Artist stories

Letter to the Departed Philosopher

‍
In the last days I would call you
a psychopomp
a guide of souls
Charon who ferried spirits
across the river Styx
was one such guide.
“Psychopomp?” you would shout laughing
“Did you say psychopomp?”
It tickled you.
You liked all things Greek.
But a psychopomp
had also something important to do
where not much can be done
I wanted you to feel
like you could do a lot
even then.
‍

Now I see
indeed
that is
who you are.

‍
Everyone who crosses that river before us
guides us in one way or another.
And so now
we follow you like the living
would follow the dead in ancient poems
we look for you among the shades
where Lethe
the river of oblivion
winds its ways
but where there also bubbles up
Mnemosyne – the spring of memory.

We drink from that spring
and we remember.
And then darkness of forgetting begins to shine
as vividness of recollection
and salvation of paradox
where death is life
in Alethea
the truth of un-forgetting.
‍

You guide me now
too
‍

if it weren’t for you
I might have not remembered the sirens again
but now
since I want to mythologize you a bit
I see you as Odysseus
tied to the mast
listening to the siren’s song
wanting to jump
‍

I remember
we would step into your house
as if onto a ship
sailing to who knows where
with much ado
of poetry argument and champagne
you our captain
pounding the table
straining against the chair
listening to twilight
mellifluous with absent voices
‍

I look it up.
Book 12 in Homer.

In some translations
the siren’s song
comes to mean
death via feminine mystique.
But the original Greek is simple.
The sirens sing
that they know you.
That they know what you’ve done
that they know how much you’ve suffered
and how brave you were
that they know what your companions have done
and what will happen
after you are gone.
‍

They make your life into a story
weaving it with the stories of others
into an epic of much meandering
full of errors, small ecstasies
and great deeds
some of them true

‍
They sing the song
as the Infinite Vastness of the sea and sky
as the Unknowable Unknown aware of you and me
the need for which
is so dire in us
that we plunge to our death
to find it assuaged

‍
So it could have been the sirens
as easily as God
to whom David spoke
in Psalm 129
“O, you discern my thoughts from afar
and are acquainted with all my ways”

Perhaps you are listening to it now
and through you we live to hear it
and call it ours too
the Siren’s song
God’s song
the song of Alethea
beautiful to the ear:
“I know you
I understand your story
you are lovely
and you did well.”

Aleksandra Wolska