The Noonday Siren

What is it about this blank page that I fear?

When I allow my mind a certain freedom, yet with introspective resolve, then my mind becomes a vehicle of time and the past and travels, adrift within the tangled forest of my memories. Why do I want to write them down? Shall they become your memories too?


I was too young to read or count or tell time when I was aged 5 in 1954. Perhaps I was not too young had someone taught me. But those were the days when small children were expected to be small children and play. There was no pressure to get them into an Ivy League college.


My mother would send me out each morning to play. Somewhere, unseen, in a place I had never been to, was a firehouse with a noon siren; at least so I was told. I imagine it had been an air-raid siren during the war, but I was not aware of such things as wars or bombs or terror or death nor concerned by them. But with dependable regularity the siren would sound each day at noon. That was my signal that it was time to come home for lunch. My mother would have a scrambled egg sandwich ready for me on Wonderbread. She would cut off the crusts, and then cut the sandwich into quarters. I never liked bread crusts at that age, for I found them bitter. Crusts resemble death. Perhaps the small quartered sandwiches were easier for my small hands to grasp. I assumed that everyone lived this way. I took for granted that everywhere around the world, an anonymous invisible siren would sound unseen at noon and children who could not read or count or tell time would come home to quartered egg sandwiches with the crusts cut off and a mommy for whom the sun rose and set on her one and only child. I was the center of her world as well as mine.

Odysseus heard Sirens too. My childhood and Mommy, dead and buried in the distant past, are a Scylla and Charybdis to crush my voyaging heart. If I fill my ears with the molten wax of melancholy, it is only a navigational precaution.

Mommy was simply there. I knew there were mommies everywhere, and noon sirens and egg sandwiches. I was all the world for mommy, but I was not conscious of that. It seemed only natural to me that I should be. I felt special and loved. It did not occur to me that my mother’s love for me was excessive, smothering, beyond the bounds of reason, and something to alienate and displace my father from our lives. Being unable to read or count or tell time, I was far beyond the reach of psychodynamics; beyond the reach of twisted , crazy sorrow.


I would set forth each morning with no plan. The morning simply happened. I would wander and wonder at a stone or acorn or leaf or pebble. I would talk with myself in my mind. I had a notion of the possibility of great adventures, always just around the corner.


In the afternoon, my mother would enforce a nap. Falling asleep was the most arduous labor for me. I felt it a duty. I would try to focus my mind in some fashion which might induce sleep. I discovered that if I lay on my stomach and put my face upon the bed, surrounding my eyes with cupped hands to shut out any light, and stared with my eyes open, then I would begin to see a mass of distant stars; specs of light. This bed of stars would slowly drift beneath my bed and vision, which gave me the feeling that I was sailing; flying; soaring. If I lost my concentration, then the vision would fade. Vision requires concentration.


As a teenager, I remembered my bedtime star wars and wrote a poem about my experience.


Once I thought... to a Pillow-Blanket Time

(circa 1965)


Once I thought
To a pillow-blanket time
When, where cupping hands, I saw
Unworlds of drifting black
Tortured dreamily
With rushing yellow train-tracks
Ribboned in and out
In purpling roars.
Red ladders I could climb
If hard enough I thought.
Red ladders I dissolved
If too hard I remembered.


Once I thought
To a pillow-blanket time
When fingers could find faith
In locks of hair
And we were a congregation
Of something slightly more
Than we deserved.
When a minister touched
On something slightly less than God
In a pulpit
That was all that it could
Or should be.


Once I forgot
To a pillow-blanket time
When ghostly figures moved
Through linen mists,
When ticks of clocks slowed down to sighs,
When sunsets were rainbows
Of tears and laughter.


My thoughts are now no more
Than a cloud's whisper
Or the sea.
My lips
Are the ripples of raindrops everywhere.
My ribs
Are sweet white birds
In the mystery of flight.
My eyes are new-born spiders
Discovering the tapestry of dew.
My hands are apple trees,
Their fingers hold
Children.

- Sitaram


I had become conscious of pity; of feeling sorrow for another being. When in my room, alone, I would conjure up in my imagination a squirrel, and I would talk to the squirrel and say “Oh, poor little squirrel” and my imaginary squirrel would look up at me in a plaintive, sorrowful fashion, grateful for my sympathy and compassion. I am not quite sure why that squirrel was so wretched except that wretchedness was a prerequisite for pity. I suppose it was my own selfishness and egocentricity which made me choose the role of the pitier over the pitied. Beatrice Potter may well have been my guilty accomplice.

Now that I have written this, I read it aloud. Unexpectedly, I burst into tears and weep uncontrollably. It did not bother me at all when I composed it in silence.

“My tongue is the pen of a swiftly writing scribe.”

Perhaps the fingers are not as connected to the emotive part of the brain as the hearing is.

“Faith comes from hearing and hearing by the Word.”

The Psalms speak of a demon at noonday. The desert fathers, monastic solitaries, called that demon “akedia” in Greek, which means ennui or perhaps depression.

My noonday siren becomes my noonday demon.

All I have of momma’s now is a montage of photos which she assembled and framed, hanging upon the wall, and the delicate crystal wineglass from which she would sip her Dubonette wine, and a clock with the letters of her name, “M-A-R-J-O-R-I-E” around its face where the numbers ought to be, ticking very loudly but with a comforting effect.


When she died, fifty years after those halcyon days of noon sirens and egg sandwiches, it took months to empty her house of memories. How does one empty them from the mind?

Tell me now, do you yet feel sufficiently haunted by my absence, reading the pale penumbra of my memories in words that, like the shadows of ghosts, glide across this page? For I died long ago. My mother and my childhood haunted me in life and now we all haunt you in death. History is a form of haunting. Language is a cruel and beautiful resurrection.