Summary
XI. HADES
Geryon and Herakles graffiti the words “SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING” on the long wall of the high school before they run off to Hades. Hades is Herakles’ hometown, a four-hour drive away on the other side of the island. Herakles tells Geryon that there’s an active volcano in Hades that his grandmother witnessed erupting, and the promise of seeing the volcano excites Geryon. Herakles tells him of another survivor of the eruption—the “Lava Man,” who was a prisoner in the local jail. Geryon leaves a note full of lies for his mother and they drive off in Herakles’ car.
XII. LAVA
Geryon wakes up in the middle of the night and lies hot and motionless in the dark, listening to the sounds of the unfamiliar house. In his state of semi-consciousness, he wonders what it would be like to be a woman listening in the dark, imagining a rapist ascending slowly up the stairs. Lava can move as slowly as nine hours per inch. Geryon, joined with the consciousness of this imagined woman, feels the rapist approaching that slowly, and wonders if he’s listening to the silence the same way she is. She (and presumably Geryon as well) falls asleep listening.
XIII. SOMNAMBULA
Geryon wakes up in the morning, and the house is filled with the voices of Herakles’ family. He goes downstairs and finds Herakles in the backyard lying on the grass talking to his grandmother, who’s sitting at the picnic table. Geryon takes a seat on the top step of the back porch and listens to their conversation. They’re talking about the death of Herakles’ grandmother’s brother. Geryon notices a red butterfly riding on a black butterfly, and comments, “how nice, he’s helping him.” Herakles looks at the butterflies and pronounces, “he’s fucking him.” Herakles’ grandmother scolds him, and Herakles mock-apologizes, and then asks Geryon if he wants to see the volcano.
XIV. RED PATIENCE
Geryon is looking at the photograph “Red Patience” that Herakles’ grandmother took as a young woman when the volcano erupted in 1923. She took a fifteen-minute exposure that captured both the still landscape—the cone-shape of the volcano and its surroundings—and the ash and lava exploding in the air and rolling down the slopes of the volcano. At the bottom of the photograph there is a row of pine trees being killed by falling lava. Geryon finds the photograph deeply disturbing, but keeps going back to look at it, and he doesn’t know why—it’s not especially pleasing or impressive as a composition. But it compressed into one image “fifteen different moments of time, nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up and ash moving down.” Geryon muses about the possibility of taking a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail when the lava has just reached his window, and Herakles’ grandmother replies, “I think you are confusing subject and object.” Geryon says that’s very likely.
XV. PAIR
Geryon’s wings are hurting in a way that they haven’t hurt since childhood, struggling and tearing against each other. He finds a plank of wood in Herakles’ family’s basement and lashes his wings to it as a back brace, which he hides under his jacket. Herakles asks him why he seems moody today, and Geryon lies, saying he’s just fine, because Herakles “liked to see Geryon happy.” Herakles tells him that the following day they will take the car and drive out to the volcano and take some photographs. Geryon sits down suddenly and pulls his jacket up over his head. Herakles asks him what’s wrong, and Geryon says that sometimes he needs a little privacy. They watch each other silently, an “odd pair.”
XVI. GROOMING
Herakles and Geryon have sex, potentially for the first time, and Geryon feels as though he’s “learning a lot in this year of my life.” Their intimacy makes Geryon feel “clear and powerful—not some wounded angel after all.” Afterwards they go to get something to eat, and while they’re waiting in the booth for their food, singing “their song” which is “Joy to the World,” Herakles pulls Geryon’s head affectionately into his lap and playfully grooms his hair for nits like they’re gorillas. When the waitress arrives with two plates of eggs, she guesses that they’re newlyweds.
XVII. WALLS
That night, Herakles and Geryon go around Hades painting messages on buildings. Geryon paints a “red-winged LOVESLAVE” on the garage of the Catholic priest’s house. They spot someone else’s graffiti “CAPITALISM SUCKS” on the post office, and Herakles paints over it with the words “CUT HERE.” They drive over to the freeway overpass and Geryon stands quietly in the night wind while Herakles paints his “seven personal precepts” in black and red on the wall of the tunnel to the on-ramp for the freeway. Herakles tells Geryon when he approaches that there’s some paint left if he wants to do another “LOVESLAVE,” but then suggests they do something cheerful instead. Herakles says that all of Geryon’s paintings are about “captivity,” and it depresses him. Geryon doesn’t have anything to say to that; he feels his “limits returning.” He remembers one time when he was a child, and a dog ate his ice cream, and he was left just holding the cone. With nothing left to paint, they drive home. Both of them are too tired to sing “Joy to the World,” and the drive feels like it takes a long time.
XVIII. SHE
When they get home that night after spray-painting buildings around Hades, Geryon decides to call his mother from the telephone in Herakles’ mother’s room. When he enters Herakles’ mother’s room, and turns on the light, he is hit with a flash memory of his dream of being a woman lying awake listening to her rapist ascend the stairs, and feels like “he had been here before, dangling/inside the word she…” He goes downstairs without calling his mother, and finds Herakles and his grandmother on the porch, Herakles lying on top of the picnic table and his grandmother on the porch swing. Geryon sits down on a deck chair and listens to her rambling monologue, which jumps between subjects as diverse as drowning, Virginia Woolf, Argentina, Freud, and a dog she had.
Herakles leaves to answer the phone, and Geryon asks her a question about what happened to the Lava Man. She tells him that the Lava Man was badly burned, and joined the Barnum Circus that toured the United States and made good money, giving away lava rocks and telling people that he was made of molten matter, claiming that his body was always 130 degrees. She says the Lava Man claimed he had “returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things.” Herakles interrupts this story to tell Geryon that his mother called, and now that she’s finished yelling at Herakles she wants to talk to Geryon.
XIX. FROM THE ARCHAIC TO THE FAST SELF
Geryon wakes up fast, from a dream that immediately vanishes, and lays in bed listening to the monkeys in the trees outside. Geryon likes to plan his autobiography in such moments, when he’s caught between sleep and waking, and “too many intake valves are open in the soul.” He compares the “skin” of the soul to the crust of the earth, which is “proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell”; what keeps both thin barriers intact, separating inside and outside, is the “miracle of mutual pressures.” When Geryon first wakes up, he is in a state of receptivity—his inner life is more open to the outer world.
Lately his autobiography has taken the form of a photographic essay. His musings about his autobiography are cut short by Herakles barging into the room with tea and bananas. Herakles is full of anecdotes from talking with his grandmother, including an anecdote that the last question on the examination to get into the electricians’ union in Buenos Aires was “What is the Holy Ghost?” Which his grandmother jokingly calls “a truly electrical question!” Geryon’s guess for the last question was “What time of day did Krakatoa erupt?” Herakles asks Geryon if he knows the answer, which he does; it was 4 AM. The noise of the eruption woke people up 3,000 kilometers away. Geryon admits that he learned this from reading the volcano article in the encyclopedia.
Then the conversation veers to Geryon’s mother’s phone call the night before. Herakles asks Geryon if he should be getting back home, and tells him that there’s a bus every morning. Geryon, suddenly nervous, asks Herakles what he’s planning to do, and Herakles says he’s going to stay here in Hades and paint the house for his grandmother. Geryon volunteers to help paint in order to stay with him, but Herakles’ reply—“Geryon you know/we’ll always be friends”—quietly breaks Geryon’s heart. Before they can fully process whether they’re separating, Herakles tells him to hurry up and get dressed, because they’re going to see the volcano.
The photograph in Geryon’s autobiography for this experience is a picture of a red rabbit tied with a white ribbon, with the title, “Jealous of My Little Sensations.”
XX. AA
Geryon falls asleep a number of times on the drive to the volcano, and when he wakes up, he catches unrelated snippets of conversation between Herakles and his grandmother that swirl around in his head. Finally, they arrive, and Geryon is jolted awake. The ground around them is black and bulbous, and emits a glassy squeak when he steps on the dried lava. Herakles’ grandmother admonishes him to be careful: the lava in this area is more than 90% glass. All of the rubble on top is from strains when the glass chilled rapidly, she tells them, joking that it reminds her of her marriage. She stumbles, and Geryon catches her arm. Geryon dozes off for a split second still standing there and when he wakes up, Herakles is talking about the Hawaiian word for blocky lava: “aa.” They get in the car and drive away. Herakles and his grandmother begin singing “Joy to the World” in harmony.
Analysis
XI. HADES
The seven words which Geryon and Herakles graffiti on the side of the high school building at night are “SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING”. Lacking punctuation or line breaks, this message takes on a multitude of possible interpretations. Consider how the meaning would change if we inserted line breaks in different locations, such as:
“SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY
ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING”
Which emphasizes the solitude and concealment of the inner life, but insists that people need each other in order to accomplish anything;
“SPIRIT RULES
SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING”
Which asserts that the inner life predominates, and that the material world of the isolated body matters much less than the immaterial world of the mind and spirit; and
“SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE
THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING”
Which paints a claustrophobic picture of an isolated life dominated by the inner workings of one’s mind, against which the body’s efforts are futile.
What remains constant in these interpretations is the potency of the inner life: in all of these scenarios, one’s “spirit rules.” But whether the body can achieve nothing, or whether the body can only achieve something in concert with other bodies, is a major question for which we are given no answer. The notion that “spirit rules” is in line with what we know about Geryon’s intense inner life, and how he turns inward and rejects all “outside things” as a coping mechanism against the world’s capacity to hurt him. The latter half of the sentence may come to bear on Geryon and Herakles’ relationship—whether ultimately their connection is futile, and they will end up more alone than ever, or whether together they can achieve something lasting. It seems that in this moment, they have a shared hope that while “alone the body achieves nothing,” together bodies might achieve something, for they paint this “truth” together, before embarking on their trip to Hades.
XII. LAVA
In this chapter, Geryon wakes in the night in Herakles’ house and wonders what it would be like to be a woman in the dark, listening to the silence. He comes to imagine himself as that woman, who is listening to her rapist ascending the stairs, slow as lava. We learn soon after, in Chapter XVIII, that when Geryon enters Herakles’ mother’s room, he recognizes it from his dream or waking nightmare of the woman waiting for her rapist. The connection isn’t explained, though the Chapter XIII’s title, “SOMNAMBULA,” suggests that Geryon might have slept-walked into Herakles’ mother’s room that night.
Whatever portion of this vision is real or imagined, it might be interpreted along a few lines. The association with Herakles’ mother suggests that we might look to Greek mythology for guidance, and indeed Herakles’ mother Alcmene was raped by Zeus, who shape-shifted and took the form of Alcmene's husband Amphitryon. The domestic setting of Geryon’s nightmare of rape matches the story of Alcmene unknowingly consenting to having sex with Zeus in the guise of her husband.
Another way of considering this vision is as embodying the power of Geryon’s empathic imagination. Just as Stesichoros’ sympathetic depiction of the monster Geryon in his Geryoneis sparked the imagination of Anne Carson, so too does Geryon possess a powerfully sympathetic imagination. First he thinks of women; then he wonders what it would be like to be a woman; and then the gap closes between himself and the woman he imagines listening to the silence in the dark. And he understands what a “cruel thing” it is that she “falls asleep listening” to what she fears approaches.
The slow ascent of the rapist may also be understood as reflecting on Herakles, though he does not rape Geryon, because Herakles’ approach over the seas to kill Geryon and steal his cattle in Stesichoros’ Geryoneis is an approach with a similarly ominous and violent character. The limits of empathic imagination are suggested by how the woman listens to the “blank space where/his consciousness is, moving towards her.” Though she is listening so hard to his approach that she falls asleep listening, her openness and vulnerability towards him do not create mutual understanding or respect—his consciousness remains an inaccessible blank.
XIII. SOMNAMBULA
This chapter begins with the cryptic metaphor that “Geryon awoke too fast and felt his box contract.” What is this box? We know that he has a complicated relationship to cages, and feelings of being trapped. His “box” could also mean his brain, because in Chapter XXVI he is described as having a “brain box.” However we interpret his box and its sudden contraction, it asserts that Geryon is acutely aware of his physical size and how his body and mind are limited and contained. Two chapters later, we see how Geryon’s wings struggle against each other as if trying to fly, and how he binds them in a back brace against a wooden board. Throughout the story, he is grappling with freedom and captivity, and when each becomes repulsive or desired.
This chapter gives us a glimpse into Herakles’ droll humor: in his “sleepy voice that no one was listening to,” he makes ribald jokes about his late great-uncle on his deathbed and two butterflies who he claimed were “fucking.” Herakles’ lewd sense of humor stands in contrast with Geryon’s vulnerability and innocence: Geryon feels “unbalanced” by the bright light of the day, and when he sees the butterfly riding on the other butterfly, he says, “how nice, he’s helping them.” This and the previous chapter paint a nuanced picture of Geryon’s perception of sexuality: he is at once innocent and jaded, dreaming of rapists but unable to identify the sexual behaviors of butterflies. Herakles, in contrast, has a simpler and more crude, as well as more experienced, view on sexuality. The difference in their perspectives on the butterflies foreshadows future conflict in Herakles and Geryon’s sexual relationship: barriers in understanding and experience that they will have to overcome, or else fall victim to.
XIV. RED PATIENCE
What does Herakles’ grandmother mean when she suggests that Geryon is “confusing subject and object”? It might be instructive to consider that Herakles’ grandmother claims in Chapter XVIII that she used to be friends with Freud (and that he gave her a dog, which died). She reiterates certain ideas of Freud's—that “reality/is a web” and about “unconscious metaphysics”—which suggests that Herakles’ grandmother is familiar with psychoanalytic thought. The idea of Geryon’s subject-object confusion might then be related to object relations theory, which in psychoanalysis is the way to describe the process of one’s internal development in relation to others. An individual is a “subject,” and Freud used the word “object” to identify other people in that individual’s environment who are the “object” of the individual’s desire or aggression, and loved or hated accordingly. So the idea of “confusing subject and object” could be understood as confusing oneself with another person; and as we just saw Geryon’s waking nightmare of being a woman awaiting her rapist in Chapter XII, we know that Geryon has the imaginative capacity to confuse himself with others.
The specific context in which Herakles’ grandmother says she thinks Geryon is confusing subject and object is when he proposes taking a photograph that would be a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail when the lava has just reached his jail cell window. The ostensible subject of this photograph would be the man, but Geryon’s grandmother is proposing that Geryon isn’t actually looking to photograph that man; he’s looking to photograph the fifteen minutes, perhaps, or death. We see earlier in the chapter that Geryon is fascinated and disturbed by Herakles’ grandmother’s photograph “Red Patience,” a fifteen-minute exposure of a volcanic eruption which captures 900 seconds of the “killing process” and compresses it into one image. He wants to photograph time, and the transition between life and death, in a photograph which is ostensibly of a man in a cell. When Geryon concedes that it’s “very likely” he’s confusing subject and object, he reveals his awareness that what he seeks to photograph isn’t the subject itself, but something else, something fleeting and amorphous that he thinks photography can pin down and capture.
XV. PAIR
Geryon’s wings are a potent symbol: they mark him as “other,” and perhaps also “more”—a supernatural being. Yet we rarely see them mentioned in this work, and only once, at the very end of the novel, do we see him fly. Mostly his wings are an impediment to normalcy, as we see in this chapter. His wings are hurting, “struggling” against each other, but instead of freeing them, he finds a wooden plank and binds his wings to it, then hides them in his jacket. Geryon chooses to inflict confinement on his own wings rather than allow himself a freedom marked by difference.
At the end of the novel, when the fictional interview with Stesichoros has the interviewer remarking on the “concealment drama going on in your work,” we might interpret this “concealment drama” as having to do with Geryon’s wings. We never see him being discriminated against for his wings, though we do see Ancash’s surprise later when he first sees them; while wings are clearly rare in the world of this story, they aren’t necessarily taboo. It is Geryon that imposes these restrictions on himself. As Herakles notes in Chapter XVII, all of Geryon’s art is about “captivity”; he paints an image of red wings in Chapter XVII with the words “LOVESLAVE,” evidently a self-portrait.
Concealing his wings takes a toll on Geryon: minutes after hiding his bound wings under his jacket, he pulls his jacket over his head, and tells Herakles that “sometimes/I need a little privacy.” He struggles with being seen as what he is; he thinks he is a monster. A major arc in this work is towards Geryon accepting himself for what he is, and granting himself freedom.
There is also an interesting metaphoric resonance between Geryon’s pair of wings which “tore against each other,” and his tumultuous relationship with Herakles, as Geryon and Herakles are described as an “odd pair.” We may recall that Herakles and Geryon were earlier compared to “two cuts [which] lie parallel in the same flesh.” Now this image of parallel wounds conjures Geryon’s wings which struggle against each other, and prepares us to understand the resonance of Geryon’s elated discovery in the next chapter that sex doesn’t make him feel like a “wounded angel after all.”
XVI. GROOMING
The first line of this chapter, “As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this,” pairs the jubilant freedom of two experiences in Geryon’s life: taking flight, and having sex for the first time with Herakles. We learn later in Chapter XLVI that Geryon “has not flown for years”; flying was a part of his childhood, but for some reason he stopped flying as a young adult. At the end of the novel, flight is a freedom that Geryon finally grants himself again. Here, the metaphor of the ascendance of flight underpins the transcendent experience of Geryon and Herakles’ erotic connection. It is not a freedom from, but a freedom in, and a freedom shared.
Sex makes Geryon feel “clear and powerful—not some wounded angel after all/but a magnetic person like Matisse/or Charlie Parker!” Likening his erotic power to that of two artists, a painter and a jazz musician, underscores that what Geryon finds empowering in sex relates to self-expression. Geryon’s creative pursuits have always been tied to his autobiographic impulse, and sex becomes another vehicle for the authentic expression of himself. It is notable that his “autobiographic” photographs usually aren’t photographs of himself, but of the world as he sees it, in relation to himself. Likewise, his sexual self-expression isn’t self-absorbed but relational, a way of connecting to Herakles.
In drawing a comparison between himself and Henri Matisse and Charlie Parker, Geryon may also be asserting a subtle likeness between himself as an artistic red-winged monstrous boy and two artists who had their own animal associations. Matisse was a leader of “les Fauves,” or “the Wild Beasts,” a 20th century artistic movement which emphasized bold color and prominent paint application. Parker was known as “Bird” or “Yardbird,” and wrote a number of musical compositions named after birds. This chapter is called “Grooming” for Herakles’ gorilla-like behavior at the diner, pulling Geryon’s head into his lap and “grooming for nits.” In the afterglow of mutually empowering sex, both of the young men act playfully animalistic, imitating gorillas’ affectionate behavior. This chapter draws a link between self-expression, freedom, and animality, foreshadowing Geryon’s freedom in the penultimate chapter when he finally accepts himself as the red, winged being that he is, and flies.
XVII. WALLS
This chapter introduces us to a new creative medium for Geryon’s self-expression: painting. After sculpture, writing, and photography, Geryon now ventures into the territory of street art, spray-painting buildings with Herakles under the cover of night. This medium remains autobiographical, as we see that Geryon paints a “red-winged LOVESLAVE” on the garage of the priest’s house. Since Geryon is the only red-winged character in the story, we understand that he is expressing himself to be indentured to love, bound to Herakles and unable to escape what draws them together. The danger and violence latent in this self-portrait of Geryon in love causes Herakles concern. He tells Geryon: “All your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.” We recall that Geryon told his brother as a child that his favorite weapon was a cage. Geryon feels drawn to explore and express the kinds of captivity he finds himself in. Whether love’s bondage is cruel or kind, Geryon pays attention to the fact that it isn’t a matter of choice or will; he loves Herakles helplessly, and that makes him vulnerable.
Geryon is interested in expressing a certain kind of reality in his art, but that reality is subjective and his own. When Herakles asks Geryon to paint “something cheerful” instead, Geryon is unwilling to do it, because it isn’t true to him. In the face of Herakles’ impossible request, Geryon “felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing.” As we saw two chapters before in XV. PAIR, Herakles “liked to see Geryon happy.” Geryon is unable to feign cheerfulness in his art because it is autobiographical, and depends on the limits of his own happiness. If all that Herakles wants of Geryon is “something cheerful,” then Geryon has “nothing to say.” Geryon’s authentic experience of love is complicated, and dark at times. This dead-end encounter between Herakles and Geryon foreshadows their break up, which Herakles instigates out of a purported desire for Geryon to be free. Herakles can’t handle the dark complexity of Geryon’s love, and Geryon is unable to perform the happiness that Herakles desires. Herakles wants things to be light; Geryon wants things to be real; and these prove to be incompatible desires.
XVIII. SHE
This chapter is connected to the previous Chapter XII. LAVA, in which Geryon dreams of being a woman waiting for the ascent of her rapist up the stairs. In Chapter XVIII. SHE, Geryon enters Herakles’ mother’s room and discovers that “he had been here before, dangling/inside the word she” in his dream of waiting and listening for the rapist. The summary of Chapter XII delves into the potential historical allusions to Herakles’ mother and her rape by Zeus in the guise of her husband. Another line of inquiry that opens up in this scene pertains to Geryon’s shifting gender identification.
The room washes over him like an “angry surf with its unappeasable debris/of woman liquors,” and, awash with feminine detritus, he loses or confuses his own stability of self-definition. After asking “Who am I?” he sees “himself/in the mirror cruel as a slash of lipstick” and “banged the light off.” The sight of his own red body in the mirror is both feminine as lipstick and “cruel” as a slash of red. What spooks Geryon enough to turn off the lights and flee the room is the simultaneous remembrance of his dream when he was a woman, and the sight of himself in the mirror, charged with a feminine and violent energy. Geryon’s subconscious has been working on and mulling over his identification with the feminine, but when he confronts it in the waking world, he spooks at his own question of “Who am I?” and turns off the light.
When Geryon flees Herakles’ mother’s room and joins Herakles and his grandmother downstairs, Herakles’ grandmother is in the middle of a monologue. She tells them about encountering Virginia Woolf, a “highly original woman,” at a party. Woolf is famous for, among many other works, her novel Orlando, in which a young man wakes up one day a woman. Coming directly after Geryon’s fleeting apprehension of himself as a woman, in a work which already makes reference to queer Modernist poet Gertrude Stein and contemporaneous artists Henri Matisse and Charlie Parker, Carson subtly interjects a Modernist approach to disassembling norms of gendered and creative self-expression.
Geryon interjects into Herakles’ grandmother’s monologue a question about the Lava Man—the man in jail who survived the 1923 eruption of the volcano in Hades which Herakles’ grandmother witnessed and photographed. Geryon’s curiosity about the Lava Man is unexplained, but we know from Chapter XIV. RED PATIENCE that Geryon was interested in what a long-exposure photograph of a man in jail as the lava reached his window would look like. Herakles’ grandmother told him then that she thought he was “confusing subject and object,” and Herakles’ grandmother now talks about Freud making an unfunny joke about “incomplete transference” when her dog drowned. These separate anecdotes spark a similar note, as they pertain to ruptured transitions and relationships in the context of someone dying. The transition between life and death is something Geryon obsesses over, as we later see when Geryon takes a long-exposure photograph of a fly in the process of dying, and the same photograph transposes the fly in life and in death. Herakles’ grandmother is also attentive to this transition, as in her long-exposure photograph “Red Patience” where she photographs the volcanic eruption in the midst of the “killing process.” Their shared interest in the Lava Man is one of multiple points of similarity between Geryon and Herakles’ grandmother. The story Herakles’ grandmother tells Geryon about the Lava Man—his claim that he “returned from the core of the earth to tell you interior things”—is suggestive of Geryon’s absorption with “inside things,” and foreshadows Ancash’s revelation that Geryon may be one of the Yazcamac, legendary red people with wings who returned from being thrown into the inside of volcanoes.
XIX. FROM THE ARCHAIC TO THE FAST SELF
This chapter crafts an elaborate volcanic metaphor for the interior life. The crust of the earth, which is “proportionately ten times thinner than an egg shell,” is likened to the “skin of the soul.” Both, Carson writes, are miracles of “mutual pressures.” There is so much pressing outwards from within, and so much pressing inwards from the outside, and yet the shell remains intact without breaking. The self is figured as a hidden thing reaching outwards, akin to the words Geryon and Herakles once graffitied on the wall of the school—“SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE”—even as the world impresses itself onto the individual. These miraculous “mutual pressures” which keep the inside in and the outside out are not fully separate, however. Geryon likes to write his autobiography when he first wakes up, and “too many intake valves are open in the soul.” In other words, he finds self-expression easiest when his inner self is most open to the outside world. This is consistent with how his autobiographic photography isn’t merely self-portraiture, but a portrait of the world as he sees it. Geryon’s version of himself that he likes to put out into the world is one which is attentive to the world. The real miracle of mutual pressures is that they maintain a dynamic equilibrium, where inside and outside meet and merge. This is a portrait of a self in relation.
Later in the chapter, Herakles barges into the bedroom where Geryon is still waking up with breakfast in hand. Their conversation is a major turning point in their relationship. Herakles initiates the end of their relationship through a few indirect statements: he tells Geryon what time the bus comes to take Geryon back home, that he himself will be remaining in Hades, and that they’ll “always be friends.” The volcanic terrain of Geryon’s interior life is transformed by this sudden rupture—his heart and lungs are “a black crust,” and “flames licked along the floorboards inside him.” Like a dormant volcano, suddenly heartsick, Geryon wants to turn inwards and go back to sleep, but Herakles insists that he get dressed so they can go see the volcano.
The photograph in Geryon’s autobiography which represents this day is a “photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with a white ribbon,” entitled “Jealous of My Little Sensations.” The image and title has a caustic humor, and evokes Geryon’s red-winged “LOVESLAVE” painting and his other artworks about captivity. Heartbroken, the bond between Herakles and Geryon is no longer a joy but a burden. Geryon is suddenly just “some red rabbit,” a prey animal and a symbol of helplessness, who is “giggle tied,” an image which yokes humor and violence in service of communicating the humiliation of heartbreak. “Jealous of My Little Sensations” reads as a bitter joke about the soured eroticism of Geryon and Herakles’ bond.
XX. AA
Geryon spends much of this chapter asleep, avoiding the pain of his and Herakles’ impending break-up, until they arrive at the sleeping volcano. The volcanic metaphor for the state of their relationship is continued by Herakles’ grandmother, who explains that “the reason for all these blocks and rubble on top/is strains produced when the glass/chills so rapidly.” She jokes that this phenomenon reminds her of her marriage. One chapter after Herakles’ words rapidly chill his relationship with Geryon, the metaphor is dually pertinent. Herakles’ grandmother sees the signs of a slumbering life in the volcano: “Has a kind of pulse as you look at it,” she observes. This volcanic heartbeat is redolent of the “black crust” encasing Geryon’s broken heart in the previous chapter. No wonder that Geryon finds them to be “terrible rocks.”
When Geryon grabs Herakles’ grandmother’s arm to stabilize her on the rocky surface of the volcano, he feels “huge and wrong.” We see in the immediate wake of the dissolution of Herakles and Geryon’s relationship that Geryon feels dislocated from himself. Feeling unwanted and feeling monstrous are connected emotions for Geryon. His hugeness and his redness and his wings are all signifiers to him of what makes him separate and unlovable. The wrongness of this fleeting moment of intimacy and support between Geryon and Herakles’ grandmother indicates how his self-esteem plummets in the face of romantic rejection, but also insinuates a sadness about the soon-to-be-lost connection between him and Herakles’ grandmother. Geryon is on the cusp of being expunged from Herakles’ world, and so any sort of connection between Geryon and Herakles’ grandmother is bought on borrowed time, and transgresses the boundary Herakles has erected between their worlds. In keeping with this new and painful boundary, Geryon is silent in the back seat while Herakles and his grandmother sing “Joy to the World,” formerly Herakles and Geryon’s special song, in easy harmony.
