Narcissus

Narcissus

By Ariel Tsai

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Ariel Tsai

All rights reserved.

NARCISSUS

ISBN

978-1-63730-655-0 Paperback

978-1-63730-738-0 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-929-2 Ebook

Author’s Note

forget talking about sex: I wish

someone had sat me down when I was younger to tell

my unformed self you do not have to be anything. love

is not transactional conditional contractual.

your voice is worth hearing and you do not have to be anything.

you do not have to be good. your voice is worth hearing.

you do not have to be good. you are worth loving.

(from quota)

I have always been and still am an incredibly self-conscious person, in the sense of being overly conscious of myself to the point of mortification. Since identity is an eternally fluctuating work in progress, who am I was a persistently urgent and perpetually unanswerable question of mine from early on. That kind of instability can be frightening for a lonely, anxious child, so I sought to make sense of myself and my thoughts in terms of words.

The power of language—to create, to connect, to empower—has always fascinated me, as has its structure and sociocultural significance. The fact that English, my chosen artistic medium, is my native language but not my first language is metaphorically significant, I think. A lot of inane things have metaphorical significance to me because I, like so many others, suffer from the desire for my life to be meaningful. Maybe that’s why my thoughts so often take shape in poetry, wherein even the most mundane aspects of life and language and poetic structure can and do have significance.

Language and the world are both such big, unwieldy things, and yet through poetry, I can wield them just a little. The artist is a little god, shaping their little pieces of the world in their own image. When you can quantify the world around you and see familiar faces (and whose face is more familiar than your own?) from time to time as a result of your work, it is a comfort. And so I write poetry.

Poetry was something I turned to as a preteen struggling with the onset of chronic depression on top of all the normal woes of growing up: questioning my sexuality, grappling with my identity as a Taiwanese American, wondering if anything I ever did was going to matter if the Sun or climate crisis or natural disaster was going to swallow the Earth someday anyway, etcetera. I felt desperately alone so much of the time. I wrote this book because it’s the kind of book I wish I had encountered as a teenager: something that put what I was feeling into words, that could quantify these things that felt so awful and confusing and all-consuming.

I wrote this book, in other words, for myself. It’s not called Narcissus for nothing. But if it truly was written for me and me alone, what would be the point in publishing? To publish, there must be an audience in mind. So who am I thinking about? Who am I writing for? You, of course. You who feel alone in your grief or your anger or your fear. You whose trauma seems to be crushing you. You who are questioning yourself. You who are exploring yourself. You who are creating yourself. I hope it can make you feel at least a little less alone. My journey is my own, yes, but maybe you can see your own reflection in parts of it.

This collection is named after Narcissus, the Greek youth immortalized in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, known for his fatal love for himself. This sort of thing—writing something and deciding it’s worth sharing with the world—is always a bit of a narcissistic endeavor. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think most writing is an exercise of self-portraiture to one degree or another, since we can only write what we know and we can only know through the lens of our own perspective.

We are all too often trapped in our own solipsistic worlds, unable to truly connect with one another, a state of affairs that impedes understanding and stifles empathy. Lack of empathy is the key issue behind many of our society’s problems. It leads to misunderstandings, stereotyping, discrimination, and oppression. It leads to seeing other human beings as less than oneself and thus justifies their exploitation. Literature—what I spent my years as an undergraduate studying, and a lifetime loving—allows us to catch a glimpse into the soul of another in a way that nothing else can. It helps us understand the experiences of others. Regardless of genre, good literature lights a fire in the mind of the reader which burns away ignorance and shapes how they see and engage with the world from then on.

This book you have here in your hands is a piece of my soul: my message in a bottle, thrown out to sea. It catalogues what I found in my exploratory journey through the uncharted depths of myself. I’d ask you to be careful with it, but I don’t think I need to. I’m sure you’re able to feel the pulse of my thoughts through these pages too, and most people are good about being gentle to the little lives in their hands.

My therapist says I have trouble with vulnerability, because vulnerability takes trust, and trust in others is something I all too often struggle with. If I put my little glass house of a heart in someone else’s hands, who’s to say they won’t drop it, unintentionally or otherwise? But I’ve been working on that, and on the rest of me too. This book has been a part of that process. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then this book is a skylight or a glass wall. It’s as vulnerable as it gets.

I’m afraid, of course. But here I am. Perhaps me being brave about my vulnerability will make it easier for you to do the same. To tell your story and make your voice heard. To help people understand and empathize with you and people like you. Because of course you’re not alone. And of course, you are worth being heard, and you are worth being loved. All it takes is for you to be a little braver.

Warning: This book contains occasional mentions, frank discussions, and overwrought contemplations of topics which may be sensitive for some readers. These include but are not limited to mental illness, suicide, death, violence, abuse, and trauma. There is an appendix at the end of the book which has more details on which poems contain these sensitive themes for those who wish either to emotionally prepare themselves for or to entirely avoid said poems.

This book also rather unfortunately contains gratuitous use of multisyllabic words which are usually only acceptable in standardized testing, extensive classical and religious imagery, and concepts which ought to have remained within the firm bounds of a Philosophy 101 seminar. The author thinks at least most of it is tasteful enough but is also aware of her tendencies towards insensitive bluntness and towards beating the dead horse of a metaphor beyond even the hope of reincarnation to get every last damn inch she can out of it, so she sees fit to warn you. There is no appendix cataloging these crimes, however. The entirety of the book is rife with it. Caveat emptor, indeed.

As for the content of this collection, some of this is fiction, but all of it is truth. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents may or may not be the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events may or may not be coincidental. Read at your own risk.

I

"... she asked the seer,

Would he long years and ripe old age enjoy,

Who answered ‘If he shall himself not know.’"

- Ovid, Metamorphoses

(translated by A.D. Melville)

origins

my past which no longer inhabits me (or does it?).

i

in my mind’s eye, I am standing

in the driveway of my childhood home. looking up at

the stripped eaves quivering in the sweet air

and the blue haze of suburban twilight.

listening to the sounds of my past

echoing in the empty street.

sometimes, I struggle to articulate,

my thoughts moving like flies in syrup,

we were almost happy here.

but do I remember anymore?

(did you have dimples on both sides?

or just one? the color of your eyes so unsure.)

my present with its filthy fingers and

filthier mouth has dirtied my past,

coloring it in with a hazy patina:

ash gray. mourning white.

the black-blue-yellow of aging bruises.

ii

therapists and lovers alike try

to plumb my depths, looking for all the world like

children digging aimlessly in the sand

with all the importance and gravitas youthful naivete

(god, you were so young)

gives an unimportant task.

iii

my own childhood is a story which has

been told