Gut Symmetries Read Online Free Page A
Author: Jeanette Winterson
old world.
I learned to feel comfortable in New York the way a fakir learns to feel comfortable on a bed of nails; enjoy it. Beauty and pain are not separate. That is so clear here. It is a crucible city, an alchemical vessel where dirt and glory do effect transformation. No one who succumbs to this city remains as they were. Its indifference is its possibility. Here you can be anything. If you can. I was quite aware that much of what gets thrown into an alchemical jar is destroyed. Self-destroyed. The alchemical process breaks down substances according to their own laws. If there is anything vital, it will be distilled. If not. . .
Undeceive yourself Alice, a great part of you is trash.
True, but my hope lies in the rest.
I walked quickly, purposefully, wearing Jove's leather jacket. I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone. My flesh was there, part pleasure, part sore, and the antennae of my nervous system still processing the facts of a second body. The body is its own biosphere, air entering cautiously through an elaborate filter, food attacked by hostile acids. Nothing from outside is given a long-stay visa. Oxygen is expelled as carbon, even champagne and foie gras are pummelled into turds and piss. The body is efficient but not polite. It uses and discards. Enter a second body and there is some confusion. In or out? Which is it?
The curious fact of love is that it overrides the body's rubber-sealed selfishness. Sex and procreation easily fit in with the body's plans for Empire; it wants to extend its territory, needs to reproduce itself. It resists invasion. Love the invader compromises the self's autonomy. Love the rescuer is the hand held out across the uncrossable sea.
Trust it? Perhaps. It may be the right hand or something more sinister. My body is unconvinced, my mind would like to throw down the keys. I am of the generation brought up on romance. Where is the one for me?
Biologically there are thousands of ones for me. If I want to rut I can rut. I should be wary of ties that are chains and hands that are handcuffs. What should lead me out is very likely to wall me in. The bitterness of love is twin of its hope.
Walk with me. What kind of a woman goes to bed with another woman's husband? Answer: a worm? That might explain my invertebrate state. Boneless woman; heart breast and thighs, not the kind of woman I thought I was. If I am so ignorant of my own self, how can I claim knowledge of another human being? My body still damp with him I am afraid.
'"Even the hairs of your head are numbered"' isn't that what God said?'Jove was lying on his back smiling at me. He rubbed his temples and pulled a face. 'In my case God need only count to twenty.'
Then he was serious, which he hardly ever seemed to be and he took hold of the weight of my hair. 'This is the mathematics of God.'
Later, admiring his own erection, he said, 'This is the physics of God.'
Both statements should be read carefully because Jove did not believe in God.
At the Battery I leaned on the rail and looked out at the water. There was a fog coming in and the lights of a tug bunking its coded message. The darkness and the water did not feel like a threat. Darkness-water felt like a response to the fluid place that had become my heart. As a scientist I try to work towards certainties. As a human being I seem to be moving away from them. If I needed any proof of the provisional nature of what is called the world I was beginning to find it. Of what could I be sure? Absolutely sure? And yet I tended towards him as light to a bright object.
I realise that is an optical illusion.
I started to walk back, away from the water, away from the dark. I would have to go back into the day just beginning.
Love affair: amour honourable or dishonourable. Jove had a wife.
THE TOWER
My husband has started an affair. Cherchez la femme. Where is she?
Ransack the bedroom. The master
I learned to feel comfortable in New York the way a fakir learns to feel comfortable on a bed of nails; enjoy it. Beauty and pain are not separate. That is so clear here. It is a crucible city, an alchemical vessel where dirt and glory do effect transformation. No one who succumbs to this city remains as they were. Its indifference is its possibility. Here you can be anything. If you can. I was quite aware that much of what gets thrown into an alchemical jar is destroyed. Self-destroyed. The alchemical process breaks down substances according to their own laws. If there is anything vital, it will be distilled. If not. . .
Undeceive yourself Alice, a great part of you is trash.
True, but my hope lies in the rest.
I walked quickly, purposefully, wearing Jove's leather jacket. I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone. My flesh was there, part pleasure, part sore, and the antennae of my nervous system still processing the facts of a second body. The body is its own biosphere, air entering cautiously through an elaborate filter, food attacked by hostile acids. Nothing from outside is given a long-stay visa. Oxygen is expelled as carbon, even champagne and foie gras are pummelled into turds and piss. The body is efficient but not polite. It uses and discards. Enter a second body and there is some confusion. In or out? Which is it?
The curious fact of love is that it overrides the body's rubber-sealed selfishness. Sex and procreation easily fit in with the body's plans for Empire; it wants to extend its territory, needs to reproduce itself. It resists invasion. Love the invader compromises the self's autonomy. Love the rescuer is the hand held out across the uncrossable sea.
Trust it? Perhaps. It may be the right hand or something more sinister. My body is unconvinced, my mind would like to throw down the keys. I am of the generation brought up on romance. Where is the one for me?
Biologically there are thousands of ones for me. If I want to rut I can rut. I should be wary of ties that are chains and hands that are handcuffs. What should lead me out is very likely to wall me in. The bitterness of love is twin of its hope.
Walk with me. What kind of a woman goes to bed with another woman's husband? Answer: a worm? That might explain my invertebrate state. Boneless woman; heart breast and thighs, not the kind of woman I thought I was. If I am so ignorant of my own self, how can I claim knowledge of another human being? My body still damp with him I am afraid.
'"Even the hairs of your head are numbered"' isn't that what God said?'Jove was lying on his back smiling at me. He rubbed his temples and pulled a face. 'In my case God need only count to twenty.'
Then he was serious, which he hardly ever seemed to be and he took hold of the weight of my hair. 'This is the mathematics of God.'
Later, admiring his own erection, he said, 'This is the physics of God.'
Both statements should be read carefully because Jove did not believe in God.
At the Battery I leaned on the rail and looked out at the water. There was a fog coming in and the lights of a tug bunking its coded message. The darkness and the water did not feel like a threat. Darkness-water felt like a response to the fluid place that had become my heart. As a scientist I try to work towards certainties. As a human being I seem to be moving away from them. If I needed any proof of the provisional nature of what is called the world I was beginning to find it. Of what could I be sure? Absolutely sure? And yet I tended towards him as light to a bright object.
I realise that is an optical illusion.
I started to walk back, away from the water, away from the dark. I would have to go back into the day just beginning.
Love affair: amour honourable or dishonourable. Jove had a wife.
THE TOWER
My husband has started an affair. Cherchez la femme. Where is she?
Ransack the bedroom. The master
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