The narcissist is always thirsty. Caravaggio's painting of Narcissus by water's edge is the best portrayal of narcissism ever imagined in painting or anything else. Narcissus, shirtsleeves up, gazes down into his reflection. A lake? A pond? A waterhole? A dream? The source of everything without ending?--its width & depths secrets beyond the picture frame. No room for anyone else, Narcissus the object is found finding narcissus the subject, a half boy longingly & hauntingly wanting to be whole again, straddling the bank, crab-like. Is it heaven? hell? limbo? Narcissus angles his angel body to fit within a glass box of his own imagining. No condensation or buzzing insects blemish the glass, just impenetrable dark as stillness fills his world of halves. Some time ago Narcissus, thirsty, faltered across his image, an image that never reaches the rim. Now he crouches, like a table, eagerly craning his neck to get a closer, better, badder look. One hand planted on the shore, the other caressing the depths, already lost, drinking the empty. This lost caress under a body without purchase puts pressure on a naked knee that monstrously muscles onto the shore, a deformed body part that aches under the weight of longing, about to burst before Narcissus is dragged in a downward dive. Like the optical deformity in Holbein's The Ambassadors, the knee divides our attention & obscures our want for symmetry, for balance, for wholeness. But the knee will hold; it has held for years, bulking up as Narcissus drinks forever the image that he loves more than himself. Always thirsty.