The myth of Narcissus and Echo

The story of Narcissus and Echo has a pervasive presence in Western cultures. The essence of the myth perhaps gives us a clue as to why this story has intrigued many artists and philosophers over the millennia.

At the heart of this story is two lovers. Narcissus who can not return love as he is enamoured by his own self-image, and Echo who can not express love as she can only repeat the last words that are spoken to her by another, i.e., she cannot generate her own expressive language.

Narcissus can be seen as withdrawn from reality. He is locked in his own head so to speak, and is driven by an extreme ego. Echo, on the other hand suffers from a complimentary condition, in that she can only reflect what others have already spoken to her.

Narcissus enters the scene after her jealous mother, Hera, has already struck Echo speechless. He cannot relate to Echo’s amorous advances towards him, and eventually scorns her. She wanders and fades away only ever being able to repeat what others have said to her. This ability survives on after she has finally faded to nothing. He, on the other hand, continues to roam unawares that he too has been cursed, so that on seeing his own self-image he too will perish.

I am intrigued by this failure of reciprocity of the sense. Echo is too obsessed with the other; she has become totally reliant on the other to reach any expressive potential at all. Narcissus, because he is so self-obsessed that he fails to respond to the human expressivity of her advances, rejecting her out of hand because of her lack of articulateness.

Finally, upon seeing the ‘real’ Narcissus reflected in the pond, he is overcome by shock at his own image, having only ever seen himself before in his vain mind’s eye. His egoism detaches him from all of his sense of the world around him making him incapable of reading the advances of the beautiful Echo correctly. He dies and turns into a flower, a symbol of female sexuality reminiscent of the vulva (after Gidé).

Echo can also overcome the one-way street of her senses. She can only receive but not give, or rather can only return after she has first received. Narcissus can only give but cannot receive, so that a co-dependency is established in their meeting and with disastrous consequences for bot male and female protagonists.

The senses in a healthy human are both reciprocal and reversible (after Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Reciprocity occurs when I touch in that the very act requires that I am also touched; when I speak I also listen; when I see I am seen, etc.. These are the reciprocal nature of the functioning and aware human senses.

The senses are also reversible. I can touch with my words and with my sight. That piece of cloth looks woollen or silken. That food looks and smells as if it will taste good. This chiasm of sensation is absent at least on one level with these mythological characters.

For this reason, over the coming months, Samantha Thompson and I will be exploring this absence, looking for its implications in the telling of this story in pictures and words, and hopefully, contributing to our understanding not only of the myth, but of ourselves as fractured human beings.

There is nothing to worry about.

It is Sunday evening and I have eaten and have the television set on. There is nothing on the box and so I thought I'd sit down and write. I couldn't think of what tow right, but remembered a lengthy online discussion that i had during the week about nothing.

Nothing is something that is mostly ignored. As humans living in modernity we are convinced that what hits our senses and is perceived directly is real, that which does not being unimportant. Seeing is believing and conversely that which cannot be sensed by our legitimate five senses is deemed illegitimate and beyond any meaningful discourse. This is in spite of the observable ad perceivable fact that the universe itself is mostly made of nothing at all.

The ancients knew this intuitively. In English we have separate words for heaven and sky but in other European languages at least this is not the case. There is one word for both heaven and sky in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Polish and Russian: ciel, Himmel, cielo, cielo, cel, niebo and небо respectively. The only other European language that uses words to differentiate the two entities is Greek, which uses παράδεισος and ουρανός. When we look up at the heavens we see nothing foregrounded by what we now know to be the bluish sheen of our planets atmosphere in interaction with the suns radiation and backgrounded by the stars, the closest of which is about four billion  billion miles away. We say this is four light years to stop this astronomical calculation overwhelming us in the almost complete nothingness that exists between us observers on earth and the closest source of light apart from our own sun.

Nothing can overwhelm us and so we have a tendency to reduce nothing to mean not being of importance. We pretend this nothing is not something to notice but is just a space. An absence rather than the overwhelming presence that it perhaps in reality is. We unwittingly perceive the foreground and background while neglecting the middle ground of nothing or next to nothing. The whole of our perceptual reality is treated similarly when I think of it. The universe is overwhelmingly composed of nothing and all we seem interested in is finding something solid. The human mind seems allergic to the idea of the abyss.

Think of a single atom. No one has directly perceived one but we believe by inference that it is made up of a nucleus of protons and neutron encircled by electrons. Other sub atomic elements are thought t exist as well and even a God particle which is being searched for at the Hadron Collider project on the French-Swiss border. These scientists are searching for something that may turn out in the end to be nothing. This is not to say that a God particle does or doesn't exist, but perhaps the God particle consists of nothing and therefore is something as part of everything that goes to make up our universe. (Other universes not with standing).

I am using nothing here in the same sense as Merleau-Ponty's concept of the Invisible. The biologist tells us that we are largely water or the chemist carbon depending on just how reductionist they happen to be at the time and what barrow they happen to be pushing. This is all part of a language game, and misses the point that the externalities of our bodies encapsulate matter which is just as much composed of nothing as it is of any particulate or matter. Remember, as matter we are both particle and light?

I do not, however, perceive myself this way. I am flesh and bone and I see the world in my image just as the ancients once saw God as a heavenly father. The world appears to me as embodied, as having a being apart from me but behaving in a way similar to the way I perceive my body to function. Once I understand the nothingness present in the universe, I begin to understand how this nothingness inhabits the world and through its existence as a flesh like substance through which I move, my very own body to be inhabited, perhaps overwhelmingly so, by nothing: That when nothing is seen as something then it and all the other somethings can be seen to construct the world around me in a way which expresses more closely the overwhelming nature of the universe we inhabit somewhere in our dark corner, lit only by our sun and the faint glow of the milky way and all the other stars off into the broad expanses.

We have the Visible or perceivable and that which is not directly perceivable and which forever remains invisible except when expressed by us humans through our day to day lives and that cultural phenomena called art, religion or spirituality. If the invisible is so overwhelming then why too is its existence denied just as vehemently as God has been by many lesser scientists and thinkers. I can no more sense nothing, than I can God. Yet, all the expressive parts of humanity are in the same basket of non-matter. Human consciousness does not exist in the same way as love does not exist. These are not particles or light, but are part of the realm of nothing that I have described. 

 

We can not sense these things from the outside but can only experience them from within. I can no more sense how much you love your cat than you can sense how sad I am that my friend forgot to ring me this evening. Because you have a body like I do, and I know through experience that we perceive the world in similar ways, I can have empathetic feelings for you and you for I. But it is not possible to cross that gap and to see my consciousness of things, because that consciousness does not exist to the senses; it is in the realm of the Invisible and nothingness. If God exists, this is the realm to look in, not for a particle but into the abyss.

So, nothing is something to worry about. If we want to gain a broad understanding of everything that goes to make our universe and the world, we need to concern ourselves with the overwhelming bulk of that universe, not discount it as meaningless. To do so is to deny one of our essential features as human beings and that is to make meaning from our perception of things and to express them in a way that makes sense of the world we inhabit.

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In what way are social networking sites spiritual?

Image via WikipediaAfter spending two weeks on Facebook and 10 or so days on RSVP in the last month, I am surprised at just how unfulfilled I feel. This experience has left me drained, exhausted and tired. The obsessiveness with which I attacked this task has no doubt contributed to this feeling of emptiness, as too has the inadequacy I feel when constantly bombarded by claims of Buddhist enlightenment, Hindu pantheons, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, half full glasses and the oneness of the world.

My experience of these sites has left me believing, that in spite of the claims made by various 'members' on their pages, that what I feel when confronted by these claims to spiritual superiority is counterfactual to the stated aims of the creators of these pages. I am left with a feeling that to me is anything but spiritual, my stomach an empty space robbed of whatever sober thought or emotion previously taking seat there, and wondering what on earth I am wasting my time reading and responding to empty platitudes and hopes rather than anything of substance.

I left these sites this morning and have been growing happier minute by minute ever since.  I can walk down the street again and say hello to a real person and smile, offer my hand in solidarity, asking nothing of them and accepting without question their humanity.

What is it to be spiritual? For me this seems to be the question at the heart of this matter. I don't know how to answer that. Surely it is tied up in someway with words used kindly and acts of genuine humanity. But that doesn't seem to go far enough. If the words and actions are given to boost my ego, that is, with an aim to making me look good in the world, of become a petty god or guru, then isn't this the antithesis  of spirituality, which surely is tied up with humility?

It is not that I am against metaphysics, not at all, it just seems to me that much of what I was exposed to in the past month has a smell of sophistry and pedantry, of people claiming that they could read my mind but never once told me exactly what I was thinking. Ancient claims presented as if the writer had only now thought of this proverb or that with a stroke of inspired genius.

Of course there where exceptions. A Spanish lady who had studied philosophy as well as being a practicing Catholic flattered me without expecting anything in return. Nevertheless, I returned the pleasure. This was a rare moment of human innocence. I had similar experience with a Philipino lady, a retired teacher in the outer suburbs, and a recovering alcoholic.

To me, these were truly human experiences as there was no pressure at all to conform, no feeling of having to submit to an idea which one could not live up to, and most importantly, a feeling that I had connected with something unspoken, ethereal and ephemeral. Perhaps that was what is called spiritual. Simply the feeling of non-exploitative human communications.

I think I'll just stick with looking people in the eye and offering my hand.

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