The cells on the surface of your skin

Seltsamer Gedanke, dass der Teil von dir, den ich am besten kenne, schon tot ist. Die Zellen auf deiner Oberfläche deiner Haut sind dünn und flach, ohne Blutgefäße und Nervenendigungen. Tote Zellen, am dicksten auf deinen Handflächen und Fußsohlen. Dein sepulkraler Körper, den du mir in der Vergangenheit geschenkt hast, schützt deinen weichen Kern vor den Belästigungen der Außenwelt. Ich bin eine solche Belästigung, die dich mit nekrophiler Besessenheit streichelt, die wie aufgebahrt vor mir liegende Schale liebt.

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Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. Your sepulchral body, offered to me in the past tense, protects your soft centre from the intrusions of the outside world. I am one such intrusion, stroking you with necrophiliac obsession, loving the shell laid out before me.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

The outer space of each other

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

The way there is sudden

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

My fossil-love and you discover it

Days and nights passed. I kissed her mouth and her neck. I kissed her breasts and her belly. I kissed her lower than her belly and was pleased with the ripples of pleasure I found there. She was dainty and sweet, a dish of figs in fine weather.

We were approaching the inevitable, but we weren't there yet.

Days and nights. Days and nights connected by rivets of pleasure. Our furnace of love heated time and welded together the separateness of the hours, so that time became what the prophet says it is - continuous, unbroken.

To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love and you discover it.

Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

Beginning the descent of you

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse - there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.

Love is an intervention.

Hand over hand, beginning the descent of you. Hand over hand, too fast, like my heartbeat. This is the way down, the cliff, the cave. No safety, no certainty of return.

Your lips are moving, what is it you say? Your lips are moving over mine, what is it? I will set you in the sky and name you. I will hide you in the earth like a treasure.

Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.

Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

I could smell you on the wind

I was on the roof. My hair was lank. My skin dull from ill-use. Only my eyes were bright. I thought I was standing on a cliff top waiting for a ship to pass under the white clouds. I had feared all the ships were gone, everyone travels by aeroplane these days. I had feared all the ships were gone, this high dizzy place the last standing room of my heart. Then I saw a mast and gay sails. Your firm sides, your hold stashed with cargo. You were a deck of colour in a pale world. Red lipstick, green eyes, hair swarming bees. You were a spice ship and I could smell you on the wind.

Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

Ship of Fools

This is the alchemic vessel, resistant to change, constantly being transformed. This is us, vulnerable, insulated, entirely self-contained yet altogether at the mercy of the elements. The Ship of Fools is sailing tonight and all of us are aboard.

- Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Here's my chance

I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve both overvalues the self and undervalues what the self is. Here's my life - I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed. Here's my chance. I'll take it.

- Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

A spell or a song I sing

What would it be to love? Would it be the fields under rain, the vivid green the grass takes? Would it be the air current the bird finds? Would it be the fox and the fox hole? Would it be natural at all? Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure or sleight of hand? Would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or a song I sing?
If I am a wound would love be my salve?
If I am speechless would love be a mouth?

- Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Straightforward is not the geometry of space

What limits? There are none. The story moves at the speed of light, and like light, the story is curved. There are no straight lines. The lines that smooth across the page, deceive. Straightforward is not the geometry of space. In space, nothing tends directly; matter and matter of fact both warp under light.

Jeanette Winterson, Weight

My body is the world in little

Boundaries, always boundaries.

I keep telling the story again and though I find different exits, the walls never fall. My life is paced out - here and here and here - I can alter its shape but I can't get beyond it. I tunnel through, seem to find a way out, but the exits lead nowhere. I'm back inside, leaning on the limits of the self.

This is the body, the sealed unit that cautiously takes in what it needs to survive, that stoutly repels invaders of the microbe kind. This is the body, whose boundaries weaken only in decay and then the freedom it brings is useless. United with the world at last, I am dead to it.

This is the body, and my body is the world in little. I am the Kosmos - the all that there is, and at the same time I was never more outside, never more than nothing. Nothing bounded by nothing.

Nothing has an unlikely property. It is heavy.

Jeanette Winterson, Weight

The valuable, fabulous thing

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting.

And if you win?

There's no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take it seriously.

Victors lose when they are tired of winning. Perhaps they regret it later, but the impulse to gamble the valuable, fabulous thing is too strong. The impulse to be reckless again, to go barefoot, like you used to, before you inherited all those shoes.

You could refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it's given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.
So you refuse and then you discover that your house is haunted by the ghost of a leopard.

I take my boat out on the lagoon and listen to the seagulls cry and wonder where I will be in eight years, say. In the soft darkness that hides the future from the over-curious, I content myself with this; that where I will be will not be where I am. The cities of the interior are vast, do not lie on any map.
And the valuable, fabulous thing?
Now that I have it back? Now that I have been given a reprieve such as only the stories offer?
Will I gamble it again?
Yes.

- Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

We believe we can be our own miracle

How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracle, and just a lottery win or Mr Right will make the world new.

The ancients believed in Fate because they recognised how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

Jeanette Winterson, Weight

Necessary cable

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That’s where I am alone, the observer and the observed.

I descend, I try to tell the truth, but the primitive diving bell that I call my consciousness is a more fallible instrument than the cheap thermometer in my fish tank. I may not have a very bottom. I may be much shallower than I like to think, or I may be a creature of infinity, for now confined. My real world, as I fondly call it, may be the necessary cable that holds me in waters I can manage.

Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies (1996)

Palimpsest

Articulacy of the fingers, the language of the deaf and dumb, signing on the body body longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become like printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know Louise would have reading hands. She translated me into her own book.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body