Author: windingstaircase

What to do if nobody speaks your language?

As we have established in class, Geryon is an outcast. A little red winged monster, in a world full of humans who neither see the world the way he sees it, nor understand his way of seeing it. Humans have a tendency to try to categorize everything, and not fitting into any category or being categorized as an outcast does something with a person. It leaves them isolated and lonely, robbing them of the “home” one can find in community. The same happens to Geryon, who is not only isolated but also seems to lack a common language in which he could articulate himself, advocate for himself and make himself heard. Because of his different way of trying to communicate, which is not being understood by others, he is repeatedly called stupid. How “estranged” his attempts of articulating himself must seem to himself can also be seen by the way how he heard himself speak (“Geryon heard Geryon say”) (p. 39).

Language and identity as well as power are closely intertwined with each other, as we have experienced in various class readings such as Brokeback Mountain or Eli Clare. Therefore, by not having a language to articulate himself in and be understood, Geryon is both isolated and left powerless. I think that he realizes this already at his young age, and that both the process of creating his autobiography as well as his interest in photography are (desperate) attempts to be understood. He is trying to switch to other means of communication, where words and oral communication have failed him.

The day after he got abused by his brother for the first time, he started working on his autobiography, where he “set down all inside things particularly his own heroism” (p. 29). Since nobody else believed in him, it was on him to believe in himself and his heroism. Additionally, it is important to have a place to offload/ outsource some of the heavy “inside things” we carry around with us. If we have no other person who understands us, we need other measures, for instance an autobiography. Especially heartbreaking is at what a young age Geryon seems to have learned (or had to learn!) this, since he started his autobiography as a sculpture, not knowing how to write yet.

The other measure of communication Geryon tries after words fail him is his camera. The first time the camera is mentioned is after he met Heracles, when his mother is trying to have a conversation with him about Heracles. He is adjusting the focus of the camera and does not (verbally) answer because “he had recently relinquished speech” (p. 40). While before Geryon had trouble communicating and being understood, his troubles seem to have worsened, and he does not speak anymore. Instead, he is zooming in on the throat and mouth of his mother while she is talking to him. This can clearly be connected to language, since the throat and mouth are the two primary speech producing organs that are visible “from the outside”. It seems as if he is trying to desperately make sense of language and find access to the language everyone around him but himself seems to speak.

I think that his autobiography and the use of his camera are two attempts of Geryon to find his language or, rather, to adapt and convert himself to another language frequency, so that other people around him can understand him and he can finally experience some of the comfort and community that a shared language can bring.

What if a queer communal “we”-feeling instead of a “me”-feeling could be our key in order to find our way to our true “me” and survive

One thing that really stuck in my head from Tara Houska’s text is the principle of living a “we”- instead of a “me”-life. As Houska describes, Western Society mostly lives in a world of individualism that mostly operates on “me” instead of “we”, also regarding the climate movements (214). Houska also offers options on how to reconnect with the “we”, namely by returning to humility, recognizing our fragility and our role in the wider, interconnected net of nature, including empathy, courage and respect (218).

I think queer communities hold the power to reconnect us with each other and create a “we”-feeling instead of operating as “me”-individuals. Further, I think that by experiencing and living a “we”-life, we can reclaim our true individual self, a “me” that many queer people had to lose on the way or hide due to the expectations and norms society presses us into.

As we talked about in one of our class discussions, being together and having a community (the “we”) can help us reclaiming our bodies (and therefore finding ourselves, the “me”). This can also be seen in Brokeback Mountain, where Ennis and Jack were able to use the mountain as their safe space where they could simply exist. For short periods of time, they were able to form a “we”, even though they never verbalized it, connecting their bodies where words have failed them, overcoming the restriction of not being able to form a personal connection (a “we”) that society imposes upon them. On page 17, Proulx writes “As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall”. I interpreted this as the double-meaning of on one side slowly starting to “fall” for Jack, and on the other hand falling out of the “normal picture” he was trying to uphold of himself “down there” (in town). Some aspect about him seems to have changed on that mountain, and while in the safe space of the mountains it didn’t matter, it does seem to matter “down there” in the real world, where society and its expectations are portrayed on Ennis.

I know these are two very different situations, but I can relate to that feeling of coming “back to reality” after you had a break/ an escape from it by temporarily moving to another place. Especially the aspect of having changed personally while being gone and the unsureness of how to fit back into the “old” world is something I experienced before. Whenever I come back from college to my parents’ house, I struggle with who I am, because I have changed so much regarding my identity and became more open and proud of who I am at college, but once I am back home I struggle to implement these aspects of “me” and instead I tend to slide back into old patterns and “my old role”. It sometimes feels as if I get to “reinvent” myself and “play a new role” whenever I start at a new place, but then once I’m back “home” I have those many fragments of “me”, different roles, and it’s incredibly tough to combine them.

I think having that “we”-feeling of community might support me in ultimately finding the real and “full” “me”-feeling as well, instead of trying desperately to puzzle all those different fragments of “me” that I have collected over the years together. If I had a “we”-community around me that supports me, there would be no need for different versions of “me” (each version trying to conform to the picture the respective person has of me) which would result in the true and real “me” being able to finally become “me” because the pressure of conformity to things that are not mutually conformable would be gone. This is why I think that we first need a communal “we”-feeling instead of a “me”-feeling in order to find our way to our true “me” and survive.

Stones and Heat

The metaphor of stones and heat recurs throughout the chapter “Stones in my pockets, stones in my heart” by Eli Clare. He talks about how not aligning with the identity he was “stamped” with as well as the damage and violence that resulted from the ableist, homo- and transphobic perceptions of others that did not match his internal sense of self stole his body from him, leaving him with the stones in his heart and his pocket as the only home he had left. Throughout the chapter, he repeatedly asks “how do I write not about the stones, but about the heat itself”.

I would argue that, in order to reach and write about the heat and go beneath the skin, we cannot ignore the stones but have to face and embrace them. The stones, resulting from the abuse and violence based on the marginalized aspects of identity function like a mask or a protective shell to assure Clare’s survival, they are a refuge home for him since his body was stolen from him. I think that to get back to the “heat”, i.e., to the passion and true, raw self, lying beneath the stones, we have to carefully dismantle and work through the stones and the pain that is stored in them. That is because by confronting them, we can change the narrative and reclaim power about our own story as well as reclaiming our own identity and multi-facetity of our identity.

Many people who belong to a marginalized group encounter their identity being reduced to that one aspect of experienced violence when in fact we all consist of countless aspects resulting in complex, multifaceted identities. The process of “facing” and “observing” the stones helps us to overcome the idea that violence is the definer of our identity, that our identity equals our experienced abuse, like we talked in class.

I tried to combine the description of being queer feeling like a loss of home in Clare’s “Losing home” with his proposal in “the mountain” that our body as a home has to be understood as not singular and as something that can be reclaimed, and connect these two to the liberating view of “queer” being able to represent possibilities, as Sedgwick proposes in her text “Queer and Now”. Thereby, it becomes visible how reclaiming our queerness and embracing our stones can help us overcome the feeling of loss of home and help us to “climb” the stones we have to deal with in life, so that ultimately we are able to reach the heat again that is lying beneath the surface of our skin.

the Piranesi nightmare

“Reason. I was caught in a Piranesi nightmare. The logical paths the proper steps led nowhere. My mind took me up tortuous staircases that opened into doors that opened into nothing.” (p.92)

The following text passage stroke me as very interesting when I read it, especially the mention of the “Piranesi nightmare”. There is a novel called Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, published in 2020, that I read last summer. It is set in a parallel world that is one endless house with an infinite number of staircases, halls and big rooms full of statues. The novel deals with various topics, among them being lost and finding oneself. After finishing the novel I did some research on Piranesi and found out that the novel was referring to the Italian Artist G. B. Piranesi, who, among other things, has produced a series with 16 prints called “Imaginary Prisons” in the 18th Century. It is also interesting, that WOTB is a lot older than Clarke’s novel Piranesi, which raises the question how Piranesi might shape newer interpretations of the mention of “Piranesi nightmare” in WOTB.

I see a reoccurring pattern in my chosen quote from WOTB, parts that can be grouped together, namely “Piranesi nightmare”, “steps leading nowhere” and “tortuous staircases opening into doors into nothing’”. All these parts have parallels to the novel Piranesi, where Piranesi, the main protagonist lives in this endless house with infinite rooms and staircases, leading to more rooms, but ultimately to “nothing”. They also resemble a labyrinth, a term that can also be associated with the artist Piranesi. The narrator feels lost in his own mind. This can also be connected to the very first word of the paragraph, “Reason”. It is interesting that the first sentence of the paragraph is just one word. Reason is a powerful word and can both mean an individual reason to do something as well as a greater, more general meaning and question of reason, almost philosophical as in “why do we do things in the way that we do them and why do we decide what we decide”.

What I am really trying to say here is that I think these lines are showing us how overthinking and analyzing can make us feel lost because we try to find a logical explanation for everything, when in reality, not every question has an answer. Reason gives us seemingly comfort, but actually it’s a nightmare, desperately trying to find an explanation for everything, thinking in complicated ways to make sense into things that aren’t supposed to make sense, just to frustratingly end up in “nothing” at the end. If we free ourselves from the urge to bring sense into everything, we free ourselves from this nightmare of a labyrinth, and thereby bring sense into it. The sense is that not everything can be explained with sense. Maybe the nameless narrator of WOTB also feel imprisoned by reason and his own mind.

This pattern of urge toward reason or explanation can also be seen in other parts of the novel, for example is the narrator trying to fight Louise’s cancer with reason, learning as much as they can about it. In the end though, cancer still does not completely make sense, since there often is no logical explanation as to when and why it develops in the body.