de quo consultus, an esset / tempora maturae visurus longa senectae, / fatidicus vates 'si se non noverit' inquit**... Everywhere there are mirrors if we but knew how to look... in the trees and in the wind that they catch but cannot hold, in the mountains and in the clouds that rest upon them before the wind comes, and in all the varieties of water: rivers, pools, oceans and, yes, in your tears that are more like rain than you will ever know, and most especially in every dream, fantasy, delusion, and lie... in every act of the imagination and in every sight, smell, and touch... your skin, this kiss... in such images we find ourselves... not something, but not nothing either... we see as if in a mirror the essential movement of mind through which there is anything at all, through which there is meaning... and, like the wind in the trees, that meaning is elusive... we are like Narcissus who at first did not recognize the image in the clear pool as his own; we too experience the world and its meaning as if they were there to be discovered and precisely not as something for which we are the author... all that there is is the reflection of our own minds at large... should we come to know ourselves as Narcissus did, we would know that we are responsible for everything, that without us there would be no joy and no death, no love and no suffering... according to the ancient story, Narcissus remains eternally enchanted by his own reflection in the River Styx... If we too come to know ourselves, would we not also remain frozen in time as if we had encountered some Medusa... to know ourselves guilty of every act of cruelty would surely turn us to stone... or would we like Narcissus in Melville’s account plunge into the pool and drown... Melville tells us that the image Narcissus beholds in the water is "the ungraspable phantom of life"*** and that that is "the key to it all"... CONSIDER YOURSELVES WARNED... as was Narcissus that he would live a long life if only he did not come to know himself... this way lies madness... just as there is madness in the very capitalization of that warning... shall we like Ishmael remain on the bank of that pool, frozen by cowardice and fade into a living death... or like Ahab seek to embrace the image of ourselves and drown...
BE WARNED!
This gentle morning’s light
heralds a coming storm
CAVĒ!
Hūius mītis māne lūx
tempestātem futūram praenūntiat.
*gnothi seauton; (γνῶθι σεαυτόν;)῾Know thyself?” – the semi-colon in classical Greek signals a question.
**"When asked whether he would see the long years of ripe old age, the prophetic seer said, 'If he does has not known himself.'" Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Bk. 3, 348-350. These lines refer to the prophecy given by the seer Tiresias regarding the fate of Narcissus.
***Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 1