Jeannette Winterson: Art & Lies

I'm no Freudian. What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pherein = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids problems of gravity. The word wont let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that rises above itself. The word that is itself and more. The associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore or cenobite. The word unlied.

Shall I use my alphabet to disentangle the days? Not to label them A, B, C, nor to make my letters a more arcane deceit. Two things significantly distinguish human beings from other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of political life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

And now? Yes, and now, still challenging the fragments that I am.

Look up. A hundred billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Unconcerned with me, that confidence of stars, light offerings, two thousand years old. If they are anything to me they are jewels for my shroud. I cannot know them. I cannot even know myself. Pascal's terror is mine: "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie." What can balance the inequity of that huge space, which never ends, and my bounded life? Perhaps this: The beatland of my body is not my kingdom's scope, I have within, spaces as vast, if I could claim them. Proof? What proof I have of this -- Not God, who, if true, is a priori and cannot be a proof, but art, that never concerns itself with the actualities of life, neither depicts it as we think it is, nor expresses it as we hope it is, and yet becomes it. Not representations, but inventions that bear in themselves the central forces of the world, and not only the world. Art ranches the stars.