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The ancient myth describes a hiatus in temporal continuity; the creation of a distinction between being and loss of being, between the active wholeness of achievement and the passive fragmentation of loss, between the "narrated", the "non-narrating" and the present narration. It describes in detail how the inversion of the space-time progression activates the negative undertaking of the unelaborated caesura.

If the space-time continuum and its manifold dimensions are not whole and in continuous inner transformation (memory and the possibility of passing from the world of darkness to the world of light, and vice versa, through a deeper grasp of art and music, of love and trust), and if these space-time dimensions are in conflict or inert, then the development and maturation of the life project gives way to regression and caesura ( caesura : a pause near the middle of a line of poetry).

Orpheus descends into the underworld ruled by Hades and Persephone in search of his beloved wife, the nymph Eurydice, who has been bitten by a serpent and is apparently now in the land of the dead. Orpheus' sweet love songs persuade1 the gods to allow him to bring his wife back up to the land of the living, on the condition that he obeys one command.

The pact negotiated with the gods will permit Orpheus to lead Eurydice back into the world of light only if he walks ahead, playing his lyre, and promises not to turn back and look at her; otherwise at the very instant that he violates this promise, she will be cast once again, and forever, into infernal darkness. Orpheus begins his journey, but grows worried when he hears no footsteps following-a shadow makes no sound. The second he turns to make sure that she is behind him she falls back, lost forever, into the realm of dead shadows from which he had tried to reclaim her.

The myth arouses a multitude of reactions and images, and is a metaphor for a series of psychic and affective movements, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways and at various levels: Orpheus turns back because his faith and the strength of his love are uncertain and ambivalent and because his knowledge is currently insufficient or linked with a past already lived (not infernal) and no longer useful because destiny is unchangeable and threatens those who dare defy the powers of Hades; because humans, to be able to tolerate and develop a link with their origins and the unchangeable do not go in a straightforward direction, but look at their present and past reflections, or regress into amorous mirroring, which gives them the energy and confidence to continue into the future, and reassures them about the present (similarly, the legend of Lot's wife warns the man not to turn back). Orpheus cannot bear the uncertainty looming over his success because his beloved is behind him, rather than at his side sharing their life's journey; for this reason she still belongs to the father and mother of the underworld and to the powers standing in the way of desire. Desire lives protected by the pronounced prohibition, and it is believed to be unchangeable; it is similar to the fall of Eurydice, who returns to the darkness because she hasn't been imagined as living, or transformed and led towards the living, but deposited in the immutable past of things dead. Orpheus does not use the moment (of resolution and of the divine pact)-which contains experience and change-as a new condition to be produced and tested, but considers it as having already occurred and been lived; he fills it with knowledge already gleaned from his own past (fear that Eurydice is dead since he cannot hear her footsteps) or of a presumed future (she should already have arisen and her footsteps should be audible), and thus the moment of new experience and of transformation cannot be created. That eternal, cyclical contrast between the seasons of light and darkness, evolving from rebirth in springtime toward winter's slumber, which has been temporarily, and rebelliously, halted and postponed to that other temporal dimension of divine concession that precludes nature from taking her course, is once again established. Relying on that extraordinary moment means risking losing Eurydice as a resurrected bride, linked once again to the budding season and spared that of hibernation.

That brief "unconscious" leg of Orpheus' journey, and the instant of Eurydice's fall, might, therefore, represent conflicts of a different nature depending on the standpoint and level from which we choose to view them.

Orpheus does not seem to believe that his reality is exactly the one he is experiencing, and he turns round because he is unable to accept that he is in the present, and that the present contains and limits the other possible timeframes of memory and hope (of non-memory and non-hope).

Seen as one half of a couple, Orpheus cannot be united with Eurydice because he is unable to bridge a caesura-a break in space, time, and knowledge. The two halves lose each other, separate, and will remain forever in contrast with each other. Just like the two halves of the seasons of nature, and of the day-night cycle, they will go on alternately completing the life cycle and renewing the unchangeable impossibility of union through time everlasting.