Why We Sometimes Need to Be Tied to a Mast

One of the most instructive stories in Greek mythology is to be found in Book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey, where the central figure, Odysseus, king of Ithaca, is described as having to sail past an island inhabited by some compelling female figures known as the Sirens, famous for luring sailors to their deaths on their island’s rocky shoreline by the sound of their song. 

Determined to avoid their fate, Odysseus devises a plan. As he approaches the island, he asks his sailors to tie him to the mast and to put beeswax in their ears and then to disregard any pleas he might subsequently make, however impassioned. Sure enough, Odysseus loses his reason and begs his sailors to get closer to the Sirens, but the rope tying him to the mast remains firm, the sailors follow their original orders and the ship sails on unharmed. Odysseus becomes the only mortal ever to have heard the song of the Sirens and lived.

The story is enduring, because for all its fancy, it defines a mental manoeuvre that every good life should at points have recourse to. There are situations in which we have to concede that no finely-wrought philosophical arguments in favour of wisdom will be effective – and that only the blunt removal of temptation can save us. When we are faced with lures which we are not strong enough to talk ourselves out of, we have to give others powers of attorney over us. We must willingly accept to be treated as children in order for precious parts of our adulthood to be preserved. We must accept without rancour the humiliating fact that we will simply lose control.

The threats to our reasonableness might include an ex who ruined years of our life but whom we long to call late at night in order to beg for another chance, or a teenage child who irritates us unbearably but with whom we should never get into an argument or an office colleague whom we must do our best to ignore or a chocolate biscuit we can’t stop eating once we start, or a site on the internet we must never revisit.

We each have our own version of the Sirens, precisely tailored to the faultlines of our minds. When we have these fully in view, without too much loss of dignity, we must gather our ‘sailors’, with whom we navigate our lives, and cede to them a temporary right to take away the tiller of our destiny. We must hand our friends our phones, give them the plug to our computer, tell them not to allow us into the shop and ask them to monitor whom we have called.

None of it is edifying but it is in the end even less edifying to pretend that we can always lay claim to a reasonableness that is in reality only ever intermittently ours. The truly mature know when maturity is no longer an option. There are moments when for a true friend to listen to us entails – in effect – not listening to us because ‘we’ have lost command of our executive functions, as we typically will, when shame, loneliness and despair grip us. We need to be sane enough to say to those who care for us: ‘I am sufficiently strong to know how weak I am; protect me from what I want; do me the kindness of tying me very tightly to a mast…’