Language

"For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else.

That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument.

I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be."

Jeanette Winterson

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/07/21/jeanette-winterson-elinor-wachtel-interview/

Genie

"I used to have an anger so big it would fill up any house. I used to feel so hopeless that I was like Tom Thumb who has to hide under a chair so as not to be trodded on.

Do you remember how Sindbad tricks the genie? Sindbad opens the bottle and out comes a three-hundred-foot-tall genie who will kill poor Sindbad stone dead. So Sindbad appeals to his vanity and bets he can't get back in the bottle. As soon as the genie does so, Sindbad stoppers the neck until the genie learns better manners.

Jung, not Freud, liked fairy tales for what they tell about human nature. Sometimes, often, a part of us is both volatile and powerful - the towering anger that can kill you and others, and that threatens to overwhelm everything. We can't negotiate with that powerful but enraged part of us until we teach it better manners - which means getting it back in the bottle to show who is really in charge.

This isn't repression, but it is about finding a container. In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

Page 34, Why be Happy when you could be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson

Coherence, not disintegration

"I often hear voices. I realize that drops me in the crazy category but I don't much care. If you believe, as I do, that the mind wants to heal itself, and that the psyche seeks coherence not disintegration, then it isn't hard to conclude that the mind will manifest whatever is necessary to work on the job,

We now assume that people who hear voices do terrible things; murderers and psychopaths hear voices, and so do religious fanatics and suicide bombers. But in the past, voices were respectable - desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wise-woman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing,'

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

Ronnie Laing, the doctor and psychotherapist who became the trendy 1960s and 70s guru making madness fashionable, understood madness as a process that might lead somewhere. Mostly, though, it is so terrifying for the person inside it, as well as the people outside it, that the only route is drugs or a clinic.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than in any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.

Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time."

Page 170, 'Why be happy when you could be normal?', Jeanette Winterson

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me

"I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy.

A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

Jeanette Winterson

Yes.

Turning to the poem

"I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. …

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence."

Jeanette Winterson

We speak in tongues

"I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck.

We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. …

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself."

Jeanette Winterson

Art, and Healing

"I wake and sleep language. It has always been so. I had been brought up to memorise very long Bible passages, and when I left home and was supporting myself so that I could continue my education, I fought off loneliness and fear by reciting. In the funeral parlour I whispered Donne to the embalming fluids and Marvell to the corpses. Later, I found that Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott' had a soothing, because rythmic, effect on the mentally disturbed. Among the disturbed I numbered myself at that time.

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.

The psyche and the spirit do not share the instinct of the damaged body. Healing is not automatically triggered nor is danger usually avoided. Since we put ourselves in the way of hurt it seems logical to put ourselves in the way of healing. Art has more work to do than ever before but it can do that work. In a self-destructive society like our own, is it unsurprising that art as a healing force is despised."

Page 156, 'Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery', Jeanette Winterson

Photo: Saleem's notebook, from his days in the Wayanad forests. 

It came too, all of it

"When no one was left she would have to confront herself. Leaving home left nothing behind. It came too, all of it, and waited in the dark. She realized that the only war worth fighting was the one that raged within; the rest were all diversions. In this small space, her hunting miles, she was going to bring herself home. Home was not a place for the faint-hearted; only the very brave could live with themselves."

Orion, from The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson

The world just pours it out

"In the morning I was woken early by the chromatic bell of the Orthodox Church.

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."

Page 196, 'Some Wounds', from 'Lighthousekeeping', Jeanette Winterson

The longing to feel

"Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional empathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over and push aside on our way home to watch the evening news?

'Terrible' you said at Somalia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Russia, China, the Indian earthquake, the American floods, and then you watched a quiz show or a film because there's nothing you can do, and the fear and the unease that such powerlessness brings, trails in its wash, a dead arrogance for the beggar on the bridge that you pass every day. Hasn't he got legs and a cardboard box to sleep in?

And still we long to feel.

What's left? Romance. Love's counterfeit free of charge to all. Fall into my arms and the world with its sorrows will shrink up into a tinsel ball. This is the favorite antidote to the cold robot life of faraway perils and nearby apathy. Apathy. From the Greek A Pathos. Want of feeling. But, don't we know, only find the right boy, only find the right girl, and feeling will be yours. My colleagues tell me I need such a remedy."

Page 14, 'Handel', from 'Art & Lies', Jeanette Winterson

Out of touch

"After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistok Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.

I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that it might be a kind of psychosis.

'You think meaning is a psychosis?'

'An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.'

'I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.'

He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean.

'I am only asking questions.'

'So am I.'

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psychosis: out of touch with reality.

Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it."

Page 195, 'Some Wounds', from 'Lighthousekeeping', Jeanette Winterson

Not what you meet on the way

"Then I will speak plainly, like a man. No hero can be destroyed by the world. His reward is to destroy himself. Not what you meet on the way, but what you are, will destroy you, Heraclitus."

Page 27, 'Weight, The Myth of Atlas and Heraclitus', by Jeanette Winterson

Sensitivity

"We value sensitive machines. We spend billions of pounds to make them more sensitive yet, so that they detect materials deep in the earth's crust, radioactivity thousands of miles away. We don't value sensitive human beings and we spend no money on their priority.

As machines become more delicate and human beings coarser, will antennae and fibre-optic claim for themselves what was uniquely human? Not rationality, not logic, but that strange network of fragile perception, that means I can imagine, that teaches me to love, a lodging of recognition and tenderness where I sometimes know the essential beat that rhythms life."

Page 112, 'Art Objects, Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery', Jeanette Winterson

To circle about in such gladness...

Muffin. 13 Dec 2014. Cubbon Park.

This is undoubtedly the most beautiful piece of writing I have ever come across. A short story called 'The 24-hour Dog' by Jeannette Winterson. About this man who adopts a little puppy. I could barely breathe till the end.
.............................................................................................

"He was as soft as rainwater. I made him walk on a lead and he jumped for joy, the way creatures do, and children do and adults don't do, and spend their lives wondering where the leap went.

He had the kind of legs that go round in circles. He orbited me. He was a universe of play. Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.

...... I looked at him, trusting, vulnerable, love without caution. He was a new beginning and every new beginning returns the world. In him, the rain forests were pristine and the sea had not been blunted. He was a map of clear outlines and unnamed hope. He was time before or time after. Time now had not spoiled him. In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

......He circled along in his warm skin, happy again because he was free and because he belonged. All of one's life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

It is no use trying to assume again the state of innocence and acceptance of the animal or the child. This time it has to be conscious. To circle about in such gladness as his, is the effort of a whole lifetime."

From 'The World and Other Places', Jeannette Winterson

This book is available on Flipkart. I got it from a second-hand bookshop on Church Street.

P.S: So a kind soul found me the full story, published online, in 1997. Thanks, Rukhiya, you have no idea what this means to me!

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-24-hour-dog-1250448.html

Feel

"...Like most people, I enjoyed the hot evenings and the smell of food and the birds that spike the sky, but I was not a mystic or a man of God and I did not feel the ecstasy I had read about. I longed for feeling though I could not have told you that. Words like passion and ecstasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try and turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell of a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love, and those who love too much.

And still we long to feel."

Page 155, 'The Passion', Jeannette Winterson

Art

"Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art.

If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?'. The usual question, 'What has happened to art?' is too easy an escape route."

Page 20, 'Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery', Jeanette Winterson

As though

"I had not intended to take communion at all, but my longing for strong arms and certainty and the quiet holiness around me forced me to my feet and down the aisle where strangers met my eyes as though I had been their son."

Jeannette Winterson, 'The Passion'

Walk Away

In the dead of the night Siddhartha got up and walked away, from everything he knew. You often think of people who disappear, who go away on their own will, vanish. All of them may never see the light, return with riches, not even be aware of what it is that they seek. Most of them, probably, will just unravel. It kills you.

You who only ever wanted to be the catcher in the rye, going about the soul-deadening drill of earning your food, while thousands fall off the ledge, every day. There are people who want to receive, and those who want to give, probably in equal numbers. But so rarely do their paths cross. In the meanwhile, for so many, there is nothing left, but to Walk Away.
.........................................................................................

"Every year thousands of men and women disappear. I don't mean the ones who sell up, move away, remarry, get a job in Acapulco, go into a nursing home or mental hospital, or even out on to the streets. I mean the ones who are never seen again. The ones untraced and untraceable. Faded photographs, out of date clothes, the years piling up in the place left behind. The place where they walked away, without a suitcase or a passport, bank account untouched, appointments still fresh in the diary.

I think of a see-saw. At one end, life's accumulations, at the other end, the self.  For many, perhaps for most, the balance can be maintained. The not too unpleasant ups and downs of day to day, a little loss here, a little gain there, the occasional giddy soar or painful crash.

What happens when the accumulated life becomes so heavy that it pitches the well-balanced self into thin air? All the things that I had and knew, crashing to the floor, myself shattered upwards, outwards, over the roof tops, over the familiar houses, a ghost among ghosts. I might as well be dead.

I shall be treated as dead. The dead have no rights, no feelings, the present deals with the past just as it likes. I shall become a thing of the past, worse than dead, a living dead, to be avoided or forgotten, to be abused because I shall have revealed myself as someone who can't cope.

We have to cope, don't we? Get on with life, pull ourselves together, be positive, look ahead. Therapy or drugs will be freely offered. I can get help. We live in a very caring society.

It cares very much that we should all be seen to cope."

Page 194, 'The Green Square', from 'The World and Other Places' by Jeannette Winterson (absolutely stunning writing)

Mirror

"In your mind there is a blocked door. You have to work hard not to go near that door. Parties, lovers, career, charity, babies, who cares what it is, so long as you avoid the door.

There are times, when I am on my own, fixing a drink, walking upstairs, when I see the door waiting for me. I have to stop myself pulling the bolt and turning the handle. Why? On the other side of the door is a mirror, and I will have to see myself. I'm not afraid of what I am. I am afraid I will see what I am not."

Page 96, 'The World and Other Places', Jeannette Winterson

He collects poems

"He collects poems
like a magpie lining the
bare nest of his heart."

Aseem Kaul

"So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Let's not confuse this with realism. The power does not lie directly with the choice of subject or its social relevance - if it did, then everything not about our own contemporary situation would be academic to us, and all the art of the past would be a mental museum. Art lasts because it gives us a language for our inner reality, and that is not a private hieroglyph; it is a connection across time to all those others who have suffered and failed, found happiness, lost it, faced death, ruin, struggled, survived, known the night-hours of inconsolable pain."

Jeanette Winterson on T.S. Eliot

From here.