My Life In The Mirror: How LaSyrenn Turned My Life Around

I just did a talk about LaSyrenn, Mami Wata, and LaBalenn, among other sea mysteries, through Mictlan Academy, on Saturday.  After the talk, Alexis (of City Alchemist) observed that most of the time, when we hear about LaSyrenn, not much detail is given beyond that she’s a mermaid, and was curious why.  Contemplating who she is and who she has been in my life, I realized that the past thirteen years have, for me, been swirling with her presence, in everything I make and do, and in who I now am, as the result of a dramatic reversal of my life’s course.  I want to start telling my story, and as I do, LaSyrenn emerges as a powerful figure in it.

For about thirteen years now, I’ve had the sense that my life consisted of a set of converging lines, meeting through a looking glass, as through a pinhole camera.  They are now at the point of meeting, in the final yet never-ending steps of Zeno’s paradoxical dance.   But in the beginning, they were irreconcilable and separate, in absolute discord.

On one side of the mirror was my life as it stood at that time.  I was teaching children in a tiny schoolhouse. The tiny schoolhouse was on the property of a closed spiritual group I had been part of for fifteen years by then, in which I had met my husband.  He and I and our two kids lived in a small apartment in the basement of the schoolhouse, and I would commute upstairs for work every day.  Describing it now, it sounds almost like a story a little girl would make up while walking a doll up and down the stairs of a dollhouse.  The mommy goes up the stairs, the mommy goes down the stairs.  My world was very contained.

I don’t really know how I ended up there, in a box within a box.  As a child, as early as I can remember, I had a powerful imagination, was a prolific artist, and was praised for my drawing skills by everyone around me.  I was sure I would end up an artist and musician in New York City, and always pictured myself as a single, childless badass.  It wasn’t a stretch.  It was basically who I was raised to be.

I took a stab at it!  I went to art school a short train ride from the city, joined an all female (we thought) punk band, and moved to Brooklyn after college.  But I also had a powerful spiritual hunger that led to me joining this group upstate and meeting my future husband there, getting pregnant, getting married, and having a whole life within that bubble.  In a sense, I felt I had renounced that creative self; conquered her, really.  This was a spiritual group that emphasized being present- a valuable pursuit- to the point of demonizing the imagination, or at least rejecting its wild and free manifestation.  So I had it in my head that my imagination was something from my childhood, something to give up.

Now I was in a closed spiritual group and a closed marriage, hemmed in by male figures (my husband, my guru) to whom I had handed all my power, who I thought WERE powerful, HAD power over me.  I had a toddler and a tween (who still exist now as wonderful, no longer very young people, and who also have evolved tremendously since the beginning of this story).  I bought my clothes at Kohl’s and drank Starbucks lattes at Barnes and Noble on Sunday afternoons with my husband while my kids hung out by the wooden train.  That was my leisure time. The rest of my time was devoted to tasks, from waking to sleeping.  Not only did I have the traditional womanly obligations of caring for children, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and sex, I had the school to run, plenty of spiritual group events to attend, and an unpredictable load of “assignments” from our guru, from acting in plays, to taking care of his friend who had Parkinson’s who really needed a trained nurse, to cleaning and repairing his stuff, to whatever else he told me to do “for my development.”

I wasn’t unhappy per se.  I had depressed moments, even a depressed year or so in which it seemed pointless to continue this way indefinitely, living a life someone else had prescribed.  But another tenet of this group was that negative emotions are useless and unnecessary, so I figured it was just me.

I would not have even glanced into the mirror if it weren’t for singing, which is, of course, what LaSyrenn does.

An old friend I was in a band with back in the day resurfaced.  During a casual catch-up conversation at a kids’ birthday party, he rather flippantly asked me if there was anything else I wanted to do with my life.  I said no, I felt I’d done pretty well.

But I took the question home with me.  It was flopping around restlessly in my mind, like a fish out of water.  I realized that, in fact, I missed singing, so I texted my old friend to tell him so, and asked if he would like to collaborate on something, as musical pen-pals.  He agreed, and sent me the first track to write vocals over not long after that.

Listening to the track over and over, a melody, harmonies, and lyrics- a whole narrative- started to bubble up from inside me.  It was mythical, epic, and from the point of view of a vulture-priestess climbing a mountain to join her coven in the Olympus-like temple at the top.  It would be more accurate to say it spilled out of me than that I wrote it, but singing it, I saw myself, a self I had forgotten, reflected back at me.  Track after track spilled out, weaving a tapestry of myth and fairy tale out of the long neglected creative self under the surface.  The imagery, at that time, was all birds, all the time, like the original form of the siren.  All day, as I went about my life on the bright side of the mirror, I was awash in songs that came from the other side; singing, dreaming, fulfilling my duties, but in another world.

There was backlash.  My husband was intensely jealous, destabilized by the discovery that I had an inner world that he wasn’t the sovereign of.  He grabbed desperately for power any way he could.  He thought it was about the other man.  It wasn’t.  It was about me… me and something, or someone, much much bigger than me.  My creative life, which barely existed so far, but which wanted to become my life.  MY life.

The music was a tiny pinhole through which I could see that life.  Standing in my bright waking world, peering through that pinhole, I could see myself reflected, projected, inverted on the other side.

Behind my image on the other side of the pinhole, the mirror, was a hulking feminine presence, towering over me, rippling like a mirage but radiating gravitas, savage, cooing like a whale up from the depths.  I didn’t have a name for her, but I could see her behind me, her shadow falling over me.  She was the one I had called, praying the Hail Mary over and over at night as I muffled my tears with a pillow so as not to wake my husband.  But she wasn’t mild and docile, shrugging with palms open.  She was pushing, insisting I go on, ever deeper, forward into the mirror.

I created a small altar for her on the top of a filing cabinet.  A candle, an incense burner.  Just a small space in a tiny apartment where I didn’t even have a room of my own.  My husband would dump his keys onto it when he got home.  I would journal there, just for a few minutes before I went to bed, free associating.  There was an eroticism under the waters and it came out in the writing.  One morning I woke up to screamed recriminations, as my husband had read it and interpreted it as a threat.

The tension between the sides of the mirror was mounting.  My marriage was unraveling faster than a rope in an adventure movie from the tug of war between the sides of the mirror.

Who were the tuggers?

It was around this time that I started to experience self as other, and other as self.  I was gazing into a mirror, into the pupil of an eye through which everything was turned upside down, and seeing my inverse doppelgänger through it.  She was swimming, swirling in the dark water, singing, happy in the depths, happy in the fluid everything-ness of her solitude.  But she didn’t want to stay in the abyss.  She wanted to walk among the living.  And she wanted to use my body, my life, to do it.

I named her Nixie. A demonized water sprite.  Nichts-ie.  The one who was not.  Nixie Unterwelt.  Nichts In Der Welt. Nothing in the world.  The water sprite of the underworld, who was threatening to drag the terrestrial me into the depths.  Whose existence I was trying to deny.

My husband made it clear he didn’t want me to collaborate with anyone who wasn’t him.  He did so in the most generous way he could, to his credit.  He bought me Ableton Live, a digital audio workspace that would allow me to make music on my own.  Nixie Unterwelt became the name of that musical project.  She had been given a voice, and the mythic visions continued to spill out, more and more aquatic-themed.

There is much more to this story. This is only chapter one.

Below are a couple of links to check out who Nixie was then and the music she made:

: