Ovid tells us that Echo was a mountain nymph, cursed to never speak until spoken to, and then doomed only to repeat the end of what is said to her. Thinking of this now, I realise that there are several Greek myths involving speech and the inability to speak--and all involve women deprived of the power of speech or of the ability to be heard and understood. In all cases it is a punishment for being an object of desire: some are punished by male gods for having resisted their advances, others are punished by female gods for having been raped or just desired by their husbands.
In one version of Echo's story, she rejects and flees from the god Pan and for this she is killed. She's torn apart (the Greeks have a love and a fear for this, death by dismemberment) and her bones are then strewn around the earth. Aphrodite loves her voice and preserves it, and it remains when nothing else does. Like what remains of her body, it's spread out everywhere and exists both everywhere and nowhere, and in no place entire or whole.
In Ovid's version, Echo's shade falls in love with Narcissus, and follows him in the woods. Separated from the friends he was hunting with, he shouts, Is anyone here? And Here! she answers. Here!
I'll stay here, he says, you come to me--and come to me, to me, she calls back.
Stay there, he says, confused, I'll come.
Come, come, she says.
What it feels like to me is like someone has walked down the corridor of my mind. All doors were open for him, and he has walked through and picked up each object. He’s handled each, turned it over, cradled it in those hands that have parted my thighs and lifted my legs over his shoulders, and I feel weaker now under those metaphorical hands than I do under the real. The subtle probing mind is so much more dangerous and seductive to someone like me than the gentle tongue, or the insistent thrust. Ultimately though he’s left, or he needs to not enter certain rooms now. What it feels like is that these items, precious to me, were looked at and examined carefully and then put back carelessly, rejected. Everything is slightly in disarray, everything has been handled, and when I look at them now these things that were precious and seemed rare no longer do. They look like the unwanted items after a rummage sale, strewn about or at least handled and discarded. In my mind’s eye I see myself naked and splayed and him lifting himself off me, satisfied and contained, while I’m left raw and wet and exposed, still shuddering and gasping. In these internal rooms now my feet echo on the floor, once again there’s no one here but me, yet somehow I am poorer. The rooms are suddenly too big and feel empty, and what’s in them now looks worthless. I wonder why I opened the door to his knock and why I gave him the keys. He still wants everything, or almost everything. Everything I am thinking or doing or feeling, but not what I feel about him. Us. I wonder about sacrifice, and where the limits of it are. I think my heart has already been made stone, and yet it still does not suffice.
I don’t feel the pain I once did, and distance no longer has the same power to hurt me…distance feels natural now, as it must have to Echo, eventually.
Sex with him now is no longer with me, but with parts of me. Each part is worshipped but I am not there. Sex is dirtier now, even more explicit, harder, even more addictive.
What does it say about me that I need that even more now? But it feels like I am a doll pulled apart and strewn around the room, and now each part is individually worshiped and commented on but it is not me. My ass, my pussy, my breasts–all are now in isolation and it is no longer me that is praised or wanted or adored. I’ve been dismembered and now my legs and arms and hips are lifted and commented on, my parts are moved and arrayed, yet I am no longer present–I am no longer seen, because he no longer wishes to see me entire. If he did see me whole, he’d see how I tear and break under his hands.
Come, he says, and Come. Come, I answer. More Ovid, here.
Labels: Echo, metamorphoses |
Closed/on Hiatus
![Your writing in the other hand [sic] is pure filth and disgusting.](http://www.gotbears.com/gund/sesamestreet/75985.jpg){kind=link}