Syntax Club: "XXXIV. Harrods"; "XXXV. Gladys"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Today's installment is a little on the shorter side in part because I'm off-sequence again (been a bit busy getting ready for in-service/varieties of Zoom training on how to teach the youths in the time of COVID, sorry) and because these sections are a little faster-moving; next week we'll get to some of the meatier content of the book, and I plan to try and wrap things up with a debrief covering the whole book by the middle of August or so. Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon finds himself stricken by the question of whether or not to phone up Herakles (and in a pre-figurement of the endless contemporary gayboy Call Me By Your Name discourse, thinks about an Emily Dickinson poem involving a peach while standing under a cold shower); Geryon's attraction to Ancash intensifies; Herakles dramatically steals a large tiger cutout from a display in a store, and the boys take off to Peru; en route to Peru Herakles initiates a sexual encounter with Geryon.

Sentences

Even now he was not
looking at the telephone (which he had placed in the bottom of his sock drawer).
He was not
thinking about the two of them in their hotel room on the other side of Plaza de Mayo.
He was not
remembering how Herakles liked to make love early in the morning like a sleepy bear
taking the lid off a jar of honey--Geryon
got up suddenly and went into the bathroom. (111)

The anaphora (repetition at the start of a sentence, phrase, paragraph, line, etc) here creates a kind of dramatic irony--Geryon might want to think that he was not totally smitten by Herakles anew, but the repetition emphasizes his lovestruck state for we readers. I also love the variation in sentence length. We start out relatively short, getting neat and easy stuff (the phone, the fact that Herakles and Ancash are on the other side of the plaza). But as we dive deeper into Geryon's emotional state (the memory of the sex itself) the sentence draws out, elongating and reinforcing our experience of this flustered young gayboy (before the memory gets neatly cut off with that dash, when Geryon himself dashes off to the cold shower)

Ancash sat very straight,
a man as beautiful as a live feather. (112)

A gorgeous, simple simile.

Geryon would have liked to wrap his coat around
this feather man. (114)

And here that simile gets worked back in as an adjective. Beautiful as a live feather becomes this feather man. Worthwhile to note too that the desire to wrap your coat around another man is an excellent, well-observed, detailed bit of gay male sexuality (we saw something similar when G and H first met--put your hands inside my shirt, yeah?).

Ancash watched Herakles.
Geryon watched Ancash. (116)

Parallelism is fun and all, but I'm especially curious as to when these characters watch each other and when they regard each other.

These are all very fine passengers,
thought Geryon dreamily as he and the plane began descent to Lima. (119)

Clever work with the compound he and the plane began descent: both of them are literally descending, but Geryon is also dreamily coming down from another metaphoric height (i.e., orgasm via a handjob on a plane).

Exercises

Compounding (Again)

We've played with this before, but we might as well try it again. Have a character and an object (see: he and the plane) in a single state of action (see: began descent) which communicates 2 different things at once (see: the plane landing and Geryon's post-ejaculation reverie).

Repetition & Irony

Use direct repetition across several sentences or paragraphs to create a sense of irony or denial about what is occuring (see: he was not, even though he quite clearly was).

Simile -> Adjective

Recall the main thrust of a simile or metaphor you used earlier in a work by re-attributing the comparison as an adjective (see: Ancash going from being beautiful as a live feather to this feather man.)

*

Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

Syntax Club: "XXXII. Kiss"; "XXXIII. Fast-Forward"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon decides he does not want to be one of those people who think of nothing but their stores of pain and explores a bookstore where he encounters both an evil Walt Whitman and, quite unexpectedly, a grown-up Herakles. The young men sit down at Cafe Mitwelt along with Ancash, Herakles traveling companion who is helping Herakles with a a documentary on Emily Dickinson--a documentary which necessitates that they record the sounds of volcanoes. Geryon finds himself struck by and sensitive to this reunion (and to the new, possibly erotic presence of Ancash), but it is not totally clear how he will respond just yet.

Questions

Adult Herakles seems slightly more put-together somehow: artistically ambitious, slightly more social aware, maybe, no?

He certainly presents better in this section, and seems to more grounded and stable and aware, but that may or may not hold up through the rest of the book.

So the volcano stuff is a big deal, huh?

One of the central conceits of the book, and probably one we will need to unpack in greater detail after we finish the read-through if we want to fully understand the essayistic implications (I'm planning a longer, more coherent, less scattered analysis for the finale of Syntax Club).

For the time being let's try to track the relationship between interior (mind) and exterior (world) as we see it operating. Obviously the relationship Carson wants us to think about with those two is one of pressure (volcanoes, fissures, cracks, explosions, etc).

Is this gonna be...a love triangle thing?

When I read this text I notice an intense & energetic interest between all 3 of our young men (Geryon/Herakles/Ancash) in these scenes; readers less gay than I have told me they didn't notice any of that starting until much deeper in the novel; make of the triangle what you will, I suppose.

Sentences

A healthy volcano is an exercise in the uses of pressure. (105)

Fun to see Carson recalling an unexpected verb from the previous sections (the question of time exercising Geryon) and here converting it into the noun form exercise. Fun too to think of a volcano--a vessel for sudden cataclysm--as an exercise! One element of the conceit being set up here might be "how is Geryon's existence in the world a form of pressure", but that certainly isn't the only direction we can take this.

Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures
of his inner life. It may happen
that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing
molten matter sideways along
lateral fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. Yet Geryon did not want
to become one of those people
who think of nothing but their stores of pain. (105)

Another effective example of register shifts; Carson juxtaposes internal emotional content with geologic metaphors, but refrains from explicitly linking them or breaking down the connection. Our sentences are roughly set up in an ABA pattern. The first and last units are dealing with the cracks and fissures of Geryon's inner life, which Carson identifies directly as stores of pain. But the long sentence in the middle adopts the geologic language absent any explicit turn to Geryon's own pysche--this sentence, dropped in the midst of Geryon's pained internal reflections, works both as a literal descriptor of the subject these young men are discussing (volcanoes) and a continuation of the broader conceit.

He put on his coat, belted it formally, and went out. (105)

The phrase belted it formally is fantastically revealing (especially due to that adverb!), since it implies that Geryon has multiple different styles of belting his wing-hiding overcoat & chooses more or less formal ones depending on his mood.

Heaps of romance spilled their bright vapor
onto the pavement from behind plate glass. (106)

Heaps of romance which spill out onto the pavement is a wonderful concretization of the mood of a particular street.

Kissing makes them happy, thought Geryon. (107)

_____ makes them happy is a frequent comment for Geryon--what makes Geryon happy, I wonder?

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew. (108)

A major issue as we continue: these 2, Herakles and Geryon, have both been thrown (like harpoons, recall), and it's not clear yet what their final shapes might be.

Herakles' gaze
on him was like a gold tongue. (110)

Another example of associative characterization (recall how Herakles is constantly surronded by golden imagery and metaphors without Carson giving us direct physical description of him), and the slide from gaze (visual sensation) to on him was like a gold tongue (tactile sensation) neatly shows how sensitive, how prone, how intimate, how frankly horned up Geryon finds himself here.

The effort it took to pull himself
away from Herakles' eyes
could have been measured on the scale devised by Richter. Call us,
we're at the City Hotel, said Herakles.
The Richter scale has neither a minimum nor a maximum threshold.
Everything depends on
the sensitivity of the seismograph. Sure okay, said Geryon, and threw himself
out the door. (110)

Another example of Carson's tendency to drop in conceits but minimize the explaining-thereof; she mentions the link between Geryon's sensitivity and the Richter scale exactly once (i.e., the effort to pull away), and then alternates between dialog and literal descriptions of the scale.

Exercises

Register Shifts

Work in a particular register of language (geologic, biologic, astrological, psychological, occult, religious, whatever works for you and your project) as a conceit for a particular emotion or thought an essaying voice or narrator or character might experience. Alternate between sentences which broach the experience directly and sentences which use only the register set aside for the conceit (see: how Carson moves between Geryon's cracks and fissures and the more precise geological accounts of vents and fire lips).

Recall & Reuse: Section Openers

Open a particular section (or chapter, or paragraph, or whatever unit you like) with an unexpected word choice (see: the question exercised Geryon from a few days back). Use a different form of that unexpected word choice to open a section later on in the work (see: today's opener about a volcano being an exercise).

*

The rest of this week, in 3 parts:

--Harrods
--Gladys
--Roof, Eyewitness

*

Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

Syntax Club: "XXXI. Tango"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

After his meal with the philosophers & his jovial self-identification as a philosopher of sandwiches Geryon finds himself startled awake at 3am by a sudden unreal, panicked mood. Geryon things about Heidegger's argument about the use of moods, namely that we would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods and how it is state-of-mind that discloses to us that we are being who have been thrown into something else. Geryon explores Buenos Aires at night and ends up at a small, dark tango bar staffed by a gnome and featuring a tango singer with whom he will discuss whales, psychoanalysis, how tango is not for everyone, and the question of who can a monster blame for being red. During the course of his conversation with the singer Geryon has a sudden and intense flashback to a memory involving both a high school dance and his brother.

Questions

What does it mean to be thrown, anyways?

The short of it, roughly: we find ourselves arbitrarily propelled forward into a world in which we have no control over the circumstances; the nature of being-in-the-world is such that this is a continual process and condition, not a mere starting point; there are ways in which mood can disclose our thrown-ness. NB: I almost certainly messed up something in that explanation, Heideggerian colleagues are more than welcome to send lengthy technical and tendentious clarifying remarks, which will of course further cement their nature as Heideggerian. 

The long of it, with somewhat more rigor: "As Dasein, I ineluctably find myself in a world that matters to me in some way or another. This is what Heidegger calls thrownness (Geworfenheit), a having-been-thrown into the world...To make things less abstract, we can note that disposedness is the a priori transcendental condition for, and thus shows up pre-ontologically in, the everyday phenomenon of mood (Stimmung). According to Heidegger's analysis, I am always in some mood or other. Thus say I'm depressed, such that the world opens up (is disclosed) to me as a sombre and gloomy place. I might be able to shift myself out of that mood, but only to enter a different one, say euphoria or lethargy, a mood that will open up the world to me in a different way. As one might expect, Heidegger argues that moods are not inner subjective colourings laid over an objectively given world...For Heidegger, moods (and disposedness) are aspects of what it means to be in a world at all, not subjective additions to that in-ness...In noting these features of moods we must be careful, however. It would be a mistake to conclude from them that moods are external, rather than internal, states. A mood “comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such being” (Being and Time 29: 176)."

An alternative, somewhat less serious, visual representation.

What's the relationship between mood and adjective gestured at here?

Mood for Heidegger, as Geryon mentions, is the thing that reveals that we are not contiguous with the world--we are thrown into it, we don't "fit", we are not a neat little piece of the world but things arbitrarily thrust into it again and again.

Given that Carson described adjectives as the latches of being in the introductory essay, I think this text is attempting to stake out a line of thought in which adjectives serve a role similar to mood: they make us aware of the lack of contiguous-ness of our experience. Encountering the adjective-as-latch on the page complicates and throws into relief our experience of a text (and all the concepts, signs, signifiers, gestures, etc within) makes us aware of a kind of thrownness the same way a mood makes us aware of being thrown into the world.

This is perhaps what makes Stesichoros so valuable--his unexpected, wild, unchained used of adjectives (in contrast to the relative fixity of the Homeric subject and all its epithets). Our boy Stesi threw up all the latches at once, sending everything floating, severing the bonds which purported to keep things neat, tidy, and organized. Stein did similar work too, recall, through varieties of repetition and syntactic play.

Carson seems to think this is valuable: how many times have we talked about inversion, subversion, unexpected qualities in the sentences of this book? She slides possessives into adjectives, coins new words and phrases constantly, turns physical descriptors into broad categories and vice versa, and so forth.

It seems, maybe, that for this book at least the literary experience of an adjective should be like Geryon's understanding of Heidegger's bit about moods: not something smoothly and seamlessly latching us to the world but something which tosses it all up in the air, all loose and shining but aware of the ongoing, contingent, anxious process of our existence (and doesn't that work as a description for our protagonist Geryon himself too?--that young man, red and winged, adrift between inside and outside, full of both ecstatic possibility and resurfacing dread).

What do we make of the insertion of the memory of the dance & the brother into this psychoanalytic tango bit?

There's a kind of melancholy, a kind of nostalgia, a kind of tenderness, and a kind of horror to this memory, certainly. Given that it comes up during this section on mood and pyschoanalysis it seems likely that we should be thinking about his relationship with his brother as a type of throwness. There's also the question of the communicability of a human experience (see: the whales), I guess. I'll try to come up with something more concrete about this stuff later down the road.

Sentences

Under the seams runs the pain. (98)

The return of the aphoristic statement! Note how the sharp use of the article the in this sentence without indicators of possession or context (no info on whose seams, which pain, etc) gives a kind of mythic dimension, a sort of intense gravity to it. A good trick, but maybe one to be careful with in our own writing.

Empty street below gave nothing back of itself. (98)

I like the absence of initial article here: not an empty street or the empty street but just empty street; it works well to communicate the particular mood of Geryon & the scene he finds himself in. Also some nice structural balance, what with the light alliteration and the way the verb gave neatly slides in as a pivot.

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 the traces. (98)

Gorgeous use of an em-dash to extend a sentence (I am 110% on Team Em-Dash, as well as on Team Semi-Colon, though I know many people loathe them). I also appreciate the movement that happens after the dash. Pistons thumping and lava pouring are straightforward, fairly "close" physical descriptors for tectonic activity, though the former is more metaphoric. But within this same unit marked off by the dash she also moves into a thoroughly abstract realm: evidence and time lignifying into traces is as much a comment on mood and being-in-the-world as it is to anything geologic. But it doesn't feel out of place at all! Carson's ability to neatly slide the philosophically expansive stuff in next to more "ordinary" physical or metaphoric description is great.

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 cutaway and stalked

one another and flew up in a cloud and sank back down on waves. (99-100)

Strong use of polysyndeton (deliberate over-use of conjunctions: and and and and and and) to simultaneously emphasize both the literal busy activity of the musicians as well as Geryon's odd, unreal, psychological experience of watching them.

It was a typical tango song and she had the throat full of needles you need to sing it. (100)

The phrase the throat full of needles is a killer way of describing a certain type of voice, no further elaboration needed.

Sweat and desire ran

down his body to pool

in the crotch and behind the knees. (101)

Sweat and desire, our compound subject, share the verb ran even though the sense in which each runs is different: sweat physically, desire metaphorically. Yoking them in a single compound subject is neat way of expressing related physical and emotional activity.

His eyes ached from the effort of trying to see everything without looking at it.

Other boys stood beside him

on the wall. The petals of their cologne rose around them in a light terror.

Meanwhile music pounded

across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being

a self in a song. (101)

The question of seeing (yourself, your lover, your brother, the world around you, the relationship between internal and external, the way being and time operate) is a big one for this book, and the first line here introduces that neatly. But (if you will permit me a somewhat crass, semi-serious interlude) given the start of the next line (other boys) it also gestures at a very important gayboy skill: knowing how to check out other dudes (at parties, at dances, at gas stations, in locker rooms) without them realizing you are checking them out, to see without looking. My straight friends are often shocked when I tell them that many gayboys considered developing this skill a formative part of adolescence.

In a more serious vein, the petals of their cologne rose around them in a light terror is an excellent way of giving image to the murky dread heat of a teenaged dance, and the image of heart valves opening to the pyschic drama of being a self in a song is a fantastically charged, brave, indulgent in the best way move.

From the stainless steel of the kettle a small red person

in a big jacket regarded him. (102)

There's probably a whole book's worth of content to be written about how Carson uses the word regarded in this book. Let me know if you have particular thoughts on how gaze, image, etc (and in this example displacement/reflection thereof) are working in this book.

Who can a monster blame for being red? (104)

That's the fundamental moral and intellectual question of the book, maybe. I suppose all we can say for now is that the question of Geryon being red is similar to the question of the how time is like a harpoon from a few sections back: it's been thrown, and all we can say is that it will arrive.

Exercises

Compound Subject Yoking

Unify a physical and a non-physical thing into a compound subject and then describe an action for that compound subject with a single verb that works in both the physical and non-physical senses (see: sweat and desire ran down).

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Next week we'll be doing 4 parts instead of 3, as I kind of want to make sure we mostly wrap up this project by early August:

--Kiss, Fastforward
--Harrods
--Gladys
--Roof, Eyewitness

*

Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

Syntax Club: "XXX. Distances"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon goes out for a late dinner with the yellowbeard and a gaggle of philosophers, including one named Lazer with whom Geryon will consider a question that has vexed him: what is time made of? Lazer and Geryon somewhat settle on time being a matter of distances--variable, not totally interchangeable or communicable--between individuals. Geryon feels a kind of widening happiness and creates a photograph prominently featuring his wings.

Questions

What do we make of the wings?

The wings are indeed presented as literal ones (frequently I have students who assume for the first chunk of the novel that the wings are an elaborate metaphor for otherness, but as we move through the book that reading becomes increasingly impossible). Geryon generally seems comfortable existing in the world as some kind of odd winged being, but we will see at least a few instances complicating that later on.

Why do all of Geryon's emotional states seem so heightened? He rarely seems to have a normal experience in the world; everything from going out to supper with some odd philosophers to sitting on airplane acquires a kind of sublime dimension.

Many possible reasons: he's an artsy weirdo in terms of disposition; he likely has some kind of synaesthesia; he's a gayboy; he's young (and thus everything is dramatic and intense); he's experienced a variety of traumas; he's a character designed to through our normal understanding of emotional range into doubt through mythic elevation.

Sentences

"What is time made of?" is a question that had long exercised Geryon. (93)

Obviously the verb exercised here is the charming, luminous bit; we might think of a question as a type of philosophical exercise, a ground or basis for practice, but rarely do we see the agency posed like this. It isn't that Geryon mulls over a thing to tease out an answer but rather that he finds himself being put into action or practice by the question itself.

The yellowbeard rode proudly at the front
like a gaucho leading his infernal band
over the pampas. (93)

I love the lush, lurid, strange intensity to the descriptions of the yellowbeard, cast here as in literally hellish terms. But despite this Geryon does seem to have some affection for members of the infernal band by the end (or at least Lazer).

The pimiento stung his mouth alive like sudden sunset. (94)

Sharp economy to this. Note how alive and sudden sunset are worked in so seamlessly (not made his mouth feel alive, not like a sudden sunset, or any other such construction).

Geryon who felt himself starting
to slide off the surface of the room
like an olive off a plate. When the plate attained an angle of thirty degrees
he would vanish into his own blankness. (95)

The tonal juxtapositions here are great; our dear gayboy protagonist is having some kind of reverie at best and quasi-disassociating at worst and the whole ordeal is rendered for us in terms of an olive plate achieving theoretical angles.

I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. (97)

The greatest of life aspirations. The casual, laconic, good-natured thought reminds me a little bit of Diogenes asking Alexander to stop blocking the sun.

And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness. (97)

There's something rather pleasing about seeing Geryon, even for a brief and highly qualified moment, approaching happy, isn't there? Frailest leaves of life is an obviously appealing bit of alliteration, but I also like how the happiness is given in external terms. Widening happiness doesn't spring up within Geryon but rather he finds himself contained in it. A nice reminder that the tendency to describe emotions entirely as internal wellsprings is a very modern conceit; the ancients likely would not have had any issues rendering emotional states in external or projected terms.

The fantastic fingerwork of his wings is outspread on the bed like a black lace
map of South America. (97)

Strong imagery, made all the stronger by the relative sparsity with which Carson directly describes the most notable feature Geryon has: his wings (as I mentioned earlier, many of students think them metaphoric at first).

Exercises

Verb Switcheroo (Again)

Describe an agent performing an action, then rewrite it such that the typical relationship between the verb and the agent is somehow complicated, reversed, or inverted (see: the question exercised Geryon). This works better with more abstract or metaphorical actions, probably; not sure it has quite the same impact if you attempt basic scene-work with it.

Exterior Emotions

Describe a character having a strong emotional experience through figurative language which locates the emotion outside the character proper (see: Geryon contained in widening happiness).

*

Tomorrow:
--Tango

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

Syntax Club: "XXVII. Skepticism"; "XXIX. Slopes"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

While in Buenos Aires Geryon finds himself thrust into contact with a somewhat unpleasant philosopher known as the yellowbeard; Geryon attends a conference on skepticism with the yellowbeard, which serves as an occasion for some loose, fragmented work on Carson's part re: the Stoics, time, and the correct human disposition to being in the world.

Questions

How much does the philosophizing stuff matter throughout this book? Do I need to look up skepticism and stoicism or whatever?

I would generally say that when reading an Anne Carson book the philosophical or philological or etc content matters as much or as a little as you want it to; I have enough of a background in some of this stuff to understand that she isn't full of shit & that serious synthetic meaning can be parsed from it, but also I find (to borrow an expression from a colleague of mine) her approach to be "demandingly broad" at times. Chew it over and dive down rabbit holes if you want to, but also I don't think it will make much of a difference re: the experience and value of the text itself if you don't.

Sentences

Buenos Aires was blurring into dawn. (85)

Love the careful work with the verb blurring here, especially when paired with dawn (normally a site of clarity, so interesting to see it paired so here).

The yellowbeard had already taken hold of the chair. (85)

Identifying this character strictly as the yellowbeard both emphasizes the awkwardness Geryon experiences with regards to the man's appearance & renders the philosopher in classical-adjective-epithet-stuff: he becomes co-extensive with his physical trait (as the classical Geryon does with Red Stuff).

The gas-white winter sky

came down like a gag on Buenos Aires. (87)

Gas-white winter is a nice little bit of alliteration, and the sudden enjambed violence of the gag descending in the rejet is lovely.

the whales afloat

in the moonless tank where their tails touched the wall--as alive as he was

on their side

of the terrible slopes of time. (90)

The use of the em-dash as a kind of balance or pivot is a strategy I adore, though I understand many people absolutely hate it. Additionally, terrible slopes of time is both sonically pleasing and a nice way of succinctly describing the kind of horror that comes with thinking about being a body in time too much.

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. (91)

Goes blue is a fun choice for this work, given the concern with Other Colors As States Of Being, but I also like the elongation and wide sense of descriptive and figurative movement in this sentence.

the yellowbeard strode up and down

his kingdom of seriousness bordered by strong words, maintaining belief

in man's original greatness--

or was he denying it? (92)

Kingdom of seriousness bordered by strong words is an excellent way of describing academic conference pretension, no?

Exercises

Physical Characteristic as Character Identification

We have done a few exercises similar to this before, but repetition is good for the soul. Take a physical characteristic and use it in a noun form as the exlcusive identifier for a character or agent in a scene (see: the yellowbeard, whose yellow beard becomes his identity to Geryon).

*

The remainder of this week, in 2 parts:
--Distances
--Tango

*

Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

Syntax Club: "XVII. Mitwelt"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

We get our first view of the adult Geryon hanging out in Buenos Aires, as well as more details about Geryon's life: he studies German philosophy, seems to have a fondness for Heidigger, maintains contact with his brother, finds travel a little bit stressful and alienating, and struggles with how the blank desertion of his own mind (i.e., his inability to render his experience of the world in terms comprehensible to others, I think) might mean that he was mad.

Questions

What is a Mitwelt?

"in the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), that aspect of Dasein (being-in-the-world) that is constituted by a person’s relationships and interactions with other people. It was introduced into psychology by Swiss existentialist psychologist Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966). Compare Eigenwelt; Umwelt. [German, literally: “with world”]"

So...we're gonna have to talk about Heidegger?

We probably need to have at least a peripheral awareness of the fact that Heidegger and time play a role in this text, though I will admit it is not a role I have a full grasp on. There is a box inside my head labelled "Incomprehensible German Mysticism", and for a long time I placed both Heidegger and Hegel in this box; it was only through the patient and kind and tireless efforts of Dr. Dennis Sepper, an excellent instructor I once had at the University of Dallas, that I began to accept that Heidegger is a serious thing worth serious study (Hegel I am still not so sure about). Despite all that, I will quickly find myself hopelessly out of my league if I attempt Super Serious Heidegger Analysis, but I can put together some loose resources and notes if it is helpful to our readers.

Mitwelt, at least, seems approachable--the fact is that Geryon's being-in-the-world, in terms of his relationships and interactions with others, is wildly atypical, and worth keeping a close eye on as we move through the remainder of the text. Notice here how his internal world is both strained (fears that writing in German rather than Spanish might be illegal, though the waiter will merely approach to ask if he wants another drink in English) and illegible to others (not only is his likely synaesthesia, seen via the burning roses incident, strange, but also the poetic-mythic dimension; I don't think Geryon's alienation is only a function of his sensory experiences, but also the odd, shifting valves of internal and external inside his pysche--in some ways it feels like he might be the only one in this world to have an "ancient", "enchanted" understanding of what it means to be in the world).

The scraps of German we see in these sections are interesting too; I don't know either Heidegger's philosophical vocabulary well enough or any German at all to comment on them in a rigorous manner, but some cursory googling indicates that the first is something along the lines of "they are what they do" or "they are that which operates" (reminds me of Aristotle's notions of character: you are what you habitually do), the second "for/to lost hearing".

What's up with Geryon's brother?

Yeah, this is a complicated relationship to trauma, definitely (though the text steadfastly refuses to directly harness the language of abuse: it was given as an economy of sex). Geryon quite sincerely seems to want to stay in-touch with his brother (i.e., we don't get the sense that his adult brother directly coerces Geryon into sending postcards), but the figure of the brother definitely looms darkly large in some of the later sections. I'll be very curious to hear what people think as we move through the text.

Sentences

There is no person without a world. (82)

The return of the aphoristic statement, and an excellent rejoinder to any and all debates on the personal essay! Person does not exist separate from world; being-in-the-world is contingent upon contexts, dependencies, relations, interactions; thus the essay, the act of unspooling the mind to be co-extensive with the work on the page must also be an act of robust engagement with the world itself--we might say "so there's no such thing as a clean-cut Cartesian or Kantian self", if we want to be expansive but sloppy undergraduates about it; more seriously, a reminder there's nothing special about an essayist per se--it's what we write with, in, and to the world we occupy.

The red monster sat a corner table of Cafe Mitwelt (82)

Much more straightforwardly, opening the meat of this section by identifying Geryon as the red monster in such close context to person above subtly but powerfully emphasizes his odd, distinctive qualities.

A cold spray
of fear shot across his lungs. (83)

Cold spray is nice, compact, powerful, as is shot--notice how this stark sensation is rendered in a sentence almost entirely monosyllabic.

They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets
and howling colossal intimacies. (84)

Howling colossal intimacies is fantastic, both in that it seems absurd (we generally think of intimacy as small, quiet, etc) but also accurate (surely we all have small textures to interpersonal life that loom large, no?)

He moved off into the tragicomedy of the crowd. (84)

Carson smoothly and effectively nestles some prepositions (into; of) on top of each other to drop a metaphorical or emotional movement (moving into the tragicomedy) into a literal or physical one (moving into the crowd). This read-through has given me a much greater appreciation for how she layers into the literal/physical things that other authors might treat separately, expounding on them after the action itself is described.

Exercises

Prepositions & Movement

Stack or juxtapose prepositions such that an emotional or metaphoric action occurs within a syntactic unit describing a literal or physical action (see: moved off into the tragicomedy of the crowd).

Heidegger Ahoy!

Browse around the internet and familiarize yourself with some concept associated with Heidegger's work. Attempt to incorporate some aspect of that concept into a lyric or essayistic passage. Wait until the next day. Drink 2-5 glasses of brandy (depending on personal need--essayists vary wildly in disposition & experience), wait 60 minutes, and then write a different lyric or essayistic passage incorporating that same Heideggerian concept. Wait until the next day. Place the two passages side-by-side, and see which makes more sense (probably the brandy-borne one). This is not a serious exercise suggestion, but if you do try it please let me know how it goes.

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Next Week, in 3 parts:
--Skepticism & Slopes
--Distances
--Tango

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

Syntax Club: "XXV. Tunnel"; "XXVI. Aeroplane"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

A now adult Geryon, one who seems more sure of himself & perhaps farther removed from the combination trainwreck-spectacle of his relationship with Herakles, talks to his mother before preparing to leave for a trip to Buenos Aires; en route via airplane to South America Geryon finds himself considering a new subject: time, and how a person moves through it.

Questions

I notice you don't pull many sentences from the dialog sections--is that deliberate?

Not per se, though it may still be revealing. Apart from the areas where the fragmentation serves as a kind of naturalistic patterning I'm not 100% sure how best to approach the unique sytactic features of the dialog, even though they are often quite distinctive (see: Herakles' grandmother talking about Woolf, Freud, et al.) Interesting though that the dialog often feels less distinctively "characterized" or "particularized" than in a "normal" novel (setting aside the ramblings of the grandmother, could you pick out the speaker of any given line based on style rather than content?). Which is to say that all the various dialog is kind of another vocal register for Carson, or the Organizing Force of the Text, or etc. (This isn't especially novel in terms of literary history, nor is it "bad dialog", although it might fly in the face of a lot contemporary realism; the idea of vocally particularized dialog serving as a means of psychological characterization above all else is actually the historical novelty here).

Isn't this project at least in part about "essayistic" aspects? What happened to that?

We'll see more of that stuff in the South America sections, I promise, I'm really not trying to fob it off; we'll start to get much more thinking-on-the-page about interiority and time and all that fun stuff soon.

Sentences

He knew who it was even though, now that he was twenty-two and lived
on the mainland, he spoke to her
usually on Saturday mornings. (76)

Setting into a regular pattern of calls with the parents, and being able to intuitively anticipate deviations from it--is there a better way of indicating a shift from a certain kind of middle-class adolescence to a certain kind of middle-class early adulthood? The enjambment set up in the first line is interesting too: he was twenty-two and lived sets us up to see that Geryon is different, possibly happier now, before the rejet (i.e., the part on the next line which completes the clause or phrase) on the mainland gives us additional physical information (and of course, the fact that Geryon lived on the mainland probably expanded the sense in which he was able to live).

Sidebar: they are in NotQuiteCanada, yeah? The text never specifies, but given that you can drive there from America (Herakles takes a bus from New Mexico), the brother plays hockey, and American currency on the beach feels foreign (why else would it have specified an American dollar bill?) we must be in Mythic, Canada-ish territory.

Something about riding boldly into nullity. (77)

Something very pleasing about the juxtaposition & contrast of the adverb boldly and the abstracted prepositional object nullity.

As the aeroplane moved over the frozen white flatland of the clouds Geryon left
his life behind like a weak season. (78)

Frozen white flatland is lush & gorgeous, and I adore how it inverts typical connotations (the clouds the plane moves through would normally sit in opposition to land, after all). As with the first example from this section, Carson is using literal information (where he now lives/the fact that he is moving through the air) to communicate additional information about the broader contours of his life.

Now leaning forward to peer out the little oblong window where icy cloudlight
drilled his eyes
he wished he had stayed to see it go free. (78)

Cloudlight is another great example of Carson's kenning-like coinages, and I love the unexpected verb choice of drilled. The it here is a dog he remembers--is this our only reference to the dog in the novel-in-verse itself?

How people get power over one another,
this mystery. (79)

A fascinating fragment, nice and mysterious (ha) in structure.

Outside a bitten moon rode fast over a tableland of snow. Staring at the vast black
and silver nonworld moving
and not moving incomprehensibly past this dangling fragment of humans
he felt its indifference roar over
his brain box. (80-81)

Tableland and nonworld continue to show off Carson's propensity for smashing words together, but I also appreciate the sheer amount of movement in these two sentences.

A moves through time. it means nothing except that,
like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive. (81)

What is Geryon being thrown towards? Guess we will find out soon!

Exercises

Coinage (Again)

We've done variations of this before, but it might be worth repeating. Combine two (or more words) into a new form (see: tableland, nonworld, cloudlight). Bonus points if you can combine in a way that alters or inverts broader connotations (see: the flatland of the clouds).

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Tomorrow, assuming I don't blow up the blog again, we will attempt "Mitwelt"

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.