Tag: Sea

What You Risk Reveals What You Value

The passage is about the effect love has on people, more specifically the effect Louise has on the narrator. This passage is also about risk, “who leaves the hearth for the open sea?” (81). Their love shouldn’t make sense, it started as an affair and turned into something beautiful despite being against all odds: “especially without a compass, especially in the winter, especially alone”(81).

The repetition of home and hearth is significant. The narrator finally found a love that feels like home, a place where they belong. This feeling served as an anchor in their life, “love it was that drove them forth. Love that brought them home again” (81). It allows exploration of each other and the world, and returns them to a place that feels familiar and comfortable. Love healed them. It made them feel invincible, “love hardened their hands against the oar”(81).

“What you risk reveals what you value”(81) is an anomaly. It seems contradicting because wouldn’t you want to protect what you value? This is about courage though, not protection. Have the courage to put it all on the line. Risk to discover something beautiful, something consuming. “In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one” (81) indicates this love is exciting and unknown but it’s also easy and natural. Hearth and quest are opposing words, but being in love wraps them into one.

In this passage, repetition of the sea is seen as it is throughout the novel. The sea mimics the phenomenon of love. It is strange, unknown, and breeds curiosity. The cluster of exploration words such as journey, quest, the open sea, and compass is significant in this passage and the novel in general. The narrator has “explored” many lovers with a wide variety of personalities to find this particular feeling expressed in the passage.

The inside of your body is innocent

“Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can’t I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on the portal vein? The inside of your body is innocent, nothing has taught it fear. Your artery canals trust their cargo, they don’t check the shipment in the blood.” (115)

The narrator is asking themselves multiple rhetoric questions about the human body, and how the sickness that is affecting Louise’s body manages to take hold. The questions are filled with naïve and hopeful imagery, of “gates” that could be closed to keep cancer out of the body. The narrator is using the questions to cope with the facts they have just learned about the sickness that will cause their lover to die.

The passage is lined with a theme of ships and the sea. The narrator uses words like “tide”, “canals”, “cargo” and “shipment” to describe the ways in which the sickness is transported through the body. They also describe the trust the body has in the “shipment” that is being transported. The body does not expect a deathly attack of cancer cells and is consequently not prepared to defend it.

Parallel to that, one could compare the narrator to Louise’s body. They have never lost a lover to a deadly sickness, or death at all for that matter. They are innocent, no one has taught them this specific kind of fear. The narrator didn’t check the “cargo”, the “shipment”, that Louise is carrying with her because they never had to before. Maybe they would have wished for a “lock gate” themselves, to protect their heart from hurt and pain. However, it is already too late. They have fallen in love with Louise and Louise is going to die. There is no changing nature. They can try to prolong Louise’s life, fight cancer as long and hard as possible – only at a terribly painful prize.

Have We Already Fallen?

“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.