Reading and Writing our Thoughts

I was recently reading an article in the newspaper about Jeanette Winterson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanette_Winterson

The article was promoting the 25th anniversary publication of her most famous book “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit”.
I’m ashamed to say that I have not read it. I’ve obviously heard about it but haven’t got as far as picking it up and having a read through. I must do that imminently.

However, the article was interesting for the many interesting comments that Jeanette made about life, love, sex, depression, families etc.

I have been trying to think how I want to write about this for some time, and whatever I come up with seems rather disjointed. So I think the only way that I can do this is to take some of the quotes that interested me and make my comments.

You can read the article for yourself here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/22/jeanette-winterson-thought-of-suicide

To paraphrase, the article explains how Winterson found herself in the depths of despair after the break-up of her relationship with theatre director Deborah Warner. It wasn’t merely the end of the relationship that made her suicidal. At the same time, she had found out some disturbing information about her adoption, which made her question her very being. In the article she explains precisely how this affected her.
She then goes on to discuss her current relationship with Susie Orbach, who beautifully describes herself as “post-heterosexual”. The joy of her relationship with Orbach emanates from the pages and she is clearly in a comfortable and content place right now. Her thoughts and discussion on writing are definitely worth a read and I also found it interesting that the Guardian writer himself clearly found warmth in this woman that he possibly did not expect to find.

As someone who finds great solace in writing, there were some interesting comments.
Any writer obviously uses their own experience to develop a theme, sometimes into a blog, sometimes into a successful novel.
"My feelings about that life before adoption leaked into my fiction. I was wounded and didn't know it. When I found I was wounded, I needed to clean the wound properly, or it could have closed up badly."

Her wounds were clearly healed by the cathartic nature of writing, and I think this is a lesson that many of us should take on board. Writing is one way of cleansing the soul, of nurturing it too. Sometimes, I get a real urgency to write because I know that I am restless if I don’t. That is quite different from feeling a need to lick wounds, but that is another reason why I write. Sometimes, I like to write because it is the only way I can reason about some of the issues that frustrate or temper me.

What has this got to do with sex and writing about it? Well, plenty!
On occasions, a lack of sex or even an intensity of sex is not exactly a wound but it is something that needs thought. I write about sex when I am frustrated that I cannot get it. I sometimes write about sex as an exciting bit of foreplay. I write about sex when I am surrounded by its strength and overwhelmed by its passion.
This quote from Winterson reiterated the fact that my writing about sex has been a sort of healing. It has allowed me to explore my sexuality and my thoughts on the sexuality of others. It has enabled me to cross thresholds that I thought I was incapable of doing.
That feels good.

Here’s another quote from the article, where Winterson is talking about depression and suicidal thoughts; not strictly Zenpuss material but here you go!
"I found what [the poet Robert] Graves calls the shining space between dark and dark. It was something I visualised, that shining space. It seemed that I could just walk in that shining space and be there. And I did and then the darkness began to clear. The wound is always there and hurts but it's not festering." You can live with it? "I can and I have to."

I actually found myself welling up at this comment.
There have been times in my life and the lives of those most important to me when there seemed no hope of finding a “shining space” yet even at the darkest moments you knew it existed.
Depression is wholly debilitating, yet even the manically depressed cannot maintain constant angst for twenty four hours a day. They do smile and they do laugh. They capture the humanity of others, even if it is slight and minimal.
Sexual relationships and even sex just as a recreation can be, for some people, that “shining space”. When everything seems hopeless, sex can take you into a different realm that eases the pain. Yes, the pain is still there but this deviation to explore your sexuality gives you a breathing space – and hope.

I’d go as far as to say that I have experienced this, not necessarily in myself, but in others. When darkness and more darkness seemed to seep into every corner, there was always the time to drift away into sexual oneness.
The shining space eventually widens and kicks the darkness to the outer edges where it should rightfully be.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be sex that does this. Writing helps too. As does music or sport or taking a walk down the street or into the countryside, but there is a shining space for all of us somewhere.

Jeanette Winterson and Susie Orbach are lovers. Here is the next quote that I want to use.
Winterson is more garrulous about the affair than Orbach. "I'm in love and I don't care who knows it," she says. The two women only started seeing each other last spring, but Winterson is already plotting a long-term relationship.

With weeping in one paragraph, I turned to laughter with this one, and the comments around it.
“Plotting a long term relationship”? Is that actually a healthy thing to be doing? Shouldn’t she just be living in the now and enjoying what seems to be a delightful, equitable, loving relationship?
“I’m in love”? Is this a healthy state or an unreality that people with a history of manic depression should not place themselves in?

Seriously though, I laughed at the excitement that she portrayed and I empathized. The woman is very happy. I think that hearing of other people’s happiness is joyous and I wasn’t laughing in a mocking way at all. I was laughing because that sort of eagerness of adoration is contagious.
I’ll not delve into the pedantry of the phrase “in love” rather than “deeply loving someone”. There is, I believe, a huge difference but for now, let’s assume she means the latter. (Actually, there is no pedantry here. People should be very mindful of the difference!)

The wonderful essence of this statement is in the “I don’t care who knows it”. In the previous paragraph she explains how Orbach, when asked about her affair with Winterson, affirmed with a very contented smile.
These woman appear to have deep affection for one another and they are unconcerned who knows.
Quite right too!
They have nothing to hide. They are not flaunting their love in an over sensualised manner. They are not fighting some feminist rant on sexuality. They are merely enjoying this feeling of bliss and are happy to share this with whoever wants to pose the question.
You get a strong sense of liberation from both of these women in being able to do this.
That feels good too – for them, though sadly not all of us are blessed with the ability and ease to be so forthcoming about our sexuality or the relationships that mean so much.

Oh, and whilst we are on the subject, will lazy writers please stop using the word ‘affair’ when they actually mean a loving and meaningful relationship? It is so debilitating!
‘Affair’ – according to the dictionary definition in this context is “an intense amorous relationship, usually of short duration”. The word ‘affair’ has so many negative undertones. It implies triviality, transition, instability, faithlessness. These women are not ‘having an affair’. From what I can see they are ‘in a relationship’. Bloody labels! More of that now.

And onto the next quote.
"Susie calls herself post-heterosexual. I like that description because I like the idea of people being fluid in their sexuality. I don't for instance consider myself to be a lesbian. I want to be beyond those descriptive constraints." Winterson has explored this theme in her fiction for decades – as if to say, if only we could get beyond the constraints of gender, we might be more sexually fulfilled.
[Just a small aside, I do like it when I have to edit the Guardian’s own typos. It makes me realize that all is well with the world. There are some constants! You will notice that I suffer from Grauniaditis frequently in my own writing. So dear readers, feel free to mentally amend! – A brownie point for anyone who finds the change from the original text – it is only the most observant and pedantic who will find it]

I listened to someone in a conference a few years ago talking about the stickability effect of labels. Once a lesbian, always a lesbian!
I remember with horror the time when the press on both sides of the Atlantic tried to assassinate Anne Heche when she firstly ‘gave up’ her heterosexuality to have a relationship with Ellen De Generes. To make matters worse, according to the media, she ‘reverted’ back once the relationship with the comedienne did not work.

Winterson is absolutely right here, as is Orbach. We don’t need these labels. They are not very helpful.
There should be fluidity in sexuality and not just fluidity about whether you want to have a heterosexual or homosexual relationship. Sexuality is fluid. Experiences, positions, occasions of sexuality are fluid.
Years ago, I would never have contemplated having sex with more than one person at a time. I would never have considered a desire to be watched having sex. I would never have thought that I could open my legs and be fucked by a man I do not necessarily desire just because it pleases his partner to see him fucking another woman. I would never have imagined I would take another woman’s breasts in my mouth and suck on them generously and lovingly.
My sexuality is fluid. My sexual experiences are fluid.
Some people think they can adamantly rule out one thing or another, but you never know.
Constancy in life can be comforting, like the Guardian and its perpetual spelling errors that used to be serious Malapropisms. Other constancies in life are crippling, sapping, unexciting.

Nobody should have to wear a label like a ball and chain, and I think that I have tried to remove these shackles so that I might be “more sexually fulfilled”.

I did explain at the beginning of this blog that this was going to be a little disjointed.
Here is the next quote from the article that interested me, and I haven’t used all of the quotes that I could have done in this writing.
On “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit” –
Does she still agree with what she wrote in the introduction, that this is a threatening novel that exposes family life as something of a sham, shows love as psychosis and argues that what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people's? "Did I write that?" she says disarmingly. "I can't remember." But she concedes that her writing always has a political purpose. "My aim in writing is never just to give pleasure. Art isn't a luxury product. It's always about trying to change people's lives."

I like the idea that art is “about trying to change people’s lives”. I hope that the reader never feels that I am evangelizing but I do hope that my various musings and ramblings about sexuality at the very least makes them consider their own interpretations on sex, sexuality and the possibilities as yet unobtained.
Writing is an art form that is so often dismissed, yet how many times has someone picked up a book or an article in a newspaper that has moved them to tears, or reduced them to hysterics?
Good art evokes reaction. It initiates and encourages a range of feelings. For me, art is a ‘must’ in people’s lives in order for them to develop, to function, to reason with the world in which they live.

I have fond memories of going to art museums where I have stood in front of a piece of work and literally wept in front of it. I actually take the greatest of pleasures from losing myself in a piece of music that stimulates my mind to the point of removing me from mundaneties. I adore jumping into the television programme or film to accompany the actors as they fulfill their roles, reaching out expressively to their audience and their own experiences.
Art moves me. But it is more than a mere reaction to an impetus. I like to take art and do something with it.
It does change lives.
Even this piece of writing is changing me. I have read something. I have taken it into my thoughts. I have remodeled and considered some of the statements within and I have moved forward some more with my own thinking.
That’s good art.

“Love as a psychosis” – I think we are back onto the territory of being “in love”. That is certainly a psychosis of sorts; a mental disorder characterized by delusions.
Being ‘in love’ is one form of psychosis but family ties and responsibilities could also be seen as a psychosis in some instances. It certainly feels that way sometimes!
I think what Winterson was saying in this introduction to the book is that love for all its alleged beauty and perfection could easily mask some very destructive emotions. There is nothing simple about love. Accompanying it, there could be jealousy, envy, disgust, control, demands – all sorts of diabolically dangerous feelings that can develop into a psychosis of sorts.
Real love has none of these. Real love makes no demands. Real love expresses freedom and compassion Real love enables rather than disables.
Real love is very hard to find.

“What makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people’s”.
It’s not just homosexuals though. This could be said for many folk.
Some people would argue that I have chosen a perverse way of living but that would be their opinion. It is their prejudism and their shallow-mindedness that does not enable my honesty.
With regard to sexuality, this is ever present. Isn’t Winterson saying that it is perverse not to consider the needs of others, the difference of others, the sexuality of others? Collectively, as a society, we still tend to see homosexuality as a perversion from the norm. This is abhorrent really. What, for goodness sake, is the norm? Maybe all folk who like to consider themselves as heterosexual are the ones who are perverse. Maybe those who deny any interest in the opposite sex are perverse in their denial.

Of course, I am being flippant here. I don’t actually think that heterosexuals are perverse but locking away sexuality in a category where the door is shut and the key is thrown away is, at the very least, questionable.
I’m not suggesting that everyone has the capacity to be bisexual. I am not saying that at all.
I am merely suggesting that it is perverse to consider other forms of sexuality as perverse, and I fear that is what we tend to do.

And now to my final comment for the day.

It is really bizarre but my final quote does not come from the article.
Thank goodness for Google, for being reliant on my short term memory would never have retraced this extract.

Here is the quote,
At first sight, of course, vice is more attractive. She is sexier, she promises to be better company than her plain sister virtue. Every novelist, and every reader too, has more fun with the villains than with the good guys. Goodness is staunch and patient, but wickedness is vivid and dynamic; we admire the first, but we thrill to the second.

And here is the piece in full
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/21/three-virtues-delight-liberty

It is part of the Citizen ethics series in the Guardian and comes from the author Philip Pullman.
Why have I cottoned onto this as part of this particular blog? At first glance I am not sure but I think it probably links to how good writing can change us. Good art can make us consider.
Jeanette Winterson and her main character in “Oranges” has virtue and vice. The two are not mutually exclusive.

A virtuous society has to be one that we aim for, but we are never going to learn from virtue alone. A sprinkling of vice does thrill but once more I question this. Who decides what is vice and what is not? Where is the perversion in this? Who dictates it? Society? Individuals?
May be the thrill and dynamism of so-called vice isn’t quite so wrong after all. May be it is not actually a vice in the strictest sense of the word.

To me, Jeanette Winterson has shown in both her life and her writing that there is a little vice and virtue in many things. What she deems as virtues others would see as vice. What I see as virtue others would criticize as anarchistic.

Art, you see. Writing and reading provokes thoughts.

This blog may seem disjointed and disparate but I hope at the end of the reading, the reader has seen a sort of journey that I take on a regular basis; my meandering mind!
I simply adore the fact that articles in a newspaper conjurs up such an array of thoughts. I love the fact that someone else would have read this article and had a thousand thoughts that in no way mirrored my own.
I love how, if you look carefully, you can see hidden messages about sexuality in many things, admittedly it was more overt in this article than some. But sex, love, passion, virtue and indeed vice are part and parcel of our lives, as is good art, good literature that makes us think and stimulates us to do something about it.

And this blog, I suppose, is my attempt to do just that.