An allusion in Carson's Autobiography of Red.

I've been searching out some of the source material in Carson's Red for some time now, but tripped over this one completely unawares. In the fragmentary propendix "Red Meat"--the very best part of the book, if you ask me (but then again I'm so modernist I'm modernest)--we get this:

    III. Geryon's Parents
If you persist in wearing your mask at the supper table
Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up
Those hemorrhaging stairs to the hot dry Arms
To the ticking red taxi of the incubus
Don’t want to go want to stay Downstairs and read

Geryon, of course, is about to be tediously molested by his older brother. Turn to The Waste Land, 215ff:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting ...

Eliot's meaning here is double--he's referring to the idle end of a workday when the body waits out the timeclock while the soul tenanting it fidgets homeward; at the same time he has something more sordid in mind, the vile tryst that follows to line 256 and the semi-automatic lusts that animate it. The image here is of the body on autopilot, soul wandering elsewhere: a psychosomatic helplessness. Now, "ticking" is the vox propria of taxi meters, and Eliot's language is rather different from Carson's; still, I think there's good reason to believe that she was receiving Eliot here. Have a look at some comparanda--In Eliot (235-38), the clerk makes his move at the end of the evening meal:

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired;
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

The parallel to Geryon's situation doesn't need much explanation--we see plenty of his passivity in the opening movements of the verse-novel, and though "unreproved" isn't exactly right the general sense is exact: unwanted after-dinner caresses at the burnt out end of the day. Now I'm not so confident about this one, but compare Eliot 223f,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins,

with the odd image at the end of Carson's fragment V:

Behind her red right cheek Geryon could see
Coil of the hot plate starting to glow[.]

I'm certain something else is going on--I have to confess that, semi-literate hack that I am, I haven't yet done the brainbreakingly obvious thing and actually compared the fragments of Stesichoros with Carson's text--but I wonder whether this image isn't a bit of subtle signposting to direct us back to Eliot? In fairness, Eliot's kitchen runs on gas and Carson's is electric and--as far as I can tell--these fragments are otherwise unrelated; but I'll take what I can get. One more thing: Geryon's brother is in early puberty when he starts to molest him, so Eliot's epithet for the clerk--"the young man carbuncular" (231)--is appropriate to teenage acne as well. This is fairly weak stuff, of course, but I hope you'll accept it as ancillary for the moment and follow me back to Eliot's taxi. What business does Carson have with a poem so different from hers in ethic and style?

Pompée dans le Temple de Jérusalem.

Jean Fouquet, born at Tours in 1420, was a painter and illustrator responsible in part for bringing Renaissance technique to the French. Probably in 1465 he was commissioned by the Duke of Armagnac to illustrate a vernacular edition of Flavius Josephus, the single work of Greek historiography available (through Latin translation) until the renaissance and in extraordinarily extensive circulation--even through the Enlightenment one would frequently find Jewish Antiquities and the Bellum Judaicum shelved next to the Bible in educated households, since it was used as a supplement for the historical lacuna between Torah and the new testament. I ran across this illumination by chance when I happened to be reading about Solomonic columns on Wikipedia, and I've been thinking about it for a few months now.


Pompée dans le Temple de Jérusalem. For sake of comparison, have a look at Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 7.4ff, conveniently available online in a very nice facing edition. (The illumination treats the desecration itself--Bel. Jud. 7.6.)

Medieval views of antiquity are a sure bet if you want to put your day off-center with a nudge from the uncanny. There are a couple of things about this image that I find enormously striking--Fouquet managed to get the strangeness of the kodesh haKodashim exactly right; the human tumult is so out of place beneath that gold-on-indigo monotony, all those bodies fenced in by undulating static space. Fouquet had previously drawn the facade of the temple as though it were a Gothic cathedral, but here you can see him struggling against the contemporary and toward the alien--the altar area is familiar from Christian worship, but from the candlesticks upward he sweeps into an inhuman and frightening holiness.

I thrill a little when artists recognize the deeply alien voice of the Torah. It's too easy to humanize G-d and archaeologize Jewish antiquity--I like to say that Abraham invented the abstract, but the uncanniness of that G-d is more iridescent and enigmatic than logos. It only gets stranger by Sinai--think of Jacob's hip or Zipporah at the crossroads! Whatever spoke to Moses out of the bush is not a humanist divinity.

I identify with Pompey. That curiosity of his (was it burning, or only indifferently analytical?) brought him over the bodies of the dead into the inviolate sanctuary, and here we have him unwilling to touch the sacred treasury--not so much because he was overawed by the enormity of his crime but out of a misplaced and very Roman pietas; fas and nefas can't even begin to explain the suicidal horror of the Jews when the temple was desecrated. It's revealing that his attention was diverted to the temple treasure instead of the Ark. He was a good man and a great Roman, but the endless centuries of power and paganism can only take you so far. It's pointless to say he should have been flat on his face--too much understanding can take a man apart.

He looks so small.

Sometimes you encounter a piece of artwork that strikes you as a kind of spiritual portrait of yourself, floating out in the logos waiting to reattach itself to you--vehicle waiting for a tenor. But believe me, the position of a gentile come into sudden contact with the terror and majesty of haShem is an unenviable one; I can't judge Pompey too severely, particularly not here--I understand him too well.

Cf. Tacitus, Historiae 5.9; Shemot 4.24-26; B. Britten, Canticle 2: "Abraham and Isaac" (The Ian Bostridge version is monumentally good). More from Fouquet can be found here and here.