Echo & Narcissus

Psychology gives Narcissus all the attention—how appropriate! Psychology itself has become an echo chamber. And yet it has no Echo.

The character of Narcissus is well-defined, fleshed out and repeated ad nauseum. But even as scientists use echo-location to chart ancient caverns, Echo’s Chambers lack definition.

Or perhaps it’s both that lack character depth because of the current paralysis of the interpretive faculty. Where one lover lacks character, the other suffers from incompletion as well.

Unless it becomes forgotten forever, Narcissus and Echo is a love story, a tragedy. Love stories are possible when characters undergo change through mediation by an other, and so they require a bare minimum of emotional and psychological depth. But no such depth is perceived by the resentful character of today’s ‘psychology’.

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If Narcissus was indeed so beautiful, than how is it possible he was so cruel? To be both beautiful and cruel is a contradiction.

Narcissus was the most beautiful human, but not in the shallow sense of beauty, which is often reduced to mere appearance: to become beautiful one has to value beauty, no one is born beautiful. Everyone knows that many who are outwardly attractive can easily be ugly in their personality, squandering any tendency towards beauty randomly bestowed on them by nature. Beauty is far more than just being attractive. Common attractiveness, what is merely pleasing to the eye is by no means sufficient to define beauty, which has a universal character that has been devalued in popular opinion. 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 — indicates Narcissus must have been a character of high values, perhaps all the highest values that humans know of — and who cultivated an extremely rare noble personality—higher than our own thoroughly unbeautiful state. Are there any beautiful people who are callous? No. If Narcissus were merely ‘beautiful’ in the most superficial and mundane sense, why would Echo—the most prized of all the wood nymphs, who found even Zeus to be not good enough for her—have fallen in love with him? 

As a noble person, Narcissus would not have wanted to hurt another person. To be callous, petty, or resentful is ugly. Narcissus would have steered away from any ugly values such as these, at the very least to satisfy a purely aesthetic value. What is called his callousness has nothing to do with a merely sinister intention. He wanted to love as others do — to love is to be close to beauty — perhaps to be a great lover. His rebukes of wood nymphs was 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 highest 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?

What exactly happened between Narcissus and Echo? Echo came upon him in the woods while he was deer hunting, and babbling her current events nonsense she scared away the deer he was about to kill. Narcissus criticized her sharply for being a talkative nihilist, a character who parroted the things she was told without ever questioning them, who was insensitive to the crimes perpetuated against her sisters by Zeus — who Narcissus unmasked and insulted as a know-nothing eavesdropper on humanity, a coercive media mogul type jealous of all-too-human-humans, who set humans against each other for his entertainment — even as Echo ignorantly aped the idle chit-chat of pious news headlines and signaled her virtues across the otherwise enchanted forest. Not that Narcissus cared what others did, but now this noisy sanctimony had cost him a buck. The very presence of it, contaminating an otherwise peaceful and fulfilling nature had the glint of barbarity in his sylvan value-vision.

Once returned to the perfect reservoir of his singular self-reflection, Narcissus was remorseful of his treatment of Echo — how could he not be remorseful, 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. Before he was cursed to see only his own reflection — cursed by Zeus because Narcissus insulted the gods by seeing into their crimes and developing his own values independent of them — his gazing into the reservoir was also 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 his damnation? 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. 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. 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, though he longed for nothing more than to have meaningful relationships. 

But his apology to Echo came too late: by the time he apologized, Echo’s voice was removed, and his apologies were lost in her echo chamber. The tragedy is that Narcissus thought Echo had not forgiven him or heard him, or even had any subjectivity at all, which is not the truth. The pain of Narcissus is his isolation, and the despair that if even his most committed lover can not hear him, then no one can.

As for Echo, in the chambers of her newfound contemplation she internalized Narcissus’s sharp criticisms of her ignorant complicity with Zeus’ crimes against humanity and her superficial parroting of whatever the powers-that-be told her; and rightly so, Narcissus’s criticism was insightful and reflective, and eloquently communicated. No one previously had the courage to tell her off in such a way because they were transfixed by her beauty. Nor did anyone 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? No. 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, and disguised methods of coercion meant to keep humans in a lowly place. After the curse, things were different.  

Narcissus may have been callous 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 shortsight; the rare & 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 heroic. Echo was punished for actually listening in a way uncommon and tabooed, insulting the conformity the gods expected from humans. Her leaking of Zeus’s rape-crimes was no longer the same babbling hearsay, but a confrontation from someone who had finally, critically, 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 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. 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.*

But love is not limited by the gods, nature. Where Narcissus valued and cultivated sight, And Echo valued and cultivated listening, these values were experienced by their other. In the depths of Echo’s chambers, where Narcissus went in search for his love, he could hear for the 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.

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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 short-sightedness that the gods hitherto needed from humans. Both valued love and beauty, and transformation, as no other had before or since. But, unable to achieve love and beauty, each were 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 the capacity for meaningful vision. Echolalia is a developmental concept that explains an infant’s babble in formation of identity. It is only resentment society that attributes evil intent to either character, as this society is defined by a type of austere and empty character that goes looking to buy masks and assume character. It is not permitted to have a little bit of Narcissus, or a moderate Echo within each character, which is probably how the Romans saw it. When people talk about Narcissus without Echo, or Echo without Narcissus, they are not talking about either of them, but something else entirely: the desperate search for individuality in a conformist society. 

Every time someone reduces the tragic love of Echo and Narcissus to a pedant’s illustration of abuse, or passively echoes popular folklore that is complicit with unnecessary social pain, Echo is more deeply ground into the mute prison depths of her contemplation. And every time Narcissus is portrayed as the cliche of someone who doesn’t value love or anything other than himself, he just further shuts out the world of petty strawmen-makers, and gazes cooly upon his own reflection as the last dying relic trying and failing to develop meaningful human values. 

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