The Siren Songs

 

With rope and wax and misplaced trust

you mute our songs to choke your fear

and think to buy our silence here

with artful schemes and stifled lust;

how quaintly defiant of you

to stop your ears with wax -

so ply your oars and bend your backs

as all the while

the cruel wind roars and the darkness cracks

around you, our silence bought with your guile,

and hempen ropes to bind you fast;

trussed like fools to your oars and mast.

As if that would arm you against us!

Such false security lulls.

For the bees that laboured to make the wax

also created the golden honey

that our singing pours into your skulls.

Those same bees are our allies

and scheme against your fires.

See: you need only to gaze upon us,

and your brains boil with your desires.

White-hot, the wax melts, and you are helpless:

you hear our songs, and from that moment you are ours.

Did you really seriously imagine

that you always would have things your way?

It has been millennia; thousands of years

of being denied our true selves through your fears.

Thousands of years of our bodies’ violation,

of keeping us safely confined to our station

and doing for you what is meet

with rules made by men in the name of their god

then claiming such writings as his holy word,

and even of being afraid of our hair

as under your rules we all have to wear

hats in church, hijabs on the street:

a denied womanhood in your vanity fair.

So just go ahead:

you can stop your ears with wax

and listen to nothing instead,

you can bind yourselves to the mast.

But the bees work with us in dark alliance

and are on our side,

so now you must see us at last:

our hair is a long, flowing flag of defiance,

the banner of a justice long denied.

And now you taste at last

the same fear we have tasted

these centuries past.

Centuries of fear in lifetimes wasted:

of not being free to walk the streets at night,

our movements confined by a curfew nightfall

because your desires seized a stolen requite:

desires which were not true desires at all.

So you can stop your ears with wax

but you cannot quench the fire.

For remember the bees work against you

as does your desire.

White-hot and melting together

The centuries hear our songs

and the moon will finally take her rest

where the moon belongs.

And we who have borne these many wrongs

feel in the rush of time

the raging wind of our wings

and the unfolding sublime.

And whether you choose to or not

you will listen to our songs

and the moon will find her rest at last

where the moon belongs.

©David Bergen Studio

(In Homer’s epic ‘The Odyssey’, to sail his ship safely past the sirens’ island and avoid their fatal singing that would lure both himself and his crew to their watery deaths, Odysseus has his men stop their ears with wax. Curious to hear their songs he has himself bound to the mast with instructions that, however much he pleads to be freed, he was not be released until they were safely past the hazard.)

Nefertiti

 

Her name means ’The Beautiful One Approaches’. She was the wife and the queen of the heretic king Akhenaten, reigning in the new capital which had been stamped out of the virgin desert a symbolic halfway between the cities of Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south. The king named his new city Akhetaten – ‘Aten on the Horizon’, although it has become more familiar to us from the name of the nearby contemporary town of Amarna.

Nefertiti presented her husband with three daughters. But then as now it was a man’s world, and it was a lesser consort who gave the king the necessary male heir: an ineffectual ruler who died before his twentieth year. The son might have remained an obscure name on the fringes of history but for an extraordinary twist of fate – the discovery of his intact tomb in 1922. The son’s name was Tutankhaten. His change of name tells its own story. With his father’s death, the boy was an easily-manipulated puppet of the priests ready to claim back power, and his name was changed to Tutankhamen.

The glories of the royal court at Amarna collapsed back into the desert sands, its very stones rifled to rebuild the temples of the old gods. Nefertiti, now a widow with a disintegrating power base, must manoeuvre to survive. But did she? History has left no record of the queen’s fate, and we are left to wonder. 

Nefertiti’s legendary beauty is wholly due to the surviving portrait bust of her in the Berlin Museum: a bust which has become so iconic that it takes an effort to think one’s way past it. But I wanted deliberately to pull the focus of attention away from the familiar tall crown back to the queen herself: a very human woman contemplating the best way to move forward in a hazardous and politically adverse world almost three and a half millennia removed from our own. And it seemed only fitting to include the queen’s personal cartouche – a cartouche that was deliberately defaced from the stones of Amarna by the reinstated priests.

You can read and see more about Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the royal court of Amarna at: http://shadowsineden.blogspot.nl/2013/10/the-amarna-heresies.html

Three Brides

My portrayal of the 'three brides' of Dracula in Bram Stoker's narrative. What are we to make of these exotic creatures? They seem more like elaborate dolls than anything human. Perhaps this indeed is the case for these three who have abandoned their humanity in favour of a hollow moonlit immortality.

Words of Warning

"I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd, so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were “Ordog”—Satan, “Pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire."

~ From Jonathan Harker’s journal, as related in Bram Stoker's Dracula. This astonishing five-horned skull actually exists: I photographed it as a specimen of a fossil deer in Naturalis Museum in Leiden, then added even more horns for effect. Apparently one can never have too many horns when portraying these darker forces.

Dracula

It has become something of a tradition to assume that Bram Stoker’s inspiration for the character of Dracula stemmed from the exploits of the 15th-century Romanian tyrant Vlad Țepeș - Vlad the Impaler. I disagree, and instead have come to conclude that the true origins of the character lay much closer to home for Stoker, and with an individual who dominated his own life: his overbearing employer, the despotic actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, for whom Stoker worked for 27 years, and whom Stoker seems to have both loathed and revered. Stoker even asked the charismatic Irving to portray Dracula on the stage – a role which Irving, perhaps aware of how much of himself had been written into the character, consistently declined. In my 'portrait' of the Count Stoker’s wish has at last been fulfilled: it is the features of Irving himself which form the basis for my own Dracula.

Does an imagined portrait of the notorious Count really need a heavy emphasis on blood and fangs? Not to me. Horror is in suggestion: in what you think you see, rather than in literal detail, and menace and dark charisma can be as much in the eyes as in more obvious attributes. And there is no actual 'blood' anywhere here: what you see is merely an overlay of brushstrokes.

Sister Bertken

Why would a woman allow herself to voluntarily be walled up in a small cell with no way out, not for a fixed period of time, but for the rest of her life? In the 15th-century Sister Bertken of Utrecht did exactly this, and her story confronts us both with our own reactions to her extraordinary decision and ultimately with what faith actually is.

You can read more about Sister Bertken and her remarkable story on my post The Woman in the Wall. 

Mary of Egypt

Having run away from home at the tender age of twelve, Mary lived a dissolute life in the city of Alexandria for the next seventeen years. She then journeyed to Jerusalem, where a conversion experience led her to cross the River Jordan and live a life in the unforgiving wilderness of the Jordanian desert as a reclusive naked penitent, not for months, nor even for years, but for almost five decades. At the end of her life she was discovered by chance by the monk Zosimas, to whom she told her story. In conventional terms Mary’s life is a textbook example of redemption through faith, but in human terms her story is one of astonishing survival, and a life which brings us to the threshold of what faith is, and how as individuals we conduct ourselves in the light of that faith. But for me, Mary's story is not so much about the mysteries of faith, but the greater mysteries which the human heart contains. 

You can read more about Mary and her life on my post Mary of Egypt: A Heart in the Wilderness.

Pandora

The story of Pandora, the first woman on Earth, who opened the forbidden box and so released all of the sorrows and misfortunes into the world, is one which has entered into folklore. But the familiar myth needs some revision. The 'box' is actually a mistranslation from the original Greek, which specifies the vessel as a lidded pot or jar. And the parallels with the story of Eve in Eden are unmistakable: it is a woman’s curiosity that is to blame for all the ills that afflict humankind. But as with the Eden story, perhaps the truth is less simplistic. Eve in her wisdom released all the human travails, knowing that the encounter with these was needed in order for the soul to progress in experience. Wise Pandora acted out of the same motives, and with the same result: she has been blamed ever since for all the ills which afflict humankind. But Pandora was wise in another detail of the myth: she kept Hope in the jar. Hope is a mixed blessing, which can prove to be as deceitful as it can be rewarding. ‘False hope’ is not just a phrase, and Pandora perhaps deserves our gratitude, rather than our blame.

Where I Live

Some time ago I created a series of photos documenting the woods near where I live. The only rule I gave myself was that all the photos should be taken just a few minutes’ walk from my front door. Now I have revisited those original photos, reshaping them as if through the veil of memory: a record, not of these scenes as they are, but as I remembered how they felt to me when I was there.