Essay 4: The Self-enclosed System of Narcissus; The Pierric-Catalytic System of Medusa
Did Narcissus take the first selfie?
In a way, yes. But in a way, no.
Was he an influencer? In a way, yes.
He was an existential threat. Because he was uninterested. Because he gave a cold shoulder to the prospect of progeny. This theme can be seen across the spectrum from hunger artists to scriveners. Those who “prefer not to” participate with gusto, lust, gluttony, frenzy, or a minimal amount of enthusiasm are immediately suspicious because of their stillness. It all starts with Narcissus. To be uninterested—in us—is and always has been punishable by death…or eternal, self-reflective contemplation.
What follows immediately in this essay is a fictional fragment of a flippant biography-qua-portrait-of-the-narcissist-as-a-young-man interwoven with critical essayistic insights, asides, digressions and diminutive disquisitions—the fugue will hopefully resolve in an echoic and melodic portrait of something sad and Sartrean.
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Pre-twilight stasis
Narcissus lived thousands of years ago on an island in a cottage. It is now an Air BnB. But then, it was just home. Narc, to family and friends, was difficult. His birth, according to papyrus scrolls on the subject, wasn’t easy. He was neither breach nor crown down. He was sideways, grabbing with a painful hold onto the womb walls, reluctant—no, defiant not to be delivered. He was torn from his mother in the first recorded procedure of the Caesarean, but it wasn’t called that then. He had been robbed of the floating, fiber-walled insularity of pre-twilight stasis. He was more Oedipal than Oedipus could ever be. He just wanted to stay one with the matrix. However, stasis is the antithesis of Heraclitus and of the natural world: pantha rhei. The I-Ching. Being is motion. At a minimum, we must bob, an object afloat in the liquiescence of existence will remain agitated, moving up and down, side to side, tethered only by the differential sidewalls of the time and cold, cold space.
Narc refused to eat, do chores, flirt, sleep or anything else that would dislodge the ‘self’ from unnatural foam of non-movement—from the consolation of the contemplation of the helices that cascaded down around his face and framed his angular jaw. Sometimes he would spend hours staring at the reflection of his chin. Those were good days. Minnows would dart beneath the silver surface of the still water unseen by our self-admirer. Occasionally something would rupture the surface and his chin would dissolve and reappear in duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate…riding the circular reflections and their self-crossing concentricity until all was flat again and he became one again on the surface of the water and one, again, with himself in this meditative reverie of the self.
Of his nose, let us not get started. Prose could never do justice to such a nose. Poetry, maybe. But I am too poor a poet to immortalize such a nose. His nose was the envy of Parnassus. Close the door on any rhinological aspirations you might have to even come distantly close to a nose like that. Archimedes would have sufficed with a point. A single, fixed point about which he could bend all thought, matter, mathematical inquiry, psychological identity, etc. What could have been done with a segment of the divine line? A length so pure and supernaturally true that it was cued and plumbed from the very center of the origin of all energy that expanded into space and time. Such a nose was the equivalent of aesthetic anti-matter: it was of such insular and episodic perfection that it eschewed context—it disfigured its surroundings by virtue of its flawlessness. Most modern noses are known for their character—their imperfection: too large or small, crooked of hooked or beaklike. Noses, like fingerprints, are unique and asymmetric. Imagine a fingerprint of perfectly concentric rings…it would not seem human. Such was the effect of this nose. His nose was aligned, cosmically, in a kind of true north to the entire narrative of time. His nose, when angled just right, would recapture that lost first light of the dawn of us, and hold it in an illuminated length of 1.73 inches, a glowing compass needle to where life originated. It was a nice nose.
Honestly, can you blame our protagonist for indulging in his own reflection? If you had a nose like that, wouldn’t you want to linger in self-reflection and marvel at your own perfection? Wouldn’t you forsake the dialectics of companionship and promises of propinquity for a few moments alone with your own reflection? What good would it be to look upon another when you could look upon…yourself!
What our observer really wanted was not to get more deeply lost in the spacetime of reflection but to elide space and time altogether and glimpse, just once, his nose for himself. He thought of stealing two golden spoons from his mother’s secret drawer and carefully scooping out his blue eyes being careful not to detach the retinas and then place them in two crystal bowls, turning them ever so delicately so that he could gaze upon his own nose. And then, of course, he would pop his eyes back into their sockets. But this was too much for our squeamish self-admirer. Thankfully. Because it would have really changed the nature of the myth and the mythos of nature.
An irrevocable schism with Zeus.
It was one thing to stare at a reflection of yourself—Zeus, who had a wonderful beard and wore what would today be considered biker jewelry—didn’t mind Narcissus’s self-infatuation. Zeus’s nose was crooked from battling with a galactic bull prior to the creation of the universe and this was an imperfection that pleased him as much, if not more, than Narcissus’s perfect nose pleased him. Just to be clear, Zeus’s nose pleased Zeus and Narcissus’s nose pleased Narcissus but of the admiration of one for the other’s nose—each other’s noses—not much has been said. Probably thin ice in terms of the fabric of the universe and all that…perfection, absolute perfection, like absolute zero, is a kind of non-contiguity that would annihilate or be invisible to context/audience. I like to think Zeus preferred a nose with some damage—some story—some honest wear—a storied nose, as it were. Narcissus’s nose was, although cosmically tuned, non-dialectical.
The taking out of the eyes—this, Zeus would not have abided. In guise as a fly, Zeus flew down and buzzed incessantly around Narcissus. This period is known as “the buzzing”. The buzzing went on for days. At the point of insanity, Narcissus metamorphosized into a flower. Of his own volition? As punishment for eschewing Echo? Neglecting a Naiad? Not noticing a nymph?
System of a Medusa and Narcissus
Medusa and Narcissus would have worked, systemically. Medusa was capable of cauterizing the unwanted look. Rhetorically saying, “What are you looking at?” and having to say only once. Frozen in perpetual gaze, they stare for eternity. But their eyes were stony and dead. In the strange aftermath of an afterlife with eyes wide open, our men here are in a quantum paradox of defying Medusa by still staring and yet being vanquished or extinguished and not longer a “threat”. But still, they stare. They are still the same threat of unwanted attention, dead or alive.
This will all return to photography. This double-essay/narrative digression will splice itself back into the main line of photography and the phenomenology of photography. For who are Narcissus and Medusa if not the psychologic centers of two very different types of subjects: the self who is only interested in the self and the self who would refuse to be objectified by the gaze of the other?
They represent irreconcilable and impossible artistic identities. Narcissus could never make images because he was too alloyed with his own image. Which one was he? The bend being or the perfect reflection? Was he not willing to sacrifice the multi-dimensionality of existence for the simplicity of quasi-two-dimensional dreaming? What of the mantissa…the complexities of the surface and its topology that reflected him back to himself—the other objects reflected behind, such as the sky…the refractions…the parallax of a clutch of reed stalks that dotted the pond-edge. We are trapped in all of the optical phenomenon of Narcissus’s non-self. He probably dissolved into a medallion of pure being. Of pure visual correspondence with the self. A bridge from the material world to the non-materiality of thought, identity, consciousness…unfortunately there is little that is productive in the non-territory of the reflection. Unfortunately for us. Perhaps not for Narcissus. Perhaps not for Bartleby.
He was a photographer without need of an instrument. Development of the image was constant, eternal and instantaneous. We are at fault for becoming bored with his system. He is not at fault. He is succeeding in the purity of a visual loop of exclusion.
Medusa. She is all of us as well. She is the sentiment of the anti-hunted. She is the one gifted with the ability to petrify the hunter. Being visual…should I say, “As visual beings…” we commit a kind of cannibalism of perception, a consumption of all in our field…photonically, we import our world. We consume light more so than we consume meat or vegetables. We are always admitting it. Should we be sighted. We involuntarily consume the light. We are taking photographs without permission and without sustained intermission—during non-sleeping, non-blinking moments. But even when we close our eyes, we see retinal after-images…we dream…we are constantly bathing in visual experience. We are beings of the light. But not in that incandescent sense of a clean, warm spiritual tone or temperature. We are the negatives that we created to create ourselves in our own images. We have committed the idolatry of record keeping. Babel was destroyed for too much cohesive hubris. Icarus was punished for heat/light proximity. Prometheus, a stealer of light, too.
Disoriented by discovery
Eve. Pandora. In general, we seem to recapitulate a guilt for piercing the veil of our ignorance, again and again. We seem to disdain or distrust or at least be disoriented by discovery. And I look at us, as the Pet Shop Boys said, with sympathy. It is beautifully overwhelming to live as creators. As creatives. It is too much stimulation and too much to have been gifted to be able to take photographs or write essays—yes, they are stepped-down and incredibly reduced portraits of existence. It would be impossible to recapitulate time, itself. Sure, we might find bent space or create wormholes or all of that sci-fi stuff. But pure, folded, re-fed-into-itself like dough-folding time manipulation is probably not for us. Neither Narcissus nor Medusa were that hubristic. Sure, their very ‘curses’ of being were alternative phenomenologies of time and photography. Sure. The former showed us how to live without distraction or instrument. How to put down the intermediacy of the device—one could extrapolate from the camera to language and build spiritual systems from what we deride Narcissus for. And Medusa—she showed us what the power to sideline the seers of us would look like—a kind of Midas touch—a kind of catalytic converter that changed the intrusiveness of others’ psychological invasion into the inorganic containment-matrix of stone. The right to privacy. That is what Medusa represents. Perhaps Narcissus was yet another example of male privilege in his unconcernedness of being gazed upon. But I think, given all space and time, the system of the Narcissistic gaze would also resent the very vibrational interference of the existence of others, no matter how peripheral we might be—no matter our being out of the frame spatially or temporally. It is not possible to be exclusive and to have an environment simultaneously. Unless you are really big. For everyone else, any pure project of self must sadly capitulate into the total democracy of all being and time and the fulfillment of pangea ultima and the collapse of our solar system and the eventual stillness of entropy as we pivot and implode and bang! We begin again.