Modern Nature: February 23
Thursday 23
Brilliant sunshine, skies so clear your vision is stretched to the horizon. As the day passed the winds gathered force, throwing up increasingly dramatic clouds, which eventually turned to rain falling in grey veils. A rainbow arched over the sea, and the shingle glistened in the last moments of sunlight - a myriad cat’s eyes. Then the hail came with the dark, setting up a staccato drumming on the corrugated metal roof. My poor daffodils, which greeted me on my return, are now beaten to the ground.
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Narcissus is derived not from the name of the young man who met his death vainly trying to embrace his reflection in crystal water, but from the Greek narkao (to benumb); though of course Narcissus, benumbed by his own beauty, fell to his death embracing his shadow. Pliny says ‘Narce Narcissum dictum non a fabuloso puero,’ named Narcissus from narkê, not from the fabled boy. Socrates called the plant ‘crown of the infernal gods’ because the bulbs, if eaten, numbed the nervous system. Perhaps Roman soldiers carried it for this reason (rather than for its healing properties) as the American soldiers smoked marijuana in Vietnam.
This prompted me to ring Matthew Lewis, the portrait photographer, and ask him if he would take a photo of a young man holding a daffodil. Last year he took a beautiful portrait of a handsome Italian, stripped to the waist, holding a lemon, the juice of which he used to dissolve heroin to fill his syringe. Narcissus, narcotics, self-absorption: benumbed retreat into self.
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