We do not know if
Orpheus really existed. Yet a gesture from his legend, the gaze of Orpheus or
Eurydice’s disappearance, is to us more poetically electrifying and tragic than
the particular details constructed around his possible existence. That moment,
that passionate synecdoche where Blanchot situates the beginning of writing
(‘writing begins with the gaze of Orpheus’), is a splitting that acquires such
mythical transcendence that it is capable of configuring the legend and
inventing the biography of its hero.
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| Rodin's Orpheus & Eurydice |
Orpheus’s gaze is a ritual gaze, is like a myth in
itself where the disappearance of what is loved becomes an essential condition
for the birth of song. But it is not a myth in itself. The gaze that by turning
disappears what was coming behind is the configuration of a literary space.
With a turn on its axis, the gaze allows writing to begin. In the opposite
direction to the gaze, immediately after, song begins to flow. The
literary was not created by the myth, and it wasn’t a continuation as a different
form of the tale: the literary broke-off from the myth. The temptation is to
break the diachrony of the tale of Orpheus’s possible existence and to see in
Eurydice’s disappearance the beauty of the singer’s song, its power, and its
mystery. But such a temptation is not real. Eurydice does not transmit energy
to Orpheus as something that transmits energy from one pole to another. Orpheus
was already singing before Eurydice disappeared. Blanchot accurately places the
appearance of writing on the gaze that prompts disappearance, not on the
interchange of powers. Not as if Eurydice, in her disappearance, impregnated
Orpheus or his song with disappearance. Nevertheless, there is an impregnation
of disappearance in writing in our modern and contemporary readings. There is a
reading that overflows with disappearance. In the myth of the singer by
antonomasia—Orpheus—there is a key situation: the hero’s responsibility for the
disappearance of the beloved. There is, perhaps, a wanting to know, an impatience,
a stupidity—which is to say, a humanity—that informs the hero of loss, that
makes him lose, and that loses him.
Is not our need for tragedy
that which reads in the situation a moment that is key yet normal and
transforms it into a foundational event? We practice a cultural extraction; we
absorb the extract of what is foundational for our culture, not for the myth.
Loss and song, loss and writing are transcendent meanings for us, not for the
myth. Among other functions that he performs, Orpheus is an agent of
civilization, a transformer, a hero. Or is the episode of Eurydice’s
disappearance the core of tension that makes Orpheus’s life’s task educational?
Orpheus is a wise character. To sing is to know. Above all the song that
transforms nature is a song that belongs to the order of Apollo. Singing is
beautiful for the Greeks. Beauty is action. That recklessness, that going
against the grain of revelation, that hiding produced by recklessness or
passion—that by which we get lost—creates rituals, orders, sects, ‘mysteries’.
But this is an extrapolation, outside the context of a reading that cannot be
understood if it is not seen as the internal tension of a tale about an
experience. Still, ever since its classical ascendance that inexplicable
tension creates the hidden speech of Western poetry, the unsaid that is said
because it is contained in what is said. It is an absence added to presence,
not by subterfuge but by pregnancy of meaning, by radiance of meaning, and for
us, by a need of completeness. I insist: the disappearance of Eurydice is a
meaningful event but it is only part of the tale, a part that for us, as
Western debtors to the tragedy, has completely impregnated song with meaning.
In this disappearance that song suffers—in this operation Orpheus is the
song—there is a model of need, as if the myth prefigured its own absence. What
is absent—Eurydice—is converted in song as insufficiency and corresponds to a
possible future absence of the myth itself. In other words, what went missing
went missing because it had to happen, it was over-determined, or determined
from above, we would like to say. And so Orpheus is a puppet of the gods,
singing is also a foreseeable insufficiency, and so is beauty. Then the myth
can indeed be understood as a setback, even that which is contained within the
myth as an internal meta-language that would inform us, from its bowels, about
the true dimension of beauty. Beauty is an absence and it is what is absent, it
is what we have a right to and what is constantly being subtracted from us. But
it is also what is absent for order—a cosmos—to be complete. Beauty sacrificed
in the name of equilibrium. And also love, which is ‘madness’. Yet what is
important is the instrument that generates the absence: the gaze. We must keep
an eye on this: it is not blindness, which also has had its cultural prestige
throughout time, that foretells what shall come, away from the world of things
that clutter our sight. It is the gaze.
Translated from the Spanish by Antonio Ochoa
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Eduardo Milán is the author of over thirty books of poetry, essays,
and translations. Born in Uruguay in the border city of Rivera in 1952, he shared
the geographical and cultural closeness of Brazil and through his mother he
inherited its language also. In the late 1970s he left
Uruguay due to the repressive political climate and the incarceration of this
father. He settled in Mexico City where he still lives.
Born in Mexico City, Antonio Ochoa is a poet, essay writer, and
translator. He is the editor of Eduardo Milán’s Selected Poems published by Shearsman in 2012. This essay is part
of Milán’s Selected Essays that will
also be published by Shearsman. He lives in Cambridge, MA.
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