“I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.”
― Truman Capote
“I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.”
― Ovid
When I turn on my computer, I no longer pine to write. I turn away from the blank white simulation of a page, press a button, and return to the well of Narcissus. I feel as though my body has been ripped from my life because everything exists in the image of myself, or others, who smile in front of food, lakes, parties, or worse, their art. In the decade that social media has moved its tentacles through our culture like a monster from an Ovid tale, we have slowly been unlearning how to be human, and now, I fear this is changing how we make art.
In the tale of Metamorphosis, the characters wreak havoc on each other in the name of love, power, and true connection. That’s what myth is for, to reframe our human impulses, our stupidity, and our longing into stories our brains can process. For, our humanness is overwhelming, and our inability to process our behavior, so far, rather failed. Myth, or in a more contemporary framework, Art, is how we rip the veil from our eyes to keep ourselves human. Yet, social media is teaching a generation of artists to be Narcissus and not Ovid. I fear that I may now be neither of them.
When I try to imagine myself in the past ten years I only see pictures of myself, taken by myself, in my mind's eye. It is as though my forties were a collection of sideways glances, of angles that made my jaw look younger, of downward angles by the lens to lengthen my frame – all of this work to become flat, an image of an image, sits in my mind's eye, removing me from the frame.
When I was a girl living in New York, and around the artists of the downtown theater scene, it was filled with poets, dancers, drag artists, writers, and bon vivants. I only hold them, these wild characters, in my memory, for no one took pictures at parties. Those artists of the 1980s were largely in their forties, though they had spent the previous twenty years in underground theaters making their own myths. The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, La Mama, Judson Poets Theater, were my home as a little girl when my father, a theater director, turned his own trauma into a language of his own. The same could be said of everyone downtown, the rejected, the strange, the sexy, and the wild – the idea of “normal” was a sin, and “legitimate” art was a bore. Everyone had an ego, everyone was damaged, and everyone watched each other to see what they could create from their very own community of outcasts.
That was then. No selfies. No online marketing. Nor, no money made online. So, offstage, or away from the clubs, studios, and stages, the artists had no masks. They existed in a community that was real. They fell in love, they hated, they competed, they stole, they adored. It was a mess, and it was also organized. The artists did their job; they made art. The audience did their job; they showed up. It was simpler? Not really, it was harder because you had to pay attention and keep track of what you saw, felt, heard, and then made. Art is a process of remembering from within your own body, it is not a collection of projects, links, bullets and poses, but a lifelong dedication to all the things that are emerging. Tough stuff, yet the artists of that time, when I was a girl, were simply great at it. They knew how to chase art, catch it, and make it their own. Those artists, long gone who died of AIDS, knew how to hunt their art like champions.
When the nymph, Echo, was wandering through the forest in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, she was unaware of her loneliness. Though, when she saw Narcissus, his beauty blinding, she chased him, and called out, “Let us meet!” then rushed to touch him. But, Narcissus screamed at her, “Hey, back off! May I die before you enjoy my body!” Echo, shattered by rejection, dissolved into the woods, pining for Narcissus until she watched him die of hunger while he searched his own reflection for love.
This story is generally explored to understand narcissists, but not to understand the searching of the artist. Though we should. For artists are all searching for themselves, their stories, and reflection like Narcissus. Echo, the nymph who sees the true beauty of Narcissus, though he cannot truly see her, is also the artist. Artists run after their inner selves, stories, and beauty and so often find themselves rejected – sometimes by others, sometimes by their art, though mostly by themselves. The balance of this myth is crucial for artists to keep in mind, that we are both searching for our reflection, while our reflection unto itself will starve us, and isolate us even more. The myth of us, of all artists, holds in the balance our need to find ourselves lost in our creative forest, yet continue the search, and when we lose this balance, we find ourselves out of step with our value, our connection, and our time.
Social Media now looks to replace this myth. It is the ultimate reflection of our most static selves and yanks us away from the tension of the story of Narcissus. For the tension of the story is everything; our job as artists is to explore the drive we have in ourselves to imagine, see, and then permit ourselves to be seen – or not. Most artists don’t like to have their pictures taken, sure, performing artists learn to do it, but in general, it’s not a natural state, because the work of art is done in private, out of the battle to decipher how we conjure the world. Put more bluntly, marketing is not art.
In marketing, there is a shorthand for a tactic to make people believe and purchase what is being sold: F.U.D. This is short for Fear Uncertainty. and Doubt. If a marketer can instill these feelings in a “consumer” – make them become afraid they will miss out, feel the urgency to act and then doubt themselves to survive without the product, the marketer has won.
F.U.D is what Social Media is built upon. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. It sucks us in with the fear that we are missing out on everything, so we post an image of us with a cupcake or falsely kiss the air. It yanks us in with a sense of urgency that if we do not like an image, or worse, no one likes our image, we will fail. It closes us into the sale with the doubt that we are in fact not relevant at all, so we post, and post and post; all with the hopes of being seen. And, this for artists is death. We have enough fear. We have enough sense of uncertainty/urgency to create. We doubt ourselves well enough, thank you very much. But the engine of F.U.D. has done something more dangerous, it has created a metric for us to gauge our isolation, and with the feedback loop of the number of views and visits to our work, we lose the crucial perspective (literally, the ability to step back and see the whole picture). Metrics of views and popularity are not the same as the work of risk, since that is what art is, the risk to be and to express that which only you can see. Marketing is the very opposite of art, it is the conscious presentation of an idea, product, or concept with the hopes to hook you without revealing any secret, or truth.
When you market well, you are providing people with excitement about something they can discover. In this way, marketing is not bad unto itself; its purpose is to draw others in to learn about something new. Marketing of films is the perfect example, a good trailer for a movie never tells the ending, but teases you with images and feelings. Nothing wrong with that. But, F.U.D. is a technique of control, and control is not art. In fact, being lost in the forest and having your echo call out to you is a profoundly important process for an artist, and learning, again and again, that being trapped in the reflection is the way to death. That’s the danger of the situation we are living within, inside this age of Narcissus; we believe the F.U.D. and think it is our inner self, our inner artist, telling us we are seen only in the reflection of our screens.
What do the screens reflect back to us? What’s in the code that moves those posted images like fast flashes of a lost promise? It’s the binary code of “success”. It’s the one-two punch of a marketing scam that’s dying to have you jump into lockstep, where you must be at ease with being familiar, even famous, for no reason at all but because people blindly follow you, as in high school, where popularity is a justified commodity for power. In this social media world (where you fail if you are not seen) we do not benefit from the needed failures of trying and trying again, to make art out of our most private selves. The glue of social media, its spider web of updates and anxious checking to see who has said what about our last flat image, is such a threat to our brains and the practiced, and needed risk of falling on our faces and the resilience that failure gives us, that I am sure, if Narcissus were one of us today, he too would grow sick of himself.
Though, now, I feel the ghosts of my machine now so vividly. The artists of The Village whom we held aloft in open caskets, their dead bodies exposed on 7th Avenue. Fists were high in the air, even mine, small then, my father at my side as the screams for a cure to stop the nightmare, to put voice to the silence that equaled death, bounced against the windows of the Stonewall Inn, ricocheted against the flowers in the small park that lay kitty-corner to heart of our downtown traffic. We screamed for visibility, not reflection. The dead, sunken and demolished, unable to eat in their last days, young skeletons, they were the true face of artists in that time of death: unashamed, defiant, publicly shared in our small world where no media source wanted to show the truth of the plague amongst artists. What would those dead do today? Would they post their rage? Would they balk at our vanity? Would they ask us why we are wasting our time reflecting ourselves, and not making the art they lost the chance to create?
Oh, but, there is no way to hide from our technology anymore. And the patterns of our thinking are changing, our brains migrating to the flat veneer of images trapped against the even flatter images of our self-marketing. Our inner Echo is being sent away by the mirror itself. Our ability to make metaphors of our trauma and love stunted by our need to be seen, by nothing, and nobody.
If I am also the nymph, Echo, then I am in the woods seeking to connect with my Narcissus. I cannot get his attention. I cannot convince him to share his body. But, I do not want to die, alone and pining in the shadows of my creativity and desire to survive. If I am Echo, then I want to be the sound of my own voice, the shadow of my time, alive, the ripple of my own lake. If I am but an Echo in this world, at least, let it be the echo of myself, and not an image to randomly share, over and over again, into a community of disconnected mirrors that only leads to death.