POETS Day! A Look at Narcissus

Narcissus, cursed, becomes this self-obsessed creature whose name we toss at the selfish and vain to this day.

Illustration by Rene Sears

It’s POETS Day! Friday afternoons aren’t meant to be spent working. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out and grab a beer, catch a game, or stroll through the park. You’ve done your part. Enjoy the rewards.

First, a little verse.

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Narcissus gets a bad rap.

There is a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. You can read all the traits common to sufferers and a series of deficits and exuberances therapists are on the lookout for in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5^th Edition. The problem is there’s no Latin. All the warning signs are kitchen table words so though it may well be true that “grandiosity” has a very specific meaning to mental health professionals, it has a more elastic meaning to the rest of us and we have an obnoxious aunt who won’t abide competing cobbler recipes, a co-worker who parks his precious convertible across two spots because he’s worried about dings, and a neighbor who thinks I like his grass clippings piled on my side of the line. By my reading of the DSM-5, they’re all a bunch of damn narcissists.

He died enthralled by his own reflection, starved because he couldn’t break gaze even to eat. Narcissus is the prime choice as patron of the self-obsessed, but there’s a hitch.

The story’s an older one than the popular version we know from Ovid. Wikipedia mentions a copy, recently found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, of the Narcissus story by Parthenius of Niceae from around fifty years before Ovid’s was written. They give a translation from W.B. Henry’s New Light in the Narcissus Myth.

He had a cruel heart, and hated all of them, till he conceived a love for his own form: He wailed, seeing his face, delightful as a dream, within a spring; he wept for his beauty. Then the boy shed his blood and gave it to the earth… to bear.

The Oxyrhynchus version is only fifteen lines long and not all is translated, whether because of damage or illegibility or whatever else, I don’t know. “God-like” appears to be the only translated words from the first nine lines and then the above, lines ten through fifteen. That’s the whole. There’s no Echo and no flower. In this telling, Narcissus is of the same species as the stock Narcissist character we find today wearing oddly expensive workout clothes while loudly telling the bartender about his Bitcoin Wallet.

Again, the story is old. Narcissus is assumed to be from Anatolia by those who research such things. I have no idea what clues were followed in order to place him anywhere specifically, but the name Narcissus appears to predate Ancient Greek languages. There’s a book called The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony that demonstrates how much can be learned tracing sounds, root words, and cognates from language to parent language. Maybe there’s evidence in the name; something proto-Turkish.

It may be that Ovid invented the story as we know it, pulled in Echo and invented the transformation into a white and yellow flower. No matter the original story, Ovid’s has been the dominant version, the one referred to when discussing Narcissus, for the last two thousand years.

From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III
translation by Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969)

Was sixteen years of age, and could be taken
Either for boy or man; and boys and girls
Both sought his love, but in that slender stripling
Was pride so fierce no boy, no girl, could touch him.

I’m a big fan of the above translation. Arthur Golding’s is the standard for good reason, but Golding, ensconced and glorified among Shakespeare’s influences, writes in fourteeners, and I can’t read those couplets without slipping into annoying sing-song (Pound’s tub-thump) so I usually turn to Rolfe Humphries blank verse.

Here’s the same passage from Golding:

From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III
translation by Arthur Golding (1536-1606)

For when years three times five and one he fully livéd had,
So that he seemed to stand between the state of man and lad,
The hearts of divers trim young men his beauty gan to move,
And many a lady fresh and fair was taken in his love.
But in that grace of Nature’s gift such passing pride did reign
That to be touched by man or maid he wholly did disdain.

It wasn’t just boys and girls, man or maid. The nymph Echo was smitten by him, too. Juno had punished Echo by cursing her voice so the nymph could never begin a conversation and only repeat what was said to her. The nymph drew ire from the goddess because she served as street corner lookout for Jove’s dalliances, whether on behalf of Jove himself or the nymphs and dryads he fiddled about with, I’m not sure. In either case, if Juno came around while her husband was carousing, she’d engage in stalling chatter and gossip to give the trysters time to scatter and hide the infidelity. Juno got wise and fixed it so Echo wasn’t able. When the nymph saw Narcissus, she followed but stayed hidden. Eventually, he guessed he wasn’t alone and called out. She repeated him. “Come out,” he tried. She repeated. That went on for a while until she broke cover and approached him. He was an ass.

“Keep you hands off,” he cried, and “do not touch me!
I would die before I give you a chance at me.”

She was crushed, hid away, and withered until all that was left was her voice. There are a brief few lines about him rejecting many others, but no details as to how or if cruelly.

One of the spurned boys (unnamed by Ovid but called Ameinias by his contemporary, Conon) calls down Nemesis, and prays “to God he may once feel fierce Cupid’s fire, / As I do now, and yet not joy the things he doth desire.” And so Narcissus, cursed, becomes this self-obsessed creature whose name we toss at the selfish and vain to this day.

But what did he really do? He was a jerk. He was an ass as well. Basically, he didn’t want to sleep with people and, because some attitude from him, at least one of them thought he should pay. His stalker had a goddess’s ear.

I have trouble calling what happened next self-obsession. He may have been awful and thought too damn much of himself, but the punishment for not sleeping with Ameinias was to act as dictated by the spell of a supernatural vengeance being. He didn’t fall in love with himself. He was shoved in love with himself; wasn’t self-obsessed so much as his obsession was directed towards his self by a third party.

There’s a malicious children’s book called The Rainbow Fish, about a fish with colorful scales that draws admiration from all the other fish. These other fish take turns swimming up to the protagonist and asking if they could have one of his scales. Naturally, he says no. He’s a bit snippy with them but well within what’s expected when asked to give up a body part. None of the fish want to be his friend because he won’t cut off parts of himself and share. He gets lonely and sad, gives in, mutilates himself and joins the collective, no longer impressive but no longer alone, having learned the moral: “Give in to peer pressure.” It’s a terrible book to give to kids you don’t dislike.

Like the conforming fish, Narcissus didn’t want to give himself. That shouldn’t be a capital offense.

The lessons of the myth aren’t dependent on the particulars. No matter how Ovid frames the case for divine punishment, the story is about broad-brush action. Don’t reject the world. Don’t turn inward at the expense of broader experience or you stagnate and die. It’s very much like the story of Oedipus. Fear of change or love of the status quo becomes an infatuation with the familiar or the moment and you can get caught in it whether you intended to or not.

As to the particulars of the story as Ovid tells it, Narcissus, jerk and ass, may well have been far beyond in acceptable self-regard. However awful and contemptuous he may have been, he was not suicidally obsessed with himself until he got zapped by a B-list Olympian. That came from outside.

He was horribly punished. Below are excerpts, first from Humphries and then from Golding, describing what happens when you don’t put out for Ameinias.

From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III
translation by Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969)

What you seek is nowhere,
And if you turn away, you will take with you
The boy you love. The vision is only shadow,
Only reflection, lacking any substance.
It comes with you, it stays with you, it goes
Away with you, if you can go away.
No thought of food, no thought of rest, can make him
Forsake the place. Stretched on the grass, in shadow,
He watches, all unsatisfied, that image
Vain and illusive, and he almost drowns
In his own watching eyes. He rises, just a little,
Enough to lift his arms in supplication
To the trees around him, crying to the forest:
“What love, whose love, has ever been more cruel?
You woods should know: you have given many lovers
Places to meet and hide in; has there ever,
Through the long centuries, been anyone
Who has pined away as I do?”

From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III
translation by Arthur Golding (1536-1606)

The thing thou seekest is not there. And if aside thou go,
The thing thou loves straight is gone. It is none other matter
That thou dost see than of thyself the shadow in the water.
The thing is nothing of itself. With thee it doth abide;
With thee it would depart if that withdrew thyself aside.
No care of meat could draw him thence or yet desire of rest
But, lying flat against the ground and leaning on his breast,
With greedy eyes he gazeth still upon the falséd face:
And through his sight is wrought his bane. Yet for a little space
He turns and sets himself upright and, holding up his hands,
With piteous voice unto the wood that round about him stands
Cries out and says, ‘Alas, ye woods, and was there ever any
That loved so cruelly as I? You know; for unto many
A place of harbour have you been and fort of refuge strong.
Can you remember anyone in all you time so long
That hath so pined away as I?

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]