Cocteau's ORPHEUS by Ovid

Where shall Cocteau set this deathless myth? The left bank vaut bien the forum. It thinks it's the center of the world, but no one passes. The police kill a poet, his patroness bundles Orpheus into the limo with the body and off we go. Charon is a limo driver who, falling for Eureydice, lets slip the details of his suicide by gas. No excess is absurd. The problem with Cocteau's Orpheus is he is bete. The car radio has more poetry: "The bird sings with its fingers: once..." It is a fair questions though - to know how those who live in their imagination will act in a real through-the-looking-glass situation.

The role of the bacchantes is problematic, as is princess death. Her biker handmen may lack the sutlety of Sartre's flies but they get the job done. A girl may be just the thing to turn a man's head, but this tends to trivialize our death-wish, reducing it to mondain love triangle. She stole the wife's soul without permission so no skill is needed to get it back. It's just a technicality, complete with paperwork. The working death is the worst. And Heurtebise was just following orders. Tam tams and echoes give the orders.

How terrible to imagine that signatures will still signify in the beyond. What Cocteau calls poet is to write without being a writer. The existential problem is to write without being written.