JEANETTE WINTERSON CONTINUED
After loss of identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, "I fuck therefore I am"
Why do you ask me about my lovers, one, two, twenty?
Why do you visit a lost island looking for me?
Why do you say "When was that day when the sun splintered the clouds and broke the light in shards on her head?"
There's no such thing as autobiography there's only art and lies.
Is appetite excess of feeling or lack of it? The glutton is not a gourmand. The alcoholic does not love fine wine any more than the womanizer loves woman. Don Giovanni; the unsheathed cock is layered to numbness. He might as well stick it in a hole in the wall for all the pleasure it gives him. Sex gives him no pleasure, only power and violence please him, that is not the mark fo the brute, it is the mark of Man.
When I say I lack feeling, you know that I mean I lack the capacity to feel, and that is a spiritual not a bodily failing.
And love? The brazier where I burn. Extravagant, profuse, excessive, beyond bounds, Out of our risk comes our safety, not the small sad life that will cling to anything because it has nothing. You are not a raft. I am not a sailor. You are not weak. I am more than a strong arm. I want to love you well, not to lose you in children and objects. I want to love you well, but to love you well I shall have to be in love with more than love. I shall have to find in myself the emotional extravagance that fits me to stay in one place.
Falling in love: Art of science? Gravity's insistence and the heart dropping from a ready tree. Gene pool or opera? You choose. Once the Church married us, now it's the little men in white coats.