Man who thinks Man beyond the boundaries of the rational cannot be the object of his thought, since it can only be directed towards a 'universal', the result of the employment of universal 'energies' (rationality, logic). The description of himself that Man can produce in this way cannot but be a reaffirmation of those 'universals' and the faculties that find expression in them. Man, the subject and object of rational thought, who flees love to confirm himself in faith in the ideal, and man reflected in the pond, who emanates of himself only the image and not the power of his means of domination, will never be the same man. Narcissus dies in the attempt to be reunited with himself, in the yearning to be united with the object of his knowing, which only Dionysus can know. His object remains beyond the boundaries of his own discourse, of his own possibility of domination, of the exercise of his own power. "Si se non noverit "1, Tiresias, the prophet, had replied when questioned about the longevity of the child: he will live a long time, but only if he does not know himself... In myth, too, the knowledge of Man is a negation of Man. When its image appears, it burns, uncircumscribable by the conceptual apparatus, by the technical instrumentation of language, and the flame leads those who are mirrored to the madness of pain. "Uror amore mei, flammas moveoque feroque!"2.
Man cannot make himself the object of his knowledge, because thinking about Man leads to his negation. Everything that is not Man, in fact, is always rationally rethinkable, without losing its essence independent of being the object of thought, while in order to think about itself, Man must deny himself that independence and with it the infinity of the unthought portion of his own essence. Rationality, on the other hand, is not content with a partial conception of its objects; it moves from wholeness to wholeness, and that is why rational thought about Man is a negation of his non-rationalised surplus, that is, of his infinite portion.
Man-in-particular, when he inhabits the world and acts out of the dynamics of interest, regardless of the fact that his strength is recognised as possession of the means and virtues disposed by power, is the actuation of a free gesture. When he frees himself from power relations, when he 'comes out of the statistics' without 'giving himself up to the woods'3, he exercises a will that is extraneous, but not contrary, to the 'substantial will'4, on which Man has built the foundation of self-assertion and in which the 'Cogito' is periodically renewed, according to the evolutionary phases of discourse. The rational thought of human essence empties Man of his infinite and unthinkable essence, of which he can regain possession, or rather in which he can experience the boundless dimension that is his own, by divesting himself not of the rational in itself, but of the categorical obligations that rational thought, hitherto conceived as causal continuity, has imposed on him.
The living Man remains beyond what is rationally knowable, and every definition of Man is an act of compulsion to abandon inspiration, to return to this side of the rational, to kill it with the mirror of utopias. If thought remains distinct from art, if it does not admit of an inspirational phase of an ascetic order, it periodically leads Man to the impression of non-existence, to uprooting, to the continuous, unhappy and aphasic frequentation of the idea of nothingness. Man's thought gradually becomes impossible, not only because the utopias of ulteriority and globality to which it leads are necessarily emptied of their content and converge to the purely formal entities of point and space, but because, wanting to think only in terms of the rational, he renounces his own Life, which can only be manifested as an irrational, ahistorical and esoteric narration of what the living person is continually encountering.
Life, it will be said, cannot only be the expression of something other than itself, and the will to express it does not only import the assumption of the monopoly of the 'narratable'. The will to know leads not only to the rational predictability of action and the consequent assumption of power, but also to consonance with a vital vibration that takes place beyond the rational and historical time, beyond the "door of mystery". There Man is alive, while all that is left of Narcissus is a flower, an icon from the radiant centre, from the point and the space around it. Echo joins the chorus of the Niads, her sisters, and their lament resounds eternally.
But already Echo was repeating what Narcissus said in life, her every utterance resonated, and of that sound she radiated an inhabited space, the human city enjoyed; her wrath was in the echo of the breaking branches, just as her joy reached us in the joyfulness of her ecstatic, contemplative song. Narcissus, before he wants to know himself, is among us, and is full of esoteric wisdom: before he mirrors himself, Narcissus is Orpheus, and his iconic and sonorous emission within a space populated by animals and humans makes him desirable. Eternal echoes his song and eternal is the desire it arouses: after the death of Narcissus, the eternal, ahistorical resonance of his song becomes itself a mystery.
Outside the myth, but in the field of its resonance, it is man himself who produces the mystery in the song; since he is infinitely his life, since his life is the song, he is mystery. Man cannot be thought of, one can only hear his voice, or the Echo. The same desire that singing moves and binds the living and reproduces them cannot be described, only sung. The same thought produced by the court of reason can only be expressed in an emission, which in turn will resound infinitely, but whose creator will perish, touched by Tiresias' prophecy, because he will have wanted to mirror himself. It is no longer an accident: we are familiar with the pitfalls of the mirror, but the desire for power still leaves us believing that that is the way, and the din with which propaganda fills the streets renders inaudible the song of Echo or that of man, whether he has decided to be Narcissus or not.
To live in the simultaneity of listening and singing, to know one can be Narcissus or Orpheus; this is the bliss and freedom of today, salvation from nothingness, in listening to the song that was and will also be one's own. Abandoning the forms of the centre (point) of the whole (space) as existential presumptions, inhabiting one's own 'continuous origin', the inner image that resonates in myth, amplified by vibrant masks. A new centrality, it may be said, is possible for Man (who is written here again with a capital letter, animated by a new instrumental, playful ideality) precisely if he were to abandon the idea of the centre, if he were able not to be Narcissus, or to be so only as long as he lives as Orpheus, and not to abandon himself to that death of hardship of thinking nothingness, to the suffering of the doggedness to power. Man would live, he would not be reduced to the nostalgic beauty of a flower, if the centrality he deserves were no more than the decision to undertake the esoteric journey, to rise to listen to the sound of myth, without mediation, free from the mirror game of utopia and ideology. A decision that does indeed entail a rupture in the political and discursive fabric of the present, but not in order to constitute a new civil order; a revolution yes, but one that may be the last, insofar as it is capable of reconciling the Man who lives in the world with the Man who lives in myth, and realising at last that they are the same Man.

Carmelo Leotta
May 2022