Eye-opening read.“The most interesting young writer I have read in 20 years.” - Gore VidalTo betray with a kiss. The reek of Judas.Nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, love to love.I come from a people to whom the invisible world is everyday present.I can’t go back into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be. The only way for me to handle what is happening is to move myself forward into someone who has handled it. I will have to make her as Jewish legend tells how God made the first man: by moulding a piece of dirt and breathing life into it. The dirt I have in plenty. The life I will have to draw out of lungs unused to deep breathing.What kills love? Only this: neglect.When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? My father could find no mercy for himself and offered none.Aliquem alium internum.t'a certain other one, within.The horse that crieth among the trumpets Aha!Where’s the difficulty in being bad?My grandmother loved me because she recognized the same stubbornness that she had gened in her son. The difficulty and the dream were not separate. To pan the living clay that you are is to stand in the freezing waters and break yourself on a riddle of your own making. No one can force you to it. No one can force you away. Rhinegold, pure gold and somewhere in the Rhinegold, the ring.Wagner’s Ring cycleThe stories agree that in the difficulty and the dream the hero should never count the cost.Some writers mix the stella maris with the remora, a tiny fish that sticks to the rudder of a vessel and brings it to a halt. Whatever it is, the fateful decisive thing that utterly alters a confident course. My father feared no remoras.Ship of Fools navigating the starsA Knife and ForkA Bottle and a CorkThat’s the way to spellNew YorkIntensity is the Desire to Receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.Whitman: I moisten the roots of all that has grownShadows, signs, wonders, said PapaWhitman: The sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal.Defect of vision.What you see is not what you think you are.Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve - Max PlanckIt appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. The material point can hardly be conceived anymore - EinsteinIf we ask whether the position of the electron remains the same we must say no. If we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say no. If we ask whether the electron is at rest we must say no. If we ask whether it is in motion we must say no. - Robert OppenheimerWhat we know constantly reveals itself as partial.In the Torah, the Hebrew ‘to know,’ often used in a sexual context is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge. A release of energy from one site to another. Instead of a hoard of certainties, bug-collected, to make me feel secure, I can give up taxonomy and invite myself to the dance: the patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, paradoxes, shifts, currents, cross-currents, irregularities, irrationalities, geniuses, joints, pivots, worked over time, and thought time, to find the lines of thought that still transmit.The facts cut me off. What is the separateness of things when the current that flows each to each is live? It is the livingness I want. Not mummification. Livingness. Energy precedes matter.New York, city of motion, could not go forward, and so, because it hated to stand still, it went backwards. The past of its people, now from so many parts of the globe, but all knowing what it was to struggle, to pioneer, To make the difficulty into the dream.To defy the silence of the snow people began to sing.Food tastes better in ItalianShe put her hands down over her belly and felt me there.“Here I am, Lord,” he said, remembering the story of Samuel.The dogs slithered to a stop, turned, obeyed the frequency, higher than 30 megahertz, and ran forwards.I was able to find you because you were radiant. That night the light in you was strong.The tougher the problem, the more beautiful the solutionGeneral Unified Theory (GUT): any particle, sufficiently magnified, will be seen not as a solid fixed point but as a tiny vibrating string. Matter will be composed of these vibrations. The universe itself would be symphonic.ttRenaissance thinker Robert Fludd: Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617-19) has a diagram of the tuning and harmonies of this instrument according to the heavenly spheres.As above, so belowThe Superstring theory, the symmetry we observe in our universe is only a remnant of the symmetry to be observed in perfect 10-dimensional spaceThe world’s most famous seducers?LotharioCasanovaDon Juan/Giovanni Purché porti la gonnella, Voi sapete quel che fa (If she wears a petticoat, you know what he does).A man with 2 reputations he wanted to protect: his primacy and his potencyWalk with me. Love him and I love star-dust and light.Walk with me. Walk the 6,000,000,000,000 miles of traveled light, single year’s journey of illumination...Walk the seen and unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot.We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. It was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it. Lighter than light in the atmosphere of our love.It was a volatile experiment.There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.When Jove began to notice me I was puppy-dog glad.Come out for a walk? WoofLike some dinner? WoofAnd then there were three.His wife, his mistress, met.I am my father’s daughter.A man is more than his penis. Not much more but something.tAlla Vostra Salute!“Do you fall in love often?”I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun to your head. I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a volunteer member of the FBI. Where did you go, who did you see, what did you do today dear? I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. Or I would not love you at all.It was not that either of them were insincere, simply, being bored by an argument, they could change sides faster than a mercenary offered double pay.Tertium non datur The third is not given, whatever it is that reconciles two opposites.Post-coital ludos -- a gameWhat shall we seek?The first said, GoldThe second said, WivesThe third said, That which cannot be found.My father shroud himself in the pressure suit and pressure helmet of normal lifeHe had protected himself against himself.The pressure suit saved him from the disruptive forces of depth.According to quantum theory there are not only second chances, but multiple chances.When dead, my father may have simply shifted to an alternative point of his wave function. A wave function spreads indefinitely though at its farthest, it is infinitesimally flimsy.Hawking’s idea is we should treat the entire universe as a wave function, both specifically located and infinite. If we accept that, then that function is the sum of all possible universes, dead, alive, multiple, simultaneous, interdependent, co-existing.Paracelsus: The galaxa goes through the bellyWhat is it that you contain?Stars in your eyes, the infinity of you, the galaxy of my girl that I explore. The much of you was more than I dared hope for. Treasure is the stuff of legends. GOld in the mine of you. Mine own gold. We did escape gravity. If I flew too close to the sun, forgive me. Water claims her own at last. You were the one who taught me the aerodynamics of risk. I should have trusted you. The failure was mine, Alice, not the pain of having spoken and said nothing. I want to tell you how much I love you. You.Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,The glorious Sun uprist.What is the proper perspective on my existence?The sun you see is 8 minutes in the past, the time it takes for light to travel the distance between the sun’s eye and yours.Look at the galaxy. What you see is thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of years past, drama of the nebula only visible when it reaches us, effort of light, 183,000 miles per second, crossing centuries of history, still dark to us. The distances are vast. Space and time become space-time.Only in the present do I begin to recognize my own past.Truth is found in odd places.The most plausible explanations usually are lies.Temporary insanity; temporary all his life.How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.Perhaps some things take more than a single lifetime to complete.Perhaps I have begun to imagine more than can be seen with the instruments we as yet possess.Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
Question. What occurs when an unstoppable cannonball encounters an immovable post? Answer: The questioner has beggared the question; any universe that does or can contain the former cannot also contain the latter; it is one or the other. It is in fact likely none or the other, but that's beside the point.Could God create a stone so large that He Himself could not lift it? As is known to those who die in the collapse of large heavy buildings, god cannot or will not lift stones. The skier in an avalanche knows he cannot even lift a snowflake.If a cat is placed unobserved into a box, together with a cannister of toxic gas that will be released upon the spring of a trigger, and the trigger itself which will spring upon the decay of a single atom, which decay, until such time the atom is observed, simultaneously has happened and has not happened, well then until the box is opened, what of the cat? Answer: Schroedinger has hypothesized a device of impossible sensitivity. If the single atom's decay cannot be known without its observation, then it cannot be the basis for the trigger to go off or not. There will always be a chance that the trigger will err and go off before the atom has decayed, or else that it will err and not go off even afterwards. Indeed, my untutored suspicion is that the possibilities explode and it becomes a binary question: If the trigger can go off before the decay, it will go off, and if it may fail to go off afterwards it will so fail. But that's also beside the central point, which is that no observer, intelligent or otherwise, can discern the difference between "maybe" and "maybe not." There are undoubtedly legions of readers who love nothing so much as a novel wrapped around imaginary enigmas such as these. (Enigmae?) For my own part, I found the effort distracting. This novel is constructed around several mysteries of the physicists' world, string theory and the like, and the author clearly means to build something lovely out of such wonders. To repeat: Undoubtedly there are readers who will find this precisely right. It is only my personal judgment that the simple such usages feel contrived, the complex ones misunderstood, and in each case too much of art's necessary artifice left uncovered. Among the central characters are a couple, a married pair, formed of a physicist and a poet. I could not help the suspicion---I mean that, earnestly, that I could not resist the sneaking impulse---that Winterson was writing too much of the work of the physicist that she did not really understand.Onto the good parts: Winterson does---clearly, unmistakably, emphatically---understand the job of the other character, the poet. The choice of style is a risky one, every description a chain of compact metaphors, still images constructed of analogies in motion. Winterson pulls it off beautifully, striking precisely the right tone. It's perhaps a bit fluid at times, but deliberately and successfully so.(On to the good parts?) Pacing remains a strong suit; plotting, less so. It's a short book that doesn't suffer from feeling too short; everything needing to be said is said, and it moves at precisely the right speed. Winterson is really quite skilled at this, actually, to the point where it's remarkable. I cannot recall another author so adept at avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of writing so slow as to induce boredom or so briskly as to inspire headache. This last note may reflect only my own personal opinion, too, but I found it quite delightful to read, and tore through it in about a day and a half.As to the plot.... There's a (small whiff of a sliver of a spoiler ahead) passage in the book where a character confesses an unrealized hypothetical purely allegorical incestuous attraction to a family member. I read this in a lot of fiction that aspires to be great, actually---not the idea of incest, necessarily, although I find that in a lot of aspirationally great fiction, but the taboo gratuitously tested, under the mistaken belief that shocking portrayals are the same as meaningful ones, or that controversy is the surest sign of significance. Perhaps I'm wrong and they're really quite earnest attempts to test the human reaction of horror, or else perhaps I'm wrong and they're cynical ploys to sell more. Call it purple plotting, perhaps. I'm not at all sure what's to be said about this, other than it seemed to have appeared in the 1970s and swelled through the 1980s, reached a thundering apex in the 1990s, and mercifully seemed finally to be on the decline throughout the last decade. Gut Symmetries is shot through with this sort of aesthetic, and there's certainly some kind of reader who enjoys it. I'm not saying that sort of reader is wrong, merely that I'm not that sort of reader.
What do You think about Gut Symmetries (1997)?
ummm i love this book and am about to re-read it."Do you fall in love often?Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. I love widely, indiscreetly. I forget it is myself I am trying to love back to a better place.Some people dream in color, I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?Don’t lie.Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live. At least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want be someone’s neat little home."&"...To live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to. Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it? Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value. Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of Einstein’s E=MC2."
—beauregard
What can I say about Jeanette Winterson? That reading her is like watching a stone fall in a calm, clear pool. You can stay for hours just watching the resulting ripples.The piece of Jeanette Winterson writing that I love the most is her short story The 24-Hour Dog. I read it while I was still in college and I've never forgotten it. I photocopy my photocopy and pass it on to friends.Who wouldn't fall in love with writing like this?If time is a river, we shall all meet death by water.&And after symmetries of autumn, symmetries of austerity. Bare winter's thin beauty, rib and spine. The back of him sharp-boned, my hands leaf-broad covering him, patterning us. Us making love on the leaf-shed in the cold of the year.&We think of ourselves as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time.& finally: Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.Her writing speaks for itself.
—Ice
Jeanette Winterson's prose is truly a sublime thing. Words of lyrical beauty that wrap themselves about you and move within you, resonant with living colour and poetic meaning. That intense beauty though does somewhat serve to render in starker contrast the one or two minor things of the book that didn't quite sit so well with me. Particularly when it comes to the (sort of) happy ending and the exceptional coincidences that may work in terms of the book are just a bit too neat, and come in too suddenly near the end, to be believably satisfying, or perhaps it is that they are just too satisfying. Winterson creates a world of beauty, wonder, passion and feeling but would have been better keeping away from the more mundane real world as she doesn't render those quite so believably and, not that the strongly feminist orientation of the story bothered me at all I might have liked to know a bit more of Jove and what made him the unlikable character that he was, besides being male. Those things aside though this remains a wondrous, beautiful and exceptional book though it may have been perfect had it kept in the deeper realms of poetic beauty and not strayed at points closer to the conventional which the book does not pull off nearly so well. Still it remains a sparkling, delightful tale.
—Peter Chandler
