siren song

There is a stretch of sea where the water lies too still and the air carries a music no sailor can quite place. On the rocks of that coast sat the Sirens, creatures with the faces of women and voices unlike anything ever made by a mortal throat.

Their song was not merely beautiful; it was aimed. To each listener it promised the one thing he wanted most, sung as though the singer had known him all his life. Ships turned toward it before their captains had decided to turn. And below the rocks, hidden by the swell, lay the whitening bones of every crew that had come that way before.

When Odysseus sailed those waters on his long road home, the witch Circe warned him what waited there. He had his men fill their ears with beeswax until they could hear nothing at all, and he had himself lashed upright to the mast. Hear the song he would; move toward it he could not.

The music came, and it worked on him exactly as promised. Odysseus strained against the ropes and begged to be freed, his face wild with longing, while his deaf sailors rowed steadily on and only bound him tighter. So the ship passed, the Sirens fell silent behind it, and for once the rocks were left no new bones.

A siren song is that same kind of call: an invitation so sweet, and so precisely shaped to your own wanting, that you fail to notice it is steering you onto the rocks.