Jeanette Winterson "Lighthousekeeping"

Jeanette Winterson

Lighthousekeeping

We’re here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe.  Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted.  Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

There’s a booth in Grand Central Station where you can go and record your life.  You talk.  It tapes.  It’s the modern-day confessional – no priest, just your voice in the silence.  What you were, digitally saved for the future.

Forty minutes is yours.

So what would you say in those forty minutes – what would be your death-bed decisions?  What of your life will sink under the waves, and what will be like the lighthouse, calling you home?

We’re told not to privilege one story above another.  All the stories must be told.  Well, maybe that’s true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.

When I look back across the span of water I call my life, I can see me there in the lighthouse with Pew, or in The Rock and Pit, or on a cliff edge finding fossils that turned out to be other lives.  My life.  His life.  Pew.  Babel Dark.  All of us bound together, tidal, moon-drawn, past, present and future in the break of a wave.

There I am, edging along the rim of growing up, then the wind came and blew me away, and it was too late to shout for Pew, because he had been blown away too.  I would have to grow up on my own.

And I did, and the stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life, and leave the rest in darkness.  You don’t need to know everything.  There is no everything.  The stories themselves make the meaning.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie.  There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. 

When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world.  That woman – a pieta.  Those men, rough angels with an unknown message.  The children holding hands, spanning time.  And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you need to know.

There it is; the light across the water.  Your story.  Mine.  His.  It has to be seen to be believed.  And it has tao be heard.  In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard. 

Some people say that the best stories have no words.  They weren’t brought up to Lighthousekeeping.  It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid.  The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues.  The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language.

I know that.  But I know something else too, because I was brought up to Lighthousekeeping.  Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence.  And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns.  Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. 

(pp133-135)