swallow, she's not poisonous
'i unlatched the shutters. the light was as intense as a love affair. i was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. nobody needs this much sunlight. nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. we are the ones obsessed by measurement. the world just pours it out.'
i have just found myself passionately lost in lighthousekeeping by jeanette winterson. i read it in precisely three sittings; the first, last night after i had switched on the electric blanket and propped my skull up with my hand. enraptured, i read to page fourteen before falling into strange nightmares unrelated to the story. the second time i indulged in its words was three or four minutes after opening my eyes to the midmorning sun this morning, feeling the light falling in warm slices across the tangled bedclothes. for my third sitting, i sat upright in bed, resting the book against a pale blue pillow, though it was easily held up by my fervent grasping of the edges as i clung to words and clumps of words. over one hundred pages. enough to get me drunk.
'that day in the lighthouse she had gone up into the light, and in her copper-coloured dress, and autumn hair, she stood like a delicate lever amongst the instruments that revolved and refracted the lens.'
of course i would fall in love with babel dark, as shards of a byronic hero glittered within him, despite his shadowy name and disposition. he is someone to keep inside me, like a found treasure. like a seahorse fossil in a pocket. my seahorse.
'there were two atlantics; one outside the lighthouse and one inside me. the one inside me had no string of guiding lights.'
if only she could know the way everything resonates within me; the story of my own voyage within myself. sailing across tendons and wet arteries, circulating, in search of the pinprick of light that will take me home. how could she know that one of my most painful tugs is the ardent desire to live in a lighthouse at the fringes of a salty body, on a cliff where the birds gather like it's where the world ends and there's nothing but water forever, with the sun burning shapes into each careful undulation.
'he told anyone who wanted to listen what he had told himself on those sea-soaked days and nights. others joined in, and it was soon discovered that every light had a story - no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.'
the power of stories. so full and magical that they can be made of light and spun and never even need language to be told. we only need warm chests and salt and the mysterious sounds of the night to know what happened, what will happen. but perhaps we must rely on language for what's happening. we seem to forget how to see the present. but more importantly, how to become it.
'tell me a story, pew.
what kind of story, child?
a story with a happy ending.
there's no such thing in all the world.
as a happy ending?
as an ending.'