24th Jun 2008
Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book marks, without an ember of doubt, the first time I’ve ever felt burned by my lack of education in the classics. I approached this book ready to feel cowed and lost, so I was enthralled when that was not the case.
I understand Geryon intimately, for I, too am a red creature.
From a forgotten notebook of mine:
“On my steady diet of nicotine and coffee, my thoughts grind (like bad teeth) into points. I am a sharp-shaped thing. A needle, an arrow, I cut. I can touch rage: rage that was the only sprig of life on the barren potato farm; rage tucked into the left work boot for the dark walk home from the plant; rage channeled into the line of a razor’s making, at first invisible, then blessed red. We all know the color of rage. Red will unmake me.”
Geryon’s red is a different hue, as has my own ripened with age. Passion. Shame. Love. The interior exposed and vulnerable. Heat. Longing. Did you know longing was red? Do you know how close you are to knowing that?
Like the terrestrial crust of the earth
which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul
is a miracle of mutual pressures.
Fuck Herakles. That bitch and his arrogance, never seeing the deep red interior of his jailbait trick. Winning is blindness. Winning is empty. Winning is lonely, even with a joint in one hand and a cock in the other. It is through losing that we learn to make bread in the volcano’s eye. It is through returning that we get wings.
Anne Carson, thank you for making a hero of the vanquished, for turning a flat story over and finding the life growing beneath it.
Geryon stood upright
within the rayon planes of his brother’s sports jacket. Sweat and desire ran
down his body to pool
in the crotch and behind the knees. He had been standing against the wall
for three and a half hours in a casual pose.
His eyes ached from the effort of trying to see everything without looking at it.
Other boys stood beside him
on the wall. The petals of their colognes rose about them in a light terror.
Meanwhile music pounded
across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being
a self in a song.
“What is time made of?” Geryon asks frequently.
Fear of time came at him. Time
was squeezing Geryon like the pleats of an accordion.
And:
…A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,
like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
What does this thoughtful young artist have against time? We might think it’s his death — we all know his demise is assured before reading the book, or at least once we find out he goes up against Herakles:
on the other side of the world somewhere Herakles laughing drinking getting
into a car and Geryon’s
whole body formed one arch of a cry — upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love.
But here Carson has turned the story around — it’s not death Geryon waits for, but heartbreak. And heartbreak, as we all can’t help but know, is red like thunder.
[...] Original post by WordWacky [...]