Narcissus Narcosis

There was once a man who looked in the mirror and said:

"This form is repulsive."

And so he took it upon himself to change it. He injected himself with certain psychedelics until his arms bruised black and his veins scarred hard and the blood boiled in his heart and he could feel no pain. And one day he gazed again upon his reflection, wreathed in all the living colours of hallucination, and he said:

"What I see is beautiful, but its beauty is unreal."

And thus knew that he must wreak further changes upon himself. By now, he needed to constantly use the drugs he had begun taking, for fear that his strength would fail him, for fear that he would never see his dream fulfilled.

So things continued as they had before, and one day he came to pass the mirror, and set eyes upon his own metamorphosis. His skin had faded to grey transluscence, mapped by scarred roads among dark abcessed caves amid the sharply visible spires and arches of his bones. And over and amid all this a river flooded, gushing red from the most recent puncture on his arm. He saw this and was awe-struck, and was possessed by the spirit of inspiration. The spirit guided his hand and mind as he opened his skin in a myriad of wounds and rejoiced in the colour that painted him. He cut slits in his scalp so that the blood would stream through his hair, and with this he was able to colour and set it into crimson tendrils that flapped wetly against his back.

This in turn inspired him to self-flagellation with a many-tailed whip festooned with hooks and razor wire. He scourged his back and body until his flesh was layed open and bleeding over much of its surface. Then he had to rest a while, the whip grown slippery with blood as tears and sobs of joy blinded his eyes and wracked his body. It was as he administered an increased dose of those substances which gave him the strength to carry out his Great Work that he was next inspired.

Through his cheeks he cut slits, and became drunk on the blood that poured down his throat. Through the tissue of his legs, his chest, his genitals he thrust steel wires, which he left protruding as gleaming streamers and spikes. Through each lip he passed fish-hooks, and with wire and knife he re-shaped his ears to a form more pleasing to his eyes.

When at last he came to crawl and drag himself before the mirror (for he had in the joys of his labour quite forgotten its purpose for a time), he gasped to see himself. He would not have known the vibrant red and glorious vision before his eyes as that vile insipid thing he once had been. And yet, whilst beautiful, his work was not complete.

Again he grasped a blade and sliced open his forearm, passing through tendon, vein, and artery, exposing bone, until at last, with blurring vision, he was able to gaze upon his reflected self and think:

"This has been made beautiful,"

and then died of loveliness.