Who among us has not kissed a mirror? It is at the far humanoid end of a chimpanzee’s capacities. And yet Narcissus is one of the most powerful and interpretable of the classic Greek myths. The Greek version told about the son of two river gods, exceptionally proud, disdaining those who loved him. He was attracted to a reflecting pool where he saw his own reflection in the water and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his reflection, Narcissus died. (Well, became a plant suitable for potting.)
One might talk about this in a geological way, saying that it is the nature of water to go on, to “love” the waterway, but that in his disdain Narcissus blocked the nature of living process, and therefore sank into the ground, the chthonic (deep earth) pool being a dark vortex only disguised by the obsidian surface. (A Gaian watercourse that follows the contours of terrain even over the precipice must become a spray, a waterfall.)
This is meta-level stuff, but old F-word -You-Know-Who managed to get out of the story a syndrome that emphasized childishness, or maybe selfishness, or possibly self-indulgent decadence, but never the kind of obsessively self-critical auto-Puritan that Freud himself was, reaching civilized-world-scale grandiosity in the process. Some identify the classic Narcissus with the preening of high society, Oscar Wilde’s campy arrogance, or a movie star’s worried concern for image, but any youth could simply and innocently yearn for self-knowledge.
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In the “queer” world, usually on the male side, Caravaggio was prompted to create this beautiful painting, the boy trying to decipher his difference from others. Perhaps this cluster of cthonic Greek myths comes from memories of the hunter/gatherer days before people were forced into roles and made to pay homage in order to finance roads through forests.
Or the dynamic might be interpreted in this teasingly seductive ballet by Norman McLaren in which he elegantly traces THREE figures: the beautiful young man, a beautiful young woman, and the man’s image from the pond, a ménage a trois.
The woman comes from the story of Echo. There was a day when Narcissus was walking in the woods. Echo, a story-telling mountain nymph, saw him, fell deeply in love, and followed him. Narcissus sensed he was being followed and shouted "Who's there?". Echo repeated "Who's there?" He tried to find her. At first she ran away but eventually revealed her identity and turned to embrace him, but then he stepped away. He said, "Let us meet together." Echo, never being more eager to reply to anyone, repeats "Let's meet."
She exits the woods in order to embrace Narcissus. He runs away from her outstretched arms and says, whilst running, "May I die before what’s mine is yours." She repeats only "what's mine is yours." Heartbroken by Narcissus, Echo spent the rest of her life in lonely glens pining away for the love she never knew, crying until all that was left was her voice. But that’s only part of a multiple labyrinth of tales, something like the modern winding thriller hooks of meeting others, misunderstanding them, wanting to part, finding too late that an embrace has locked one’s throat into the crook of a crushing elbow.
My own early story was Echo in love with Pan, the lecherous goat, who, when she escapes him, causes her to be torn to pieces by shepherds (pastoral) and strewn over the face of the earth. But their children were Iambe (humorous poetry) and Iynx (not lynx cat, but iynx, a singing bird that stands for passionate but restless love).
So the meta-meta theme here is still the on-goingness, the wandering, the dreaming mix of images that express what words cannot: specifically the changing ways of relationship, now coming together, now struggling to escape each other. Too different to merge, too alike to forsake the lover. This particular myth does not address lovers that seek to understand the “other” and by their scrutiny destroy the fragile bonds of acceptance. This is a story about image and word, reflection and song, kindling and death.
In reality, it rained in the night, jeweling the grass. Once again lightning struck the Baptist church next door, the explosion half-wakening me to smell the ozone zing. I’m going to end with a poem by Aad de Gids. He is from the Netherlands so his multi-languages interpenetrate. If you cannot decipher that -- and you only need to let the words suggest -- stop here. But maybe this information will help.
In Greek mythology the Oneiroi (Dreams) were sons of Nyx (Night), and brothers of Hypnos (Sleep), Thanatos (Death), Geras (Old Age) and other beings, all produced via parthenogenesis (without sex). Cicero follows this tradition, but describes the sons of Nyx as fathered by Erebus (Darkness).[
oneiros après l'ondée (Dreams After the Shower)
oneiros, relative of night, sleep and death, roams the evening in balmy
warmth, après l'ondée,with the raindrops still shuddering the longer on
roses' leaves than on the other plateformes vertigineux,the leaves with
smallest fur, greenshining lacquered leaves dripless, evening of vanishings
oneiros lost in his forgotten assignment yet lucky with his next of kin,
all hypnagogic narcotic lethal psychotic apparitions, swarming the fields
of evening in hypothetical greeces, grecian eyes laughing and crying at
once, endowed with the insatiable palate shivering in fragrance of roses
traveling fragrances of oldfashioned blushcoloured roses and ligustrum
of vining honeysuckle forgotten its heliotropism winding wildly around
the trellises other climbing plants or, grounded fundamentalists, offer to its
as insatiable as silent winding and asphyxiating, slow as to seem a caress
no rain is to fall anymore and the release of the vesperide perfumes for
poor oneiros a disdirective labyrinth of mystifications, as meaning escapes
incessantly into other meanings never to reach conclusion rather some light
loose mappology of dynamics and energy as life seems this wasted time
caught yet inmidst of this dynamic contradances of dissipative meaning,
moments of seeming elucidation, happiness as the smell of carnations does
incorporate, fleetingly that is while also this is enlightenment, that it bears
the promise of ephemerality as "wasted time" is used time, time we lend
Borrowing words from friends, we let the echo die away into the roar of the waterfall, only to find it again in another place, inscribed in stone. The stream that sinks into the swallowing pond, or flings itself over a cataract, are only dreams we feel and in the end have no names to save. No words left in the scrabble box. Gently, gently, we all go mad in the end, leaving through a gate of horn if true (a play on the Greek words for "horn" and "fulfil") or a gate of ivory if false (a play on the Greek words for "ivory" and "deceive"). The message we leave is written in “linear B.” Some middle-aged woman, smoking late into the night at her dining room table and making notecards from old exam covers, will figure it out.
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