Orpheus, after Eurydice was sent back to Hades a second time, lost himself in loss. He went back to the forests with his harp, singing as he wept, weeping as he sang. But why then did the Naiads who should have pitied him tear him apart? Why did he not move them to tears of their own, he who had lost his beloved twice over?
But who can bear the limitlessness of suffering? Who but wants to put an end to grief? They fell upon him and tear him apart, throwing his remains into the river. It is said that his head continued to sing as it disappeared into the waves, and that it sings yet.
Each singer is Orpheus, each the one the Maenads tear apart. To sing, to suffer: equivalents, one and the same. That is the tautology of song. But singing breaks itself from singing; it searches for its term. Singing is not always the infinite; the ‘to sing’ delimits itself in the ‘I sing’. But why is it I imagine that Orpheus’s head sings regardless, and that the limit always quivers with the limitless?
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