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.
