out-box #4, meaning as psychosis

Jeanette Winterson's novels and articles are the only works I ever re-read. (Apart from Szymborska's. And Tove Jansson's. And Virginia Woolf's.)

'End of story. Gotta start again. Gotta be positive. Gotta move on. Don't look back. No regrets.'

That's how he said it. He said it like a mantra. I wonder how many times a day he had to say it to make it true? It was a poultice over his heart.
I didn't know how to poultice my heart.

(...)
After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.
I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that might be a kind of psychosis.
'You think meaning is psychosis?'
'An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.'
'I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.'
He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean.
'I am only asking questions.'
'So am I.'
There was a pause.
I said, 'How would you define psychosis?'
He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.
(...)
In the morning I was woken early by the chromatic bell of the Orthodox Church.
I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.

I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.

'Why are you afraid'? I asked myself, because fear is at the bottom of everything, even love usually rests on fear. 'Why are you afraid, when whatever you do will die anyway?'
(...)
I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don't expect to be happy. I don't imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don't think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving.And when it burns out, the planet dies.

My little orbit of life circles love. I daren't get any closer. I'm not a mystic seeking final communion. I don't go out without SPF 15. I protect myself.
But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love – all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do.
But love it is that wins the day.
(...)
The light was lengthening in soft lines along the river. Whether it was the quality of light, or the clarity of my feelings for you, I don't know, but there was softness and no blurring. 'This is not a lie,' I said to myself. 'It may not hold, but it is true.'


[Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping]