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• 1 2019-03-15T08:35:36-07:00 EC(H)OLOGY 2 plain 2019-03-15T08:44:09-07:00 Echo, the Greek nymph suffering from a kind of speech impediment, is always read in relation to Narcissus, the spectacular youth who rejected Echo’s love.  The myths that go around never emphasise Echo’s love for Narcissus that she even died of mourning drawing away from the world of daily life and covering herself in foliage of leaves and flowers but the centre of discussion is always Narcissus’s rejection of Echo, a man’s rejection of a woman.  Echo’s rejection has an underlying thread that connects it with the human world’s perpetual pride in language, speech.  To Narcissus, Echo appeared to be a funny creature who cannot speak the way human beings normally do as she reverberated only the last few words or sounds of a spoken line.  It is this threshold between speaking and non-speaking that added to Echo’s pathos of lying on a margin.  However, Narcissus, the handsome youth, too underwent a sad end as he eventually fell in love with his own image reflected in water and became lovelorn in this one sided affair as his image could not love him back.  When Narcissus’s companions came to take his body to the pyre, they found in its place a.  
  Echo’s death in the foliage and Narcissus’s turning into a flower perhaps unite the lovers if not in human life then in a life that Sumana Roy calls “plant life;” if not through human speech then through a speech-act that is all about a different kind of language, communication of the ecosystem.  Ec(h)ology refers to study of such a language that we humans need to respond to overcoming our narcissistic love of one”self.”  This language is not as sophisticated as that of humans and in that sense suffers from a “lack,” an impediment like Echo.  But it is a communication that is not only about making coherent sounds but also about incoherence and sometimes silence.  In fact, when a voice is echoed what comes is a repetition followed by a silence.  We humans often suppress our inner voice that comes from our conscience and an echoed repetition is very much like hearing that inner voice and therefore perhaps echoes do not occur in crowded places.  An ecosystem is indeed a system, unlike a system of rigid boundaries and hierarchy, that appreciates our coming to terms with our own cruelties, limitless obsessions and lets us “talk” to them who have a different way of showing love and letting love.  Sumana Roy in the chapter “The Silence of Trees” in her book How I Became a Tree shares an “envious” experience of the language of love between bamboo leaves and wind:
  I recorded the sound of the crisp bamboo leaves moving in the wind- there was something delightfully sensuous and sexual in their refusal to be tamed, and also something terribly sad in the way they let the wind leave them and move on to a neighbouring lover.  I recorded the sound of that meeting- mating?- between the leaves and the wind.
  Later when she listens to that recording at home closing her eyes she says, ”I could make out my gasping at two places in this short one-minute video.  I felt sad and even envious: why could I not react to the wind like the leaves of the bamboo? (24).”  Roy’s experience is what I would like to call “ec(h)ology”cal and the “h” in “eco” is protected within a bracket lest anyone of us [humans] makes a narcissistic fun of this Echovian impediment of non-speaking of the beautifully non-“system”atic ecosystem.