"There is no person without a world" (82)

Today's seminar was "one of those moments/ that was the opposite of blindness" (29) to me. Our discussion opened my eyes and heart for Geryon's autobiography and I can - despite my denying it in my last blog post - identify with him and his experiences after all. I thus read his redness as being different and individual and his red world, as living in his own world, as everybody does. We should all try to understand each other's redness, but we always fail (and a "between" people "a dangerous cloud" (132) develops), as this quote indicates:

"I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it./ But this separation of consciousness/ is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is/ to believe in an undivided being between us." (105)


At the very beginning of the romance, Geryon is a boy - innocent, pure - and has no notion of selfhood and no concept of distinction between outside and inside world. If I was him, I would have taken his brother very seriously, when he called me/him "stupid". As a small girl, I thought we are all part of one world and we can read each others thoughts and be together, helping each other out, being one unit, basically. Bad experiences like Geryon makes with his brother, made us (me and him) realise that we were wrong. Every individual lives in his/her own world - be it red, yellow or whatever - and is wandering around in a sometimes shared space being caght in his/her inner world. We come across other people in life with other worlds and try to give each other a glimpse into one's world. Experiences Geryon makes with Heracles enhance and strenghten the sensibility and sensitivity, and consequently the awareness of being different.

We are all unique and individual, but what we all share is an original and major fear of being misunderstood. We seek for understanding the outside and our inside, but more than that we seek to satisfy our biggest need which is to be understood by others. What motivates us to make distinctions and differences, in my opinion, is to prevent misunderstandings and to improve others' understanding of ourselves. This is my humble and probably oversimplified interpretation of next week's topic "distinctions and differences" and I look forward to our fruitful discussions. To sump up, I think life is all about understanding oneself and being understood by others and love is the feeling that we understand another person's inside world and are understood by that other person (outside). When love fades due to a lack of understanding or being understood, we feel like Geryon and think:

"I once loved you, now I don't know you at all. He does not say this./ I was thinking about time - he gropes - / you know how apart people are in time together and apart at the same time - stops." (141)

I hope you understand me in one way or another.