Later, two of the longest sequential lines in the poem tumble into one of the shortest, and it comes when the two boys have been separated:
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. (75)
Those three words, ‘of wrong love’, growing to span the line, speak directly to the feeling of wrongness that come with ‘queer’ desire under structures of cis-heteropatriarchy. At the same time, there is the simpler meaning of love being the wrong love at the wrong time, the fact that love is not always a saviour. And yet – wrong love is introduced as ‘custom, the human custom’ – we have always been here.
When Herakles takes Geryon to see a volcano near his home. They make the journey together, across an unknown island, a physical displacement where the end destination is almost tediously symbolic. Like Odysseus’s Sea voyage, but, well, over land. Volcanoes are, of course, mountains of red rock standing above the landscape, simmering over time whilst waiting to explode. Thus, in taking Geryon to his mountain, Herakles essentially takes Geryon to himself.
But first, Herakles leaves. When Geryon meets Herakles again, it is by chance in South America – a continent strongly tied to magical realism in contemporary literary understanding. Herakles is there with a man named Ancash, and Geryon gets pulled into travelling with them, this time to Ancash’s home in South America – he is trapped in planes and cars, as he is throughout the poem, but no longer alone. In her essay ‘Eros the Bittersweet’, Carson writes: ‘A space must be maintained or desire ends’ (48). In Autobiography of Red, after Geryon has united with Herakles and Ancash, Carson reverses this process with a scenario in which space is growing and desire with it:
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them developed a dangerous cloud. Geryon knew he must not go back into the cloud. Desire is no light thing. (133)
Clouds of ash, clouds in the sky. If circling back to the original tale of Herakles and Geryon, Ancash is a direct insertion. At first, it appears that Herakles is a true shared object of desire, with Ancash and Geryon drawn into his orbit. However, jealous rivalries are never exchanged, and indeed I would argue that there is a connection between Ancash and Geryon, desire or love or something else, triangulated via Herakles. They seem to be made of the same stuff. Compare the above tension with this wordless exchange at the café where the three boys rendezvous, Ancash and Geryon sharing a recorded tape of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines:
Up high the air gets so hot it burns the wings off birds—they just fall. Ancash stopped. He and Geryon were looking straight into each other’s eyes. At the word wings something passed between them like a vibration. (109)
It is interesting to me that the mention of wings brings a charge to occupy the space between them. Through it all, his wings remain hidden from sight, rarely even invoked. Of course, the wings are a metonym for escape, via flight; Geryon has the tools but not the capacity.
It is Ancash who speaks about Geryon’s wings and eventually encourages him to use them, rendered in staccato:
Geryon? Yes. There is one thing I want from you. Tell me. Want to see you use those wings. (144)
Autobiography of Red is a story of gay trauma and desire as monstrosity, refracted through Stesichorus’s lost manuscript which itself takes up a grander tale. I’m reminded of how much of history is simply inaccessible to us, in particular the histories of those told and lived by people at the margins. There is the appeal in reaching out, like Gatsby for his green light. Yet, as Heather Love reminds us, the pains of the real past ought not to be ignored, or understated; it would be a disservice, I think. Love compares the task to Orpheus’s attempt to rescue Eurydice from Hell; she reminds us, ‘according to Blanchot, not to botch it would be a betrayal.’ Only in failing to extract, or rescue, these figures from their pasts does something new arise.
I think, for example, of Ocean Vuong’s debut poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2014); In an interview with Zoë Hitzig for Prac Crit, Vuong explains, ‘As a queer child, I always found myself looking at the sky, particularly the night sky. […] Describing the stars in the night sky as ‘exit wounds’ says a lot about the viewer. Through gazing we have an autobiography of sight, through that we can map a history.’ (‘Daily Bread’). Night Sky maps less of a history and more of a personal mythology, littered with intertextual references to history and literature in order to make sense of the Vietnam War and after-trauma. Night Sky borrows from ‘White Christmas’, Chinese poet Bei Dao, and contemporary poets Carl Phillips and Li-Young Lee, amongst others. In back-to-back poems ‘Telemachus’ and ‘Trojan’, and in ‘Odysseus Redux’, Vuong draws clear parallels between the Trojan War and the Vietnam War, and between himself and Telemachus, son of Odysseus. Just as Telemachus waits for his father, Vuong undertakes a similar search throughout Night Sky, where the father is a recurring figure with whom the speaker is trying to configure a relationship., ‘Eurydice’ in the same collection embraces whole and transforms the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to document a moment of loss, like that of Orpheus’s turn; the piece spirals around the image of a wounded doe in short, fractured lines, every other line indented to create a curious rhythm filled with constant turning.
