I was preoccupied for a year with retelling the myth of Echo and Narcissus. There had been many versions of the Narcissus story but the character of Echo first appeared in Ovid’s (AD 8) version in the third book of his Metamorphoses. Echo was a beautiful nymph who – because of a curse- could only repeat the last words people said. She fell in love with Narcissus; he rejected her; and she wasted away. The Gods then punished Narcissus; they made him fall in love with his own reflection. When he realized that that was an impossible love, he too wasted away. In his place, narcissus flowers have grown. Echo's bones turned to stone and all that has remained of her is her haunting voice.
I tried to rescue echo. I used a transfer technique to reveal Ovid’s version of the story onto different surfaces. The process necessitated mirroring, transferring and then excavating the text. I tried to excavate Echo from the wall, from the floor, and finally from the bath. And that’s where I eventually left Echo, submerged in water in a body of text that will forever lock her to her self-defeating passion. I had realized then that rescuing Echo was not necessary. Maybe in the ego-echo duality there was an underlying complementarity that should not be dismissed. Patricia Berry (2008) emphasized the beauty of the hollowness of echo; she suggested that narcissism was only part of an archetype; the rest had to do with echo and her longing.
