Narcissus, of course, finally beholds his beauty in his reflection in a pool and falls in love with himself. But this love is torture to him, for, falling in love with himself, he is caught in an unbearable contradiction. In the figure of Narcissus, self and other collapse into one: he is both lover and beloved in one body. Unable to endure the torment of such desperate love that is its own object and can, therefore, never possess itself, he breaks the circle by killing himself. Echo is there at his death to repeat his desolate dying words.
In the subtle wisdom of Greek mythology it is no accident that Narcissus and Echo are paired. It is as if she externalizes the fatal symmetry of Narcissus’s self-obsession and his life path, which is littered with those he has rejected. The irony here is that he too will have to reject himself as well, with the same ferocity. Trapped within a sealed circle of self-belonging, his longing for himself leads to self-annihilation. He is unable to build any distance or otherness into his own self-love. It tells us much about the nature of Echo that her fate is twinned with his. She is totally vulnerable because she cannot speak first. Her name and nature are one. She longs for him and when he rejects her, she is doomed to a life of demented longing which reduces her to little more than a lonely, desperate voice.
A book is barely an object; it is a tender presence fashioned from words, the secret echoes of the mind. This book attempts a poetic and speculative exploration of the creative tension between longing and belonging. The text has a dual structure: a first layer of image, story, and reflection, and underlying this a more philosophical subtext which might invite a more personal journey of reflection. The modest hope is that in a broken world full of such eerie silence, this little reflection might clear a space in the heart so that the eternal echoes of your embrace in the shelter of the invisible circle of belonging may become audible. A true sense of belonging should allow us to become free and creative, and inhabit the silent depth within us. Such belonging would be flexible, open, and challenging. Unlike the loneliness of Echo, it should liberate us from the traps of falsity and obsession, and enable us to enter the circle of friendship at the heart of creation. There is a resonant heart in the depth of silence. When your true heart speaks, the echo will return to assure you that every moment of your presence happens in the shelter of the invisible circle. These eternal echoes will transfigure your hunger to belong.
1A
T
In the beginning was the dream. In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened. Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed. Everything had its beginning in possibility. Every single thing is somehow the expression and incarnation of a thought. If a thing had never been thought, it could never be. If we take Nature as the great artist of longing then all presences in the world have emerged from her mind and imagination. We are children of the earth’s dreaming. When you compare the silent, under-night of Nature with the detached and intimate intensity of the person, it is almost as if Nature is in dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn into time and place. Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we are always somehow haunted by that; we are unable ever finally to decide what is dream and what is reality. Each day we live in what we call reality. Yet the more we think about it, the more life seems to resemble a dream. We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos. There is no protective zone around any of us. Anything can happen to anyone at any time. There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream. What we consider real is often precariously dreamlike. One of the linguistic philosophers said that there is no evidence that could be employed to disprove this claim: The world only came into existence ten minutes ago complete with all our memories. Any evidence you could proffer could still be accounted for by the claim. Because our grip on reality is tenuous, every heart is infused with the dream of belonging.
