History has not been kind to Narcissus. His name is synonymous with an unsavory amount of self-absorption, and those who are typically described by an allusion to his name tend, for the most part, to be unbearable.
But, I would argue, Narcissus was right.
In the myth of Narcissus, his mother is told by the seer Tiresias that her new-born son will live a long life if and only if "he doesn't know himself."
Compare and contrast this to the Delphic Oracle's injunction to Socrates to "know thyself." In Plato, knowing yourself is synonymous with virtue. In the myth of Narcissus (as recounted by Ovid), to know oneself is synonymous with death.
But what does it mean to know oneself? Which self does one know? And which self is the knower? And is the myth really a warning against excessive self-absorption, as is often assumed, or is there a more compelling reading of the myth?
Perhaps the myth is allegorical, and the self that Narcissus apprehends in the water is not his body but his soul. Perhaps the self that Narcissus falls in love with is not his temporal mortal self but his eternal self.
In this sense, Narcissus is the mythological precursor of Rumi and the Sufi mystics. Perhaps the Narcissus who dies is the ego, and the Narcissus that remains (the flower that is called a "narcissus") is the eternal soul.
To know oneself is to know that one will die. And so, Narcissus is he who sees his own reflection, but from the other side. What he sees is his own death, but he sees it in life. He accepts his death, and in accepting his death, he is transformed. And so, his death is not a tragedy but a transcendence, not an act of suicide but a mythical instance of rebirth.
Narcissus is he who knows that love is never outside himself. When we love, it is not true that we love the other. There is no outside to love. We love Love, and the other is encompassed in that love.
Love is the space in which love becomes possible, but it emanates from within, not from without. Perhaps the deeper moral of the story is not, as is commonly believed, that one must refrain from excessive self-love in order to be able to love others, but that one cannot truly love others until one has learned to love the self.
We all need to resist our desire for symbiosis, and to go inward to find what we need rather than to try to get another person to give it to us. Perhaps this is another way to read the myth of Narcissus. Perhaps we could all use more inwardness and more self-love, and perhaps history's scapegoating of Narcissus is merely a reflection of our collective self-hatred as a species. Perhaps Narcissus is the Greek equivalent of Christ.
posted by Caveh Zahedi at
11:23 AM
