but love persists, and grows with the grief of rejection

original writing cross-posted to ao3 and wordpress

[shiximi]

Mighty Nein - Part 1 > Done for Critical Role and most recently featured in their 10th anniversary trading card collector's box.

[zaraasays]

‘The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium’ (Nussbaum)

[echomourns]

echo

Listen, Muse, as I sing of deception.

The queen of the gods, stupefied by my winged words and tangled in an inescapable web of conversation, waited dumbly while her husband betrayed her over and over with nymph and mortal alike.

My wit always drew envy and ire. Troublesome. I knew her vengeance would find me. One should always return with equal duty that which they had received; such were the laws of men and of the gods. 

The goddess stole my words, ripped them from my throat, tied down my tongue, pierced through my jaw with divine power that even the divine feared. In her anger, she restricted my speech so the only sounds I could make were those thrown out before me, by anyone except myself.  She made me into a borrower. Poet no longer, she believed it would silence me.

Yet my voice prevailed. I was unsilenced. I chose when I spoke, which words to capture and reform with my mouth - I chewed and swallowed them, then spat them back. I stored them away fervently, but no matter how I hid them - behind my teeth, under my tongue - they would vanish, replaced with the next words uttered in my earshot. I became an injured hunter, a pair of elusive lovers, a nightingale or a chattering cicada.

He appeared in the wake of the naiads' beautiful songs, sung as they lounged by a crystal-clear spring. I trapped their words, plucked them from the air, and carefully laid them out on my tongue. But as I let them fly, his melodic voice cut through the dense trees I hid amongst and wrenched them from me. 

“Anyone here?” he called, searching. I did not wish to call back, but my voice had already spread its wings, and before I could stop, I had already responded, “Here.”

Spurned by my resounding voice, he entered the clearing where the naiads had lounged. The sun caught in his hair, shining golden threads, beauty incarnated. I thought he must be the son of some god for no mortal could glow in such a way. 

Perhaps I loved him at first glance. Fine limbs statuesque in their beauty, skin flawless like sleek marble, eyes like stars wrenched down from the night sky. Enviable. Fleeting. 

Or perhaps I did not love him but his words. Poetic and unceasing, they gave themselves to me and I gleefully stole them, winding them around myself and sending them back. The cadence of his voice was like a lyre, and when I returned the words he spouted, they became imbued with some power, a persuasion I did not realise I had given up. I manipulated his words to fit my voice and drew him in closer - he followed without hesitation, enthralled. He hung on every note of my voice. In that moment, I became something of my past, one with cunning words that not even the queen of the gods could resist. 

I reached out to touch him. Too rash. My movements were clumsy where my words were calculated and the shock of it made me fumble. 

“Take your hands off!” he screeched, like strings wound too tight. “I’ll die before I let you have me!”

“Have me!” I shouted back, out of control. The words I had claimed as my own betrayed me, embarrassed me, and after suffering such rejection, my pride burnt and crumbled. 

I retreated to the steep mountains, in a narrow cave. Over and over, I repeated those final words - they bounced off the walls and back into me, an unending loop. Gradually, I melded into them. 

My body disappeared. My flesh grew thin and my bones brittle, until they dried and became dust. All that remained of me was a voice and words that were not my own, infinitely repeating.  

Now formless, nothing limited my scope, the places I could go, things I could see, sounds I could hear. I listened to everything. No longer did I have a tongue to be bound by singular words that reached my ears. I heard all, could speak all, and all could hear me in the wake of each utterance. 

I sought him out and found him trapped in the glassy surface of the same spring at which we had parted. 

I watched him melt. This love drained the life from him. And I observed as my lingering voice haunted him like his beauty and his cruelty haunted me. He mourned himself, beating his chest with delicate hands. I relayed his laments to himself, taking his voice as well as his words and once again becoming the trickster. The reflection of beauty that enraptured him gained speech, and never could he bring himself to part with such that returned his affections. The object of his desire meant nothing to me. He loved an image; I was naught but sound. Both hollow. A shade of desperate imagination, a whisper in the wind.  

His death was slow. His body collapsed into itself, starved, feasting on his own flesh as he stared into the glassy water at himself. Even as his beauty drained from him, escaping into the earth, he did not look away, did not stop whispering sweet nothings. For as long as the words escaped him, I took them and spoke them back to him. My resounding voice kept him there - they held him tenderly, but they were shackles. Cold iron warmed by the heat of his desire for what lay reflected in the ripples.  

His lifeless form slumped forward and rolled into the spring, disturbing the water’s calm façade.  

Although his mortal body vanished, his beauty nourished the earth, and where he once sprawled across the grass, small flowers sprouted and bloomed. Pure white petals crowded around a golden centre that caught the sun and reflected it back. The sight called back to grey bones bleached white by the sun and the golden skin that had been blanched of life, melting from the skeleton. Though beautiful in life, his death was the same gore as any other. The flowers, planted by the pity of some god, were a false consolation, for they too will die just the same. They will wither and their petals will fall and their stems will collapse and be sealed underground until the earth warms over and their beauty will emerge again. Thus began an unending cycle of life and death, beauty and its withering. 

Sound cannot die; I remain long after they are forgotten, infinitely resounding.  

No voice is impervious to an echo. Even the goddess that cursed me and the god king that watched it happen, thankless, are not immune to my claim of their words. I stand in the shadow of every utterance, carve my place inside each word. My voice, once stolen, now becomes all.  

END.

[echomourns]

dialogue quoted from Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Ovid, Metamorphoses (2010)

this was originally written for a module which discussed women author's modern retellings of ancient mythology. couple of annotations from the original piece:

I found the character Echo to be an interesting case study for the presence of women’s voices in ancient myth and a means of exploring how modern women writers interact with ancient narratives.

I felt a distinction needed to be made between Echo’s voice and the words that she uses. Although she is limited to using only words said by others, Echo retains her own individual voice and therefore a level of autonomy. Also, Ovid does not go into detail on the specific limitation of Juno’s punishment, therefore I have made Echo exploit these loopholes. She is not forced to use every word she hears, nor are there temporal limitation on how long she can ‘hold on’ to these words. This makes her later interactions with Narcissus more purposeful, rather than thoughtless and spurned by desire, although not immune to mistakes.

In a similar fashion, modern authors exploit ‘holes’ in ancient narratives to create ‘new’ ones that fit their own purposes - they rework the ‘words’ of ancient authors to fit their own ‘voice.’ In this sense, Echo becomes a very literal interpretation of the “thieves of language” idea in feminist theory, where women writers ‘steal’ language which is inherently coded with male privilege and uses it to express personal, feminine experiences. (Ostriker (1982), 69) Similarly, the way that Echo manipulates the words she takes resembles a revisionist approach to mythology, where existing myths are appropriated in order to fit an author’s individual ends and to contribute to wider cultural change. (Ostriker (1982), 72)

Upon her death, Echo becomes an echo, not to Narcissus, but rather the sound itself, since the modern concept and word for “echo” is derived from the myth of Echo. In death, Echo becomes more than life or divinity; sound is ungoverned and omnipresent, which opposes the control of the gods and of man, demonstrating that her fate of becoming bodiless does not strip her of autonomy, but rather grants her more freedom than before.

Meanwhile Narcissus is ‘trapped’ by his own beauty, and as long as he lives he will never be free. Even in death, as Ovid describes (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.552-3), he remains trapped by his reflection in the water of the Styx and is never able to cross, forever a shade. This acts as a clear contrast to Echo, who is no longer bound by mortal form.

In a stark contrast to Echo’s death, Narcissus death has him melting, draining away, and his body falls into the water. In a way, his body becomes the water that feeds the narcissus flowers that become his posthumous existence. In life, his beauty was his most noteworthy feature, and it is for this that he is remembered - to a modern audience, however, this focus on beauty is more commonly seen in regards to female characters. Similarly, Ostriker notes how flowers, water, and earth are common images for the female body used by modern poets, (Ostriker (1982), 71) yet ancient myths most commonly use these to describe young boys (for example, Adonis and Hyacinthus). Therefore, when these contrasting ideas of masculinity and femininity collide in a modern reimagining of ancient myth, a cognitive dissonance occurs and the character of Narcissus assumes an intermediate position between modern and ancient cultural coding, bridging between the two.

The difference between the deaths of Echo and Narcissus is highlighted by the dichotomy of ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ that emerges between them - Echo’s death ‘burns’ until she is naught but ‘bones’ and ‘dust,’ while Narcissus ‘melts’ and becomes water and flower, brining new life. Their posthumous existences also contrast in this way - the ‘life’ of narcissus flowers ebbs and flows, while dust and sound are ever present and will remain as such even when all life is extinguished. Echo, therefore, achieves a form of immortality greater than Narcissus or any figure, even the divine.

for interested parties, references from Ostriker, A. S. (1982) “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking.” Signs 8 (1): 68–90. 

[echomourns]

echo

Listen, Muse, as I sing of deception.

The queen of the gods, stupefied by my winged words and tangled in an inescapable web of conversation, waited dumbly while her husband betrayed her over and over with nymph and mortal alike.

My wit always drew envy and ire. Troublesome. I knew her vengeance would find me. One should always return with equal duty that which they had received; such were the laws of men and of the gods. 

The goddess stole my words, ripped them from my throat, tied down my tongue, pierced through my jaw with divine power that even the divine feared. In her anger, she restricted my speech so the only sounds I could make were those thrown out before me, by anyone except myself.  She made me into a borrower. Poet no longer, she believed it would silence me.

Yet my voice prevailed. I was unsilenced. I chose when I spoke, which words to capture and reform with my mouth - I chewed and swallowed them, then spat them back. I stored them away fervently, but no matter how I hid them - behind my teeth, under my tongue - they would vanish, replaced with the next words uttered in my earshot. I became an injured hunter, a pair of elusive lovers, a nightingale or a chattering cicada.

He appeared in the wake of the naiads' beautiful songs, sung as they lounged by a crystal-clear spring. I trapped their words, plucked them from the air, and carefully laid them out on my tongue. But as I let them fly, his melodic voice cut through the dense trees I hid amongst and wrenched them from me. 

“Anyone here?” he called, searching. I did not wish to call back, but my voice had already spread its wings, and before I could stop, I had already responded, “Here.”

Spurned by my resounding voice, he entered the clearing where the naiads had lounged. The sun caught in his hair, shining golden threads, beauty incarnated. I thought he must be the son of some god for no mortal could glow in such a way. 

Perhaps I loved him at first glance. Fine limbs statuesque in their beauty, skin flawless like sleek marble, eyes like stars wrenched down from the night sky. Enviable. Fleeting. 

Or perhaps I did not love him but his words. Poetic and unceasing, they gave themselves to me and I gleefully stole them, winding them around myself and sending them back. The cadence of his voice was like a lyre, and when I returned the words he spouted, they became imbued with some power, a persuasion I did not realise I had given up. I manipulated his words to fit my voice and drew him in closer - he followed without hesitation, enthralled. He hung on every note of my voice. In that moment, I became something of my past, one with cunning words that not even the queen of the gods could resist. 

I reached out to touch him. Too rash. My movements were clumsy where my words were calculated and the shock of it made me fumble. 

“Take your hands off!” he screeched, like strings wound too tight. “I’ll die before I let you have me!”

“Have me!” I shouted back, out of control. The words I had claimed as my own betrayed me, embarrassed me, and after suffering such rejection, my pride burnt and crumbled. 

I retreated to the steep mountains, in a narrow cave. Over and over, I repeated those final words - they bounced off the walls and back into me, an unending loop. Gradually, I melded into them. 

My body disappeared. My flesh grew thin and my bones brittle, until they dried and became dust. All that remained of me was a voice and words that were not my own, infinitely repeating.  

Now formless, nothing limited my scope, the places I could go, things I could see, sounds I could hear. I listened to everything. No longer did I have a tongue to be bound by singular words that reached my ears. I heard all, could speak all, and all could hear me in the wake of each utterance. 

I sought him out and found him trapped in the glassy surface of the same spring at which we had parted. 

I watched him melt. This love drained the life from him. And I observed as my lingering voice haunted him like his beauty and his cruelty haunted me. He mourned himself, beating his chest with delicate hands. I relayed his laments to himself, taking his voice as well as his words and once again becoming the trickster. The reflection of beauty that enraptured him gained speech, and never could he bring himself to part with such that returned his affections. The object of his desire meant nothing to me. He loved an image; I was naught but sound. Both hollow. A shade of desperate imagination, a whisper in the wind.  

His death was slow. His body collapsed into itself, starved, feasting on his own flesh as he stared into the glassy water at himself. Even as his beauty drained from him, escaping into the earth, he did not look away, did not stop whispering sweet nothings. For as long as the words escaped him, I took them and spoke them back to him. My resounding voice kept him there - they held him tenderly, but they were shackles. Cold iron warmed by the heat of his desire for what lay reflected in the ripples.  

His lifeless form slumped forward and rolled into the spring, disturbing the water’s calm façade.  

Although his mortal body vanished, his beauty nourished the earth, and where he once sprawled across the grass, small flowers sprouted and bloomed. Pure white petals crowded around a golden centre that caught the sun and reflected it back. The sight called back to grey bones bleached white by the sun and the golden skin that had been blanched of life, melting from the skeleton. Though beautiful in life, his death was the same gore as any other. The flowers, planted by the pity of some god, were a false consolation, for they too will die just the same. They will wither and their petals will fall and their stems will collapse and be sealed underground until the earth warms over and their beauty will emerge again. Thus began an unending cycle of life and death, beauty and its withering. 

Sound cannot die; I remain long after they are forgotten, infinitely resounding.  

No voice is impervious to an echo. Even the goddess that cursed me and the god king that watched it happen, thankless, are not immune to my claim of their words. I stand in the shadow of every utterance, carve my place inside each word. My voice, once stolen, now becomes all.  

END.