by Eurydice (c) 1995

Barefoot and Naked

People behave outrageously with EU, for they need to give them-selves to her, but also to find a respectable reason for their spontaneous subjugation.  They treat her everyday actions as proof of her love for them.  "Don't be afraid of your love!  You can fool yourself, but you can't fool me!" they claim. 
 
EU counsels her followers: "I am not necessary to you.  I am the light from a thigh suddenly revealed under a lifted dress."  When EU tells her followers that they stifle her, they offer to take her away from this world that drains her. The idea of her rescue, of saving her from others, becomes the center of their lives. 

As EU lacks common sense, she needs friends or servants to look after her.  But being served by people who love her is exhausting and keeping those who serve her from loving her is impossible.  That is the deadlock of EU's quotidian existence.  It explains the high turnover of all the persons who are connected to her.

Men don't think EU is subject to need, disease or growth; they don't believe she had a past, or a childhood.  In her presence, words become cumbersome and meanings fall apart.  She seems like a vision that may vanish at any moment.  Men blab: "Women like you turn up in literature, they can't sit across the table and eat dinner with me!"  "You are life to me, but it's strange to be near you!"  EU responds: "How sad that I am everything to you."

No one knows who EU is.  So everyone wants her.  "This is the real thing," men think, and want to rise up to her standards.  She embodies everyone's ideals and pretences, for she is arbitrary, like a dream-condensation; that is her freedom. 
 
EU's freedom is mere indifference.  She lives well on her indifference, for people love her freely and easily because her own affections are not involved.  They feel proud to possess her unpossessed spirit and to buy her all that she can do without. 

People exist as fiction for EU.  The world is a second language for her.  She contemplates: People can't see that I am normal.  No one presumes that I am a subject.  I need a sign on me. 

Men develop florid theories about EU.  They assume she contains more than meets the eye and undertake to unveil her.  "Behind EU's confidence beats a heart wounded by a fatal love for a man," some judge.  "If you solve me," EU contends, "I am not a mystery.  If I am a mystery, do not solve me; make up your mind."   

EU thinks: Love is a curse.  Don't be loved and you'll be happy. 

"Oh, EU," men babble, "I'd be happy if I could just look at you across the table for the rest of my life!"  Every man whom EU meets advises her: "You must become the real you.  No one knows you like I do.  You must get to know yourself.  The real you is sensitive, sweet, insecure.  Let me impregnate you." 

Amidst such emoting, EU's life would be terribly trite if she didn't have the mirror.  As it is, she looks into it and thinks: I live in a playground and I have a clown's face!  What fun!