Can we talk about reality anymore when reality means ‘that which actually exists. Not counterfeit or assumed.’ What does actually exist? The universe has become a rebus.
I touch you and you disappear. Always you escape me. The nearer I come to you the further off you seem. The more I know of you the more enigmatical you are. Cogito ergo sum or is it Amo ergo sum? I think therefore I am? I love therefore I am? What has defined me at the clearest point of my out-spread life has been my love for you. Not a raft or a lifebelt. A fix in the flux.
Matter is provisional and that includes me. Matter has at best a tendency to exist, and will, it seems, divide infinitely because there is no there there. There are vibrations, relationships, possibilities and out of these is formed our real life.
Still and still moving matter. String paradox of the restless and the formed. If the physics is correct then we are neither alive nor dead as we commonly understand it, but in different states of potentiality.
Absurd? Yes. I know it is absurd. I have buried my father. While we were at the graveside, the priest intoning, my grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, ‘David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,’ my mind was repeating Schrödinger’s Cat, Schrödinger’s Cat.
The Schrödinger Cat experiment. The new physics belch at the politely seated dinner table of common sense. An imaginary cat is put in a box with a gun at its head. The gun is connected to a Geiger counter. The Geiger counter is triggered to a piece of uranium. Uranium molecules are unstable. If the uranium decays, the process will alert the Geiger counter, which in turn will cause the gun to fire. So much for the precarious fate of the Virtual cat. To observe the cat’s fate we will have to open the box, but what is the state of the cat before we open the box? According to the mathematics of its wave function, it is neither alive nor dead. The wave function describes the sum of all possible states of the cat. Until a measurement is made we can’t actually know the state of the particle. The cat, like it or not, is a series of particles. It shares the potentiality of the entire universe. It is finite and infinite, dead and alive. It is a quantum cat.
Absurd? Yes. Einstein, who could not refute the mathematics or deny the evidence of the experiments, hated the conclusion. What kind of a conclusion is it? The truth is, we don’t know. As yet, the cat has outwitted us.
Open the box? Not me. I will see what I expect to see, the cat either dead or alive. I cannot see past my three-dimensional concept of reality, bound as it is to good/bad, black/white, real/unreal, alive/dead. Mathematics and physics, as religion used to do, form a gateway into higher alternatives, a reality that can be apprehended but not perceived. A reality at odds with common sense. The earth is not flat.
‘What you see is not what you think you see.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Shadows, signs, wonders.’
‘Who are you?’
There was no answer, or if there was an answer it was drowned out by our cabin boy shouting, ‘Friday! Friday! Friday!’ We had been sailing for about nine hours. It was the morning of the next day.
Friday had sighted the boat, about a half hour away, listing badly, no radio communication. I swung the wheel so rapidly that I broke my finger. I did not notice till later. When my father died I had not seen him for two years. Until I sat by his bedside there was a distance of two years between us, a long way to cross, and news of his condition had been like glass breaking far away. Now the glass was breaking round my head. His death and theirs.
We manoeuvred alongside and I jumped the gap shouting at Friday to hold us steady. Stella was lying on the deck, her eyes closed, her body in a pool of blood. Very gently I turned the dead weight of her. My heart came up into my mouth and I vomited. Her buttock and her hip had been chopped away.
There was a noise from below. I don’t know what I expected. Jove dragged himself up out of the cabin, his upper lip and chin bearded with blood. In his hand he had a filleting knife. He saw me, terror, horror, unbelief, relief, and fainted.
Like one who sleeps I radioed for a rescue helicopter. Ishmael was kneeling over Stella, his face close to hers, he was keening or making a noise like a recheat, a horn-call into the wilderness of his grief. He had his hand on her wounded thigh and the sun on his hand made a poultice of light. He held up something, put it in his mouth, cleaned it with spittle. He took it out and rubbed it over Stella’s eyes and face. It was articulate with light. With his fingers he opened her mouth and laid the diamond onto her tongue.
‘Papa?’
She was alive.
Jove and Stella were air-lifted off the damaged yacht. I had no choice but to sail my boat back to port with Friday and Ishmael. The roof of the sky was low. Our mast seemed to graze through the electric stars like a trolley-bus wire. We sped.
ME: Who are you?
HE: A temporary imprint in a temporary place … Since the beginning of time you and I have been sitting here, talking, listening, sliding the bottle between us, but it was not us, or it was some other us, marked out, firm for a moment, fading, disappearing, replacing ourselves. The air is thick with dead bodies. Breathe in, breathe out the daily crematorium. Lung up on the dead. The bellows in your rib cage are home to millions, tall like you, uncertain like you, mother, father, sister, friend, tenemented into spinning lots, decayed from mastery into breath.
You live on particle physics. You are a science museum.
What tales would they tell, those compressed mites whom neither name nor influence nor jewels nor obscurity can save from the merciless vacuum of your nostrils? What do you not know that there is in you now, a Caesar, a Raphael, a tear of Mozart, the ended bowel problems of Napoleon at Waterloo? Breathe, all powerful one, and vanquish kingdoms as you do. Your idiot nose has sucked up Rome. Your open mouth has spewed out the Thames.
What Rome? What Thames? The flaking stone, the crumbles of bread, the dirt on the feet of St Peter, the patina of the Basilica, petals from Easter Sunday 1603, the drift of barges, tar of warships, twists of sheep wool, quick of eel. The tallow, felt, oil, food, intestinal belch of matter breaking down, breaking up, passing on, passing into you, star-dust that you are, dust to dust.
The dead are laughing at last. Hold your nose, and you become them, sinking airless to the tomb. Dive your lungs with clean, fresh air and you must feed upon their plankton, whale-like.
Call you Pantagruel? What Fe Fi Fo Fum do the giants plan? Call yourself a lady, taking fingers and toes like snuff? The circuits of your air are a nightmare out of Bosch. Potentates and pig farmers fertilise your nasal scrub. Call yourself upright, uncorrupted, when your very life depends on history’s compost?
Sneeze? After all I have told you, you are going to sneeze? Call yourself Vesuvius? Your larval eruptions have shattered the room into a Pompeii of time’s wreckage. You have strewn the table-top with palaces.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, breath to breath.
‘And the Lord God scooped up the clay of the earth and made of it a manikin and breathed into it His own breath …’
Breathe in, breathe out.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, throwing in your face a harvest of peasant women from the Ukraine. Broken snowfall of winter 1947. A piece of glass from the Empire State. You are what you breathe.
You dream what you breathe. Images, that in daylight float random and strange, coalesce in the untutored night when the particle world becomes you.
The dead live again. The destroyed are rebuilt. There is music, dancing, food unfound in recipe books. Your body refleshes the air. You are still the perfect clay, amiable, vital, capable of being breathed upon and accepting that breath as your own.
Those scents are images. The perfumer’s art is yours. You decode the air into its own language. The pyramids belong to you and the ark on many waters. Men and women crowd at your command. A single clover idly picked breathes you back to that summer when …
Breathe in, breathe out. You breathe time and time’s decay. Matter disposing of itse
lf, still imprinted with its echo, the form it took, the shape of its energy for a little while.
The mediaevals thought that the damned lived in Satan’s belly, hot pouch of indigestion, but damned or saved, what we were continues in the lungs of each other. Nitrogen, oxygen, tell-tale carbon.
Do not mistake me. This is not the afterlife. This is no after life. There is life, constantly escaping from the forms it inhabits, leaving behind its shell. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. History is in your nostrils.
ME: Who are you?
HE: Look in the mirror, Alice, who are you? What table rappers we are, summoning each other across ethers of common sense.
ME: We have never met.
HE: What we are doing does not exist.
ME: This intimacy of thin air.
HE: Is it so hard to believe?
ME: Truth is found in odd places.
HE: Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.
ME: Who are you?
The port. Bustle, fish, nets of spider-crab, a lorry unloading crates of aqua minerale and vino frizzante, fasces of grissini piled outside the harbour trattoria, broad red and white stripes of the awning, jacinth and amber of fish in the ornamental tank, brooding blue of the claw-bound lobster on the crushed ice.
Children and men were hauling and jumping, shouting commands across the high masts and wet stones. Here and there, the swank of a motor launch, impatient blare of testosterone, jostling for an opening in the crowded harbour.
The women were standing in groups, checking off the merchandise as it was dragged up from the holds, dropped down from the trucks. The men, legs apart, arms akimbo, noisily denied all knowledge of shortages and breakages, while the women waved printed-up order sheets and shrilled a flight of abuse over the static ‘No, no, no’ of the delivery men. Sea-birds and cats fought over the garbage.
The benign sun. The open sky. The sea as innocent as a baby’s bath. Tang of salt, smell of rosemary, artichokes and cep drifting the air with wholesome rot. Outside the booths, the geraniums, red in terracotta, were flares of early summer. A boy came by eating pepper pizza. I felt a simple clean sensation. I was hungry.
As I guided my boat into the hire bay, I saw the carabinieri. Of course. Friday had leapt ashore and was expertly securing us to the water-pole. I turned to Ishmael. He had gone.
I would have to explain my peregrinations and copula alone. Since the truth would certainly be written off as an unfact I decided to lie. The most plausible explanations usually are lies. What do you say to others about yourself? In any case, in a police cell, the earth is still flat.
Judgement
Walk with me.
At this point in the story I can say only what happened: that Stella had plastic surgery. That she always will walk with a slight limp.
That Jove was able to avoid criminal charges on the grounds of temporary insanity.
‘Temporary all his life,’ said Stella.
I visited them both in hospital. He, surrounded by Italian nurses listening to his extraordinary story of survival, which did not include eating his wife. She, reflective in a room without mirrors, sun at her head and feet.
SHE: I had decided to divorce Jove before he took a bite out of me.
ME: Will you stop it? He could have killed you.
SHE: Victim or volunteer?
ME: He lied to you.
SHE: He is a liar.
ME: And that forgives him?
SHE: I forgive him.
ME: What?
SHE: And I forgive you.
ME: I don’t understand.
SHE: Shouldn’t I forgive the woman who first took my husband and then took his wife?
ME: You took me. Both of you.
SHE: Victim or volunteer?
ME: Accomplice?
SHE: Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?
ME: He could have killed you.
SHE: This year, last year, any year. I am the one who has to say ‘Stop’.
ME: Does that mean me?
SHE: Does it?
She put her finger to my lips.
SHE: This is not the time.
Summer curved into autumn and Stella came back to New York. We went to see Abel Glinert, whose family have fol lowed Stella since she was a child. He had not been at the port. He had lost track of his inherited quarry when she had left for Italy. We took the diamond to him, and he held it up, confident in the light. I thought I too was in the red kitchen on that snowy night when Uta had escaped and seen her soul skimming towards her across the impassive sea.
Her soul? Stella’s? The Jews believe that the soul comes to inhabit the body at the moment of birth. Until then, until the image of itself becomes flesh, it pursues its crystal pattern, untied. Wave function of life scattered down to one dear face. How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.
What was it Uta saw? Uta, down at the water, First Class, Cabin Class, the great doors of Cunard? Perhaps it was my grandmother polishing her brass plaques, light of her skipping sea miles and common sense.
My father had loved Uta. Stella remembered him on the ferry to Staten Island, bringing her a game of iron filings under a sheet of plastic. By using a magnetic pen she could pull the iron chips into patterns and faces. She had drawn a picture of my father and her mother making love in a children’s animal park. Papa had seen it and shut himself further away.
I am my father’s daughter. I look like him. Stella has her mother’s eyes. I do not know what this signifies, if anything at all. Perhaps some things take more than a single lifetime to complete. Perhaps I too have begun to imagine more than can be seen with the instruments we as yet possess.
‘Signs, shadows, wonders.’ Abel sat rocking in his chair, listening to our story, rolling the diamond between finger and thumb.
‘A dybbuk,’ he said.
‘Papa,’ said Stella.
Abel alternatively shook and nodded his head, and finally he dropped the diamond into Stella’s palm.
‘It is given to you,’ he said.
Walk with me. The streets, the cross-streets, the Hudson river where the cattle used to come up to the abattoir. Stella, dismantling and rebuilding the invented city, showing me what had been and what had not been, sweat and ingenuity of the slowly hoisted dream.
The difficulty. The dream. To pan the living river that you are and find gold in it. But the river moves on, never step in the same river twice, time surging forward and sometimes leaving a caracol, its half-turn backwards that mocks the clock.
My time, my father’s time, my grandmother’s time. Now separate, now flowing together, and joined with the floods and cries of men and women I have never met, places and years that snag their movement in mine and choose me, for a moment, as a conscious depot of history.
What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future. If the universe is movement it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time.
Walk with me.
Two sparrows were diving at a bread roll. A woman’s shoes were spattered with mud. A small child in long socks poked at the bucket of eels outside the Chinese grocery store. His father’s belly swagged over his head. Through the window, in the barber’s shop, white towels were bibbed around weathered necks. An old man shuffled inside his sandwich board: THE END IS NIGH.
The freight train and the rose garden. The hot-dog stand and the evening news. Closing Down Sale. Everything Must Go.
From a room up above, the smell of frying. Above that, Mozart on a tinkly piano ‘… Purché porti la gonnella …’
From the open window of an attic a canary cage dangled over the street, its occupant feather and beak in song.
They were raising the roof next door. Girders in the mouths of cranes, the steel squawk of
the construction bird, hard-hats crane lit, beams and specks of men balanced on the threshold of the built and the unbuilt.
Up higher, far away, the red digital flash of date and time: November 10 19:47 (Sun in Scorpio. City of New York).
Blue sky light had turned black, red tracks of automobiles wound across the bridge, safety lights on brake reflectors, red on red.
The universe hangs here, in this narrow strait, infinity and compression caught in the hour. Space and time cannot be separated. History and futurity are now. What you remember. What you invent. The universe curving in your gut. Put out your hand. Kiss me. The city is a scintilla, light to light, quartz and neon of the Brooklyn Bridge and the incandescence of the stars.
They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. 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.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Jeanette Winterson lives in London and the Cotswolds.
Books by Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
The Passion
Sexing the Cherry
Written on the Body
Art & Lies
Art Objects (essays)
Gut Symmetries
The World and Other Places
The PowerBook
Lighthousekeeping
Tanglewreck
The Stone Gods
The Battle of the Sun
BOOKS BY JEANETTE WINTERSON
ART & LIES
A train hurtles through the future with three passengers on board: a disillusioned surgeon named Handel, whose humanity has been sacrificed to intellect; a woman artist named Picasso, cast out by a family that drove her to madness; and the lesbian poet Sappho, who has propagated her subversive gospel through centuries of censorship and exile. Out of their interwoven stories comes an impassioned, philosophical, and daring novel that burns with phosphorescent prose on every page.