Narcissus & Echo

At the time, Narcissus was the most beautiful human… though not exclusively in the colloquial sense, regarding physiology, bone structure and so on. As a starlusting boy in the pale moonlight, nurtured by Celine, Narcissus dreamt that to become beautiful, one first learns to value beauty in the erotic privacy of their aesthetic self-education. No human wretch is born beautiful, and Narcissus was infamous for a rare intensity of self-education. In the bottomless depths of his somnambulant solitude, Narcissus focused his keen hunter's eyes on the mental image of true beauty exceeding common attractiveness. Far exceeding it. Everyone now knows that many who are superficially attractive can easily be ugly in their personality, squandering any trace of objective beauty randomly bestowed on them by the happenstance of nature. Narcissus was the first to dare this thought, and he was cruelly punished for entertaining it. 

Common attractiveness, wearing the right clothes, was by no means sufficient to define beauty, he thought, which has a much more deviant, yet universal character. And the recognition became clearer, more figured in the mirrored skull of his profound reflection. To value beauty — a challenging concept to grasp, let alone express … let alone express in the most acute and rarified example of beauty’s expression — indicated that he, Narcissus, must have been a character of high values, perhaps a unique synthesis of all the highest values that humans then knew of — and who cultivated an extremely rare personality that exceeded known values, radiating out from his silvered reservoir. Perhaps it was even his syntheses themselves which rendered such beauty… the ability to connect disparate, fleeting evocations from the depths and surfaces of his reflective pool. If Narcissus were only “beautiful,” in the most mundane sense common to all in that era, why would Echo — the most beautiful and selective of all the wood nymphs, who found even Zeus insufficient — have fallen in love with Narcissus? 

The stories of Narcissus and Echo are tarnished by rumors, mendacious ideology, and ignorant hearsay. But we know that it was above all a tragic love story, not a moralist’s manual. What exactly happened between Narcissus and Echo? It began in the woods outside of town, near the caves and brooks, in a place of childlike wonder and potentially dangerous exposure to nature, where social mores are temporarily suspended, where one could freely deviate in their erotic solitude. Echo came upon Narcissus in the woods while he was hunting, and, babbling her current events stream as she fawned over Narcissus, she scared away the deer that Narcissus meticulously arranged in his finest of perceptual crosshairs. Rightfully frustrated, Narcissus sharply criticized Echo for being a talkative nihilist, a chatterbox who parroted the things she was told without ever questioning them, who was insensitive to the crimes perpetrated against her community of sisters by Zeus — who Narcissus unmasked and insulted as a know-nothing eavesdropper on humanity, a coercive media influencer–type, jealous of all-too-human humans, who set people against each other for his entertainment — even as Echo ignorantly aped the idle chit-chat of pious news headlines and signaled the virtues of others across the otherwise enchanted forest like a demented birdsong. Not that Narcissus cared what others did or thought. But now this noisy sanctimony had literally cost him a buck. The very presence of such thoughtless drivel, dressed up in self-importance, contaminating an otherwise madly beautiful mood had a glint of barbarity in his sylvan vision.

Yet, once returned to the deepest reservoir of his singular self-reflection, Narcissus reevaluated his treatment of Echo. For how could Narcissus not be thoughtful about his actions, he was nothing if not self-reflective. Indeed, Narcissus was the original Man in the Mirror. The world before Narcissus had no concept of self-reflection. But it was here where Zeus, insulted, cursed him to reflect upon the shallow and petty existence that Narcissus boldly dared to turn his back on with his stargazing spirit. For beauty knows nothing of pettiness or resentment. Before Narcissus was cursed to see only his self-reflection — cursed by Zeus because Narcissus keenly saw their crimes and developed his own values independent of them (as well as stealing the heart of Echo from a jealous Zeus) — his gazing into the reservoir was a spirited and courageous attempt to see what lay beneath the surface. How — by virtue of what singularly exalted perceptive values and visual faculty — did Narcissus look into his reservoir before this spiteful damnation from a jealous god? He could look directly at his reflection, yes, but he could also squint and see deep beneath the surface, he could cross his eyes and see both the surface and the depth, he could blur his eyes and perceive transcendent color fields. And, son of Endymion, he could even see in his sleep, a first man of lucid dreaming. And so on. He had the gift of human sight, as any hunter requires. Above all, he had the eagle’s eye for what is far, and could see distant stars glinting in his keenest retinas. He wanted nothing more than to become a distant star, far away from the cruel and banal society that was encroaching upon him, to raze his forest, to entomb him in his own individuality. Although, he did long for meaningful relationships founded upon the most ambitious visual scope and penetrating insights into hidden truths. 

And so Narcissus sought Echo to clarify his actions. But Narcissus's appeal to Echo came too late: by the time he found her and apologized, Echo’s voice was removed by the petty goddess Hera, and his apologies were lost in her echo chamber, resonant in eternity. What tragedy! Narcissus understandably thought Echo had not forgiven him, heard him, or even had any subjectivity at all, which is by far not the truth. For she was nothing if not the greatest listener. What pain Narcissus felt in his deepening isolation, finding only a freshly minted despair that if even his most committed and sincere lover can not hear him, then no one ever will.

As for Echo, in the chambers of her newfound contemplation, rich with new and erotic imaginary forms efflorescing from self-reflexive critique, she internalized Narcissus’s sharp criticisms of her ignorant complicity with Zeus’s manipulation of humanity and her superficial repetition of whatever the powers-that-be told her to think. And rightly so, Narcissus’s criticism was insightful and reflective, and eloquently communicated. No one previously had the courage to tell her such hard truths because they were superficially transfixed by her beauty… a beauty fertilized by Narcissus's new standard of beauty. And the love which could be born by such a joint commitment to something beyond their given roles was a possibility which gripped each of their imaginations. They could almost scent the freedom which wafted through their imagination and led … into exciting new worlds. Nor did anyone other than Narcissus have the capacity for such insight into her very being. Why else would Echo have loved him so? Was she so superficial as to love him only for his attractive appearance? Not at all. If she were capable of love to begin with, she would have known self-love, and wouldn’t have been an authoritarian who fell in love with the first person who cruelly insulted her. She would have been able to accept criticism without being wounded by it. So much could not be said for Narcissus, in part because before the curse there truly wasn’t much to criticize him for — the criticisms leveled against him were easily unmasked as false, often disguised methods of coercion meant to keep humans in a lowly place. After the curse, things were different. 

As a noble character, Narcissus would not have wanted to hurt another person (unless, bastion of insight that he was, he knew they found pleasure in their pain and asked for it). To be callous, petty, or resentful is ugly. Narcissus would have steered away from any ugly values such as these, seen them miles away with those big eyes, at the very least to satisfy a purely aesthetic value. What is called his callousness has nothing to do with a merely sinister intention. What lame minds the media expects of its public! He wanted to love as others do — to love is to be close to beauty — perhaps to be a great lover. One might say that in such an alienated and abstract character as Narcissus, he was unusually gripped by the possibility of love in a way that most aren't. His rebukes of wood nymphs were not because he wanted to hurt them, it was because he didn’t value a vulgar and loveless promiscuity. A promiscuity not only of sex but of values. He didn’t fall in love with himself because of mere vanity, it was because he looked around and saw in the culture around him so much ugliness in comparison with the singular depth of his ideals. Narcissus looked around him and saw ugliness, ascetic rejections of life, petty and vindictive behavior, chatterboxes void of self-reflection, self-enslavement, conformism. He looked around and saw that no one believed in anything except what they were told by the gods to keep them enslaved. His tragedy was not mere vanity, but that the self-reflective mind was incapable of transforming broader social conditions. He was ultimately unable to love, not unwilling to love because Zeus cursed him so for his hubris, not because he lacked the desire to love. Who now is human enough to feel the suffering of one who wants nothing more than love, but is incapable of grasping it? Had Narcissus never left his reservoir, intent on changing the world for his maddening love, he would never have been exposed as wounded.

Narcissus may have been callously indifferent to those he rejected, but let’s also never forget Echo’s crimes as a rape-enabler. Echo, alone in the chambers of her mind, where she was imprisoned by the resentful queen Hera to live forever, was also remorseful and reflective of her shortsightedness… the rare and altogether new capacity for self-transforming reflection was the bond of Narcissus and Echo. Echo’s recognition and commitment to transform herself from a babbling idiot, complicit with unnecessary pain and suffering, to a self-reflective human who could begin to develop her own values, was singularly heroic. Echo was punished for actually listening in a way uncommon and tabooed, insulting the conformity the gods expected from humans. Voiceless, her whistleblowing of Zeus’s rape-crimes was no longer the same babbling hearsay, but a confrontation from someone who had finally, critically, and ultimately tragically, found her voice. Echo’s tragic fate was that it was required her voice be taken so as to develop any semblance of reflection whatsoever, and which was given the special character of contemplation. Where Narcissus is the birth of reflection without transformation, Echo is the birth of contemplation without action. Where Narcissus was the birth of self-sight, Echo was the birth of self-listening. When Echo returned to Narcissus, excited to report her newfound reflection and the insight he awoke in her, she literally had no words to convey it, and so Narcissus in turn was unaffected and unable to undergo the changes forged by the excessive image of love. Echo also had to watch in eternal despair as Narcissus could no longer see into her mind, as he once would have been able to before the curse of shortsightedness. He was no longer the radiant Narcissus she had glimpsed, who courageously saw through and beyond everything. Had Echo words, it could then have been a transformative love instead of a tragic one. But it wasn’t Narcissus who took her words away — it was Narcissus who gave her any valuable insight at all that could hypothetically give meaning to her otherwise meaningless echolalia — but rather the gods who destroyed the possibility of her liberation.

But love is not limited by the gods or nature. Where Narcissus valued and cultivated sight, and Echo valued and cultivated listening, these values were now first experienced by their other. In the depths of Echo’s chambers, where Narcissus went in search for his love, he could hear for the very first time. And in the wilderness of Narcissus’s fields, where the speechless Echo went looking for her love, she discovered the capacity for vision. To interpret Narcissus and Echo as anything other than a tragic love story whose love was cut short by whims external to their own intentions, and whose tragedy suggests deeper transformations in humanity writ large, is tendentious and conforms to the shortsightedness that the gods hitherto demanded from humans. Both valued love and beauty, and transformation, as no other had before. Maybe since. But, unable to achieve love and beauty, each was consigned to reflection and contemplation. They were punished for valuing high values that were reserved for the gods alone. And just as a thing without an Echo is a thing that lacks meaningful resonance, a thing without reflection is a thing that lacks meaningful vision. Lest it be forgotten, Echolalia is a developmental concept that explains an infant’s babble in formation of identity. 

Every time someone reduces the tragic love of Echo and Narcissus to a pedant’s illustration of abuse, or passively echoes pop psychology myth that is complicit with the social ornament of unnecessary suffering, Echo is more deeply ground into the mute prison depths of her contemplation, where aural illusions of Narcissus's beautiful voice prey upon her longing. Even as scientists use echo-location to chart ancient caverns, Echo’s own Chambers lack definition. And every time Narcissus is boorishly portrayed as a cliché who doesn’t value love or anything other than himself, he just further shuts out the world of petty strawmen-makers, and gazes coolly upon his own reflection, hallucinating Echo beside him as the last dying relics trying and failing to metamorphose meaningful human values.

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Max Ernst, The Nymph Echo. 1936

Caravaggio. Narcissus, 1594-96

Zinaida Serebriakova. Narcissus and The Nymph Echo, Etude, 1916-17