It’s the second time I’m reading it and I still can’t put it down.

Gut Symmetries. 1997. Jeanette Winterson.

It deals with love, loss, and the ever-present longing to understand the incomprehensible magnitude of the world we are just merely suspended within.

Or, in short, the epitome of everything that fascinates me. Reading it feels like sitting on the surface of mars, looking down at yourself and all of the messy love that you try to carry on earth.

LOVE AS QUANTUM THEORY

I first found this gem back in high school when my English teacher was prescribing me books like they were pills that could save me from the horrors of being seventeen. They were, and they did. He put Gut Symmetries into my hands one day and I opened it up, not yet knowing that I would still be gushing over it’s prose all of these years later.

As Winterson puts it, it’s a story of time, universe, love affair, and New York…a working-class boy, a baby, a river, the sub-atomic joke of unstable matter. Meaning, the plot is rooted in a love triangle, one where Alice, the mistress, has an affair with Jove, only to find herself then falling in love with his wife. But it reaches out far beyond the confines of a concrete narrative and into abstract theories of space and time that Winterson metaphorically employs. String theory and quantum mechanics, wormholes and the laws of matter, all become templates for understanding the much more elusive, much more difficult to wrap your brain around, concept of love.

GRANDER WEBS

At seventeen, I loved the story because it felt like my own. I was in something like love for the first time and it was anything but linear, anything but painless. I was also infatuated with astronomy and science, staying up all night listening to nerdy podcasts about stellar fusion and the limits of gravity, forever trying to use concrete fact as a way of comprehending the dizzying abstractions of my own reality. Learning that stars are born in the midst of their own flaming chaos felt like an encouraging sign that something brilliant might come from the pressurized mess that was adolescence.

So I suppose I loved Winterson because she did it better than I ever could. She took science and theory and applied it to love, to human relations, and to the ever-labyrinthian experience that is loss. Her books became my bibles, reliable sources of comfort that my experiences might just extend beyond my own life and out into some grander web of human experience that I was just beginning to dip my toes into.

THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Having had a few more years learning to swim in that pool since first reading it, the pages are telling me things I didn’t hear back then. I am not as intrigued by the details of the love triangle anymore as I am in how Winterson catalogs love itself. Love not just as a measure of romance, but of life. Of friendship, family, your work, yourself. Love as a complex thing that surrounds you like particles, not some far off place you hope for an invitation to.

Also having since read her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?, I know that love and connection were not things she knew for a long time in her life. I know her childhood was anything but a linear crash course in healthy human relations and that because of that, she has spent her adult life trying to understand the experience of real love, right down to the subatomic level. Which, invariably, cannot be done without also exploring it’s absence.

In the very beginning, she asks Can anyone deny that we are haunted? What is it that crouches under the myths that we have made? Always the physical presence of something split off.

Haunted. Yes, haunted. Haunted by the depths of the human experience. If there could be one, that would be the overarching sentiment of this book, the one that I have selected each of these passages in honor of.

PAIN AND LOSS

“I understand that pain leapfrogs over language and lands in dumb growls beyond time. A place where there is no speech and no clock, no means of separating either the moment or the misery. Nobody comes and nobody goes.”

“Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it? (The Standard Model?) Or to fall into her arms, fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.”

“The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes. We tow it down the river, people and things, emotions, time’s inhabitants, not left on shore way back, but still swimming close by…The past comes with us and occasionally kidnaps the present so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. present. future.”

-Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Grief, vulnerability, and the haunting nature of memory. How each holds the hand of the other, fighting to have their palm on top. What wins? The possibility of love or the memory of it’s loss? Is safety the risk or the reward? What are you dragging in your net, deep under the surface?

These are the dizzying questions Winterson weaves throughout the narrative like invitations for introspection. She captures the lonely, otherworldly essence of grief that renders time and logic utterly void. She explores the thick malaise of the past and how it falls over us out of nowhere, momentarily taking us back in time before spitting us back out into the present reality. All while acknowledging the ever-present allure of the future and what it might hold. Of love and all of it’s constituents. For lodged somewhere deep in our human brains is a voice whispering there is no discovery without risk.

SHOUTING INTO THE VOID

“Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars. I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously?

I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”

-Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

This has been underlined over and over again in my copy as a stinging, poignant reminder of what one of my professors referred to as epistemological nihilism, or, the idea that we can never, ever, truly understand each other to the capacity that we desire. The probability, Winterson explains, is miniscule. Yet the lure immense. The mere fraction of a percent is enough. We send out secrets out into the void and wait for signals to return, clinging to Fermi’s paradox as a beacon of hope that surely we cannot be alone.

BREATHING IN HISTORY

“She hopes he is in heaven. I hope he has found the energy to continue along his own possibility…He wanted to transcend the illusion of matter.”

“Breathe in, breathe out. You breathe time and time’s decay. Matter disposing of itself, still imprinted with its echo, the form it took, the shape of its energy for a little while. The medievals thought that the damned lived in Satan’s belly, hot pouch of indigestion, but damned or saved, what we were continues in the lungs of each other. Nitrogen, oxygen, tell-tale carbon.

Do not mistake me. This is not the afterlife. This is no afterlife. There is life, constantly escaping from the forms it inhabits, leaving behind its shell. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. History is in your nostrils”

-Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

The poetics of stardust, of recycled atoms and up-cycled flesh, will never run out and I will never tire of them. History is in our nostrils just as it is cemented in our bones. We are constructed entirely from the elements of the past, allowing us to continue in the lungs of each other. Carbon tells stories we are not privy to, revealing to us the grander web that our lives have been plucked from oblivion and nestled inside of.

Death is a spider and we are in it’s web, trying all the time to find beauty in the sticky patterns that engulf us.

For more of me gushing over Winterson, check this one out.

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