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HE CAME after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a diffi-cult interval for a poet.
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.
Gods’ laughter is unquenchable.
Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless. Or hell as deep as the sun is high. Or Herakles ordeal strong. Or a planet middle night stuck. Or an insomniac outside the joy. Or killings cream black.
To Helen of Troy, for example, was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him for a moment.
Geryon is the name of a character in ancient Greek myth about whom Stesichoros wrote a very long lyric poem
They tell of a strange winged red monster who lived on an island called Erytheia (which is an adjective meaning simply “The Red Place”) quietly tending a herd of magical red cattle, until one day the hero Herakles came across the sea and killed him to get the cattle. There were many different ways to tell a story like this. Herakles was an important Greek hero and the elimination of Ger-yon constituted one of His celebrated Labors. If Stesichoros had been a more conventional poet he might have taken the point of view of Herakles and framed a thrilling account of the victory of culture over
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No edition is exactly the same as any other in its contents or its ordering of the contents. Bergk says the history of a text is like a long caress.
His mother saw it mothers are like that Trust me she said Engineer of his softness You don’t have to make up your mind right away Behind her red right cheek Geryon could see Coil of the hot plate starting to glow
In those days the police were weak Family was strong Hand in hand the first day Geryon’s mother took him to School She neatened his little red wings and pushed him In through the door
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
TOTAL THINGS KNOWN ABOUT GERYON He loved lightning He lived on an island His mother was a Nymph of a river that ran to the sea His father was a gold Cutting tool Old scholia say that Stesichoros says that Geryon had six hands and six feet and wings He was red and His strange red cattle excited envy Herakles came and Killed him for his cattle The dog too
The red world And corresponding red breezes Went on Geryon did not
When Geryon was little he loved to sleep but even more he loved to wake up.
New Ending. All over the world the beautiful red breezes went on blowing hand in hand.
windows. New moon floating white as a rib at the edge of the sky.
So what did he do? He gave out souvenir pumice and showed where the incandescence had brushed him I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things— Look! he would prick his thumb and press out ocher-colored drops that sizzled when they hit the plate— Volcano blood! Claimed the temperature of his body was a continuous 130 degrees and let people touch his skin for 75 cents at the back of the tent. So you touched him? She paused. Let’s say—
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.
Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.
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. Giant ribs of rain shifted open on a flash of light and cracked together again, making the kitchen clock bump crazily. Somewhere a door slammed. Leaves tore past the window.
Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.
Yes you were this old Indian guy standing on the back porch and there was a pail of water there on the step with a drowned bird in it— big yellow bird really huge you know floating with its wings out and you leaned over and said, Come on now get out of there—and you took it by one wing and just flung it right up into the air whoosh it came alive and then it was gone. Yellow? said Geryon and he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams he doesn’t know me at all! Yellow! What’d you say Geryon? Nothing. It’s a freedom dream Geryon. Yes. Freedom is what I want for you Geryon we’re true friends
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He had touched bottom. Feeling bruised but pure he switched off the light.
Perhaps he was mad. In the seventh grade he had done a science project on this worry. It was the year he began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came roaring across the garden at him. He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against the window screen. Most of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear the cries of the roses being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully, like horses in war. No, they shook their heads. Why is grass called blades? he asked them. Isn’t it because of
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I see the terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in.… the yellowbeard quoted Pascal and then began to pile words up all around the terror of Pascal until it could scarcely be seen— Geryon paused in his listening and saw the slopes of time spin backwards and stop. He was standing beside his mother at the window on a late winter afternoon. It was the hour when snow goes blue and streetlights come on and a hare may pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book. In this hour he and his mother accompanied each other. They did not turn on the light but stood quiet and watched the night
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And you are an atheist too? said Geryon. I am a skeptic. You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear. It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back. Moments of death I call them. Have an olive,
it seemed to me that I was standing on a hill. I have labored up to the top of this hill, here I am it has taken about half my life to get here and on the other side the hill slopes down. Behind me somewhere if I turned around I could see my daughter beginning to climb hand over hand like a little gold animal in the morning sun. That is who we are. Creatures moving on a hill. At different distances, said Geryon. At distances always changing. We cannot help one another or even cry out— what would I say to her, “Don’t climb so fast”?
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside. He would like to discuss this with someone. And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness. When he got back to the hotel room he set up the camera on the windowsill and activated the timer, then positioned himself on the bed. It is a black-and-white photograph showing a naked young man in fetal position. He has entitled it “No Tail!” The fantastic fingerwork of his wings is outspread on the bed like a black lace map of South America.
Somewhere (he thought) beneath this strip of sleeping pavement the enormous solid globe is spinning on its way—pistons thumping, lava pouring from shelf to shelf, evidence and time lignifying into their traces. 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. Something else than
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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. It gradually became clear that nothing could crush this man. Hardly glancing at one another the three of them played as one person, in a state of pure discovery. They tore clear and clicked and locked and unlocked, they shot their eyebrows up and down. They leaned together and wove apart, they rose and cut away and stalked one another and
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Geryon clapped every time the other people clapped then a new song started then they all began to blur into a stream that ran down over the dirt floor and then he was asleep, burning, yearning, dreaming, streaming, asleep.
Sweat and desire ran down his body to pool in the crotch and behind the knees.
Meanwhile music pounded across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being a self in a song.
She studied him a few moments then said slowly—but the gnome gave the piano a shove against the wall and Geryon almost missed it—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, pocketing her cigarettes. Do come again, she said as Geryon’s big overcoat swept out the door but he did not turn his head.
But his thighs under the Aeroperu blanket were very warm. He snapped off the light and shoved the book deep out of sight in the seat pocket ahead of him. Sat back in the dark. On his left side Herakles stirred in sleep. Ancash was motionless on the right. Geryon tried to cross his knees but could not, then shifted sideways to the left. He would pretend to be asleep so he could lean against Herakles’ shoulder. The smell of the leather jacket near his face and the hard pressure of Herakles’ arm under the leather sent a wave of longing as strong as a color through Geryon. It exploded at the
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Two women with toothbrushes stumbled up the aisle in the reddish dawn dark. These are all very fine passengers, thought Geryon dreamily as he and the plane began descent to Lima. It filled him with tenderness to see many of the people had little red flush marks on their cheeks where they had slept with faces pressed to the seat cushion. Gladys!
It is different from Argentina, said Geryon. How do you mean? No one here is in a hurry. Ancash smiled but said nothing. They move so softly, Geryon added. He was watching the soccer team whose movements had the rounded languor of a dream. Smells of burning blew across the air. Dogs went nosing without urgency through the garbage and marigolds that lined the seawall. You’re right Argentinians are much faster. Always going somewhere. Geryon could see many small Peruvian people wandering along the seawall. Often they would stop to stare at nothing in particular. Everyone seems to be waiting,
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Herakles’ head appeared on the ladder. Hombres! He clambered up onto the roof. Big chunk of papaya in his hand which he waved at Geryon. You should try this stuff Geryon! It’s like eating the sun! Herakles sank his mouth into the fruit and grinned at them. Juice ran down his face and onto his bare chest. Geryon watched a drop of sun slide past Herakles’ nipple and over his belly and vanish into the top of his jeans. He moved his eyes away.
Ancash stepped forward and pulled Geryon’s overcoat down past his shoulders and off his arms. It fell to the floor. Then he thrust the blanket into Geryon’s hands and spun him around so he could start wrapping from the back. All of a sudden the night was a bowl of silence. Jesus Mary and Joseph, said Ancash quietly. He gave a low whistle. Ancash had not seen Geryon’s wings before. They rustled through the two slits cut in the back of Geryon’s T-shirt and sank a bit on the night wind. Ancash ran his fingers slowly down the red struts that articulated each wing base. Geryon shivered. He wondered
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Now listen to me Geryon, Ancash was saying, there’s a village in the mountains north of Huaraz called Jucu and in Jucu they believe some strange things. It’s a volcanic region. Not active now. In ancient times they worshipped the volcano as a god and even threw people into it. For sacrifice? asked Geryon whose head had come out of the blanket. No not exactly. More like a testing procedure. They were looking for people from the inside. 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— I think the anthropologists
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Geryon sat staring out over the roofs into the darkness. The Pacific at night is red and gives off a soot of desire. Every ten meters or so along the seawall Geryon could see small twined couples. They looked like dolls. Geryon wished he could envy them but he did not. I have to get out of this place, he thought. Immortal or not. He climbed into his sleeping bag and slept until dawn without moving.
It is a photograph of four people sitting around a table with hands in front of them. ———— The pipe glows on a small clay bowl in the middle. Beside it a kerosene lamp. Monstrous rectangles flare up the walls. I will call it “Origin of Time,” thought Geryon as a terrible coldness came through the room from somewhere. It was taking him a very long while to set up the camera. Enormous pools of a moment kept opening around his hands each time he tried to move them. Coldness was planing the sides off his vision leaving a narrow canal down which the shock— Geryon sat on the floor suddenly. He had
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Herakles and Ancash in the front seat are (in English) discussing Yeats which Ancash pronounces Jeats. Not Jeats. Yeats, says Herakles. What? Yeats not Jeats. Sounds the same to me. It’s like the difference between Jell-O and yellow. Jellow? Herakles sighs. English is a bitch, Ancash’s mother announces unexpectedly from the back seat and that closes it—
The burros seek and munch with their long silk ears angled towards the hot sky. Their necks and knobby knees make Geryon sad. No not sad, he decides, but what? Ancash’s mother says a few fast harsh Spanish words out her side of the car. She seems to be stating her mind boldly today, perhaps he will do the same. What is it about burros? he says aloud. Guess they’re waiting to inherit the earth, she answers him in English with a little rough laugh that he thinks about all the rest of the day.
It is a photograph of a man’s naked back, long and bluish. ———— Herakles standing at the window staring out on the dark before dawn.
When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles’ back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.
Herakles makes a low sound and moves his head on the pillow, slowly opens his eyes. He starts. Geryon what’s wrong? Jesus I hate it when you cry. What is it? Geryon thinks hard. I once loved you, now I don’t know you at all. He does not say this. I was thinking about time—he gropes— you know how apart people are in time together and apart at the same time—stops. Herakles wipes tears from Geryon’s face with one hand. Can’t you ever just fuck and not think? Herakles gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom. Then he comes back and stands at the window a long while. By the time he returns to the
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Pass down an alley then turn a corner and there it is. Volcano in a wall. Do you see that, says Ancash. Beautiful, Herakles breathes out. He is looking at the men. I mean the fire, says Ancash. Herakles grins in the dark. Ancash watches the flames. 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.
One critic speaks of a sort of concealment drama going on in your work some special interest in finding out what or how people act when they know that important information is being withheld this might have to do with an aesthetic of blindness or even a will to blindness if that is not a tautology
