence which is transmuted into an endless singing similarly without words, the nameless siren has here narrated her story. An implication here is that it is, in fact, this tale that she endlessly sings from her perch atop the rocks: a tale that is and is not hers, in which, even as protagonist, she can only be a spectator. She thereby continues to sing mutedly, without a voice that is her own, bound as if by rope (seira) to her fate until the death which she knows is coming, and yet is endlessly deferred by her constant immersion in a past.