Reading Eros in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

Some brief and possibly illegible thoughts on a novel.

Autobiography of Red, Carson’s novel in verse, inspired by the myth of Geryon and the Tenth Labor of Herakles, a poem telling the story of a young boy and man, blessed/burdened with a pair of red wings. An artist boy - hopelessly in love.

In her introduction to If Not, Winter (fragments of Sappho) Anne Carson states an intent through her translations to “hear Sappho’s echo” and these fragments seem faithful iterations, fitting Carson’s unique and sparse vernacular. Not simply because they are translations of ‘fragments’, but because of the way she constructs words and exploits the potency of spaces, of absence. Carson writes: “Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an acute recording of it.” Carson’s work is aesthetic, remove meaning and the signifier still paints itself along the page. The spaces tell stories.

The literal aesthetics of what is lost, and the mystery of what is left behind gift the reader with fear and agency. From nothing, the fragments sustain and robustly support lost sentiments. They are like moments of a puzzle, these terrifying and beautiful words, they are subtle reminders. They are, in their nothingness, more than enough.

What interests me most about Carson’s epic poem Autobiography of Red is how she depicts a relationship of absences. Like the canvas of impressions left by her Sappho translations, Eros’ requisite absence provides a sort of aesthetic story, a vision of too much is never enough: love’s tension. For Geryon, there is an absence of connection/companionship, outweighed and outdated by emotional wounds. The absence of love and intimacy, the growing absence of connection with his mother. His fundamental experience of eros. In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson speaks to how Sappho is “irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros,” in Fragment 31. Geryon breaths within the absence that Eros demands. Eros saves him, demands him, inspires him. Geryon travels where absence of nostalgia, combined with Carson’s heavy personification of the non-human world, alienate him further. He is deserted by his sensory environment. Eros and absence define not only his relationships, but they are the window through which the world communicates to him its beauty, difference, temperance. Eros is the lens of Geryon’s camera, like the lens of my own.

Underlying this journey into loneliness and depression, we are assaulted by the colour red. It is blood, flesh, love, the colour or life and death. It is both aggressive and warming. Frightening and comforting. A colour that like Carson’s writing, is characterised by tensions.

I have been touched like this by Rothko’s Four Darks in Red. Perhaps, is was the fearlessness of sentiment, just abstracted colour - nothing else. Occupying a radical size of canvas - set to stark on the white walls. No. It is not so contrived - there was something about this colour, there was something about the depth of red and the composition of soft hollowing rectangles, floating and battling - that moves. The painting made me feel I was being attacked, and loved. The painting is oxymoronic, and it tempts us with its play on visual absence.

The privilege of sleep.

Remembering childhood sleepovers. Adult ones. The friend, the lover, is asleep. The whole world is asleep. Beings are next to you, but they are also so far away. You cannot sleep. Noisy thoughts keep us awake, ‘we are unjust, we are unworthy, we are alone.’ The unjust cannot sleep. We are, we feel - different. Geryon’s eyes close, noise enters (from within), and his eyes open. If only I could  justify the space I manifest. If only I could justify love, deserved love? Love is mine. Should be.  Justified peace, a justified home, justified mothering and sleep. I mean: punishment, deserved punishment? Self punishment? 

Sleep is sweet, it’s full bodied and rich. It’s an intimacy with oneself.  Too much sleep, sleep as escape, serves consciousness as a blur. A lack of sleep, and consciousness becomes intensified effort. And so the cycle continues.

Carson writes: “Black central stalled night. He lay hot and motionless, that is, motion / was a memory he could not recover, / - ” Without sight, motion or memory. But heat. Fire and death. “(among others) from the bottom of the vast blind kitchen where he was buried”…“He could feel the house of sleepers / around him like loaves on shelves.” The stalled night, minutes can be so different in length. Black stalls time.

“Sappho begins with the sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger. From her inchoate little poem we learn several things about eros. The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time)”…“eros as a sweetness made out of absence and pain” - Eros the Bitter Sweet

The lover, with their tensioned and abstract reasoning in the grips of Eros.  Autobiography of Red follows a disillusioned soul, an outsider, artist, off in the emotional battle. Purpose is the desperation for another soul that grounds, completes and also devours. Love has a certain power over time, time slips away from us and gives a supernatural meaning to a face that was once nameless. And once this person can no longer be a stranger, the time we spent with them arouses a certain existentialism. Love is more powerful than time - to the lover, time is abstracted, all of a sudden perennial or not there.  In Eros the Bitter Sweet  Carson writes how  the lover’s “desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, a desire for a necessary part of himself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly, his.”  What is mine, what can I capture, preserve, see, touch, when will it end? Love asks us hard questions.

In Eros The Bitter Sweet, Carson’s exegesis of language (and love) brings light to the abstraction and distance language affronts a primordial connection with the world. “Oral cultures and literature cultures do not think, perceive or fall in love in the same way…Self-control is minimally stressed in an oral milieu where most of the data important for his survival and understanding are channelled into the individual through the open conduits of his senses. . . linking him the world around him. . . he resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him. . . the interior self as an entity separable from the environment.” In this way one is more aware of the self, aware of the edges the boundaries that being presents. And how to become outside ourselves? Through loving we can escape somewhere, a cage we didn’t know existed before we meet the object of (subject) our affections, we become “a body finally on a scale with our soul.”¹

In modernity, full of exacerbated boundaries, nauseating simulacrum, the artist must reconcile this vacuous introversion. This profound absence. Carson makes us wonder about film, wonder about image. Geryon is a photographer. Geryon is an artist.

‘According to Minor White, “the state of mind of the photographer while crating is blank. . . when looking for pictures. . . The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and feel it better.”’ Is Geryon perhaps chasing this creative space; that for a shutter second, the artist and their world are in collaboration. Is this love? A love he can love, and the autonomy to love it? Throughout Autobiography of Red resonates this chase to feel indefinable, to feel whole with something. To fill the blankness where both art and eros come into play, (the camera, Hercules) the ravaging sense of incompleteness can be briefly sated. Sontag: “the older generation of photographers described photography as a heroic effort of attention, an ascetic discipline, a mystic receptivity to the world which requires that the photographer pass through a cloud of unknowing.”

Unknowing, merging, no skin - no separation, fornicating with the totality. Knowledge is nothing compared to being, taking the picture is being, is loving, is making love. Intoxicated with being. Something faustian… I dunno. Some exchange takes place here, or no exchange - no concept can exist here in the pure act of being and loving, we do not exist, we have melted away separation and have nothing to trade because we are the world and everything in it.

Geryon, the red winged photographer with his disillusioned heart, idiosyncratic gifts, his isolating/unifying artistic eye. Geryon is the voyeur. The outsider. He recalls Woolf’s Orlando. Orlando personifies: a character both at odds with and subverting the passing of time. A paradox. Also outsider. Wolf looks to the boundaries and complications of language’s relationship with the subject of description, especially when the subject is something as un-tameable as nature. - “green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy;” This space establishes tensions. The intention to capture permanence, in which, time of course, moves. Nature changes, seasons, we cannot grasp or bottle this river. “he loved beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earths spine beneath him.” The attachment to other beings that provides meaning, rooting; the “spine” of the earth. My brain is so often congested, a lapsing highway that stumbles its way through communicating itself. Words never seem to come together in the heat, but rather, in the space between changing temperatures. The sudden changing of the lights, the cars that wake and then run.  Why do we feel so creative at 2 or 3 in the morning? When all alone and our fear is ravenous. Regardless of being on the burgeoning of success or not, the possibility of heartbreak (personal and professional) still drives at us and as I try to sleep, I feel trapped in that second of slow-motion, between the deer and approaching car, between fantasy and jealously, yearning and self loathing. When the two collide, perhaps that’s where my art sits.

Carson, takes that space, the seconds of staring at a moonlit curtain, seconds that pretend to be years. She takes these years and sets them on fire. Colour and metaphor ricochet and align the readers passions. To read Carson is to orgasm, in a mutual understanding of pain. It is to witness the magic of a woman defying the ineffable.

1. Helene Cixous: Stigmata : Ringing in the Feminine Hour