ECHO

There is a strange elision within the curse that Juno utters upon Echo, a gap between the terms of the curse as Juno utters them and the actual effect on Echo’s speech.  It is from within this gap that Echo’s famous mimesis emerges, and since Juno most definitely does not condemn the nymph to mimesis but merely to the far less ingenious ‘briefest use of speech’, it is perhaps reasonable to assert that the mimetic echo is somehow the nymph’s stroke of genius, an invention from within the term of oppression—a song from the prison of failing language, a mockery of mortality.  Listening to an echo we hear our own words die, they answer themselves by saying nothing new and then they die.  When we first hear an echo it pleases us.  There is a childlike pleasure in hearing this confirmation of our sound, not unlike seeing the vapors of your breath on a cold day.  We are apparently locked for the term of our existence in the impossible agon of proving that our existence is real, that it is of the same substance and nature of the world’s scattered objects who paradoxically prove their reality by being not us.