Author: Love

When Geryon first started writing his Autobiography , it struck me as important, because it took a step back from the scenic descriptions and started to define the truths of Geryon’s world. It reads,

“On the cover Geryon wrote Autobiography. Inside he set down the facts. Total facts about Geryon. Geryon was a monster everything about him was red. Geryon lived on an island in the Atlantic called the Red Place. Geryon’s mother was a river that runs to the sea the Red Joy River Geryon’s father was gold. Some say Geryon had six hands six feet some say wings…” (page 37).

This was the first thing that Geryon wrote, supposedly. Before this, he’d still been trying to create an autobiography, just from a cigarette and a tomato (page 34-35), because he couldn’t write yet. After suspending disbelief about how a child who just learned to write knows the word “autobiography,” we can examine these “facts.” Geryon has expressed the importance of facts to him previously. He seems to respect facts in a peculiar way, especially considering how most of his story is in prose. I propose that he values facts so much because his life feels so fragmented and uncemented, as described by the “cinematic”-like chapters. So, he has to cement some realities and believe the things he writes about himself are true.

The first thing Geryon describes about himself is his redness. He takes his identity as “a monster” without question, and then furthers a certain devilish image by saying “everything about him” is red. Not just his appearance but his emotions, his state of being, his intentions. Red is associated with anger, lust, embarrassment, hunger– most of which are things Geryon has described in some way at this point. Geryon then describes not consistent with what we have read so far, saying he lives on an island. By this he might mean he lives in isolation, but surrounded by a positive resource, his mother the river. A river is very mystical, an uncontainable, ever-changing fixture of an environment. He sees beauty and refuge in her existence, but does not feel that she is corporeal in the same way as him. Even further removed is his father’s description, just “gold.” Perhaps the color, perhaps the mineral– this vagueness makes sense considering the father has barely been mentioned thus far.

In the bigger picture, Geryon’s motivations for even writing an autobiography are conflicted and yet intuitive. Even a child, he is desperate to tell his story, to describe himself for what he is. Yet, his descriptions are not all that kind. I think his words are the expressions of a person who is so suppressed that they cannot help but try and escape their existence, through metaphor and truth-telling, but who has a hard time escaping the marginalization that have been placed upon them while in that cage. It reminds me of how a lot of our readings have had a lot to do with personal stories– we read many works by Eli Clare, and he outlined many intricate details of his life. Even Written on the Body, while still unnamed, the narrator is very concerned about the “self,” and what they have experienced. This idea of “autobiography” is a reoccurring one, and might tell us something about the importance of stories, and understanding individual experiences on a case by case basis instead of through generalities.

The way time was structured in Brokeback Mountain was both rushed and savored, where long periods of time could pass by in a paragraph, but moments could last pages. Time seemed to structure itself around the things that were important to Jack and Ennis, skipping over their married lives but reveling in their moments of intimacy. Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place writes, “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction,” (1). In the beginning, when Proulx sets the scene of the mountain and the sheep and their daily tasks, it reminded me of queer time, of a place that existed outside regular societal time constraints. Perhaps they didn’t intend to carve out queer time for themselves, were ready to subscribe to marriage, normativity, and had no such fascinations with men. Either way, they ended up separated from everything but nature and each other, acting on base instincts—eating, sleeping, and roaming– which is how they came to discover their desire or one another. They found their own queer time on the mountain. Proulx writes, “There were only the two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk’s back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours,” (15). The emphasis is on their isolation, on their actions that are nobody else’s business, on an existence outside of expectations and prejudice, where all that mattered was their desire and care for each other. 

Queer time seems to manifest a lot in nature, in isolation. I found Jack and Ennis’ relationship interesting in this respect, where they had such little hesitation about their couplings, as if operating on base instincts. The first time they had sex, Proulx writes, “nothing he’d [Ennis] done before but no instruction manual needed,” (14). This implies a certain naturalness to queerness, like what we discussed regarding queer ecology. Very relevant to Brokeback Mountain, Sandilands writes, “ Gide’s Corydon…pursued the idea that the homosexual activities of boy-shepherds represented a more authentic and innocent sexuality than the heterosexual conventions they needed to learn in order to enter into adult relations of heterosexuality,” (169). Whether we need scientific precedence to validate queerness or not, letting people be people in the mountains certainly seems to imply that being gay is not in fact something unnatural at all. I had never thought before about the relationship between queerness and nature, but now I see there seems to be an almost inseparable connection, where queerness is a return to base instincts, to nature, to something that can exist peacefully outside the restraints of a chronobiologically organized life. I feel certain that they would never have experienced this kind of love without the space and time Brokeback Mountain offered them, and I wonder what kind of lives people could lead on their own mountains, away from tire irons and loveless marriages. 

A reoccurring theme of capitalism invading activism efforts has arisen in our class discussions as of late. Eli Clare mentioned his two cents on this phenomenon in losing home, talking about Stonewall 25 and pride events in general. He says, “Stonewall 25 strikes me not so much as a celebration of a powerful and life-changing uprising of queer people, led by trans people of color, by drag queens and butch dykes, fed up with the cops, but as a middle- and upper-class urban party that opened its doors only to those who could afford it,” (43). At an event supposed to be celebrating the joy of queer existence, admission had a cost. Queer community lost its inclusivity, something that might seem paradoxical. The capitalist mindset that pervades the social activism sphere prohibits lower classes from inclusion. The non-inclusive middle- and upper- class party idea applies to sustainability too. Many people simply can’t afford sustainable options. Somehow, highly processed food and other industrially made consumer goods are priced lower than local or sustainably made food, clothing, and goods. Houska says, “Far too much of our collective energy is directed toward a pursuit that leaves us mirroring capitalism…” describing the environment of administrative-level climate change activism, which also is profit-driven, despite its original ideals (214).  

This inability for us to enact change outside of capitalism is reminiscent of the desire for “queer time.” If capitalism is the “normal,” regulated subjugation of people’s organization of life, then queer and sustainability activism are a battle to broker a reality where we can exist outside of those bounds. Eli Clare is fighting an essential battle in this arena, highlighting the ways we can truly exist outside of the binaries and confines of the dominant culture– by escaping back to nature, finding peace within ourselves in a natural way, existing in a fluid, genderless world of connection. In stones in my pocket, stones in my heart, Clare describes the mental stone wall he retreats to when considering his experiences of hardship with identity. He writes, “In the end, I will sit on the wide, flat top of my wall, legs dangling over those big, uncrackable stones, weathered smooth and clean,” (159). The language he uses to describe this wall is strong, evoking an image of something that withstands the test of time. He hopes to conquer this wall of gender, class, disability, but also live in peace, working together to build something sustainable. 

“What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call,” (Page 186-187).

The narrator makes the claim that neglect kills love, supporting that with a cohesive list proving this claim. They start by listing the kind actions that people stop doing, and then listing what cruel acts they do instead. They do this using two anaphors for the different sections, first starting their sentences with “Not to…” and then “To…” This choice feels reminiscent of the types of lists we have seen in other writers’ work on normal vs deviant lifestyle and sexuality choices such as Michael Warner’s “The Trouble with Normal” and Eve Sedgwick’s Christmas Effects list in “Tendencies.”  

Here, the narrator is examining what long-term love looks like. They have only experienced short-term infatuation, obsessed with affairs, spontaneous decisions and morally questionable but romantic ideas. With this limited and intentionally stunted experience, it’s ironic that the narrator is pondering what it is to neglect a relationship. Applying these ideas to their relationship with Louise, Louise must be “the neglected” in this scenario because the speaker left her. However, it’s unclear whether they really reached a part of their relationship with the kind of familiarity that this passage describes. Doing the dishes, making the bed, and setting the table are very late-stage acts in a relationship, much farther than the honeymoon phase that Louise and the narrator had reached. The only way the narrator would have any insight into a long-lasting relationship that turned neglectful is through Louise and Elgin’s relationship. I propose that the narrator is identifying with Elgin’s role, feeling that they have fallen into the dispassionate-husband-who-doesn’t-know-how-to-love-their-wife-anymore category. Furthermore, they are critiquing this role, questioning whether a party is to blame for this phenomenon.  

The narrator speaks with an implication of guilt, as if they have failed to avoid this relationship dynamic with Louise. Worse, they have instead neglected her even sooner than Elgin did, by leaving her so soon into their relationship. Perhaps even, since the narrator is pondering these relationship aspects that they did not even achieve, they are thinking about the future they ran from. So afraid of falling into this relationship dynamic, the narrator abandoned Louise under the guise of “for her benefit” before they could reach that phase. This calls into question the inevitability of these roles, and whether the narrator had really escaped the role they were so adamant to avoid. It seems to me like the narrator is struggling with these binaries, eternally frozen with the uncertainty of how to exist outside these roles, but desperate to try.