Autobiography of Red

“XXIV. Freedom,” in Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, Vintage Books, 1998.

Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.

 ——-

He got a job in the local library shelving government documents. It was agreeable to work in a basement
humming with fluorescent lights and cold as a sea of stone.  The documents had a forlorn austerity,
tall and hushed in their ranges as veterans of a forgotten war. Whenever a librarian came clumping down the metal stairs with a pink slip for one of the documents, Geryon would vanish into the stacks. A little button at the end of each range activated the fluorescent track above it.
A yellowing 5x7 index cardScotch-taped below each button said EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN NOT IN USE.Geryon went flickering though the ranges like a bit of mercury flipping the switches on and off.The librarians thought hima talented boy with a shadow side. One evening at supper when his mother asked himwhat they were like, Geryon could not remember if the librarians were men or women. 

COMMENT

     The words of the old spiritual say, "this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." It's a reference to Matthew (5:15), Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house."

     The dreary government documents stacks are a dark night of the soul for our hero Geryon who has been dumped by his lover and is now obeying instructions to "extinguish light when not in use."
I find the metaphor particularly amusing since I am a documents librarian. And yes, we documents librarians are a lot like the ones in the poem —  heavy-footed, gender ambiguous trolls lurking in the basement with flickering lights, pink slips, and forlorn, joy-killing, unreadable books. But note also  the librarians' radical inclusion. Geryon is literally a monster, red with wings (incidentally also a queer, tortured artist) but to the librarians, he is a talented boy. In an depository, grand dramas of sex and passion are quite simply irrelevant.  If Geryon wanted to, he could become one of them.

     It seems probable from the nuanced description that Anne Carson experienced this particular documents library as an actual place. These days most government documents are online. One day the FDLP depository in the poem may seem like pure imagination, the fanciful invention of an impossibly drab, soul-sucking job.