“What is time made of?” is Geryon’s favorite question. The yellowbeard, a philosopher Geryon meets on a trip to Buenos Aires, offers the unsatisfying answer that time is an “abstraction” that humans “impose upon motion.” Implicit in such a view is that humans construct the idea of time to measure and “impose” structure onto the trajectory of their lives, which otherwise is beyond their ability to control. In quantifying the passage of time into hours, days, and years, humanity can reflect on time in a way that makes sense. What this explanation misses, however, is the palpable way the march of time connects to the human experience of mortality. Thinking of time as a mere abstraction obscures how directly time affects us all. As Geryon states, “A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, / like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.” In other words, the forward motion of time universally results in the real, non-abstract consequence of death.
Geryon’s question then becomes, if one cannot dismiss time as an “abstraction,” how does one deal with a problem that is beyond one’s ability to control? Geryon uses photography to impose the illusion of structure and control over time, most notably in the 15-minute exposure photograph he takes of a fly drowning in a pail of water. He learns of the idea from Herakles’s grandmother, who shows him a 15-minute exposure photograph she took years ago during the eruption of a 1923 volcano that decimated Hades, Herakles’s hometown. The photo, entitled “Red Patience,” is striking because it shows the difference 15 minutes can make. Geryon finds the image disturbing, yet he can’t take his eyes off it because it illustrates the core of his anxiety about time (its uncontrollability) as well as a potential solution to that problem. When Geryon later records his own 15-minute exposure of a fly drowning in a pail of water, he captures the process of the fly’s death, which symbolically allows him to “move[] through time” on his own terms. In this way, photography gives Geryon the power to manipulate and reflect on time in a way that allows him to work through his anxieties surrounding death.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Time ThemeTracker
Time Quotes in Autobiography of Red
Once she said the meaning
it would stay.
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved.
What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said.
Very likely, said Geryon.
Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
There is no person without a world.
[…] Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction.
Just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.
It is
because of her I began to notice moments of death. Children make you see distances.
You can’t be alive and think about nothing.
“…I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.”
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.
A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has effects
no one can calculate in advance.
We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.
