TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Monday, March 14, 2005

12:45 PM
Posted by jodi rose

The dangers of reading Jeanette Winterson in a foreign place and overly susceptible poetic mood will soon become apparent. Forgive me for quoting heavily in this entry - I don't have words of my own right now.

Realising how entirely dependent we are on people around us. Even more so in a place where you don't speak the language, have no grounding and can never quite find your bearings. I keep getting lost because I think I know where I'm going enough to not look at the map - and am often only 4 or 5 streets away, but in completely the wrong place.

Had an amazingly weird dream last night - well it was crystal clear and even more disturbing in its strange clarity - all these spiky freeways built high in the sky, thin concrete curves with no railings and cars going across, but not joining together yet, and another section of solid thick concrete train bridge with carriages already on it waiting to be able to go somewhere and the road we were travelling on was mostly finished and much closer to the ground, but also had no railing and missing sections.

Other part was about the woman I was travelling with, and trying to unravel this riddle together, stopping at the crime unit and watching three fighter jets in the sky next to us, almost in the treetops, two of them crashed into each other, and the third disappeared with my companion - as I wondered what had happened to her, got back to the backyard and found she had been swapped with a young child who spoke only french, who I knew that it was my job to look after and bring up. Spookily uncanny... all those things. Then I decided I needed to do kickboxing classes and be more active. There you go.

I feel like something fragile has been shattered. Trust? Faith?
You need to have faith in people, someone said to me yesterday, talking of a moment when they had lost theirs. They built it back eventually.
This is my journey, I choose to share it with you.

(From) The Power Book, by Jeanette Winterson

'Be confident, even in your mistakes. There is no wrong road. There is only the road you must travel. And if the road leads nowhere? Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere.

What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the titanic you go down.

Only the impossible is worth the effort.

This is a virtual world. This is a world inventing itself. Daily, new landmasses form and then submerge. The buried treasure is really there, but caulked and outlandish. Hard to spot because unfamiliar, and few of us can see what has never been named.

The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.

I do not know whether science will formulate its grand theory of the universe. I know that it will not make it any easier to read the plain text of our hearts. It is plain but it seems like a secret alphabet. We train as our own Egyptologists, hoping the fragments will tell a tale. We work at night as alchemists, struggling to decipher the letters mirrored and reversed. We are people who trace with our fingers a marvelous book, but when we turn to read it again the letters have vanished. Always the book must be rewritten. Sometimes a letter at a time is all we can do.

My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form, but pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and god-like success.

The wilderness is not tamed. It waits - beautiful and terrible - beyond the reach of the campfire. Now and again someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there. A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a letter in a dead man's pocket.

Love is worth death. Love is worth life. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or an echo. Perhaps I will hear nothing. It doesn't matter. The journey must be made.'

end quote.

If I can't have impossible love, I will have impossible bridges.
'I'm all out of faith, this is how I feel, cold and I am shamed lying broken on the floor' ('torn' but the original version not natalie imbruglia. I know, the words are the same.. but the story is not)