Weight. Jeanette Winterson
calls it the world before life began – the Hadean period. But life had begun, because life is more than the ability to reproduce. In the molten lava spills and cratered rocks, life longed for life. The proto, the almost, the maybe. Not Venus. Not Mars. Earth.
Planet Earth, that wanted life so badly, she got it.
Moving forward a few billion years, there was a miracle. At least that’s what I call the unexpected fact that changes the story. Earth had bacterial life, but no oxygen, and oxygen was a deadly poison. Then, in a quiet revolution as explosive in its own way as a star, a new kind of bacteria, cyanobacteria started to photosynthesise – and a bi-product of photosynthesis is oxygen. Planet earth had a new atmosphere. The rest is history.
Well not quite. I could list for you the wild optimism of the Cambrian era, pushing up mountains like grass grows daisies, or the Silurian dream-days of starfish and gastropods. About 400 million years ago, shaking salt water from their fins and scales, the first land animals climbed out of the warm lagoons of the vast coral reefs. The Triassic and Jurassic periods belong to the dinosaurs, efficient murder weapons, common as nightmares. Then three or four million years ago – chancy and brand new – what’s this come here – a mammoth and something like a man?
* * *
The earth was amazed. Earth was always strange and new to herself. She never anticipated what she would do next. She never guessed the coming wonder. She loved the risk, the randomness, the lottery probability of a winner. We forget, but she never did, that what we take for granted is the success story. The failures have disappeared. This planet that seems so obvious and inevitable is the jackpot. Earth is the blue ball with the winning number on it.
Make a list. Look around you. Rock, sand, soil, fruit trees, roses, spiders, snails, frogs, fish, cattle, horses, rainfall, sunshine, you and me. This is the grand experiment called life. What could be more unexpected?
All the stories are here, silt-packed and fossil-stored. The book of the world opens anywhere, chronology is one method only and not the best. Clocks are not time. Even radioactive rock-clocks, even gut-spun DNA, can only tell time like a story.
When the universe exploded like a bomb, it started ticking like a bomb too. We know our sun will die, in another hundred million years or so, then the lights will go out and there will be no light to read by any more.
‘Tell me the time’ you say. And what you really say is ‘Tell me a story.’
Here’s one I haven’t been able to put down.
My father was Poseidon. My mother was the Earth.
My father loved the strong outlines of my mother’s body. He loved her demarcations and her boundaries. He knew where he stood with her. She was solid, certain, shaped and material.
My mother loved my father because he recognised no boundaries. His ambitions were tidal. He swept, he sank, he flooded, he re-formed. Poseidon was a deluge of a man. Power flowed off him. He was deep, sometimes calm, but never still.
My mother and father teemed with life. They were life. Creation depended on them and had done so before there was air or fire. They sustained so much. They were so much. To each other they were irresistible.
Both were volatile. My father obviously so, my mother more alarmingly. She was serene as a rock but volcano’d with anger. She was quiet as a desert but tectonically challenged. When my mother threw a plate across the room, the whole world felt the crash. My father could be whipped into a storm in moments. My mother grumbled and growled and shook for days or weeks or months until her rage fissured and crumpled entire cities or forced human kind into lava-like submission.
Humankind … They never could see it coming. Look at Pompeii. There they are in the bathhouses, sitting in their chairs, wearing skeletal looks of charred surprise.
When my father wooed my mother she lapped it up. He was playful, he was warm, he waited for her in the bright blue shallows and came a little closer, then drew back, and his pull was to leave a little gift on her shore; a piece of coral, mother of pearl, a shell as spiralled as a dream.
Sometimes he was a long way out and she missed him and the beached fishes gasped for breath. Then he was all over her again, and they were mermaids together, because there was always something feminine about my father, for all his power. Earth and water are the same kind, just as fire and air are their opposites.
She loved him because he showed her to herself. He was her moving mirror. He took her round the world, the world that she was, and held it up for her to see, her beauty of forests and cliffs and coastlines and wild places. To him she was both paradise and fear and he loved both. Together they went where no human had ever been. Places only they could go, places only they could be. Wherever he went, she was there; a gentle restraint, a serious reminder; the earth and the waters that covered the earth. He knew though, that while he could not cover the whole of her, she underpinned the whole of him. For all his strength, she was strong.
I was born. I was born one of the Titans, half man, half god, a giant of a giant race. I was born on an island where my father could lie over my mother for a day and a night before subsiding. From this prolonged intercourse, riddling himself into every crack, I was bound to be a fatal combination of them both. I am as turbulent as my father. I am as brooding as my mother. I act suddenly. I never forget. I sometimes forgive, compassion washing away memory. I know what love is. I know love’s counterfeit. At the same time, my good nature makes me easy to deceive. Like my brother Prometheus, I have been punished for overstepping the mark. He stole fire. I fought for freedom.
Boundaries, always boundaries.
I keep telling the story again and though 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.
This is the body, the sealed unit that cautiously takes in what it needs to survive, that stoutly repels invaders of the microbe kind. This is the body, whose boundaries weaken only in decay and then the freedom it brings is useless. United with the world at last, I am dead to it.
This is the body, and my body is the world in little. I am the Kosmos – the all that there is, and at the same time I was never more outside, never more than nothing. Nothing bounded by nothing.
Nothing has an unlikely property. It is heavy.
The story is a simple one. I had a farm. I had cattle. I had a vineyard. I had daughters. I lived on Atlantis, the perfect synthesis of a wealthy mother and a proud father. The Titans bowed to no-one, not even Zeus, whose thunderbolts were like a game to us.
When I wanted gold and jewels I asked my mother where she kept them and she indulged me as mothers indulge sons, and showed me her secret mines and underground caves.
When I wanted whales or harbours or nets lined with fish or pearls for my daughters, I went to my father, who respected me and treated me as an equal. I dived with him into hot springs that blasted the floor of the ocean. We swam wrecks and tamed porpoises. Land and sea were equal home to me, and when Atlantis was finally destroyed, I even felt a kind of gladness. All that loss was after all, only my mother and father’s embrace. I was nothing. I returned to nothing. I wish it had been so.
Boundaries, always boundaries, and the longing for infinite space.
I built a walled garden, a temenos, a sacred space. I lifted the huge stones with my own hands and piled them carefully, as a goatherd would, leaving tiny gaps to let the wind through. A solid wall is easily collapsed. My mother stirring in her sleep could do as much. A wall well built with invisible spaces will allow the winds that rage against it to pass through. When the