Fragments of Narcissus

by S.M. Balding

I.

What I would have liked to tell Ovid the night I knew myself a mirror and fell into its love: Only a fool rebukes the lover. 

Perhaps I am fair Narcissus born again (again), that boy who flowered in his own reflection. No fool was he, to fall and pray to self—that void. The only fools are these: Men who think the pleasure of a reach is in the getting. To them we say: Let such singular thinking perish in the they, which no one can contain.

II. 

The first time—
                         —a mirror took something from me:

On the beach, as a girl, I came upon a man and a mirror in the dunes. From where I stood, the mirror did not reflect me, only man and sky, sand and seeing. Myself being seen. I cannot recall what the man—his reflection—looked like, just his looking, watching me. The feeling that I was there only for another, when before myself had been a thing only for I. After they took their fill, the man left, and the mirror went back to acting like its purpose was to do nothing more than give back only what was given to a beholder. I ran crying to my mother.

At home that night, I found I could not lull myself to sleep as I so often did with dreams of my own making. When I closed my eyes, I did not see scenes of daring magic, only: The man. The mirror. Eventually, I got up to gaze at my own reflection, I found instead something new looking back. A being both me and not me. The sharp slope of shoulders, jutting hips, and bruised knees I knew as myself were gone, replaced by ampleness, curvature, something pleasing to the eye, yet unwanted. This woman in my mirror turned when I did, but more slowly, with a strangeness, as though regarding herself through me. Is this what the man had seen? Not a knife, cutting through the world, invincible, however that feels in the thoughts of a child—but ornament. A thing different from him that he wanted.

From that night, I moved through life thinking: I am the woman in the mirror.

III.

To liberate Narcissus is to let him live like he wanted: Ever blooming, invisible to no one but himself. Let us try to fit back the pieces into which he gazed.

When Narcissus was born, thrice-birthed Tiresias handed down a peculiar prophecy: The boy will live long and happy, so long as he doesn’t come to know himself, contrary to Delphic command. Of course, Tiresias didn’t say this directly to the boy—no one worries about a baby’s knowing. That’s for later.

So Narcissus lived, daring and beautiful and ignorant of it. An ideal being, for hungry men in the market for youth—an ideal tale for the philosopher. But neither matter yet—for now, we have eyes only for Narcissus, running dumb-young through the hills and forests, casting desire on all he passed. How his lovers longed—though for his ignorance or beauty, they could not say. And when he went on without them, they fell like incomplete triangles to the ground, crying out their clear-crystal wanting in vain.

Among these not-quite-triangles, men are wont to forget, was dear Echo, able only to relay the last bit of any words she heard. Not much good for conveying a wanting—and that’s exactly what Echo found when she came upon Narcissus in the woods. 

Echo made herself a hypotenuse. Even after she lured him in on his own words, her touch made Narcissus realize that she was a separate thing. He fled and left her in despair, still reaching, and she reached until she left herself behind completely. 

Only when Narcissus stumbled across great beauty looking back from the bottom of a pool did he stop and consider another. How he wanted that thing now, looking back at him! How spiteful, this liquid that kept him from the object of his longing. He sighed and the nymphs sighed along with him, lost as they were in the same pit, less one abstraction. Less one doom. Ovid himself put it straight to the boy:

Fool—
why try to catch a fleeting image
in vain?

What you search for
Is nowhere; turning away,
what you love is lost.

What you perceive
is the shadow of reflected form.
Nothing of you
is in it.

It comes and stays with you
and leaves with you
if you can leave it!

And when Narcissus realized that it was himself he longed for—for Narcissus knew he was no other—he resolved to waste away. What a curse to bear, to wish to be apart yet inseparable from that you so want to consume. To see that your only way out is to starve. 

What was Narcissus’ error? Freud pointed to an overgrowth of ego: How dangerous, to see oneself spilling over into pool. To mistake, like a child, object for being. Men like him have been getting away with the reverse since the beginning.

IV.

The night I discovered I was no longer the woman in the mirror, I was looking for a man. I found the man first, sitting with a beer in the back of the bar beneath my apartment building, as promised by a friend with a fondness for pairing up single things. The man was not my idea of something to look for, but my friend knew I was more than a little enamored with the idea of love. Men, it seemed, were what women found whenever they decided to look for that sort of thing. Back then, I wanted whatever it is that lovers want. I wanted to know.

We talked. Which is to say, he talked and I made a show of listening. He filed through rote word after word, a fixed script I imagine he hoped would end in his own wanting; he did not seem concerned with the idea that perhaps I, too, needed to be convinced. I wondered how my friend had sold me. A hole in need. Liquid asset, ready to fill a lacking. Always alone, always at home, at work, lost in books and nights and unknowable things, stuck in a time when time was on our side and not ticking down, down, toward self-imposed deadline. 

The more this man spoke, the more I watched myself become something obscured, as if I could not rule out the possibility that an ideal life was one in which I ceased to exist completely. I reflected the pretty picture I thought he wanted me to be as he talked me into Echo, but some strange thing possessed and kept hold of myself in the twist of his words:

MAN: I’m looking for the kind of girl who’s her own person. Independent and self- sufficient. That can’t be such a terrible thing?

I: A terrible thing.

MAN: It’s just been hard to find someone who can keep up. I hate to say it, but a lot girls just don’t like a challenge.

I: You do.

MAN: At the end of the day, though, I’m a simple guy. I want someone kind to come home to after a long day who’ll understand if I just need to kick back with a book and have a glass of whiskey, yeah?

I: Have a glass of whiskey, yeah?

MAN: Why not? I’m having a good time, too. 

I: Two.

When he finally went up to pay, I followed and there, behind the bar, I saw, where I should be, broken into three by the myriad arches of a mirror, a hungry thing looking back—not the kind of lack this man hoped for. I watched this new being who should have been, but was not, me, prowl down the column of heads at the bar, flashing her bone-sharp cheeks and fire eyes and nails that seemed already tipped in blood. I stood enraptured in the ravenous dark at the deep of her, which threatened only to consume. She stopped when she caught a man’s gaze, then plucked it out like carrion, affixed it to her own, becoming the thing she had preyed upon—all bulk and swagger and entitlement. Only when a hand on my arm began pulling me out into the cold did my reflection lose shape and slide back into me before dropping out of frame completely.

I let my date walk me the five minutes home—for the novelty, maybe, or because I had never quite learned when to say no, when I wanted to know—and invited him in. Following the script (maybe his), I pulled him down to bed. He was as good at kissing as anyone who learns from the movies can be; as good at taking as anyone raised to think the world is theirs to have. Whatever desires I possessed were lost in my desire to have whatever was wanted. But I could not have myself.

As I dressed in front of the mirror, he came up behind me, to see me being seen. When I looked, my reflection did not look back. The hunger was there, turned away from me, sinking teeth into flesh and gripping at hair with venom nails. The woman in the mirror took in a way I never had. She took this man’s reflection right out of his grip, ran hands down flesh—first his, then her own—took pleasure in ways I had never dreamed until she stood again, holding two perfect spheres in the palm of a hand: Eyes—not mine, but this man’s, which she raised to her own. In a moment, she became him, while he, oblivious, pressed on with his own agenda, rubbing hands over my skin like a treasure. Never did he look away from the mirror, as if it still showed a wanted thing. Pleased, he said:

MAN: You know what they say? A man is just a frame. His value is determined by the woman he’s with.

He laughed at his cleverness, and I laughed at this idea of being. A fixed image. 

V.

Allow me to abstract myself into antiquity once more. With every new becoming, I see back to how we have closed the doors on all our selves one by one, shut them up in a city with no wings to carry us out again. A problem that even Plato understood.

Far out of place from the city where he spun his tale of self-discovery down in the echoes of the caves, Socrates (the hero of Plato’s tale, valiant warrior taken up with self-knowing against men who preferred ignorance to pleasure) ventured to guess what it might have been that sparked our first wanting. Our first wings. Our first taste of something beyond ourselves to have. Sitting in the wilderness with eager-to-please Phaedrus, a student who has fallen head over heels for a fallacy, Socrates acts supremely out of character, abandoning dialogue in hopes of wooing this boy who has strayed from the logic of Eros.

Eros the liberator doesn’t get much due these days, that once-deity now reduced to new-cult figure, unknowingly worshipped in beds and browsers and bawdry tales. But even Socrates knew not to trifle with such a wily thing; the great thinker knew his logic didn’t have a chance against something that operated according to no design. Enter Lysias, the man who has won Phaedrus’s heart with an ill-conceived treatise against the beginnings of love. What good can love be, Lysias asks, for the receiver if desire only serves the will of the lover? Better to skip it entirely, better for the object of that wanting to choose someone who can keep their head. All these people running around in a rut are only predisposed to making a mess of themselves. Of leaving out in the open holes that before were safely hid.

Socrates cut straight to the heart of Lysias’ error with what he knew to be the logic outside time: If man has seen fit to render desire a god, it cannot be bad. Besides, what’s wrong with a little madness? He carries on, and Phaedrus, overflowing with questions and love for this desire who will give him nothing but trouble, does nothing to discourage him, insists Plato guide him over and over through the pleasure of a world in which these feelings are front and center.

VI.

The weekend after my reflection came to life, I told my friend: I can’t stop looking at people in the mirror. This was not quite true. The looking was not the issue. On the way to the café, I was helpless to watch the new self of me dress up in the reflections of others—the preen of a gaze in the subway window, the ballet-shift of shoulders pulling posture up in the freezer doors of the grocery store. This being flit from man to woman and back again, from young to old at a whim, let me lose myself in others. My mirror, I saw, feasts on man better to become him, takes and takes without leaving him the wiser. 

My friend dismissed the problem. Not once has she questioned the woman she makes herself up to be. She is a lawyer, particularly adept at convincing judges that her clients have suffered their crimes due to momentary insanity, due to passion. She has never thought there is a difference. When we met years ago, as freshmen in college, our first order of business was to abandon our philosophy reading (Descartes and Hume and other men I found at first to be insufferable, preferring then the live ones) for the siren call of Greek Row. Whenever I returned, though, inevitably alone, there those same men were waiting, and I eventually learned to make do with the company life rendered convenient.

Later, listing about for something to say, I told her I’d been reading Plato again on quiet shifts—revisiting the other Greeks. She closed her eyes, tipped her head back to take another drink, and then I remembered: A wedding, two or three years ago, the invitation still on the fridge. Flower-print, linen suit, anonymous park, gazing into each other for the camera. A shower, sometime later, announcement in pastel pink and purples. Family photos in the mail. Probably thrown away.

When I went to ask after them, I couldn’t remember names, husband or baby. Did she have more than one, now? Her patience was gone by then, as was mine, and she did not want to change the topic. The only thing she remembered of Plato was some trite, treacly thing: We’re not made to be alone.

Plato says we were compelled by something, to make us come out of our cave. We are there, walking forward and forward, trapped in the echo of voices, unable to turn our heads to the shadows on the wall above, to the fire that casts them and the sun that shines behind it, until someone is freed. I can’t recall what it was. Some shadow of a thought suggests that maybe Plato didn’t quite recall himself. Some wanting, maybe. He never was as quick to myth as Ovid. 

Whatever it was that set that first soul free, I don’t think I’ll ever understand what made them decide to crawl back round to the beginning.

VII.

When I was young and still thought myself to be that woman in the mirror, I would often lie awake in the dark with no desire to fall asleep. Instead, I opened my eyes as wide as I could to take in the night until I could feel the border of hair and skin and atoms that separated me from the invisible slip away. Lost in the black, I thought I could feel through walls the green lurking outside in the world, thought I could hear it singing clear, indecipherable and always coming. I remembered being a knife and remembered wanting always to be a new and wild thing, a Dionysian child and better for it.

Now, I recall a cautionary tale: Rather than indulge in a little madness, Pentheus did all he could to deny twice-born Dionysus, god of wine and wild and new growth after a burn, his due. He shut up the gates of the city, wound up the crafty god head-to-toe in bindings, and still could not pin desire down. In response, Dionysus sent a plague of women running mad through the mountains, singing songs and waving their branches like new limbs. Pentheus, dress and torturous want for transformation hidden deep in his closet, mistook them for a mockery. Dionysus’ Bakkhai mistook themselves for no thing, wished only that all others would join them in the negation of being exactly as they wished, called out this desire in the unbroken mystery of original tongue. Unlike dear Echo, they refused to despair over any who did not answer.

VIII.

Maybe we missed something, back when we were building our words (ourselves), etching solid sounds that whist empty through our marks and meaning. What do we lose when we write down a world? When we split infinite atoms into discreet cells, held separate by the spaces between that make it possible for us to know another.

I press up against the mirror now, wonder at the flat line the sunders me in two. This isn’t about looking. It’s not about feeling the cool sea of another world trapped in a deception. I cannot bear to know the thousand selves caught up in every twist of a head, every sigh of missed wanting. 

IX.

Glass and window and rain-street-puddle. I turn and turn, think of unreflected sounds, entire lives spent in belief of one-being. To what ends goes such singular reaching? This woman in the mirror makes light of myself, bursts I into prism and multitude. Cacophony. Each wanting brings a new divide, pushes at the limits of this form. Will we sprout feathers next? Court shadowed being in full palette of plumage, flashed without shame in reproductive display? True lovers grow wings, see themselves reflected in beloved and take flight.

We grasp at liberation through each recreation, ripple after ripple.

X.

Deconstruct the woman in the mirror. Follow round breasts, waist’s curve, vial running out into nothing. No room for life’s red in the ends of me, unmoored as I am coming from being. I have made myself a home for vacancy, left no room for something to fill—no soft place for belly to hide, no welcome in wide yawn of hips. I am just a thing yearning to be inscrutable. To see it reflected back at me from empty space is a thrill, this thing that took a life of its own and rings out newer and newer back at me with each passing day. 

There’s violence in vacancy. I turn away from the soft of woman and watch in the shadows as something new asserts itself around this emptiness, this cage stretched over muscle and bone. A snarl stretched out behind the shadowed teeth of ribs, a wink of shoulder blade shifting in a pocket of skin. Waist flat, shoulders wide, breasts lifeless, encased in muscle. All ox ready to bless some new continent to the world. Change again, from man to woman and back again, from human to mirror to something rooted. The pallor of my skin goes green, grows, greening, until I am kudzu, all-consuming death of life, robbing the light from anything that does not fight to be surface. There’s no room here for underneath, just a room here of mirrors. Nothing but plane, perfect abyss: Something infinitely depthless. That thing most without end.

XI.

With every turn away from the mirror, I leave newness in my wake. I ache to know what world I’ll find when I look back in. At night, when these selves go quiet, I turn and encounter the woman, the source. The most intimate moments we’ve had are when she is sleeping, when the foliage of her has stilled its growing. Still, I fear the thought of carrying these leaves unfettered within me. The thought of seeing darkness looking back from the middle of everything that shines so brightly, like glass.

I am no Narcissus, of Freud or myth. I think I’ll cast my lot with the empty spaces that poet back the din of a crowd with one voice speaking, even if there’s no light to see them.

XII.

Mirror, mirror, dark deep well that waters my being. Hook hands round ankles, draw up in self’s birthing—day after night after day. Look back—and back—and see. No she. No he. Only they. Why would I ever want anything less?

XIII.

Again: Perhaps I am Narcissus, sweet boy who discovered himself right out of body, cosmos trapped in bloomburst. He desired nothing. True love of self. And poor Echo—she reached for the same as he, before he even knew to be it. 

Who echoed whom? She, though, escaped his static doom, became shapeless to roam the earth, empty. Potential.

XIV.

My dive into the mirror: A coming out. A not inviting in. The crowd of my being leaves no space in me for any less. The bacchanal of being fills me, opens up chaos and disastrous becoming until I
                         dissolve
                                        into O—
                                                                 —I—
                                                                                     —O!
                                                                                                              IO! IO!
                         —thyrsus held high to signal the coming of awe-full they: The hallelujah of being a(s) self-loved thing—
                                                                                                              —an I broken free into plural.

© 2021 S.M. Balding

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S.M. Balding spends most of their time trying to break things and put them back together in new ways. When they aren’t writing almost-stories that shatter into queerness, you are likely to find them muttering over kanji flashcards or rereading Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’ Bakkhai. This is their first published creative piece. Follow them on Twitter @susanb