by Stephen Fry
And Narcissus? Day after day he lay by the river, passionately and hopelessly in love with his own reflection, gazing at himself, filled with love for himself and longing for himself, with eyes only for himself, and consideration for no one and nothing but himself. He drooped down over the water, pining and pining until at last the gods turned him into the delicate and beautiful daffodil that bears his name and whose lovely head always bows down to look at itself in puddles, pools and streams.
You can choose to think of the characteristics these doomed young people have bequeathed us and our language as common human traits or as problematic afflictions. Narcissistic personality disorder and echolalia (the apparently mindless repetition of what is said) are both classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which medically and legally defines mental illnesses. Narcissistic personality disorder, much talked about these days, is marked by vanity, self-importance, a grandiose hunger for admiration, acclaim and applause, and above all an obsession with self-image. The feelings of others are railroaded and stampeded, while such considerations as honesty, truthfulness or integrity are blithely disregarded. Bragging, boasting and delusional exaggeration are common signs. Criticism or belittlement is intolerable and can provoke aggressive and explosively strange behaviours.fn5
Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves. When we look into another’s eyes, in other words, we are not looking to see who they are, but how we are reflected in their eyes. By this definition, which of us can honestly disown our share of narcissism?
Lovers
Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Catherine, Sue Ellen and J.R. – the doomed lovers we know all owe a great debt to the tragic Greek tradition that preceded them.
Pyramus and Thisbe
When we hear the name ‘Babylon’ we think of a Middle Eastern civilization famed for ribaldry and excess. Its Hanging Gardens were one of the original Seven Wonders of the World and for a time Babylon was the largest city in the world.fn1 The Babylonian Empire took in much of Asia Minor, indeed some believe that this story really took place in Cilicia, the kingdom that Cilix founded before he joined Cadmus and the other sons of Agenor in their quest for Europa. Ovid, however, in his version of the tale, is happy to locate the action plum in the centre of Babylon and so that is where I have placed it too.
In Babylon, then, lived two families who had been feuding, no one quite remembers why, for generations. Their great palaces stood next to each other on the main street of the city, but the children of each household were raised as enemies, forbidden so much as to speak, write or sign to one another.
One of the families had a son called PYRAMUS and the other a daughter called THISBE who somehow fell in love with each other despite the obstacles in their way. They had discovered a small hole in a shared wall between their adjoining homes. Through this aperture they whispered, swapping views of life, poetry and music until they found themselves falling very deeply in love. The hole in the wall was too small to allow them to touch, but the heat of their young and ardent passion could be breathed from one mouth to another through that benevolent chink, intensified by the forbidden nature of their feelings and their thrillingly unbridgeable proximity.
This exchange of hot, youthful breath enflamed them so much that one night, maddened beyond endurance, they arranged each to escape their respective palaces and meet at night in the grounds of the tomb of Pyramus’s ancestor, the Assyrian King NINUS, founder of the great city of Nineveh.
And so, the following evening, the nimble and quick-witted Thisbe slips past the guardians of her room and the sentries on duty outside her father’s palace and is soon beyond the city walls, built all those years ago by her ancestor, Queen SEMIRAMIS. When she reaches the trysting-place, Thisbe encounters not her lover Pyramus, but a savage lion whose jaws drip with the blood of its recent prey, an ox. Frightened by its roars, Thisbe runs from the cemetery. In the hurry and panic of her flight she drops her veil. The lion approaches the veil, snuffles it, takes it between its jaws and shakes it from side to side, staining it with some of the ox-blood on its muzzle before letting it fall back to the ground, giving one last roar and padding off into the night.
A little later Pyramus arrives on the scene and sets himself to wait for his beloved under a tall mulberry tree loaded with its heavy summer burden of snow-white fruit. A shaft of moonlight shoots between the tree’s branches and illuminates Thisbe’s veil, which is lying on the ground all smeared and dabbled with gore. Pyramus snatches it up. Horrorstruck, he can make out the embroidered crest of Thisbe’s family in the bloodstained linen, and more than that, he recognizes the scent of the girl with whom he has exchanged the fierce fever of love’s breath so many times. Paw prints on the ground bear witness to the presence of a lion.
Blood, paw prints, the family crest, the unmistakable scent of Thisbe herself: the clear and tragic meaning of it all bursts in on Pyramus. With a cry of despair he draws his sword and stabs himself deep in the stomach, ripping the wound wider from side to side in his hurry to join his dead beloved. Blood spurts up from him like a fountain, dyeing the white mulberries purple.
‘You took my beloved Thisbe away before we could be united for the short span of our lives,’ Pyramus cries to the heavens, ‘so let us be one in the endless night of eternal death!’ With these noble words he expires upon the ground.fn2
Enter Thisbe. In the dead hands of Pyramus she sees her own veil, smeared and spattered with blood. She sees the lion’s paw prints and reads all too clearly the story written there.
‘Oh gods, can you have been so jealous of our love that you could not grant us even one short moment of happiness?’ she cries.
She sees Pyramus’s sword. It is still hot and wet with his blood. She throws herself upon it, plunging it deep into her belly with a cry of triumph and ecstasy in one of the most Freudian suicides ever.
When the two families are taken to the site of the tragedy they fall weeping on each other’s necks and beg forgiveness. The feud is over. The lovers’ bodies are cremated and their ashes mixed together in a single urn.
As for their spirits – well, Pyramus was turned into the river that bore his name for millennia and Thisbe into a spring whose waters run into it. The flow of the Pyramus (now called the Ceyhan) has been dammed for hydroelectric energy, so the power of the two lovers now goes to light Turkish homes.
Moreover, in honour of the couple’s love and sacrifice, the gods decreed that the mulberry fruit would from that moment on be always a deep crimson purple: the colour of their passion and their blood.
Galateas
Acis and Galatea
Amongst the many daughters of the Oceanid Doris and the sea god Nereus, was one Nereid called GALATEA. Named for her milk-white complexion she was adored by POLYPHEMUS, a Cyclops. Not one of the original Cyclopes – Polyphemus was the savage and ugly offspring of Poseidon and the Oceanid THOOSA.
Galatea herself loved ACIS, a Sicilian shepherd boy of simple charm and beauty. Though the son of the river nymph SYMAETHIS and the god Pan, Acis was only mortal. One day the jealous Polyphemus caught sight of Acis and Galatea in each other’s arms and hurled a boulder down onto the boy, crushing and killing him. The grieving Galatea was able to call upon sufficient power and resources, or perhaps had enough friends on Olympus, to be able to turn Acis into an immortal river spirit with whom she consorts for eternity. Their story is the subject of Handel’s pastoral opera Acis and Galatea.
Galatea II
While on the subject of girls called Galatea there are two more worth meeting.
PANDION of Phaestos in Crete had a son, LAMPROS, who married a Galatea. Lampros had no interest in fathering girl-children and told his wife that if she gave birth to a daughter she was to kill it and they would keep trying until she bore the son he craved. Their first child was a beautiful baby girl. Galatea
did not have the heart to kill her – what mother would? – and told her husband that the baby had been born a healthy boy, and that she wanted to call him LEUCIPPOS (white horse).
Lampros took his wife at her word without bothering with any anatomical inspections and thus, raised male, Leucippos grew up to be a fine, intelligent, universally liked and accepted boy. Teenage years approached, however, and Galatea became more and more afraid that her beloved child’s lush natural curves and striking lack of any downy growth on the chin must eventually give the game away to Lampros, who was not the kind of man to overlook such a deception.
For safety’s sake Galatea took Leucippos and sought refuge in a temple of Leto (the Titaness mother of Apollo and Artemis), where she prayed that her daughter might change her sex. Leto answered the prayer and on the instant Leucippos was transformed into a masculine youth. Hairs pushed through where they should on a male, the correct bulges appeared, the incorrect bulges disappeared. Lampros was none the wiser and they all lived happily ever after.
For generations after this, the city of Phaestos celebrated a festival they called the Ekdusia.fn1 In this ritual all young Phaestian boys lived amongst women and girls, wore female clothes and had to swear an oath of citizenship before they could graduate from their agela, or youth corps, and acquire full male dress and status.fn2
Leucippos II, Daphne and Apollo
Interestingly, another myth tells of a different sex-changing LEUCIPPOS – this one a son of OENOMAUS – who fell in love with the naiad DAPHNE, whom Apollo also loved but had not so far wooed or seduced.
In order to be near Daphne, this Leucippos disguised himself as a girl and joined her company of nymphs. The jealous Apollo saw this and caused the reeds to whisper to Daphne that she and her attendants should bathe in the river. Accordingly they slipped out of their clothes and splashed about naked. When Leucippos, for obvious reasons, refused to remove his maidenly garb the girls teasingly stripped him bare, discovered his embarrassing and unmistakable secret, and angrily speared him to death.
By this time Apollo’s own lustful blood was up. He materialized and began a pursuit of Daphne. The terrified girl leapt out of the river and ran away as fast as she could, but he quickly gained on her. He had almost reached her when she sent up a prayer to her mother, Gaia and her father, the river god LADON. Just as Apollo closed in and touched her he felt her flesh change under his fingers. A thin bark formed over her breasts, her hair began to slither out into shining yellow and green leaves, her limbs wreathed themselves into branches and her feet slowly drove down roots into her mother Gaia’s receiving earth. A stupefied Apollo found that he was clutching not a naiad but a laurel tree.
For once in his life the god was chastened. The laurel became sacred to him and its wreath thenceforward crowned the brow, as I have said, of the winners of his Pythian Games at Delphi. To this day the winner of a great prize is still called a laureate.fn3
Galatea III and Pygmalion Too
The island of Cyprus, being the landing ground of spume-born Aphrodite, had long worshipped the goddess of love and beauty with a special fervour, earning Cypriots a reputation for libertine licentiousness and libidinous loose-living. Cyprus was thought of by the mainland as a degenerate place, an Island of Free Love.
In the southern port town of Amathus, a group of women known as the PROPOETIDES, or ‘daughters of Propoetus’, were so indignant at the amount of sexual licence that pervaded there, they even had the temerity to suggest that Aphrodite should no longer stand as the island’s patroness. To punish such blasphemous impertinence the wrathful Aphrodite visited upon these sanctimonious sisters feelings of insatiable carnal lust, at the same time ridding them of any sense of modesty or shame. So cursed, the women lost the ability to blush and began eagerly and indiscriminately to prostitute their bodies about the island.
A sensitive and wildly attractive young sculptor called PYGMALION saw the flagrant and shameless behaviour of the Propoetides and grew so disgusted that he decided to foreswear all love and sex in perpetuity.
‘Women!’ he muttered to himself as he set to work one morning on a commission to render in marble the face and figure of a general from Amanthus. ‘You won’t find me wasting my time on women. Oh no. Art is enough. Art is all. Love is nothing. Art is everything. Art is … well now, that’s strange …’
Pygmalion stepped back to look at his work and wrinkled his brow in surprise. His general was taking shape in the oddest way. He could have sworn the man had a beard. Furthermore, the old warrior may have been a little on the tubby side, but Pygmalion was sure he didn’t sport a pair of swelling breasts. Nor were his neck and throat so slender, smooth and irresistibly …
Pygmalion went out into the yard and dipped his head in the fountain of cold water that played there. Returning refreshed to the studio he looked again at his work in progress and could only shake his head in bewilderment. The general, when Pygmalion had been permitted to go round to his villa to study the great man’s features, had struck him as being constructed more on the lines of a warthog than anything human, and yet here he was emerging from the marble as nothing short of a refined and miraculous beauty. A distinctly feminine beauty at that.
Picking up a chisel, Pygmalion ran his artist’s eye over the work and knew that with some merciless and well-aimed blows he could easily enough get back on course and not waste the valuable block of marble for which he had paid a month’s income.
Crack, crack, crack!
This was more like it.
Tap, tap, tap!
Must have been some weird subconscious urge.
Chip, chip, chip!
Or indigestion perhaps.
Now, let’s step back again and see …
No!!!
Far from rescuing the work and bringing the general’s masculine and martial glare back to the face of his sculpture he had somehow managed only to amplify its soft femininity, grace, sensuality and – goddammit – sexiness.
He was in a fever now. Deep inside he knew he was no longer rescuing the general. He was on a mission to see through to the end the madness that had seized him.
The madness was of course the work of Aphrodite. She had not been pleased when one of the handsomest and most eligible young men of her island had chosen to turn his back on love. A young man moreover, whose seaside dwelling happened to be exactly where Aphrodite had made landfall after her birth in the waves and, she reasoned, ought therefore to vibrate with a special intensity of amorousness. Love and beauty, as most of us find out in the course of our lives, are remorseless, relentless and ruthless.
For days and nights Pygmalion laboured on in a frenzy of creativity, of literal enthusiasm. Generations of artists in all media since might have recognized the agonized, breathless ecstasy of inspiration that had seized him. No thought of food or drink – no conscious thought at all – came into his mind, as he tapped, hammered and hummed.
At last, as the pink flush of Eos and a nacreous flash of light from the east betokened the beginning of his fifth continuous day of work, he stepped back with the miraculous knowledge that only true artists understand: somehow, yes certainly, at last – it was finished.
He hardly dared raise his eyes. All his work thus far had been up close, detailed – the lineaments of the complete figure existed only in some dark inaccessible corner of his mind. For the first time he could take it all in. He took a deep breath and looked.
He cried out in shock and dropped his chisel.
From its exquisitely rendered toes to the perfectly worked flowers that wreathed the hair on its head the sculpture was far and away the best thing he had ever done. More than that, it was surely the most absolutely beautiful work of art that had ever been seen in the world. To a true artist like Pygmalion this meant it was more beautiful than any person that had ever been seen on earth, for he knew that art always exceeds the best that nature can manage.
Yet he saw that the figure he had rendered in marble from his enraptured imagina
tion was even more than the most absolutely beautiful thing now in the world. She was real. To Pygmalion she was more real than the ceiling above his head and the floor beneath his feet.
His heart was beating fast, his pupils had dilated, his breath was short and the very core of his being stirred in the most powerful and disturbing manner. It was joy and pain all at once. It was love.
The expression and posture of the girl – whose name he knew should be Galatea, for her marble loveliness was white as milk – were caught in a moment of sublime hesitation, between awakening and wonder. She seemed a little surprised, as if on the verge of gasping. At what? At the beauty of the world? At the handsomeness of the young artist who was feasting his eyes so hungrily upon her? Her features were regular and perfect, but so were the features of many girls. There was more to her than conventional appeal. An inner loveliness of soul sang from her very core. Her lines were sweepingly, swoopingly, swooningly smooth, supple and sensuous. Her breasts seemed softly to be pushing out, her nakedness made so much more alluring by the way her hand touched her throat in a gesture of sweetly modest alarm.
Pygmalion walked around her to take in the thrilling generosity of the curve of her buttocks and the glorious fullness of her thighs. Dared he put a hand to that flesh? He reached out – gently, so as not to bruise her. But his fingers met cold marble. Hard, unyielding marble. To the eye and through to the depths of her Galatea seemed quick, warm and alive, but to Pygmalion’s stroking hands and to the loving cheek he rested on her side she was as cold as death.