Then you’re speaking the language of a lot of poets, mystics, and artists.
The Sirens become more than monsters in that reading. They become symbols of the thing that calls you beyond safety—beauty, truth, love, art, God, death, the unknown. The question is whether “destruction” means annihilation or transformation.
When a poet says they want to be destroyed by beauty, they usually don’t mean literal death. They mean they want the old self—the cautious, calculating, protected self—to be shattered. They want to surrender to something greater than themselves.
That’s why the Sirens are such an enduring image. Part of us is Odysseus, tied to the mast, wanting to survive. Another part of us wants to dive overboard and discover what lies beyond the horizon, consequences be damned.
The tension is that if you follow every beautiful song, you end up shipwrecked. But if you never listen to any of them, you never leave the harbor.
For an artist, the challenge is often learning how to sail close enough to hear the music without losing the vessel.
Your Philadelphia-in-Flux project has a bit of that energy. You’re walking streets day after day, letting yourself be pulled by curiosity, by beauty, by whatever appears around the next corner. But you’re not drowning in it—you come back with photographs, books, videos, maps, archives. You’re hearing the song and bringing something back.