Essay 7: Narcistentialism
The sterile space of a silvered forever
When the unbridled replication of one’s own likeness becomes a surrogate for creation, the artist has entombed—or enwombed—himself in a geodesic sphere of mirrors. In this system of self, one’s options for expression are still never enough. You might wonder about light sources and how the self hovers in the sterile space of a silvered forever. You might also wonder if the interior is planar, so many adjoining triangular facets getting ever more slender—more knifelike. Could such a harrowing interior be a kind of hairshirt? A kind of flotation above infinite edges that should one ever touch a solid surface again, one would bleed—a fear of castration for the abnormally self-absorbed? You gotta love Freud!
Perhaps yes to all of the above. There would be biological repercussions of perpetually-other-spurning, imagistic self-love. Obviously. We would fail to reproduce. But isn’t meditation a good thing? And what is it that one indulges in when captive to one’s likeness? Isn’t it a hoped for likeability? Isn’t it prematurely celebratory of pending celebrity? Or is it just a project of perseveration on one’s good looks? And isn’t the purpose of looking good to ensorcel another into the act of begetting and begetting? Don’t we look good for others? So shouldn’t Narcissism, in the purest sense of the term (looking into still water) be a kind of ‘foreplay’ if you will?
With chiseled cheeks, forever
Yet the Narcissus of Greek mythology, with chiseled cheeks (or was that a statue?), vampiric skin, a disheveled helix cascading down to the pensive brow that now dissolves its tension and matches placidity with the mercury of the pond in resonance, still hungers. For what? More. More self? No. More time. But herein lies the enemy and the antithesis to Narcissism. Time. It changeth us.
And yet, the self above the water hungers—consumes more and more of the self in the water and is less and less sated. The narcissist is never satisfied. But this is not meant to be a minimalist recast of the DSM-VII criteria for a disorder. We are attempting to understand—not describe—the narcissist. And not just any narcissist. Not the stationary narcissist. The dynamic, analytic, fractured, photographic narcissist. The selfie-taker. For there is a fundamental difference between the monogamy of mythology’s Narcissus, wedded to his one and only image, and the modern and then post-modern narcissi that walk among us today.
The Accidental Narcissist
And I should disclose that I have been doing research in a narcissism-project—it was accidental. The accidental narcissist. That would be a more narcissistic title to this essay than the one I chose. By exfiltratating the self from the title in favor of a system, I might or might not have been being less self-centered. Less narcissistic, if you will. In any event, being enough of a simulacra of a post-modern narcissist to be unmistakable from an actual de jure selfieavich, I am de facto the animal I wish to be observing. Hence, the old cliché, “If it walks like a duck, and if it quacks like a duck,” can be recast as, “If one clicks (takes pictures) like a narcissist, and…well, there is only clicking when one reaches the advanced stages. I guess there is post-processing. So the idiom might go like this: If one clicks like a Narcissist, and if one posts (herein we have a lovely double entendre of post-processing, which is perhaps the dynamic, authorial analogue to our purely passive Greek model’s contemplation, and also of publishing to social media) like a Narcissist, then, ipso facto, by the enthymeme or other devilry of literary logic, one is probably a Narcissist.
If you can’t beat them, join them. But are they really bent on destruction to feed their own egos? Isn’t the endgame of Narcissism, like so many other ideologies, absolution in the all-ego? Surrender to the time-laptic arrogance of us, writ longitudinally through whatever temporal tunnel we are lucky enough to exist during? And doesn’t one quickly realize that even an us-less space, the us-less-ness, or uslessness, or…uselessness? of time and matter, isn’t the emptiness of a stage with so much potential a thing that will beget actors eventually and inevitably, with liberty (hopefully) and justice for all? Doesn’t self-love lead to social-democratic well-wishing for all? If for nothing else, to have a larger reach in terms of immortal fame?
Two Narcissists Walk into a bar…
Two narcissists come to mind as case-studies to round out my portrait (I should have said self-portrait…in a convex mirror, even! Homage!) of my own narcissism. The first is Jeff Bridges character Ego in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. Setting aside the alternate Christ allegory (which can be read into so many movie-figures), I wish to focus on the father, the egoist. It is ironic that the son suffers from crumbling self-worthlessness as a kind of inverted counterpoint to the father.
The father. For millions of years and across the entire reaches of known space, his self-interesting energy built a form for himself, and then a world, a world in which the typical tropes of telekenisis and energy-ball throwing show that the author of one’s own private planet can also supersede the physics of those who aren’t planet builders, but merely terrestrial tenants.
I have to admit that the treatment of the ego character in Guardians of the Galaxy was clean in concept and enjoyable/disturbing aesthetically. Wouldn’t a plenipotentiary ego build its own environment? Build a planet? But why the quest to reproduce? Wouldn’t a pure ego be divorced from biological dictates? Wouldn’t Narcissus in his or her final form be anti-biological? In a way, I think the attempt to reject the biology of sex, rejection, death, difficulty, decay, aging, weakening, and all of the other indignities that come after the halfway mark has been lived through is the motivating drive of the late blooming Narcissus. The youthful Narcissus may not have consolidated his thinking or may not be driven by a deep kernel of programmatic logic. The old one, I think, may be.
Ego, the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, has attempted to plant his seed in members of species from across the galaxy. Al but one die. There is a grim grotto of the remains of unsuccessful hosts. There is often a closet full of skeletons—literally, in this case—somewhere in the background. Narcissism may be the falsifying fantasizing of physical perfection in lieu of admission of the messy and possibly inevitable moral mishaps that exist in the 3D side of the mirror.
The other Narcissist—though, in many ways, I feel like I haven’t said what I wanted to about the first—is Agent Smith from the Matrix. Now an argument could be made for Neo being the Narcissist, and the alliteration would be pleasant, Neo the Narcissist. But his journey is one of surrender of the self in an infusion to the system. Agent Smith, on the other hand, is on a joy-ride of partnerless reproduction. He is a planet overpopulator of one. Encountering Agent Smith is transformative. Literally.
Is there an original Smith? Would primacy or primo-genitor status be a function of one’s number in the series of Smiths? The lure of Narcissism is the pleasure a hoarder derives from having so much in stock for potential needs. At the cost of actually using and enjoying what might or might not be apropos for the moment. It is a time-illness. As mentioned above. It is an attempt at an end-run around mortality as a poor facsimile for the dynamic reality of actual immortality—an immortality in which so many, and perhaps all, selves die but the energy of the system that created them—might that dim, too?—may or may not have existed. The anti-Narcissist hoards negative potential and cherishes, paradoxically, the relief and the release of death for such an event is grounded, narratively, in a longer work. The Narcissentialist, on the other hand, seeks a wallpapered world, a mirrored cave, a perfect and smooth teardrop to inhabit in which the self will be everywhere and thus indestructible. It may be that faith is harder for this individual.
The etiology of the egoist
I may need to recount my own story and see if it provides the axia I hope to find, the lines in the algorithm, the etiology of the egoist. My own story started with a camera I had bought and hoarded. I am not, fortunately, surrounded by piles of things I need to navigate in order to make it through my warren. But I have had the tendency to acquire more than I need in terms of gear or paraphernalia related to whatever hobby is foremost in my life at a given time. So when I was really enthusiastically peripatetic with a digital device on my person at all times, I became obsessed with the differences between the devices. I bought more cameras. I started with a Fuji Finepix, designed by F. A. Porsche. It was a pleasure materially and performatively. At the time, it was quite capable amongst the lineup of consumer grade devices, with a slight advantage, in my opinion, from its vertical body format, cool metallic heft, and overall aesthetic. I loved using that camera.
It stopped working and I had to find another. After much deliberation and time spent reading forums, I decided upon the Ricoh R-8. Again, I was delighted. It was a different format and it was all black and quite compact and slow and somewhat indiosyncratic. I am an outlier in some regards. I actually like a camera that doesn’t like its user too much. I like a camera that requires a bit of sacrifice but one that can deliver an extraordinary user experience and superlative images.
I was on the way with my R-8, but it wasn’t until my Sigma Merrill DP1 with the Foveon sensor that I truly found the camera and sensor system, with all of its idiosyncracies, that allowed me to truly move from being a surface level image taker to one who enters the shallow, hologrammatic depths of worlds captured. There is nothing like working with raw Foveon images. Now most people will be quick to give you their complaints. Poor low-light performance. Extremely long write times. Lack of image stabilization. Yes. But I see all of these as reasons TO buy and use my camera. I want to work in the light. I want to wait for the image to be recorded because its like winning at a slot machine—don’t you want that sound to go on forever? And I want to be still. I want to be part of my process. And so, me and my DP1 went many places together. We saw a lot. And then I re-saw what we had seen. But with my landscape format, wide angle DP1, I was mostly working with urban and industrial street photography.
I had no concept of what it would be like to work with a longer lens, so I bought the DP3. All the DP cameras (there are only 3) come with fixed lenses. That is another thing I love. I don’t want telescopic ease. I want to zoom with my feet. The 3 is a portrait or telephoto camera. I hadn’t realized that it would not work when not on a tripod. I hadn’t realized that, whilst outside, I prefer wide-angle work.
To be ancilla to the act
Years went by and my 3 sat in a closet. I thought of selling it. But before I did, I thought, “Why not set it up on a tripod and learn how to take images of people? And since I don’t have anyone else to participate, why not be my own subject?” And so, my accidental Narcissism began. There is another fork in the period of portraiture, hyper-selfieism, that I will discuss in another essay. But for me, it was really out of a desire to not let a machine lay idle. In a second part to this, I will discuss the psychology of taking so many selfies. It wasn’t what I thought it was…not exclusively. Partially, yes, what you can imagine is true. But it is always the things one wouldn’t have thought would be, the ancilla to the act, that surprise us.