Disappearing bodies, from a talk on Orphic Fragments, SACI (2006?)
While the 1700's gaze has been directed towards the external infinity observed in nature, the disillusioned melancholic of our time (whose sense of space is directed more to an interior than to an exterior) redirects the gaze and looks for an infinity within. That is, as far as I can see, the (sublime) gaze into the body and into body-related psychological spaces. It's the gaze underneath the skin which opens into a huge organic landscape, and naturally it is a gaze of great, overwhelming melancholy.
So, I guess so far the main points are: disappearing bodies and the sense of melancholy. in the historic development of the concept of the sublime, there is the issue of translating exterior space into interior, and trying to find the sense of awe and greatness within the experience of intimacy.
I guess that is certainly a road to melancholy, you look at the distant points of your own intimate life, and there is a sense of perspective there, almost in an optical sense: a vanishing point. So, in those terms there is a vanishing point that is intuitively recognized in the perception of our bodies.
The vanishing point of memories and desires begins from the observation of our own reflection. I feel I could find some optical rules there, find some method of looking, observing, even mapping that space. Certainly, one very logical vanishing point could be our own death. That's where the Orpheus story comes in, and where everything becomes complicated.
Commonly, myths refer to cyclic, repetitive events in nature and in the life of man. I believe that the myth of Orpheus refers to a recognition of insurmountable division between bodies that through the act of sexual love simulate 'oneness' yet fail in reaching total unity. At the edge of the shade between the two worlds (two bodies) there is a recognition of the inevitable physical separation, and consequently the sense of loss. The object of desire (romantic love) provides us both with passion for continuous attempts to reach the perfect unity, and with the sense of melancholic failure. So, as an alternative reading, the paths through the underworld may be read more as a space defined by an anatomy rather than by a topography (or rather, as a topography of an organic landscape).
In the orphic burying rituals that were performed in Greece, southern Italy, and even in the areas close to Rome, there has been one element that in a very beautiful way relates memory with space. In the museum of Pela in Greece there is a thin plate, darkened by time, but actually made of gold, with a peculiar text inscribed: it was a description of an itinerary for the soul, that the soul has to take when descending to the underworld. It may have indicated that one must pass by a tall cypress tree, and then go left, and not right, to the lake of memory whose water will refresh the orphic teaching and indicate to the soul its way to the Elysian fields. Naturally, that 'travel guide' comes from Orpheus' experience of descending to the underworld to bring back Eurydice. I haven't found this in any other source, but I have the feeling that his journey may be interpreted in one particular way. I believe that his descending has very much to do with the relation between male and female sexuality, and with the particular combination of passion and tenderness that are the consequence of a romantic love. There are several indications that may lead to imagine Orpheus' journey as a sexual act, with relation to earth, death and night as the female principles, his negotiation with Persephone, his leading of Eurydice through the darkness, their sensual, invisible communication, and his loss at the end of his experience, at the edge of the shade, upon the return to his post-orgasmic melancholy. He loses her, as her sexuality is inevitably apart, after the appearance of unity, her orgasm is different and mysterious, she goes back to her death and darkness, and it is exactly his passion and love that remind him of the impossibility to 'own' the desired one, to be one with her sex. Apparently, his passion and love grant him only his mistakes, his act of self-betrayal. Orpheus' experience is renewed in the sexual act, and it ends in melancholy, in emptiness, in death faced at the journey's end. I wish to attempt to describe the anatomy of this journey, to recognize a body in those places described, relying both on the Orpheus myth and the orphic plates. Apparently, the orphic plates can be seen at the archeological museum in Chiusi, half way between Florence and Rome.
So, my research, visually speaking, could be an analyses of the vanishing point constituted by death and desire, a force that pulls the gaze into the body like a vortex, leaving the observer with a melancholic craving to lose oneself in a huge, overwhelming emptiness of an organic landscape. The death of Orpheus is, in fact, another scene of a body disappearing. Hated for his eternal love for Eurydice, he was attacked by screaming Menades, and once their screams annihilated the protective power of his song, they tore his body apart.