On your impending reunion with the Tigress
March 6, 2010
“The masses do not see the Sirens,” Nikos Kazantzakis observes. “They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them… and royally squander their lives with her.”
Kazantzakis’ siren is a “merciless voice — the Tigress.” She is his companion on all his journeys. She “digs her claws into my brain, and we reflect on all we have seen and all we have yet to see.” Robert Graves calls her the “White Goddess,” who can appear as a “she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag.” The test of any writer’s vision, Graves says, is “the accuracy of his portrayal” of her.
The goddess’s physical beauty lies only in her eyes. Her allure is the life of the mind. For it is the yearning after comparisons and metaphors for each new object and landscape that sanctifies consciousness.
I’ve started reading an interesting book by journalist Robert Kaplan about his prolonged travels through the Mediterranean in his twenties. Mediterranean Winter seems like the perfect read for me here and now, especially as I consider how to best live the next 3-4 months of my life.
You’re leaving to go on an adventure in mere hours. I found this one little snippet in the first chapter to be fitting for the both of us — for me, as I grapple with and consider my own intimacy with the Tigress (lately she appears as a loathsome hag), and for you, as you look to rediscover her, go about with her, and depend on her for the new sort of consciousness that perhaps can only come about from following her call.
Travel is where we truly meet ourselves. Thank god we’re the types who can hear the Sirens.
Be safe. Miss you a ton. And most importantly, share stories of awkwardness and delayed response due to weird language abilities. I find that entire thing hilarious.
GERTRUD
