Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

Lookin for the handle

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LauraGigs:

--- Quote ---"...the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity."

--- End quote ---

I've always wondered what this is supposed to mean.  I immediately assumed it was some kind of metaphor, but maybe it's just nothing.  (In any case, it's a bit baffling IMO.)

belbbmfan:

--- Quote from: LauraGigs on January 11, 2008, 02:44:49 am ---I've always wondered what this is supposed to mean.  I immediately assumed it was some kind of metaphor, but maybe it's just nothing.  (In any case, it's a bit baffling IMO.)

--- End quote ---

Yes, lurid colors? And obscenity? Why use those words? To give a sense of shame that Ennis maybe still feels about the dreams he has? Him 'not being queer' and all that. I don't know. He has the shirts hanging in this trailer at that moment, he isn't hiding them. And at that point be has come out, in a way, to several people.

I thought that the image of the handle reflect Ennis's lack of having 'something/someone to hold on to' in his life. Isn't Ennis holding more handles in his hand when he's around Jack (he drinks the whiskey holding the cup by the handle telling Jack about how he ended up there, he's holding the saw when they're setting up camp).

My mind is just wandering here. I'd love to hear your thoughts. And maybe someone has an better explanation for those lurid colors?


great idea to revive this thread Amanda!  :)

Front-Ranger:

--- Quote from: LauraGigs on January 11, 2008, 02:44:49 am ---I've always wondered what this is supposed to mean.  I immediately assumed it was some kind of metaphor, but maybe it's just nothing.  (In any case, it's a bit baffling IMO.)

--- End quote ---

Speaking of metaphors, here's AP's recollection on the first metaphor she created:


--- Quote ---I was very young, about three years old, when introduced to metaphor, and I remember the first sharp pleasure I felt in playing what seemed a kind of game. I was with my mother in the kitchen of our small house. Classical music came out of the radio, I have no idea what, some sweeping and lofty orchestral statement. I was not consciously listening until my mother, who was a skilled watercolorist, said, "What does this music make you think about, what do you see?" Immediately I translated the music I heard into an image. "A bishop running through the woods," I answered. I had no idea what a bishop was but liked the word for its conjunction of hiss and hiccup. What the music made me see in my mind's eye was a tall, glassy, salt-cellar figure—the bishop—gliding through a dark forest dappled with round spots of light. The connections of perception between the sounds of the music and the image of trees / slipping figure / broken light had been made. Thereafter, and forever more, I found myself constantly involved in metaphoric observation.
--- End quote ---

Front-Ranger:
I just had a bolt of lightning hit me about the last metaphor in the story, where the spoon handle is jutting out of the can of beans "with an air of comic obscenity." It happened after I woke up from a dream where some things were pictured like cartoons...a television remote, a car, and a drainpipe. They sort of glowed like black lights and had a black outline around them. I realized that these things were not pictured that way to make fun of them or put them down, it was because they were symbolic icons, like drawings on the walls of primitive native caves and temples. What Annie Proulx is doing here is creating or advancing an iconography, and emulating in prose what the artists she admires, like Richard Prince, did for the cowboy, the West, and now our own private story.

Front-Ranger:
I was just reading the book Women Who Run With the Wolves about the origins of the word obscenity. It comes from old Hebrew, meaning wizard, sorceress. Like many things having to do with the old feminine-based religions, the word came to have perjorative meanings in order to denigrate those religions.

The author Clarissa Estes also says, "...ladylikeness in certain situations actually throttled a woman rather than allowing her to breathe. . . .The mischief and humour of the obscene Goddesses can cause a vital form of medicine  to spread throughout the endocrine and neurological systems of the body."

These obscene Goddesses described by her heal through sexual/sensual means. One is Baubo, the ancient Greek Goddess of Obscenity or the Belly Goddess. Another one is named Coyote Dick. And I think a contemporary person who should go in this category is our dear Annie Proulx.

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