I like the Scylla/Circe idea...but why not Charybdis? That's an even more blatant cunnic/yonic symbol (okay, can I get my head out of the gutter?).
We can safely and securely look to Mary as the model for the good, nay, preeminent way of becoming nothing. In one way, she is merely a paragon of humility, the vessel in which God becomes incarnate. Yet she is given to utter the Magnificat. Aside from that, her only message--echoed down through the centuries--is "do whatever he tells you" (Jn. 2:5). She "ponders all these things in her heart" (Lk. 2:19). Like Carlton Farthington, she has no content of her own; she echoes, contemplates, or makes manifest the content of others. But in her case, the only one held within her frame--within the ribs of her proscenium, so to speak--is the Almighty, the ground of all being.
Carlton Farthington exhibits the bad version of becoming nothing.
Cut off from the ground of his being, he seeks to appropriate the being of others. He seeks to be the outer frame, the last arch in the proscenium, the maelstrom that draws in and envelops the existence of others. This, as I've pointed out before, leads to the near nothingness of Hell. Losing all inner integrity, he eventually implodes. Like a collapsed sun at the center of a black hole, he becomes hyper-massive, infinitesimal, concentrated and trapped within himself along with all the other damned ones who have drifted across his "event horizon." Nothing, not even the remaining light within him, can muster the velocity to escape the gravitational field that results.
Could this role be played like a woman? She would basically be a Charybdis at that point. Smacks a little of adolescent, Kerouacian misogyny. I think your second email suggests that maybe he should remain a man and that Mary is the heroine of the entire story. She manages to do what we all were made to do. Everyone else does it in distorted ways. Some of those ways can be rerouted or redeemed.
Others lead direct to damnation.
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