eh.

on the subject of eurydice:

she's the perfect object of woman, and i'm not just saying that. though it might be interesting to see what that woman grecian scholar olson so liked (and with reason, with freaking reason--she's fabulous) has to say on the subject of eurydice, as far as i know now, as far as i can tell, it's impossible to pin a face on eurydice. in the course of her story she does one thing that can be framed as an action not precisely thrust upon her: she runs away from aristaios (who, gleaning from wikipedia, was most firmly associated with beekeeping in virgil's georgics, the last fourth of which was about beekeeping and was where the whole eurydice running away thing came up), one assumes to preclude her rape. then, not unlike cinderella in the jump-rope rhyme, she steps on a snake and it bites her and she dies.

i'm not saying it's not a complex metaphor. apparently there was an orphic cult, which i (possibly inaccurately--i didn't get very deep into this olson-lady-with-the-myth's book) took to understand as a school, of sorts, of, in a sense, either more or less concrete, aesthetics, which means to me (again possibly entirely inaccurately) that the myth itself is extremely bound up in its own metaphor; in other words, the myth was there to serve a purpose, give locus to a previously unexpressed shared opinion (which are such thin words to embody what i'm trying for)--airy nothing/habitation, name, location. as opposed to its just existing for people like cocteau to grab down off the shelf in 19whenever and slap a poetics onto, it's a story steeped in meaning, with a long tradition of half-representation or the visceral match which might be called metaphoric device. and i'm not saying it hasn't changed in meaning, obviously. as with shakespeare (romeo and juliet die for disobedience/romeo and juliet die for love/romeo and juliet die because they're so freaking young), time and the individual and cultural perspective have gotta change the context.

but it's still impossible to plug a face onto eurydice. i once read a review of sabrina that pissed me off immensely in which the person said it was sub-par as a hepburn movie because there were too many characters that underwent cinderella-style transformation (not just audrey but bogie as well). and okay, that still pisses me off. but it might apply to eurydice: giving her agency makes the story what it isn't (i mean, if you replace cinderella-style transformation with agency, and bogie with eurydice, that's how the above-above applies to the above). it makes the story orpheus's, almost solely. eurydice is the thing he's got to drag up from out of the dark. it leads him to ask himself whether or not he ever knew her, whether or not he ever wanted her or even saw her...it's possible for him to ask himself these questions because he doesn't exist--or because time has gone by and now she doesn't exist either.

someone pointed out that petrarch made a killing off laura much as dante did off what's-her-face--that it was the inaccessibility, rather than the person, or the petty emotion of lost love, able to be tamped down into lines and phrases, rather than the ladies themselves, or the versions that survived inside the poets rather than any outside source of light, dark, joy, or suffering, that made the poetry. and the whole eurydice thing to me pretty much accurately describes the utter subjectivity of that poetic source. maybe a person can't help but eurydice a lost and silent love. i don't know. it makes for pretty good poetry though.