Narcissus’s Home
February 5, 2024
A hideaway cubby hole playhouse with sliding doors and hidden compartments and rolling movable wardrobes and shelves, where people suddenly turn into furniture and the furniture seems to move about of its own accord and all are decorated with glass windows in unnecessary places like the sides of bookcase shelves, so that mirrors seem to beckon everywhere but none are true and all are occluded. Every pocket and every slot, every shelf and every closet has a false bottom or a trick door, and you can hide memories everywhere, anywhere, and always catch a glimpse of yourself doing so, in a glass, darkly. That’s why you can never quite remember where you put it, because your distorted self is so distracting.
Such a place can only be navigated roughly; this dresser was over there yesterday, and it was a woman named Matilda.
You need a key, a legend, a map. You may spot a place you know a memory is in, but when you get there, open it, and look, it may not be what you expect. Which is to say, it may not serve your purpose. That’s why you need a map. A story, a piece of music, a feeling—something to tell you what to do with what you have found. And that can hardly be called navigation. The experience is re-screened, again, through a glass darkly; the memory is, again, remembered at a distance. The self is further dismembered.
Narcissus’s home is a labyrinth of the soul, a prison of the mind. It is a memory palace built for forgetting.