Autobiography of Red

by Anne Carson

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning “placed on top,” “added,” “appended,” “imported,” “foreign.” Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon

GERYON’S END The red world And corresponding red breezes Went on Geryon did not

Herakles stepped off the bus from New Mexico and Geryon came fast around the corner of the platform and there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness. The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.

Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.

Love does not make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other from opposite shores of the light.

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

This was when Geryon liked to plan his autobiography, in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

It was not the fear of ridicule, to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life, but this blank desertion of his own mind that threw him into despair.

retrauma -> dissociation

I’m interested in how people decide what sounds like a law. So what’s your favorite law code? Hammurabi. Why? Neatness. For example? For example: “The man who is caught stealing during a fire shall be thrown into the fire.” Isn’t that good?—if there were such a thing as justice that’s what it ought to sound like—short. Clean. Rhythmical.

So blank and so bizarre would be the human life that tried to live outside belief in belief.

At what point does one say of a man that he has become unreal? He hugged his overcoat closer and tried to assemble in his mind Heidegger’s argument about the use of moods. We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods. It is state-of-mind that discloses to us (Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.

“To deny the existence of red is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul which does so will one day go mad.”

Mental states like anxiety or grief have degrees, he thought, but boredom has no degrees.

It seemed that darkness had descended but then the car rounded a curve and the sky rushed open before them— bowl of gold where the last moments of sunset were exploding—then another curve and blackness snuffed out all.

We are amazing beings, Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire. And now time is rushing towards them where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.