This excerpt is from Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson:

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else…These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Of course, there are several different ways to be. In the world of the Homeric epic, for example being is stable and particularity is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled…the sea is unwearying. Death is bad…Homer’s epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind of passion? “Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code,” says Baudrillard.

So into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born. And Stesichoros was studying the surface restlessly. It leaned away from him. He went closer. It stopped. “Passion for substances” seems a good description of that moment. For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches.

Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved.  Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless….or a planet middle night stuck. Or an insomniac outside the joy. Some substances proved more complex. To Helen of Troy, for example, was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him…”

For further information:   “Seeing Red”, the New York Times 1998 review of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red:   http://bit.ly/7MXqd

Geryon, the protagonist of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, as illustrated by Gustave Dore for The Divine Comedy.