Jeanette Winterson + boats, or my love for water

Bots, babes, bees, b-words of the loving sort, 

It is my hope that you've been staying safe. As always, the world is a big and beautiful and scary and difficult place to live. I doubt there is a planet in this great universe of ours that is better or worse, but what could I possibly know. We tell ourselves the lies we need to sleep at night & when the lies become too futile, perhaps we enter existential despair or constant negligence or strive to change the world or grow a mustache. Jeanette Winterson and Pamela Paul read books. I oscillate between hours of television and nature. On one of my most recent adventures, I followed a game trail into a swamp and lost my way back. I was bushwhacking and swimming (in the swamp) for about an hour or so when I emerged like a rugrat and some kind gentlemen gave me a ride to my car, which was .25 miles away. In short, I am a navigational genius. 

What is it about the ego or our most prized self-assessments that requires so much attention? Why is self-confidence fragile? Why must I reassure myself of my beauty and intelligence when I could save time simply knowing it was there? The books I read don't answer these questions for me. If anything, they pose more. Jeanette Winterson's words were most recently painful, if not controversial. 

It is difficult, when we are surrounded by trivia makers and trivia merchants, all claiming for themselves the power of art, not to fall for the lie that there is no such thing or that it is anything. The smallness of it all is depressing and it is inevitable that we will have to whip out the magnifying glass of our own interests to bring the thing up to size. 'Is it about me?' 'Is it amusing?' 'Is it dirty?' 'What about the sex?' are not aesthetic questions but they are the questions asked by most reviewers and by most readers most of the time. 

I supposed the true pain here lies in the very fact that Winterson may ask a question, and in turn criticize, the root of every problem I've ever had: "'Is it about me?' 'Is it amusing?' 'Is it dirty?'" The answer is so often no, and while I find comfort in that fact I am equally disturbed by my attachment to the nature of these personal questions, which turn into crises if I am left unattended. None of this would matter except that Winterson is a lesbian icon writer with opinions she's never afraid to share and in the span of two pages I have fallen hopelessly in love with her. She's written humorous titles like Sexing the Cherry and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and if that's not reason enough to listen up I don't know what is. The text I just cited is from Art [Objects]: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, the kind of book about art that you read because you know it's not just about art but books and poetry and love. Winterson believes strongly in the separation of art from the artist, specifically where LGB and straight writers and readers are concerned, for...

Art succeeds where polemic fails...the conventional mind is its own prison. 

In other words, to read widely without regard for the sexual orientation of the writer is to get at the crux of art. I won't go so far as to say Winterson applies this mentality to all identities and/or social leanings freely and without nuance, though she seems to. How could I? I've only read two pages. But I will say this: is the world not inundated with so much homophobia already? Should I find myself in a boat with Ms. Winterson, I will inquire further. 

ahhhhhh, boats

Should you find yourself on the coast of Maine on a friend's ancestral property with two sea kayaks running around, I highly recommend a nice morning paddle in high tide. Surely you, too, will find the dripping of freshwater from sea-side cliffs entertaining, or the way seaweed stretches to the water's surface only to fall flat during low tide poetic. 

I thought helplessly of Robert Frost's "After Apple-Picking," a water's surface or that invisible crust I've always imagined between earth and heaven or the way a hand reaches for an apple and, having finally grasped it, tugs the fruit from the tree (think: "snap"). 

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.

I tried to meet this seaweed just below the water's surface, bending as far as I was able (though not as far as is expected for a novice of my skill) to graze strings of green bulbous grass with tiny, ineffectual prune fingers. What I could touch was pleasing in the same way that digging through boxes of buttons for a match satisfies a manic soul. 

Should I bend any farther, however, I would find myself too close to the water to maintain my cool, causing me to tip the boat out of shock and fall headfirst into a large vat of slimy underwater grass. I would of course have to tow said boat half a mile to shore and, upon draining it of its saline contents, re-seat myself for the remainder of the paddle. Thankfully, I am fearful. I am equally thankful for my love of the ocean. 

I hope you love things that scare you, read things that confuse you, and talk to people who test you. Or just eat a sandwich...

xoxo

BLT