Of Siren Eyes, Old Women and the Sea

 

“Women in your paintings have siren eyes” a visitor to my gallery told me. “That is all one sees on their faces.”

“I cannot hear their song without seeing their eyes” I replied.

… I was thinking about that conversation this morning, and I thought about the poem by Canadian poet Margaret Atwood titled “Siren Song” inspired by the Greek mythology of the voyages of Odysseus, but addressing the experiences of all humans through their travel through life.

The lines from that poem that remain in those after their first reading of Atwood’s almost spiritual analysis of a facet in human interactions are:

This is the one song everyone

would like to learn: the song

that is irresistible:

 

the song that forces men

to leap overboard in squadrons

even though they see the beached skulls

 

the song nobody knows

because anyone who has heard it

is dead, and the others can't remember.

 

 

I stopped to think about the last two lines, as mythology and my life experience crossed the space where time had taken respite and made room to remembrance.

Do I paint siren eyes to remember or to forget?

 

Perhaps the answer is in the lines of Pablo Neruda’s of “The Old Women of the Ocean”:

They sit down alone on the shore
Without moving their eyes or their hands
Without changing the clouds or the silence

… Now they have the ocean
The cold and burning emptiness
The solitude full of flames.

 

PS/ The photo atop the page is from the 1979 with a Minolta Mark II camera that used 110 film.

The photo of the fisherman’s wife selling sardines on the beach is from Nazaré, Portugal., taken with a Nikon F2.

March 22, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025