Douglas Mercer
February 4 2024
For the Greeks Narcissus was the beautiful youth in love with and transfixed by his own image; living in isolation he was able to apprehend the figures of beauty; but the only image he saw was the image of his beautiful self multiplied endlessly. But being able see only himself and only see himself though himself he was equally endless denied self-knowledge; as beautiful as he was without the benefit of the mirror of society and of others he was akin to a savage beast; a beautiful beast but a savage one nonetheless.
Let us now suppose as a thought experiment that this isolate is immediately not merely thrust into social relations; but thrust into social relations on an industrial scale; forced to see himself not just in the mirror of a few others but of countless others and in a never-ending amount of times; to be thrust into seeing himself not just in a single mirror but in a wilderness of mirrors all of them of them rotating around him like a fun house or a fishbowl, each ramifying the reflections of his self like the infinitely complex patterns of fractals; the beautiful youth will lose his serene composure, his pristine self will be horribly dislocated and disorganized and destabilized and disintegrated; seeing himself through the eyes of so many others will break the calm surface of his repose and cause it to ripple violently in undulating waves.
If Psyche was the beautiful goddess of the soul with butterfly wings Narcissus is split into a million different pieces no longer beautiful and whole but wholly savage. No longer really even a self but a multiplicity of selves each bearing no relation to the other.
The question then becomes will the new self-images that have been projected onto the screen of his former equipoise and serenity begin to form a new pattern of integration or will they endlessly split and splinter and the splinters split and splinter until they are dispersed into dust; for Narcissus has lost forever his former home of looking only at himself in the surface of the image of the water and the simple and beautiful face which he so longed to look at is no longer perceptible; the perfect innocence of the isolate now exists in a dense network of relations; finding himself among them constitutes the trauma from which he no longer has the option to withdraw from but must find himself among; or which he will fall to the bottom of and be lost forever.
