Self-Portrait of an Autist
The Christian is not without a guide. Believers know that the triadic office of prophet/priest/king is fulfilled in Jesus. We aren’t looking for a writer, a thinker, or a musician to show us the way. Christ is the Way. That frees us up to not make idols of thinkers and makers when they do get things very right. There are a few examples in art and history, some with more poignancy and relevance than others. We will only consider the example of Narcissus and the way in which his story has been handled by artists.
In Scripture, we begin by understanding that textual meaning is established first and foremost by the original historic and grammatical context of the passage. Further meaning may be added by additional clarifying texts or manifold applications points may become apparent, but that doesn’t undo the primary and first sphere of interpretation being housed by the original context.
The story of Narcissus is a wonderful example of this in art. The blind prophet, Tiresias, has promised Liriope that her son’s life will be long and prosperous as long as he never ‘recognizes himself.’ However, when he rejects the love of Echo, he is then punished by Nemesis who leads him to a pool where he will see his own reflection. He falls in love with himself, at first believing the person in the reflection to be someone other than himself. Eventually, he dies of his inability to eat or drink, due to being so sick with self-love. The story is so true that the applications will continue to yield cautionary fruit in every culture.
In 1599, Caravaggio painted Narcissus. In it, the protagonist is looking at himself in the pool’s reflection with such stillness and mirror-like quality that people in the digital age are forced to see an uncanny relationship to the screen and the subsequent culture of selfies and a strange hybridization of voyeurism and exhibitionism so rampant in the false environments of social networks. Narcissus is both exhibitionist and voyeur. Caravaggio is noted to have painted Narcissus in a vest made of the same material as that worn by Mary Magdalene in his The Penitent Magdalene. Is this an attempt to identify hope for the narcissist in repentance or is it an identifying mark of the same kind of sin shared between the two of them prior to Magdalene’s repentance?
In almost all of the painted renditions of the myth, we see Narcissus losing his true self in the imaged version of himself. The mediated view of the self is almost never portrayed as being truthful to the viewer. In our day, this is so much the understood reality that companies like TooFame, SocialTradia, and Managergram will prepackage purchasable Instagram accounts that include weekend adventures, amazing meals, and more depending on your price-range. In fact, you can sell your already established instagram account to these companies, or in a private sale, to someone who will gladly portray you as themselves in order to have “real followers”. Strange realities like these, draw our eyes from Caravaggio to Salvador Dali, whose portrayal of Narcissus has him lost in a literal outward expression of something like body dysmorphia. His parts fade into one another and the overall sense is that the body has consumed itself. He is not only looking down, averting his eyes from Heaven, but he has no eyes in his head. And so, the prophetic nature of the content of artists and myth-makers, like Dali, is not necessarily to predict the future, but to summarize a recurring truth with such versatility that the truth within the form continues to wield the weight of relevance, regardless of the context within which it functions.
Numerous artists, for many years, have played off the very ideas set forth in the myth of Narcissus. Many have seen ways in which, going forward, the maladies of this pathological autism could continue to bear toxic fruit. Christian or not, perceptive people throughout time have seen introspection as being most appropriately paired with a qualifier like morbid.
For over 55 years, Yayoi Kusama has been reworking variations of her installation known as Infinity Rooms. The idea is the creation of a microcosm of mirrors, resulting in a small space being virtually opened up into an apparently much larger one. It lends itself to what Francis Schaeffer called the epistemology of the drug-experience. The answers that are only to be found outside a person are solely looked for within the person and the experience of vastness in the details is confused with a greater possibility of finding that for which they are hunting. Perhaps the most immediate and obvious consequence of this, however, is the creation of a space in which introspection and an imaging of the self is ever more the norm. More mirrors means a higher likelihood of self-objectification . . . a sort of feedback loop of subjectivity. Like old-timers say, “Wherever you go, there you are.” This, coupled with disorientation, makes her work prophetic in the same common kind of way we understand the myth of Narcissus and Caravaggio’s painting of it to be prophetic, they are able to say more than was intended by the original author. Often, however, as with Kusama’s work, this truth may reverberate apophatically, or through negation, rather than overtness.
The Gospel teaches human beings the most valuable of all maneuvers: the ability to avoid narcissism through the purposeful gaze of the viewer away from the self and onto God. Sinners are so self-obsessed, however, that we are like alter-egos to Midas. Everything we touch, rather than becoming gold, becomes a mirror. Taking one’s eyes off of oneself is only efficacious and fruit-bearing if they are then placed faithfully on the Creator. When we try to kill narcissism with anything else, even humanitarian service, apart from faith, the action will inevitably become an idol-building project.
Worship of the Triune God is the singularly effective tactic that has, as a design feature, the destruction of narcissism. By moving the epicenter of pleasure and worth from the self onto God and God alone, we avoid the inevitable implosion that accompanies every act of idolatry, whether self-directed or outward. God is pleased, when our gaze is on Him, to free us from the watery prison of our own delusion. Narcissus looks down. God calls us to look up. Narcissus wastes away from hunger. God tells us to taste and see that the Lord is good. Narcissus dies unsatisfied in his desire for an image of himself. God is pleased to accept the worship of all whose hope is in the Living Word, the Icon of God, the Head of an undying race of creatures who are made in His image and are being conformed to it.
