"Why be happy when you could be normal?"
A book of two halves. Emotion recollected in tranquillity; caesura; raw lumpy ungrammatical misery.
Childhood in the house of Constance Winterson, now at arm's length, exorcised into anecdote, patinated, harmless. "Wasn't she dreadful!"
Then Jeannette went to Oxford, and was successful.
And went mad (so unhappy! But why? And no answer), and looked for her birth-mother, and in finding her experienced again: Other people do not fix what I feel.
Not learnt again, experienced again. "Other people do not fix what I feel." Disappointment, anger, the search for the next person, disappointment, anger... Live and don't learn.
***
So many efforts, such an industry!, built on attempts to fix what we feel. And if what we feel is not broken, what then? "But I feel unhappy..." -- yes. That is how humans feel. Call it "original sin", if you like. The intuition that happiness is outside us, and that we are closed away from it. The realisation that we are mortal.
Romans 3:23, For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God: Life as a pre-death experience, a vestibule to eternity, and a vale of tears.
That was Constance Winterson's accommodation with unhappiness.
Lucy van Pelt: Life has ups and downs? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard! I don't want any downs! All I want are ups and ups and ups!
That is Jeanette Winterson's.
***
A book of rationalisations; metaphors of literature and of psychotherapy, babbled like charms to magick the hurt away, but not yet a book of understanding.
Metaphor is the mirror in which we can gaze safely on the basilisk.
This book mirrors Jeanette. She is her own basilisk, but she does not see that yet.
Childhood in the house of Constance Winterson, now at arm's length, exorcised into anecdote, patinated, harmless. "Wasn't she dreadful!"
Then Jeannette went to Oxford, and was successful.
And went mad (so unhappy! But why? And no answer), and looked for her birth-mother, and in finding her experienced again: Other people do not fix what I feel.
Not learnt again, experienced again. "Other people do not fix what I feel." Disappointment, anger, the search for the next person, disappointment, anger... Live and don't learn.
***
So many efforts, such an industry!, built on attempts to fix what we feel. And if what we feel is not broken, what then? "But I feel unhappy..." -- yes. That is how humans feel. Call it "original sin", if you like. The intuition that happiness is outside us, and that we are closed away from it. The realisation that we are mortal.
Romans 3:23, For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God: Life as a pre-death experience, a vestibule to eternity, and a vale of tears.
That was Constance Winterson's accommodation with unhappiness.
Lucy van Pelt: Life has ups and downs? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard! I don't want any downs! All I want are ups and ups and ups!
That is Jeanette Winterson's.
***
A book of rationalisations; metaphors of literature and of psychotherapy, babbled like charms to magick the hurt away, but not yet a book of understanding.
Metaphor is the mirror in which we can gaze safely on the basilisk.
This book mirrors Jeanette. She is her own basilisk, but she does not see that yet.