Autobiography of Red

by Anne Carson

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do. GERTRUDE STEIN

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen. Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

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.

Bergk says the history of a text is like a long caress.

the fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat.

Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him Joyfully

Like honey is the sleep of the just.

She was standing before him now smiling hard and rummaging in his face with her eyes.

He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell of the screen itself as it pressed its grid onto his face.

XI. HADES Click here for original version Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING

Why are you alone in this huge blank garden like a piece of electricity?

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

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.

Geryon was trying to breathe but a red wall had sliced the air in half.

The other two were talking about feminism then life in Hades then unstable bitumen

Most volcanic rock is basalt. If it is dark and blocky that means very little silica in the composition (so the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

… in crossword puzzles. It’s the word for blocky lava in Hawaiian. How do you spell it? Just like it sounds—aa.

Are you going to tell me none of the stars are really there? Well some are there but some burned out ten thousand years ago. I don’t believe that. How can you not believe it, it’s a known fact. But I see them. You see memories.

That would be very cold. What? That would be very cold, repeated the grandmother from the porch swing. Watching men in forests? A memory burn. Ah. She’s right. Yes she is she had lung burn once and that was cold and don’t call me she when I’m right here. Sorry. You got lung burn in Hades? No it was in the Pyrenees I burned my lungs

He had taken the local bus from Hades. Seven-hour trip. He wept most of the way.

Geryon trapped in his own bad apple.

Outside the natural world was enjoying a moment of total strength. Wind rushed over the ground like a sea and battered up into the corners of the buildings, garbage cans went dashing down the alley after their souls.

Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.

He got a job in the local library shelving government documents. It was agreeable to work in a basement humming with fluorescent tubes and cold as a sea of stone.

“Among the indigenous folk of Tierra del Fuego were the Yamana which means as a noun ‘people not animals’ or as a verb ‘to live, breathe, be happy, recover from sickness, become sane.’ Joined as a suffix to the word for hand it denotes ‘friendship.’ ”

“The Yamana, whose filth and poverty persuaded Darwin, passing in his Beagle, that they were monkey men unworthy of study, had fifteen names for clouds and more than fifty for different kinds of kin. Among their variations of the verb ‘to bite’ was a word that meant ‘to come surprisingly on a hard substance when eating something soft e.g. a pearl in a mussel.’ ”

What is time made of? He could feel it massed around him, he could see its big deadweight blocks padded tight together all the way from Bermuda to Buenos Aires—too tight. His lungs contracted. Fear of time came at him. Time was squeezing Geryon like the pleats of an accordion.

There is no person without a world.

What is time made of? Geryon said suddenly turning to the yellowbeard who looked at him surprised. Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

So this is skepticism, thought Geryon. White is black. Black is white. Perhaps soon I will get some new information about red.

“What is time made of?” is a question that had long exercised Geryon. ————

Much truer is the time that strays into photographs and stops.

twelve percent of babies in the world are born with tails. Doctors suppress this news.

pistons thumping, lava pouring from shelf to shelf, evidence and time lignifying into their traces.

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. Something else than what?

But sounds eerily to Wittgenstein

Three ancient musicians hunched there— piano, guitar, accordion. None of them looked less than seventy years old, the accordion player so frail each time he swayed his shoulders around a corner of the melody Geryon feared the accordion would crush him flat.

Other boys stood beside him on the wall. The petals of their colognes rose around them in a light terror.

What do they think about? Floating in there. All night. Nothing. That’s impossible. Why? You can’t be alive and think about nothing.

Who can a monster blame for being red? What? said Geryon starting forward. I said looks like time for you to get home to bed, she repeated, and stood,

Balling from Behind caught his eye (a whole magazine devoted to this? issue after issue? year after year?) but he was too embarrassed to buy it.

a self-help book whose title (Oblivion the Price of Sanity?) stirred his ever hopeful heart. “Depression is one of the unknown modes of being. There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity. All language can register is the slow return to the oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape and habit blurs perception and language takes up its routine flourishes.” He was about to turn the page for more help when a sound caught him.

Herakles had explained that he and Ancash were traveling around South America together recording volcanoes. It’s for a movie, Herakles added. A nature film? Not exactly. A documentary on Emily Dickinson.

to make love early in the morning like a sleepy bear taking the lid off a jar of honey—

Wise ones. Holy men I guess you would say. The word in Quechua is Yazcol Yazcamac it means the Ones Who Went and Saw and Came Back—

the Yazcamac return as red people with wings, all their weaknesses burned away— and their mortality.

Icchantikas?

In Mahayana Buddhism the icchantika (一闡提) is an incorrigible unbeliever who lacks faith in Buddhism and has no prospect of attaining enlightenment

there is a link between geology and character I: What is this link S: I have often wondered

Economy of the Unlost: