Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [50]
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture – exploit the new thing then move on.
There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are.
At the end of my first term at Oxford we were reading T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
I was thinking about the pattern; the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperone, standing between us and the newness of the present – the new chance.
I was wondering if the past could be redeemed – could be ‘reconciled’ – if the old wars, the old enemies, the boarhound and the boar, might be able to find peace of a kind.
I was wondering this because I was thinking of visiting Mrs Winterson.
That there might be a level we can reach above the ordinary conflict is a seductive one. Jung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises – at that level there is only a winner and a loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above – like seeing a storm from higher ground.
And there’s a wonderful passage too, at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, where Troilus, defeated and dead, is taken up to the Seventh Sphere and he looks down on the sublunar world – ours – and laughs because he realises how absurd it all is – the things that mean so much, the feuds we carry, the irreconcilables.
The medieval mind loved the idea of mutability and everything happening chaotic and misunderstood under the sphere of the moon. When we look up at the sky and the stars we imagine we are looking out at the universe. The medieval mind imagined itself as looking in – that Earth was a seedy outpost, Mrs Winterson’s cosmic dustbin – and that the centre was – well, at the centre – the nucleus of God’s order proceeding from love.
I like it that order should proceed from love.
I understood, in a very dimly lit way, that I would need to find the place where my own life could be reconciled with itself. And I knew that had something to do with love.
I wrote to Mrs Winterson asking if she would like me to come back for the Christmas holidays – and could I bring a friend? Yes, she said, which was unusual.
She didn’t ask what I had been doing since we had last seen each other – no mention of happy/normal, or leaving home, or going to Oxford. I didn’t try to explain. Neither of us thought that was odd because in Winterson-world it wasn’t odd.
There she was with her new electronic organ and her home-built CB radio and headphones the size of alien-life detection devices.
There I was with my friend Vicky Licorish. I had already warned Mrs W that she was black.
This was a great success to begin with because Mrs Winterson loved missionary work, and seemed to think that my having a best friend who was black was a kind of missionary endeavour all of its own. She went round to veterans of Africa and asked, ‘What do they eat?’
The answer was pineapples. I don’t know why. Are there any pineapples in Africa? In any case Vicky’s family was from St Lucia.
Mrs Winterson was not a racist. Hers was a missionary kind of tolerance, and as such it was patronising, but she would not hear a slur against anyone on the grounds of colour or ethnicity.
That was unusual at a time when Pakistanis had begun to arrive in noticeable numbers in white working-class towns where employment was already in short supply. Then, as now, nobody talked about the legacy of Empire. Britain had colonised, owned, occupied or interfered with half the world. We had