Even Death has her place in the dream of God. Even Death calls her place in the dream of God “nightmare.” In Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, Death is a great, if severe, beauty. Played by Maria Casares, in the film Death wears stunning gloves and perfect makeup, bejeweled tops that magically change colors depending on her mood, teetering heels as she stomps through the cobbled streets of 1950s Paris, or, better yet, through the shimmering surfaces of bedroom mirrors, these latter positioned as the doors between mundane life and the crumbling, bombed-out vistas of the underworld.

The symbol of the mirror as doorway to hell, or else to the immortal, enantiodromic madness that exists just beneath the surface of things, comes to the forefront mid-film when Orpheus (in Cocteau’s rendering a famous poet whose star has just begun to set in the face of more ambitious, more talented competition) confronts the death of his wife as a by-product of his own narcissistic obsession with maintaining his place at the top. Death’s driver, the likewise-immortal Heurtebise, has stayed behind after Eurydice’s killing, and is trying to convince Orpheus of the reality of the Underworld, and of the imperative to travel there to bring Eurydice back to life. The two men stare into the mirror on Eurydice’s dressing table, her body visible on the bed behind them. Orpheus can’t imagine the mirrored glass in front of them as anything but an object that provides reflection on this latest miserable scene in his increasingly miserable life. But Heurtebise, disgusted with Orpheus’ thick sense of victimhood (and in love with Eurydice himself), urges Orpheus to look more closely:

Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes.

Look at yourself in a mirror and you’ll see Death at work.

Orpheus does eventually see what Heurtebise wishes him to see. Donning a pair of rubber gloves—cast aside and left behind in Orpheus’ marital chamber as a more lively calling card of Death’s reality than Eurydice’s body could ever hope to be—Orpheus feels his way through the suddenly rubbery texture of the mirror, slipping behind the false surface of one world into the false depths of the next.

And the depths of the underworld are exactly as false as anything else. Much has been made of Cocteau’s twist on the Orpheus myth. Here Death falls in love with Orpheus, and he with her—indeed, he’s been in love with her all along. If it has been said that philosophy is preparation for death1, then it’s not much of a leap to understand poetry as a love of death, whether we’re considering Emily Dickinson’s “certain slant of light,”2 Keat’s “spirit ditties of no tone,”3 or Cocteau’s Orpheus, scribbling out lines of received poems from the enchanted radio of a Rolls Royce parked in a country garage.4

But even Death has something to fear in the film, which is that she, too, finds herself at the whim and behest of strange orders from strange men who also find themselves led by whims and behests cast by forces, shadows, aporias, sights unseen. No mirrors will do to capture or reflect the One who circumscribes the hierarchies of time, order, and reality that Death works and then does not work within. When Orpheus asks her where her orders come from, she can only pity him for the asking:

Orpheus: I will go to he who gives those orders.

Death: My poor love, he exists nowhere. Some say he thinks of us. Others, that we are his thoughts. Others say he sleeps and that we are his dream—his bad dream.

*

I drew the Thoth Death card the morning after Christmas but had forgotten I had drawn it by dusk, in the moment my husband and I decided to watch Orpheus. Although I’d attended my first conference in grad school on the merits of an essay I’d written about Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête, I’d never seen his Orpheus, nor read about it. I hadn’t anticipated the slant meditation on Death, maybe silly given my preoccupations in earlier years with Cocteau’s slant meditations on Beauty. When I’d drawn the card, I thought it was speaking, on a personal level, to the particular post-holiday slump that comes from being the mother of a child who struggles with food anxiety, not to mention the keeper of a past self who spent multiple summer solstices shuttered up in eating-disorder rehab. Just a few weeks before, I’d been expressing relief to a friend about how far I feel from that miserable version of myself, the twenty-something who had tended to the horrors of death on the crime beat with the “precisely calculated defiance”5 of purging after dinners and writing poetry during homicide trials.

Alas. She comes back to me in my brilliant son’s stubborn refusal to eat, never mind engage in merry-making around a holiday table, when the vibes feel off. These are occasions that sometimes see me at my worst as a mother, moments in which I find myself trying to stave off fantasies that my future death from cancer6 might heal, if not the complex of the family, if not the complex of the culture, if not the complex of history, then at least the complex of him, my son, my first-born. My own Christmas tale, Mary’s gift, in reverse.

These fantasies are Death at work in me. The fear of death and disorder come home to roost in my kid becomes more real, for a time, than the everyday circumstance. In the grip of such fear, I don’t see a healthy five-year-old exhibiting five-year-old behavior. I see the bodies of the dead boys I wrote about as a reporter; I see the photos of myself from that time; I see the photos of the severe and severely beautiful in our culture now. I see the skeleton of Lady Frieda’s Death card, and I draw on my years of experience learning to bear the multiplicity of meaning, the every-interpretation of art. I take a breath, then, take a moment, take a step back from spinning stories about what I think I can see, and the orders I fear that these hard impressions, these bad stories are expressing.

In reading the cards, in watching the film, I see the myths I’m living in—the myths we’re all living in whether we want to claim them or not—the gods come home to roost as illness and fear, the orders from “nowhere,” in the words of Death on screen, “sent back and forth by so many sentinels.”

*

The gift of art, in my life, is that in its moment, it is always an expression of something beyond the surface of what I feel I can say in and about the moment I share with it—the mirror in Cocteau’s Orpheus. The gift of the tarot is that it helps me fix my attention on what is actually being expressed to me, in particular, as I participate in art, as I encounter truth in my life. The tarot helps me see the mirror, and the magic, which is to say the real, beyond it.

What happens with this seeing? Is it always a gift? How does one live after attaining knowledge of one’s place, even if for a fleeting moment, in the dream of God? What happens if the place is a nightmare?

In the film’s end, Cocteau leaves these questions unanswered. Death betrays her orders and returns both Orpheus and Eurydice to the land of the living, to “their mire” of the everyday. Every time I live a day with the Death card, I feel a bit delighted to have survived it. But there’s always a rubbery thought, rising up from the nowhere of my mind: Is the mire of the everyday truly a survival of it? Or, in the words of Shelley, elegizing Adonais, does Death bring “Peace, peace?” (He is not dead/he does not sleep. He hath awakened from the dream of life.)

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