“I had lately learned that another way of writing ‘FALL IN LOVE’ was ‘WALK THE PLANK.’ I was tired of balancing blind-fold on a slender beam, one slip and into the unplumbed sea” (26).
“Lately learned” implies prior ignorance. It is so interesting that a feeling, a sense of happiness, a supposed ‘euphoric’ feeling can be so scary. The unstated connection made between the narrators heart and an “unplumbed sea” demonstrates the depth of the universal language of love.
I see freight in the words plank, balancing, blind-fold, slip and even sea; but why are these words associated with the oh so beautiful LOVE? Well, this fear was just learned. ‘Ignorance is bliss,’ or, was.
Why is love a “slender plank?” Is it the fear of the unknown? Fear of getting hurt? Fear of shame? Or fear of slipping off the slender plank and into the unplumbed sea? The Author suggests that his/her new learning of the dangers of love is strictly a game of ‘survival of the fittest.’ If we have already ‘fallen’ in love… then how are we still on the plank? There’s a connection there. The only difference is that it is an emotional fall, not a physical fall.
“Balancing blind-fold on a slender beam” would instill fear in us, it would give us an almost animalistic instinct to fight, to prevail and to survive. Who did The Narrator ‘learn’ that you need to ‘survive’ love from? Is he/she crazy? Or did we teach ourselves? Are we dying to survive something that would never kill us in the first place?
In Sedgwick’s Tendencies, she states that,
“The survival of each one is a miracle. Everyone who survived has stories about how it was done” (1).
Maybe this is the “newly learned” case in Winterson’s Written on the Body? Should we fear love? or love the fear? I am going to go out on a limb and say that it is the fear of the unknown within the unplumbed sea that makes us fear surviving, but LOVE survival.