James Baquet

    There is something downright weird in the work of Salvador Dali. There is also something weird in the stories in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” The name itself means “changes,” and most of the stories feature some sort of transformation, often as surreal as a Dali painting.

    So when Dali takes a story from Ovid as his theme, the result — while weird — can be pleasingly congruent.

    Such is the case with his 1937 painting “Metamorphose de Narcisse” or “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus.”

    The story, as Ovid tells it in Book 3, is this: At his birth, the nymph who was the mother of the beautiful baby Narcissus asked a seer, “Will he live a long life?” and the answer was, “If he does not discover himself.”

    After scorning dalliance with any others, the grown Narcissus is cursed by the goddess Nemesis to fall in love with himself. That is why people overly full of self-love today are called “narcissists.” One day the boy came to “an unclouded fountain, with silver-bright water” — a perfect mirror — and when he went to slake his thirst, a different thirst was created, and he was “seized by the vision of his reflected form.”

    Not realizing it was his own reflection he saw, he tried to seize the image before him — and it vanished in ripples! Again and again he tried, and remained rooted to the spot, forsaking even bread, until at last he died, and a beautiful flower — narcissus poeticus, commonly called the narcissus, a type of daffodil — grew up where his body had lain.

    In Dali’s painting, the young lad is kneeling over his reflection, hands and feet in the water as he tries to merge with himself. Nearby, a stone figure resembling the same form stands — a previous Narcissus? or is this the same scene some time later? — but its head has turned into an egg (symbol of fertility) out of which — you guessed it — the flower springs.

    Dali wrote a poem to accompany the painting’s first exhibition which reads, in part, “Narcissus loses his being in the cosmic vertigo in the deepest depths of which is singing the cold and Dyonisiac siren of his own image.”

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. nature spirit, usually seen in the form of a young woman

    2. small waves on water

    3. flirting

    4. dizziness

    5. rejecting or refusing with contempt

    6. a nymph who fatally attracts men

    7. fitting, suitable

    8. ease, as water eases thirst

    9. wild, unrestrained

    10. fixed, firmly planted