Weight

Another great library find from the same trip. Who knew Bexleyheath Central Library had so much good fiction in it? The defendants of suburbia are massing indeed...

151 pages and two day's commuting, and I remember all the reasons why I love Jeanette Winterson, even if her Saturday columns in the times can be a bit sniffy sometimes.  This is the kind of commission she was made for.

The myth of Atlas and Heracles wrapped around philosophy, modernity and autobiography - I'm not sure whether I'm more impressed that Jeanette Winterson claims that she can lift her own weight, or that a slim tome can do justice to such a wide vision. 

There are so many signs and symbols (of which more next time, with Mr Murakami) that it felt like the kind of book that prompts thoughts unbidden for days afterwards, and the key idea is one that really struck me:

'I keep telling the story again and thought I find different exits, the walls never fall.  My life is paced out - here and here and here - I can alter its shape but I can't get beyond it.  I tunnel through, seem to find a way out, but the exits lead nowhere.  I'm back inside, leaning on the limits of myself' (p.14)

Until after reading this, I'd never considered just how often repeated in classical mythology this idea is: the acknowledgement of our powerlessness over the boundaries that form the limits of our existence.  Atlas' relationship with his globe, particularly as he comes to let go of it at the end of the reimagining reiterates this again - what we see as the limits of freedom are symbolically the innate essence of our being.  When Atlas lets go, the burden ceases to exist - 'there was only the diamond-blue earth gardened in a wilderness of space'.  And yet there Atlas leaves us, his story over.  Without the boundaries that define us, we cannot continue.

Laika, the dog sent terrified on Sputnik II, before being automatically being lethally injected a week later, features too, with Atlas to sympathise with the boundaries of her metallic prison.  Both mythically released from that which binds them, however, they simply have to walk away.  Elsewhere in the mythologies past and present, being tied to your fate typically guarantees the repetition of your stories - even in the case of deaths at the hands of fate or prophecy (Hercules here the perfect example) the stories continue to swirl and recoil down the ages like the ghostly spirit itself.  Not so for Atlas and Laika.  Released from their burdens the repetition of 'I want to tell the story again' is no more. They walk away from us, and from life-giving narrative.

The dream of freedom is a dream of control over our boundaries - a dream of escaping the essence of who we are.  The idea of reinvention works for literature only whilst the boundaries remain, and so it is for us too. To escape our own boundaries completely is to lose ourselves.  Far better then to examine the boundaries of self-creation, and keep the sense of our own narrative.  Escape from DA8 isn't the issue - my story wouldn't exist outside the limits of geography, and so the search to refute them is futile.

Plus, the coral of the A206 is now drawn in perspective against Prometheus chained to a rock having his liver torn out daily.  Drive through KFC anyone?