WEIGHT
Jeanette Winterson
Source note: the author referred to Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, Volume One and Volume Two in her research for this book.
For Deborah Warner, who lifted the weight.
Sedimentary rock is formed over vast expanses of time, as layer upon layer of sediment is deposited on the sea bottom.
Being formed in this way, such rock is usually arranged in a succession of horizontal bands, or strata, with the oldest strata lying at the bottom.
Each band will often contain the fossilised remains of the plants and animals that died at the time at which the sediment was originally laid down.
The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete. The process of sedimentation in any one place is invariably interrupted by new periods in which sediment is not laid down, or existing sediment is eroded. The succession of layers is further obscured as strata become twisted or folded, or even completely inverted by enormous geological forces, such as those involved in mountain building …
The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book …
Each with a record of contemporary life written on it …
Unfortunately the record is far from complete …
The record is far from complete …
CONTENTS
Introduction
I want to tell the story again
Weight of the World
Heracles
Thought-Wasp
Three Golden Apples
No Way Out…
But Through
Leaning on the Limits of Myself
Private Mars
Hero of the World
Woof!
Boundaries
Desire
I want to tell the story again
Introduction
Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision.
Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a café, years ago.
These chance sightings, these portents, these returns, begin the unconscious connection with the subject, an unconscious connection that waits for an ordinary moment of daylight to show its face.
When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realised I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written.
Re-written. The recurring language motif of Weight is ‘I want to tell the story again.’
My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the re-telling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text.
Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Hercules takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere.
Of course I wrote it directly out of my own situation. There is no other way.
Weight has a personal story broken against the bigger story of the myth we know and the myth I have re-told. I have written this personal story in the First Person, indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this leads to questions of autobiography.
Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.
Right now, human beings as a mass, have a gruesome appetite for what they call ‘real’, whether it’s Reality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary, or at the better end, the factual programmes and biographies and ‘true life’ accounts that occupy the space where imagination used to sit.
Such a phenomenon points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic, of the non-material, of the contemplative.
Against all this, a writer such as myself, who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities, and who believes that language is much more than information, must row against the tide rather like Siegfried rowing against the current of the Rhine.
The Myth series is a marvellous way of telling stories – re-telling stories for their own sakes, and finding in them permanent truths about human nature. All we can do is keep telling the stories, hoping that someone will hear. Hoping that in the noisy echoing nightmare of endlessly breaking news and celebrity gossip, other voices might be heard, speaking of the life of the mind and the soul’s journey.
Yes, I want to tell the story again.
I want to tell the story again
The free man never thinks of escape.
In the beginning there was nothing. Not even space and time. You could have thrown the universe at me and I would have caught it in one hand. There was no universe. It was easy to bear.
This happy nothing ended fifteen aeons ago. It was a strange time, and what I know is told to me in radioactive whispers; that’s all there is left of one great shout into the silence.
What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.
Your first parent was a star.
It was hot as hell in those days. It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist. Those ceaseless burning fires and volcanic torments are lodged in us as ultimate fear. The hells we invent are the hells we have known. Hell is; was not, is not, cannot. Science calls it the world before life began – the Hadean period. But life had begun, because life is more than the ability to reproduce. In the molten lava spills and cratered rocks, life longed for life. The proto, the almost, the maybe. Not Venus. Not Mars. Earth.
Planet Earth, that wanted life so badly, she got it.
Moving forward a few billion years, there was a miracle. At least that’s what I call the unexpected fact that changes the story. Earth had bacterial life, but no oxygen, and oxygen was a deadly poison. Then, in a quiet revolution as explosive in its own way as a star, a new kind of bacteria, cyanobacteria started to photosynthesise – and a bi-product of photosynthesis is oxygen. Planet earth had a new atmosphere. The rest is history.
Well not quite. I could list for you the wild optimism of the Cambrian era, pushing up mountains like grass grows daisies, or the Silurian dream-days of starfish and gastropods. About 400 million years ago, shaking salt water from their fins and scales, the first land animals climbed out of the warm lagoons of the vast coral reefs. The Triassic and Jurassic periods belong to the dinosaurs, efficient murder weapons, common as nightmares. Then three or four million years ago – chancy and brand new – what’s this come here – a mammoth and something like a man?
* * *
The earth was amazed. Earth was always strange and new to herself. She never anticipated what she would do next. She never guessed the coming wonder. She loved the risk, the randomness, the lottery probability of a winner. We forget, but she never did, that what we ta
ke for granted is the success story. The failures have disappeared. This planet that seems so obvious and inevitable is the jackpot. Earth is the blue ball with the winning number on it.
Make a list. Look around you. Rock, sand, soil, fruit trees, roses, spiders, snails, frogs, fish, cattle, horses, rainfall, sunshine, you and me. This is the grand experiment called life. What could be more unexpected?
All the stories are here, silt-packed and fossil-stored. The book of the world opens anywhere, chronology is one method only and not the best. Clocks are not time. Even radioactive rock-clocks, even gut-spun DNA, can only tell time like a story.
When the universe exploded like a bomb, it started ticking like a bomb too. We know our sun will die, in another hundred million years or so, then the lights will go out and there will be no light to read by any more.
‘Tell me the time’ you say. And what you really say is ‘Tell me a story.’
Here’s one I haven’t been able to put down.
Weight of the World
My father was Poseidon. My mother was the Earth.
My father loved the strong outlines of my mother’s body. He loved her demarcations and her boundaries. He knew where he stood with her. She was solid, certain, shaped and material.
My mother loved my father because he recognised no boundaries. His ambitions were tidal. He swept, he sank, he flooded, he re-formed. Poseidon was a deluge of a man. Power flowed off him. He was deep, sometimes calm, but never still.
My mother and father teemed with life. They were life. Creation depended on them and had done so before there was air or fire. They sustained so much. They were so much. To each other they were irresistible.
Both were volatile. My father obviously so, my mother more alarmingly. She was serene as a rock but volcano’d with anger. She was quiet as a desert but tectonically challenged. When my mother threw a plate across the room, the whole world felt the crash. My father could be whipped into a storm in moments. My mother grumbled and growled and shook for days or weeks or months until her rage fissured and crumpled entire cities or forced human kind into lava-like submission.
Humankind … They never could see it coming. Look at Pompeii. There they are in the bathhouses, sitting in their chairs, wearing skeletal looks of charred surprise.
When my father wooed my mother she lapped it up. He was playful, he was warm, he waited for her in the bright blue shallows and came a little closer, then drew back, and his pull was to leave a little gift on her shore; a piece of coral, mother of pearl, a shell as spiralled as a dream.
Sometimes he was a long way out and she missed him and the beached fishes gasped for breath. Then he was all over her again, and they were mermaids together, because there was always something feminine about my father, for all his power. Earth and water are the same kind, just as fire and air are their opposites.
She loved him because he showed her to herself. He was her moving mirror. He took her round the world, the world that she was, and held it up for her to see, her beauty of forests and cliffs and coastlines and wild places. To him she was both paradise and fear and he loved both. Together they went where no human had ever been. Places only they could go, places only they could be. Wherever he went, she was there; a gentle restraint, a serious reminder; the earth and the waters that covered the earth. He knew though, that while he could not cover the whole of her, she underpinned the whole of him. For all his strength, she was strong.
I was born. I was born one of the Titans, half man, half god, a giant of a giant race. I was born on an island where my father could lie over my mother for a day and a night before subsiding. From this prolonged intercourse, riddling himself into every crack, I was bound to be a fatal combination of them both. I am as turbulent as my father. I am as brooding as my mother. I act suddenly. I never forget. I sometimes forgive, compassion washing away memory. I know what love is. I know love’s counterfeit. At the same time, my good nature makes me easy to deceive. Like my brother Prometheus, I have been punished for overstepping the mark. He stole fire. I fought for freedom.
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 myself.
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.
The story is a simple one. I had a farm. I had cattle. I had a vineyard. I had daughters. I lived on Atlantis, the perfect synthesis of a wealthy mother and a proud father. The Titans bowed to no-one, not even Zeus, whose thunderbolts were like a game to us.
When I wanted gold and jewels I asked my mother where she kept them and she indulged me as mothers indulge sons, and showed me her secret mines and underground caves.
When I wanted whales or harbours or nets lined with fish or pearls for my daughters, I went to my father, who respected me and treated me as an equal. I dived with him into hot springs that blasted the floor of the ocean. We swam wrecks and tamed porpoises. Land and sea were equal home to me, and when Atlantis was finally destroyed, I even felt a kind of gladness. All that loss was after all, only my mother and father’s embrace. I was nothing. I returned to nothing. I wish it had been so.
Boundaries, always boundaries, and the longing for infinite space.
I built a walled garden, a temenos, a sacred space. I lifted the huge stones with my own hands and piled them carefully, as a goatherd would, leaving tiny gaps to let the wind through. A solid wall is easily collapsed. My mother stirring in her sleep could do as much. A wall well built with invisible spaces will allow the winds that rage against it to pass through. When the earth underneath it trembles, the spaces make room for movement and settlement. The wall stands. The wall’s strength is not in the stones but in the spaces between the stones. It’s a joke against me I think, that for all my strength and labour, the wall relies on nothing. Write it more substantially – NOTHING.
This garden is well known. My daughters, the Hesperides, tend it, and far and wide it is called The Garden of the Hesperides. Along with the usual kinds of fruit, the garden enjoys a rarity. My mother, Mother Earth gave the goddess Hera a golden apple tree for her wedding day, and Hera loved the tree so much that she asked me to tend it for her.
I have heard some men say that the apples are solid gold, and that this is the reason why they must be guarded so carefully. Every man assumes that what is valuable to himself must be coveted by others. Men who love gold, long for gold and guard it with their lives, though life is more precious than any metal. My mother has no need of gold, and what does Hera want with gold? No, the beauty of the tree is in its living nature. Its apples are tiny, pineapple- scented jewels that hang from fruiting branches covered in dark green leaves. There is no other tree like it. It stands in the centre of the garden, and once a year, Hera comes to collect its harvest.
All well and good. At least I thought so until Hera appeared to me in a rage that sent me cowering inside a shed of excuses.
My daughters had been secretly eating the sacred fruit. Who could blame them, the tree, sweet-scented and heavy, and the grass underneath it wet with evening dew? Their feet were bare and their mouths were eager. They are girls after all.
I did not see the harm myself, but the gods are jealous of their belongings. Hera sent the serpent Ladon to guard the tree, and there he is now, coiled and watchful, with a hundred heads and double that in tongues. I ha
te him, though he is a dark dream of my mother’s, a solid nightmare birthed into day.
When I was cast out of the garden, I thought nothing heavier could befall me.
I was wrong.
The war between the gods and the Titans was a war we had preferred to avoid. There are several versions of this war. One thing is certain; what began as just cause became just excuse. We fought for ten years.
Some say that my father was Uranus and that my brothers and I, especially Cronus, plotted to attack him and castrate him. It is certain that Cronus cut off the genitals of Uranus, and then took power himself. It is certain too, that Cronus bore a child, Zeus, who likewise dethroned his father and gained control of the heavens. Zeus had two brothers, Hades and Poseidon, and while Zeus became Lord of the Sky, Poseidon had his kingdom in the waves, and Hades was content with what lies beneath. The earth was left to mankind.
It was mankind who attacked quiet Atlantis, and Zeus who helped them to destroy my people. I escaped, and joined the revolt against the heavens. I was the war-leader, the one who had lost most and had little to fear. What can a man fear with nothing to lose?
In the long fighting, most of us were killed, and my mother, out of her secret nature, promised victory to Zeus. What Titans were left were banished to Britain, where the cold inhospitable rocks are worse than death. I was spared for my great strength.
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