Don’t do to love what I do
‘Love – the great leveller. Love – the life-changer.’
- Jeanette Winterson
‘The most helpful thing I have learned in the last year or so is what I do when I am stressed or depressed or struggling or anxious – whatever, large or small. I will drive the thing round and round in my head and suddenly try and park it, well crash it, actually, into my relationship. I will pick a fight or invent a crisis – just so that I can be dealing with that, and park the other thing that is really bothering me.
I noticed myself doing it, and suddenly it became very clear that it is was something I had always done, because strife and struggle in the love place is where I can cope with problems – it may be horrible but it is familiar territory, instead of the scary unfamiliar territory of a new problem or the intractability of an old problem.
I am in a very good and loving relationship now – the best I have ever had, and we are able to deal with things as they arise, but on maybe 3 or 4 occasions I have gone back into default mode.
I was physically parking my real car when I saw myself parking the virtual stuff in the wrong bay. I called Susie and told her what I thought I had been doing – and said sorry for the fight we had just had, or I had just manufactured. She understood, of course, because she understands so much about how people tick, but insights mean nothing unless they are your own.
I can catch myself at it now, and take a deep breath, and force myself back to the real anxiety, whatever it is, and that is not fun. But at least it is true.
We are all going to suffer – that’s life – so we might as well suffer for the thing we need to be suffering over, and not displace it into something else. ‘
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com
‘Jeanette Winterson a surprise hit with Muslim women’ – Samuel Peeps
Samuel Peeps: Jeanette Winterson a surprise hit with Muslim women – Samuel Peeps.
‘We make love, we make babies, we make dinner, we make sense, we make a difference, we make it up, we make it new…’ – JW
THE JERWOOD CONTEMPORARY MAKERS SHOW
Publication: Visual Arts
The most satisfying thing a human being can do – and the sexiest – is to make something.
Life is about relationship – to each other – and to the material world. Making something is a relationship.
The verb is the clue. We make love, we make babies, we make dinner, we make sense, we make a difference, we make it up, we make it new….
True, we sometimes make a mess, but creativity never was a factory finish.
The wrestle with material isn’t about subduing; it is about making a third thing that didn’t exist before. The raw material was there, and you were there, but the relationship that happens between maker and material allows the finished piece to be what it is. And that allows a further relationship to develop between the piece and the viewer or the buyer.
Both relationships are in every way different from mass production or store bought objects that, however useful, are dead on arrival. Anyone who makes something finds its life, whether it’s Michelangelo releasing David from twenty tons of Carrera marble, or potter Jane Cox spinning me a plate using the power of her shoulders, the sureness of her hands, the concentration of her mind.
I have a set of silverware made by an eighteenth century silverworker called Hester Bateman, one of the very few women working in flatware at that time. When I eat with her spoons, I feel the work and the satisfaction that went into making them – the handle and bowl are in equal balance – and I feel a part of time as it really is – not chopped into little bits, but continuous. She made this beautiful thing, it’s still here, and I am here too, writing my books, eating my soup, two women making things across time. I feel connection, respect, delight. And it is just a spoon…
But the thing about craft, about the making of everyday objects that we can have around us, about the making of objects that are beautiful and/or useful, is that our everyday life is enriched.
How it is enriched? To make something is to be both conscious and concentrated – it is a fully alert state, but not one of anxious hyper-arousal. We all know the flow we feel when we are absorbed in what we do. I find that by having a few things around me that have been made by someone’s hand and eye and imagination working together, I am prevented from passing through my daily life in a kind of blur. I have to notice what is in front of me – the table, the vase, the hand-blocked curtains, the thumb prints in the sculpture, the lettering block. I have some lamps made by Marianna Kennedy, and what I switch on is not a bulb on a stem; it is her sense of light.
So I am in relationship to the object and in relationship to the maker. This allows me to escape from the anonymity and clutter of the way we live now. Instead of surrounding myself with lots of things I hardly notice, I have a few things that also seem to notice me. No doubt this is a fantasy – but…
The life of objects is a strange one.
A maker creates something like a fossil record. She or he is imprinted in the piece. We know that energy is never lost, only that it changes its form, and it seems to me that the maker shape-shifts her/himself into the object. That is why it remains a living thing.
Of course it is possible to design an object that will be made by others – but that is an extension of the creative relationship, not its antithesis. It is the ceaseless reproduction of meaningless objects that kills creativity for all of us, as producers and consumers.
But are producers and consumers who we want to be?
To make is to do. It is an active verb. Creativity is present in every child ever born. Kids love making things. There are different doses and dilutions of creativity, and the force is much stronger in some than in others – but it is there for all of us, and should never have been separated off from life into art.
I would like to live in a creative continuum that runs from the child’s drawing on the fridge to Lucien Freud, from the coffee cups made by a young ceramicist to Grayson Perry’s pots.
We don’t need to agonise over the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘craft’, any more than we should be separating art and life. The boundary is between the creative exuberance of being human, and the monotony of an existence dependent on mass production – objects, food, values, aspirations.
Making is personal. Making is shared. Making is a celebration of who we are.
*This post has been re-blogged. You can find the original here.
‘Disaster does not matter, intensity does.’ (Why I love…) – Jeanette Winterson
~
‘I love you is always a quotation, and it is the least original thing that any of us can say, but just as it must be often said, it must be sincerely said, and as if for the first time, on a planet new-made from love.’
‘Anything with love in it always has a bit of a muddle in it, because love is chaotic and exuberant as well as careful and dedicated.’
‘What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?’
‘Desire deserves respect.
It is worth the chaos.
But it is not love, and only love is worth everything.’
‘Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.’
‘You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?’
Love, is always worth it
‘The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.’ - Jeanette Winterson
‘I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal.’ – JW
‘I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn’t rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can’t settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy me and be destroyed by me.’ - Jeanette Winterson
(Excerpt from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit)
‘But on the wild nights who can call you home?’ – JW
‘There are many forms of love and affection; some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power.
But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.’
www.jeanettewinterson.com
“You’ll get over it…”
Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson
‘”You’ll get over it…”
It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. you don’t get over it because “it” is the person you loved.
The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death.
This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?’
‘What You Risk Reveals What You Value.’ – Jeanette Winterson
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
It’s the playing that’s irresistible.
Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love,
what you risk reveals what you value.
~
To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts.
The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand.
Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
~
I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling.
It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read.
Wordlessly, she explains me to myself.
Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.
~
‘Desire deserves respect. It is worth the chaos. But it is not love, and only love is worth everything.’ – JW
While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.
Desire is always a kind of invention. By which I mean that the two of us are re-invented by this powerful emotion. Well, sometimes it is the two of us, sometimes it might just be me, and then I am your stalker, your psychopath, the one whose fantasy is out of control.
Desiring someone who has no desire for you is a clue to the nature of this all-consuming feeling; it has much more to do with me than it has to do with you. You are the object of my desire. I am the subject. I am the I.
When we are the object of each other’s desire it is easy to see nothing negative in this glorious state. We become icons of romance, we fulfil all the slush-fantasies. This is how it is meant to be. You walked into the room… Our eyes met… from the first moment… etc
It is safe to say that overwhelming desire for another person involves a good deal of projection. I don’t believe in love at first sight, for reasons that will become clear later, but I do believe in desire at first sight. Sometimes it as simple as sexual desire, and perhaps men are more straightforward there, but usually desire is complex; a constellation of wants and needs, hopes and dreams, a whole universe of uninhabited stars looking for life.
And nothing feels more like life than desire. Everyone knows it; the surge in the blood, cocaine-highs without the white powder. Desire is shamanistic, trance-like, ecstatic. When people say, as they often do, ‘I’d love to fall in love again – that first month, six months, year’…, they are not talking about love at all – it’s desire they mean.
And who can blame us? Desiring you allows me to feel intensely, makes my body alert as a fox. Desire for you allows me to live outside normal time, conjures me into a conversation with my soul when I never thought I had one, tricks me into behaving better than I ever did, like someone else, someone good.
Desire for you fills my mind and thus becomes a space-clearing exercise. In this jumbled packed, bloated, noisy world, you become my point of meditation. I think of you and little else, and so I realise how absurd and wasteful are most of the things that I do. Body, mind, effort, are concentrated in your image. The fragmented state of ordinary life at last becomes coherent. No longer scattered through time and space, I am collected in one place, and that place is you.
Simple. Perfect.’
Until it goes wrong.
The truth is that unless desire is transformed into love, desire fails us; it fails to do what it once did; the highs, the thrills. Our transports of delight disappear. We stop walking on air. We find ourselves back on the commuter train and on our own two feet. Language gives it away; we talk about coming back down to earth.
For many this a huge disappointment. When desire is gone, so is love, and so is the relationship. I doubt though, that love is so easy to shift. Loving shies away from leaving, and can cope with the slow understanding that the beloved is not Superman or Miss World.
We live in an Upgrade culture. I think this has infected relationships. Why keep last year’s model when the new one will be sleeker and more fun? People, like stuff, are throw-aways in our society; we don’t do job security and we don’t offer security in relationships. We mouth platitudes about time to move on, as though we are doing something new-age and wise, when all we really want is to get rid of the girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife.
I don’t want a return to the 1950’s when couples stayed together whatever the hell, but whoever said that relationships are easy?
Advertising always promises that the new model will be easier to use. And of course when you ‘upgrade’ to the next relationship, it is easier – for a while.
If you are pretty or personable, handsome or rich, serial relationships offer all the desire and none of the commitment. As sexual desire calms, and as the early fantasies dissolve, we begin to see the other person in real life, and not as our goddess or rescuer. We turn critical. We have doubts. We begin to see ourselves, too, and as most of us spend our entire lives hiding from any confrontation with the self, this sudden sighting is unpleasant, and we blame the other person for our panicky wish to bolt.
It is less painful to change your partner than it is to confront yourself, but one of the many strange things about love is that it asks that we do confront ourselves, while giving us the strength of character to make that difficult task possible. If desire is a magic potion, with instant effect, (see Tristan and Isolde), then love is a miracle whose effects become apparent only in time. Love is the long-haul. Desire is now.
An Upgrade culture, a Now Culture, and a Celebrity culture, where the endless partner-swapping of the rich and famous is staple fare, doesn’t give much heft to the long-haul. We are the new Don Giovannis, whose seductions need to be faster and more frequent, and we hide these crimes of the heart under the sexy headline of Desire.
Don Giovanni – with his celebrated one thousand and three women, is of course dragged off to Hell for his sins. Desire has never been a favourite of religion. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, Christianity sees desire as the road to the sins of the flesh and as a distraction from God.Islam has its women cover themselves in public lest any man should be inflamed, and jeopardise his soul. In Jewish tradition, desire ruins King David and Samson, just as surely as modern-day Delilah’s are still shearing their men into submission. Yet it would be misleading to forget the love poem in the Bible that is the Song of Solomon; a poem as romantic as any written since, that gives desire a legitimate place in the palace of love.
And quite right too. Desire is wonderful. Magic potions are sometimes exactly what is needed. You can love me and leave me if you like, and anybody under thirty should do quite a lot of loving and leaving. I don’t mean that desire belongs to youth – certainly it does not – but there are good reasons to fall in love often when you are growing up, even if only to discover that it wasn’t love at all.
The problems start when desire is no longer about discovery, but just a cheap way of avoiding love.
It is a mistake to see desire as an end in itself. Lust is an end in itself, and if that is all you want, then fine. Desire is trickier, because I suspect that it’s real role is towards love, not an excuse in the other direction.
There is a science-based argument that understands desire as a move towards love, but a love that is necessary for a stable society. Love is a way of making people stay together, desire is a way of making people love each other, goes the argument. This theory reads our highest emotional value as species protection. Un surprisingly, I detest this reading, and much prefer what poets have to say. When Dante talks about the love that moves the sun and the lesser stars, I believe him. He didn’t know as much as we do about the arrangement of the heavens, but he knew about the complexity of the heart.
My feeling is that love led by desire, desire deepening into love, is much more than selfish gene social stability and survival of the species. Loving someone is the closest we can get to knowing what it is like to be another person. Love blasts through our habitual sclerotic selfishness, the narrow ‘me first’ that gradually closes us down, the dead-end of the loveless life.
There are different kinds of love, and not all of them are prefaced by desire, yet desire keeps its potent place in our affections. Its releasing force has no regard for convention of any kind, and crosses gender, age, class, religion, commonsense and good manners.
This is bracing and necessary. It is addictive. Like all powerful substances, desire needs careful handling, which by its nature is almost impossible to do.
Almost, but not quite. Jung, drawing on alchemy, talked about desire as the white bird, which should always be followed when it appears, but not always brought down to earth. Simply, we cannot always act on our desire, nor should we, but repressing it tells us nothing. Following the white bird is a courageous way of acknowledging that something explosive is happening. Perhaps that will blow up our entire world, or perhaps it will detonate a secret chamber in the heart. For certain, things will change.
I don’t suppose that the white bird of desire is nearly as attractive to most of us as the white powder substitute with natural highs. Desire as a drug is racier than desire as a messenger. Yet most things in life have a prosaic meaning and a poetic meaning, and there are times when only poetry will answer.
For myself, when I have trusted my desire, whether or not I have acted on it, life has become much more difficult, but strangely illuminated. When I have not trusted my desire, out of cowardice or commonsense, slowly I have gone into shadow. I cannot explain this, but I find it to be true.
*This article by Jeanette Winterson appeared as a column in The Independent and has been produced here in its entirety. The original can be found here.
Once Was Love
‘I love you is always a quotation, and it is the least original thing that any of us can say, but just as it must be often said, it must be sincerely said, and as if for the first time, on a planet new-made from love.’ – Jeanette Winterson
(Credits: excerpt from The Times: www.jeanettewinterson.com ; art – Tracy Emin)
‘There are places, people, situations, that are a total waste of time. Leave them.’ – JW
‘I have cried nearly every day for the last year. There was a lot I needed to cry about. Not only present things, but deeper, much deeper, for all the tears not shed, for the strange rackety past… and the life there.
I never thought it was going to come and get me, but it did.
All I can say is that there is no escape from the night sea voyage and when it comes, that dark ship with no crew and no destination, you must board it, not knowing when the journey will end or what its purpose might be.
Night is followed by night. There is no day. But daylight comes.’
- Jeanette Winterson
(excerpt from September 2008 column: www.jeanettewinterson.com)
The trouble with you and me
i was lonely... and you weren't.
‘I fell in love, and with all the recklessness of love, I had no idea what I was doing until it was far too late to get out…’ – Jeanette Winterson
Make the most of everything- even the bad stuff. This time, this day, will never come again.’ – JW
‘I once wrote ‘Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.’ And again, I said, ‘Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.’
Language, ruled by Mercury, is made of doubleness. The things that can be said – the dazzling power of language to communicate, to restore, to invigorate, to explain, to make possible, and the things that can’t be said – the thresholds of language where silence allows no noisy crossings, no not even a whisper.
Language is a human achievement and it needs to be re-made, re-achieved, every time a baby is born…’
‘But there is so much life – and it is wrong to waste it. Make the most of everything- even the bad stuff. This time, this day, will never come again.’
- Jeanette Winterson (www.jeanettewinterson.com)
Powerless by the Book – Part V of excerpts
‘As you get older, the open spaces start to close up.’
‘You seem to have slipped through.’
‘I get reckless. I risk more than I should.’
‘Have you left your husband?’
‘No, just lied to him.’
‘Can you lie to someone you love?’
‘It’s kinder than telling the truth.’
‘Are you still close?’
‘As close as two people growing apart can be. You keep the form and the habit of what you have, but gradually you empty it of meaning.’
‘If you feel like that, you should leave.’
‘I still love him.’
‘You can love someone and leave them. Sometimes you should.’
‘Not me.’
Powerless by the Book – Part IV of excerpts
The next morning I woke late and turned over to kiss her.
She had gone. The sheet was still warm but she had gone. I lay there, my growing agitation of mind beginning to fight with the gentle heaviness of my body. I had no idea what to do, so I did the obvious – got dressed and ran round the corner to our other hotel.
I walked to a little café on the river and ordered some coffee and croissants. No difficulties. No complications. Not even goodbye. So that’s the end of it then.
I felt as if I had blundered into someone else’s life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.
Who was I last night? Who was she?
Powerless by the Book – Part III of excerpts
‘The trouble is that in imagination anything can be perfect. Downloaded into real life, it was messy. She was messy. I was messy. I blamed myself. I had wanted to be caught.’
She said, ‘Do you still like having sex?’
‘You talk as though I’ve had an amputation.’
‘I think you have. I think someone has cut out your heart.’
She put out her hand. ‘I want to rescue you.’
‘From what?’
‘From the past. From pain.’
‘The past is only a way of talking.’
‘Then from pain.’
‘I don’t want a wipe-clean life.’
‘Don’t be so prickly.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What do you want? Tell me.’
‘No compromises.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘Only the impossible is worth the effort.’
‘Are you a fanatic or an idealist?’
‘Why do you need to label me?’
‘I need to understand.’
Powerless by the Book – Part II of excerpts
She held out her hand. What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I’m talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable.
She held out her hand. ‘You’re still angry.’
‘I’m still alive.’
What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
‘But pain is pointless.’
‘Not always.’
‘Then what is the use of suffering? Can you tell me that?’
She thinks I’m holding on to pain. She thinks the pain is a souvenir. Perhaps she thinks that pain is the only way I can feel. As it is, the pain reminds me that my feelings are damaged. The pain doesn’t stop me loving – only a false healing could do that – the pain tells me that neither my receptors nor my transmitters are in perfect working order. The pain is not feeling, but it has become an instrument of feeling.
Powerless by the Book – Part I of excerpts
‘You’re not married but you won’t sleep with me.’
‘You are married.’
‘That’s my problem.’
‘True…’
‘Well then…’
‘I’ve done it before and it became my problem.’
‘What happened?’
‘I fell in love.’
It was a long time ago. It feels like another life until I remember it was my life, like a letter you turn up in your own handwriting, hardly believing what it says.
I loved a woman who was married. She loved me too, and if there had been less love or less marriage I might have escaped. Perhaps no one really does escape.
She wanted me because I was a pool where she drank. I wanted her because she was a lover and a mother all mixed up into one. I wanted her because she was as beautiful as a warm afternoon with the sun on the rocks.
The damage done was colossal.
‘You lost her?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘Have you got over it?’
‘It was a love affair not an assault course.’
‘Love is an assault course.’
‘Some wounds never heal.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Jeanette winterson – Change Theory
‘I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people’s emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.
This is not fancy. If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places.
There’s a chance that I’m not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn’t make, for a moment brush against each other.’
‘I like garden squares and tiny tea-rooms. I like being held, and knowing that my own little world is safe. But I know too that the excitement and challenge… is to go beyond all of that into a place that is often uncomfortable. I can’t expand my mind or my emotional range if I always choose an enclosed world…
Of course, long familiarity with anything makes it safe again – which is why even the most radical becomes commonplace, and why we must always be making things new.’
~
‘The right to fail is important’ – JW
‘My advice to writers anywhere, published or not, is to love what you do, and forget about the rest. Writing is always hard work, always difficult, there are days of despair, that are times when the thing really isn’t working, but you have to be able look underneath all of that, and find the place of private commitment that is yours and yours alone. If that is there, and if it is real, you will be able to carry on. If it isn’t there, then you will be vulnerable to whatever other people have to say about your work – good or bad, and that is not right. For anyone who works alone, creativity is not about consensus. This isn’t to say that you behave like an arrogant shit – it doesn’t matter whether your gift is great or small, it matters that you care about what you do, and find enough satisfaction in it, through good times and bad. And remember, experiment is important, and the right to fail is important.’
(December 2007 – www.jeanettewinterson.com)
‘Many waters cannot quench love. Neither can floods drown it.’ – JW
Jeanette Winterson
‘I thought of us that afternoon in Paris, after we had escaped from the rain. The sun came out and the pavements shone. It was as though the streets had been silvered into a mirror, and we could see the buildings and the statues and our own faces multiplied by the glass pyramid of the Louvre and the smooth flat mirror of the rain.
It was after the flood. The past had been drowned, but we had been saved. In the multiple possibilities of the mirror we could have taken any direction we wanted.
Drops of rain fell from the hems of coats and from the falling weight of your hair. Each one was a complete world, a crystal ball of chance that held our future. Let them fall. There were so many, so many chances, so many futures. When I brushed away the rain from your forehead, aeons broke back into the waters where they were made. We were universes dripping with worlds. All we had to do was choose.
‘Noah must have felt like this.’
‘Soaked?’
‘Free.’
Imagine it.
The floodwaters subside and the ark comes to rest on top of Mount Ararat. The dove returns with an olive branch in her mouth.
Imagine it. Year and years later, the ground is long since dry and fertile, and the boat is still up there, beached on its mountain-top like a memory-point.
I look back on it amazed. I can hardly believe it is there – absurd, impossible, testimony to something that never happens.
But it did happen. It happened to us.’
‘The more real work I do the less tolerance I have for the unreal world called real life.’ – JW
‘Some days are like this – nothing really gets done and what does get done is pointless. Then, out comes a poem or a cat, or a flower, or a sunburst, or even a good piece of cheese, and the tilted world rights.
I admit it, I am struggling with my life at the moment – not my work life or my inner life, but the how to manage the incessant ignorant demands of senseless life. The bureaucratic nosy-parker form-filling time-wasting email-crazy, texting nightmare, junk sham of life that technology has locked us into. I seem to have spent all day today talking to Call Centres, arranging paperwork for VAT returns, filing receipts, checking out travel data, and it’s the mental equivalent of stuffing your face with Big Macs.’
- Jeanette Winterson
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com
I am in a similar predicament. I too feel an immense struggle but I lack the peace this author seems to have made with life and whatever it may throw at her.
I am unhappy. Tired, emotional, let down and angry. I am terrified of my anger. Terrified of the power it wields over me and my senses. Terrified of what I am capable of saying and doing in the moments it holds me captive. Yes, there are certain aspects of my life that require a relook now. If I ignore them any longer I am setting myself up for another disaster. Inwardly and out.
I admit I am scared of what will change. And perhaps even more afraid of that which will not.
Why I love… Jeanette Winterson (Tanglewreck and the speed of love)
‘The kindness of strangers is a wonderful thing, and renews faith in the world, and defies the scientific hocus-pocus of selfish genes. Not everything we do is for personal gain, thank god, or even because we hope one day that someone will be kind to us in return. Sometimes there is love – a very unscientific emotion that is always surprising.
When I was writing my kids’ book, Tanglewreck, it was important to me that Silver rescues Gabriel out of the Black Hole because she allows for a miracle. Even light cannot escape a Black Hole, though light travels at 300,000 kilometres a second. Travelling at the speed of light is not fast enough to make escape possible, but through Silver, Gabriel travels at the speed of love.
I suspect that love has a number of different speeds. Sometimes it will belt the universe as fast as light or faster. Sometimes it will take a slow train through France.
It may be that love is a good speed selector, and teaches us the right movement for all that we need to do, Maybe love, the most unscientific of criterion, is exactly the yardstick we need to make our judgements.
I don’t know what else can get you out of a Black Hole.’
