Gut Symmetries Read online

  Acclaim for Jeanette Winterson’s

  GUT SYMMETRIES

  “A writer who has … a genuine passion about language and a serious reflexiveness about the complex moral circuitries of carnal passion.”

  —The New Republic

  “At every turn … [Jeanette Winterson’s] fresh, vivid way of putting things stops one dead in admiration. In Gut Symmetries, Ms. Winterson has struck gold.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Her prose is luminous, precocious, naughtily excessive.”

  —Time Out

  “Read [Gut Symmetries] for those generous portions of incredibly rich, delicious, sexy writing that Winterson cooks up so well.”

  —Out

  “The most interesting young writer I have read in 20 years.”

  —Gore Vidal

  “A fresh voice with a mind behind it.… She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent deeply resides.”

  —Muriel Spark

  “Always a narrative daredevil and linguistic voluptuary, Winterson … sustains a level of writing here that’s at once incantatory, discursive, and passionate: a breath-taking Joycean romp.… A major book, by any standard.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 1998

  Copyright © 1997 by Jeanette Winterson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Granta Books, London, and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.

  ‘King’s Mountain’ by Muriel Rukeyser, which appears on this page, is reprinted by kind permission of William L. Rukeyser from A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, 1994, W.W. Norton, New York, copyright ©William L. Rukeyser.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Winterson, Jeanette, [date]

  Gut symmetries / Jeanette Winterson

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR6073.I558G87 1997

  823′.914—dc21 96-49636

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76363-1

  Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  For Peggy Reynolds with love.

  Special thanks to Frances Coady and her team at Granta Books. Thanks to Suzanne Gluck at ICM, Elizabeth Ruge at Berlin Verlag, Angela Leighton, Mrs Adrienne Reynolds, Henri Llewelyn Davies and my Jewish friends who taught me their love and mystery, especially Mona Howard.

  Gratitude as ever to Don and Ruth Rendell, who make things possible for me in so many ways.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  The Fool

  The Tower

  Page of Swords

  The Star

  Ten of Swords

  Page of Cups

  Death

  The Moon

  Knave of Coins

  The Lovers

  Judgement

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Author’s Note

  Until the discovery of the planet Pluto in 1930, the sign of Scorpio was ruled by Mars. Since Paracelsus assumed Mars as his ruler, I have used his system where he is concerned.

  Prologue

  November 10 1493. Einsiedeln, Switzerland. Sun in Scorpio.

  First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.

  Paracelsus, physician, magician, alchemist, urge, demiurge, deus et omnia was born under the sign of the occult, ruled by Mars and driven by a mountain in his soul.

  What do we know of him? That he was short and ugly. That he wore an oversize sword. That he wanted to be a hero and looked like a victim. There he was a bellicose, bellyaching, belching, belfry of a man with a pelvis like a beldam. So odd was the anatomy of this mis-bodied bel esprit that some hazarded his sex as female.

  Man or manikin his genius brought him considerable reputation. If he had signed a pact with Mephistopheles, the Old Deceiver did not reward him in the usual way. Paracelsus made enemies faster than he made friends, and he had a habit of re-beggaring himself whenever he was beginning to do well. Perhaps this was necessary for an alchemist who did not want to turn base metal into gold. Like his contemporary, Luther, Paracelsus wanted to change the whole world.

  The sign of Scorpio takes as its symbols the scorpion and the eagle. If its higher nature is as lofty as its mountain haunts, its nether part is creviced and hostile. The poisoner and the scientist are one.

  And both. Hired by the town of Basle to cure its epidemic of syphilis Paracelsus despatched as many as he re-hatched. The mediaevals were entrail-minded and Paracelsus often delivered his lectures over a scalpelled corpse. This was not the nineteenth-century model of diagnosis by pathology. It was, if it was anything, diagnosis by cosmology. Paracelsus was a student of Correspondences: ‘As above, so below.’ The zodiac in the sky is imprinted in the body. ‘The galaxa goes through the belly.’

  What is it that you contain?

  The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

  The Miracle of the One that the alchemists sought is not so very far from the infant theory of hyperspace, where all the seeming dislocations and separations of the atomic and sub-atomic worlds are unified into a co-operating whole. This is not possible in three spatial dimensions or even in four. Ten, at least, lure us out of what we know.

  Star-dust that we are, will death lose its sting? Theoretically there will be no death, only an exchange of energy into what is likely to be another dimension.

  The marriage of Heaven and Hell?

  The old sceptics used to say that if Hell exists, where is it? What part of the Universe does it occupy? What are its coordinates? It had to be a latitudinal Hell, a longitudinal Hell. A Hell subject to tape measure and set square. The question ‘Where is it’ could not be answered satisfactorily.

  Many tried. Traditionally, the afterlife lairs at the centre of the earth: Odysseus got in through a cave entrance in Persephone’s Grove, while Virgil and Dante had only to look under the floorboards in Italy. In 1714, an Englishman, Tobias Swinden, published his Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell and concluded that Hell is on the Sun. In 1740, Whiston, Newton’s successor as Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, proved that Hell was somewhere in the regions of Saturn.

  Such determined Hell-spotting may have had some sound science behind its normal devoutness and abnormal morbidity. Hell, we think, is hot. The waste heat generated by the endless stoking of sinful souls would be impressive. Heat gives us a clue. These days physicists scan beyond our solar system for evidence of heat emissions. The energy consumption of an advanced civilisation would be considerable and we should be able to detect its fall-out. As yet nothing. No spacemen, no Heaven, no Hell. But perhaps they have curled up on the Planck scale, in the six-dimension sister universe, smaller than small, bigger than big.

  This is the theory.

  In the beginning was a perfect ten-dimensional universe that cleaved into two. While ours, of three spatial dimensions and the oddity of time, expanded to fit our grossness, hers, of six dimensions wrapped itself away in tiny solitude.

  This sister universe, contemplative, concealed, waits in our future as it has refused our past. It may be the symbol behind all our symbols. It may be the mandala of the
East and the Grail of the West. The clouded mirror of lost beauty that human beings have stared into since we learned to become conscious of our own face.

  Can anyone deny that we are haunted? What is it that crouches under the myths we have made? Always the physical presence of something split off.

  Paradise: The Eden from which we have been forcibly removed.

  The Twins: Missing self, other half, completeness again.

  Male and Female: The uniting mystery of one flesh.

  The Christ Motif: The Divine infills the human form and makes it whole.

  Suppose the moment of Creation and our torn-off universe were recorded in the star-dust of our bodies? What is it that you contain? The atoms that you are were shook out of a star-burst ante-dating the Solar System.

  We are the beginning. We are before time.

  It may be that here in our provisional world of dualities and oppositional pairs: black/white, good/evil, male/female, conscious/unconscious, Heaven/Hell, predatory/prey, we compulsively act out the drama of our beginning, when what was whole, halved, and seeks again its wholeness.

  Have pity on this small blue planet searching through time and space.

  Here follows a story of time, universe, love affair and New York. The Ship of Fools, a Jew, a diamond, a dream. A working-class boy, a baby, a river, the sub-atomic joke of unstable matter.

  TIME: A concept arising from change experienced or observed. A quantity measured by the angle through which the sun turns on its axis. A moment in which things happen.

  UNIVERSE: All that is. The Cosmos.

  LOVE AFFAIR: Amour honourable or dishonourable.

  NEW YORK: Manhattan Island. Latitude 40:46N Longitude 73:59W.

  SHIP OF FOOLS: A mediaeval conceit. Lunatics/saints sailing after that which cannot be found.

  JEW: A person of Hebrew descent or religion. A chosen one. See Old Testament.

  DIAMOND: Crystallised carbon. The hardest of all minerals. A magic stone.

  DREAM: An image of truth.

  WORKING-CLASS BOY: Drive disc of Capitalism. Girl or boy. An unexploded dream.

  BABY: A beginning. An epiphany. A culet.

  RIVER: See Einstein, Heraclitus, the Mersey, the Hudson, Time.

  MATTER: A witticism. At sub-atomic level, that which has a tendency to exist.

  The Fool

  It began on a boat, like The Tempest, like Moby Dick, a finite enclosure of floating space, a model of the world in little. Here is a vas hermeticum, a sealed capsule on a rough sea. This is the alchemic vessel, resistant to change, constantly being transformed. This is us, vulnerable, insulated, entirely self-contained yet altogether at the mercy of the elements. The Ship of Fools is sailing tonight and all of us are aboard.

  This is a true story. If it seems strange, ask yourself, ‘What is not strange?’ If it seems unlikely, ask yourself, ‘What is likely?’

  Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative. Relative to what is an important part of the question.

  This has been my difficulty. The difficulty with my life. Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips. The sensible strong ordinary world of fixity is a folklore. The earth is not flat. Geometry cedes to algebra. The Greeks were wrong.

  Those Greeks, who too began in boats, are the root of Western science, a science that has taken 2,500 years to find its way back to the meaning of its premise. In the sixth century BC, the Milesians of Iona deeply concerned themselves with what they called ‘physis’, that is, nature, the nature of things; spirit, man, the observable world, the heavenly bodies.

  By the fifth century, Heraclitus was teaching his doctrine of eternal Becoming, flux not fix, an identity of perpetual change, process not substance, the flow that made it impossible to step into the same river twice.

  His rival, Parmenides, a man for whom nothing changed, taught instead the supremacy of godhead and the certainty of matter. Either things existed or they did not. Becoming was challenged by Being.

  Since unalterable Being and perpetual Becoming could not be reconciled, the Greeks fashioned the ingenious compromise of dividing spirit and matter. Written along the clear line of demarcation was the new view of the Atomists that matter was made out of basic building blocks; passive intrinsically dead particles, moving in a void. Their movement was controlled by the individual spirit of man and the over-spirit of god.

  This cosmic picture, so well-known to us that it has become axiomatic, was systematised and refined by Aristotle. Matter and Mind, Matter and Form, were persuasively interpreted and later incorporated entire by developing Christianity. That science and the Church should be tied together until the Renaissance was made possible by the dualistic system of the mundane and the miraculous that suited the world-view of both interested parties.

  The tenacity of the model should not be underestimated. Newton made it the basis for his Mechanics in the seventeenth century and rested his clockwork universe firmly in the principles of Euclid. Firming up Greek thought, it was Newton who realised concepts of absolute space and absolute time. Newton who regarded the Universe as three-dimensional, solid, massy, hard, made up of the motion of material points in space, a motion caused by their mutual attraction, that is, the force of gravity.

  The mathematics he developed to explain his proposals were of such astounding success that no one thought to enquire behind them into the validity of the Newtonian world itself. His theories remained triumphant and unchallenged until 1905 when Albert Einstein published two papers; one, his ‘Special Theory of Relativity’, and the other, a look at the disturbing implications of electromagnetic radiation. These were the beginnings of quantum physics and the end of the mechanistic, deterministic, mind/matter of cosmic reality.

  Forgive me if I digress. I cannot tell you who I am unless I tell you why I am. I cannot help you to take a measurement until we both know where we stand.

  This is the difficulty. Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of humankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been cordoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l’oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people’s psychology with my own. I say I am open-minded but what I think is.

  According to Darwin the evolutionist, man stood upright when he shed his saurian tail. What happened to it? Here it is, in my hand, like a motley joke of the commedia dell’arte. My fool’s wand, my visible weakness, dropped off the back only to run round the front. I am civilised but my needs are not. What it is that lashes in the darkness?

  What or who? I cannot name myself. The alchemists worked with a magic mirror, using reflection to guide them. The hall of mirrors set around me has been angled to distort. Is that me in the shop-glass? Is that me in the family photo? Is that me in the office window? Is that me in the silvered pages of a magazine? Is that me in the broken bottles on the street? Everywhere I go, reflection. Everywhere a caught image of who I am. In all of that who am I?

  My suspicions were aroused when I was quite young. I could not find myself in the looking glasses offered. I could not define myself in relation to the shifting poles of certainty that seemed so reliable. What was the true nature of the world? What was the true nature of myself in it?

  I could not immunise myself against the germ warfare of object and dream. There seemed to be no bridge between mind and matter, between myself and the world, no point of reference that was not a handy deception.

  I tried to copy my parents, as monkeys do, b
ut they were trying to copy me, looking to the child for the energy and hope they had long since lost.

  I tried to copy other children but lacked their tough skin. I was a glove turned inside-out, softness showing. I was the visceral place between mouth and bowel, the region of digestion and rumination. No doubt it is my spleen that refuses to locate the seat of reason in the head. No doubt it is my natural acidity that fears the milkiness of the heart.

  This story is a journey through the thinking gut.

  It began on a boat.

  The QE2. Southampton to New York and on to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. A spring cruise of fun and fantasy where each day had been labelled with a mortician’s care. There was an undertaker on board but his services are not usually required. For a few days, at least, the expensive antibodies of illusion and excess are sufficient to stall the effects of ageing and apathy, jolting even the most coffin-like into pink cheeked pleasure.

  Pleasure = consumption.

  After only six hours at sea my dauntless fellow travellers had begun to jowl their way through 2,455 lb of butter, 595 lb of frozen prawns, 865 gallons of ice cream, 26,500 tea bags, 995 lb of frozen fish, 135 jars of baby food, 170 bottles of vodka, 1,959 lb of lobster … the list is not endless but it is long. In a few days, these gut-defying deck chair adventurers will have vanished the lot in an orgy of Now You See It Now You Don’t. I doubt whether our resident magician will perform such prodigious feats of disappearance. I said in my lecture this morning that the dining rooms of the QE2 were proof positive of a fourth spatial dimension; there can be no ordinary human explanation for the daily loss of so much matter.

  It is remarkable, at sea, how delicate appetites, special diets, macrobiotic tendencies, and Yin-Yang energy alignments fall victim one and all to the Dionysiac phrensy of champagne (1,160 bottles) and caviare (55 lb). The unworldly should remember that caviare is normally eaten by the ounce.