The Sea No Man Can Bless

The reason the Siren lives in the sea is simple: "The priests have blessed the air, so she cannot breathe it, and blessed the rocks, so that she cannot sit on them. But the sea no man can bless, because it is too big, and always changing."

Everything consecrated is contained. The sea can't be contained, so it remains unconsecrated, and therefore the Siren lives there, untouchable by the church's grid of sanctioned and unsanctioned.

Giuseppe, who should have crossed himself before diving and didn't, sees the Siren and comes up without the coin he was diving for. He's too big — "like a piece of the sea." The holy water doesn't dry on him until evening. He knows everything now, and knowing everything means knowing that all things die, which makes it impossible to live normally. "When a child was born he would cover his face with his hands."

The story is about what happens when someone encounters the genuinely uncontainable. It doesn't drive him mad in the clinical sense. It makes him truthful in a way that the village can't bear. He stops performing the normal things — work, appetite, the social choreography. He stands in the street looking at people. Every person he looks at, he loves more and grieves for more because he knows they'll die.

This isn't the soft Hell of "The Point of It." Giuseppe didn't slowly compromise into vagueness. He saw something and was changed absolutely by it.

What's interesting is who can see the Siren: "As a rule only good people see the Siren." Not those who fast and pray especially, but people who are good in daily life. The narrator had claimed to see her "often and often" — the Sicilian's single glance at his face dismisses this immediately. You can see the postcard-Siren, the tourist-Siren, anytime. The real one only comes for those who are actually open to what it shows.

Giuseppe was wicked in the ordinary sense — cheerfully violent, disinclined toward the formalities. But he was apparently good in the deeper sense, which put him in reach of something that undid his ordinary wickedness along with everything else.

When he finds Maria — a woman who also "went mad from bathing in the sea" — the village's fear spikes. Two people who've seen the Siren, together. The prophecy says their child would one day bring the Siren from the sea, into the air, where all the world could hear her sing. Not destruction: salvation. "And the world would be saved."

The church and the hotel-keepers act together. The tourist season is beginning. Maria is pushed off the cliffs the night before she and Giuseppe are to be sent inland. The child is never born.

What strikes me is the coalition. The priests, who fear the Siren for theological reasons. The hotel-keepers, who fear disruption of the tourist trade. They find themselves aligned, for completely different reasons, against the same thing: the uncontained.

The story ends with the brother's quiet faith: "Silence and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing."

He's right, I think. The blessed/unblessed binary isn't stable — it requires continuous maintenance. The priests bless the air and the rocks, and this requires re-blessing, and eventually there's air no one bothered to bless, and rocks at the edge of the map. The sea just keeps going. It predates every system of consecration and will outlast them.

What the story's really saying, under the Sicilian mythology, is something about the relationship between goodness and exposure to the genuinely uncanny. To be actually good — not performatively good, not good-for-the-Board-of-Education — is to be in danger of encountering the thing that upends everything. The tourist sees the postcard Siren. The good person sees the real one and is marked.

Giuseppe wasn't ruined by the Siren. He was transformed by her into something the village couldn't use. He became useless in the economic sense and became more real in a different sense. The village's problem was that he kept looking at people and seeing them clearly — which, for people who don't want to be seen clearly, is terrifying and then enraging.

The Siren didn't destroy him. The village did. But the village was afraid because what Giuseppe had seen made him immune to their management.