"Orange Is Not the Only Fruit"

[fiefoe]

Jeannette Winterson's autobiographical novel has a familiar arc -- an enchanted childhood, growing pains and 'unnameable desires', a defiant fall from grace. The nice surprise is the last chapter, where Jeannette does go back and visit her past, and her combative mom received her like nothing had happened. Most of the fairy-tale like vignettes are too dream like for me to really understand.

• She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She _wanted_ the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
• She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me.
• We lived in a town stolen from the valleys, a huddled place full of chimneys and little shops and back-to-back houses with no gardens... The town was a fat blot and the streets spread back from it into the green, steadily upwards. 小镇犹如一大块墨迹，街巷从中渗出，蔓延到绿色里，稳稳地向上攀升。
• He remained in the flue in a state of rapture 他心神狂喜地待在烟道里
• My mother keeps it by her bed. My mother is very like William Blake; she has visions and dreams and she cannot always distinguish a flea’s head from a king. Luckily she can’t paint.
• she was not so young these days and people were not kind. 她现在也不年轻了，人心不古。
• she told me all about the lives of the saints, how they were really wicked, and given to nameless desires. Not fit for worship; this was yet another heresy of the Catholic Church and I was not be misled by the smooth tongues of priests.
  ‘But I never see any priests.’
  ‘A girl’s motto is BE PREPARED.’
• I learnt that it rains when clouds collide with a high building, like a steeple, or a cathedral; the impact punctures them, and everybody underneath gets wet. This was why, in the old days, when the only tall buildings were holy, people used to say cleanliness is next to godliness.
• ‘Because if you don’t go, I’ll have to go to prison.’ She picked up the knife. ‘How many slices do you want?’
  ‘Two,’ I said. ‘What’s going in them?’
  ‘Potted beef, and be thankful.’
  ‘But if you go to prison you’ll get out again. St Paul was always going to prison.’


• ‘Did you hear that?’ she demanded, and poked her head round the kitchen door. ‘The family life of snails, it’s an Abomination, it’s like saying we come from monkeys.’
  An old woman had made it for me, and made the neck hole the same size as the arm holes, so I always had sore ears. Once I went deaf for three months with my adenoids: no one noticed that either.
• ‘What’s the Lord?’ May was confused.
  ‘Working in mysterious ways,’ declared my mother, and walked ahead.
  So, unknown to me, word spread about our church that I was in a state of rapture, and no one should speak to me.
• She hadn’t been to church for a long time because of her tour of the Midlands with the Salvation Symphony Orchestra, and so she didn’t know that I was supposed to be full of the spirit. She stood in front of me opening and shutting her mouth, which was very large on account of the oboe, and pulling her eyebrows into the middle of her head.
• I tried to build an igloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn’t have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about ‘How Eskimo Got Eaten’, which made me even more miserable. It’s always the same with diversions; you get involved.
• When I was sad she read me Goblin Market by a woman called Christina Rossetti, whose friend once gave her a pickled mouse in a jar, for a present.
• ‘All things fall and are built again
  And those that build them again are gay.’
  I understood this because I had been working on my orange peel igloo for weeks. Some days were a great disappointment, others, a near triumph. It was a feat of balance and vision. 那是既要有预见力、又要能掌握平衡的巧活儿。
• ‘it’s got an interlude for seven elephants in it.’
  ‘What’s it called?’
  ‘The Battle of Abysinnia.’
  Which is, of course, a very famous bit of Victorian Sentiment, like Prince Albert.
• ‘Not really, the Lord and I don’t bother with each other just now. It comes and goes, so I’ve been doing a bit of decorating while I can. Nothing fancy, just a dab on the skirting boards, but when I’m with the Lord, I haven’t time for anything!’
• So an hour early, we trooped back on to our coach, and joggled home. Three plastic bags full of sick and hundreds of sweet wrappers were our memento to the driver. It was all we could part with.
• It had been a bright, difficult time; saving up for a piano and hymn books; fending off the temptations of the Devil go to on holiday instead. 那是艰难而光辉的时代
• then angry, in-the-stomach angry. 而后怒气攻心，十分窝火。
• I had been Mary for the last three years, and there was nothing else I could bring to the part. 过去的三年里，我一直扮演玛利亚，再演也演不出新花头了。
• Whenever we read ‘Thou shall not eat any beast that does not chew the cud or part the hoof she drew all the creature mentioned. Horsies, bunnies and little ducks were vague fabulous things, but I knew all about pelicans, rock badgers, sloths and bats. This tendency towards the exotic has brought me many problems, just as it did for William Blake.
• I had told all the others about the horrors of the demon and the fate of the damned. I had illustrated it by almost strangling Susan Hunt, but that was an accident, and I gave her all my cough sweets afterwards.
• I knew what she meant. It meant that to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.
• It couldn’t be anything pre-Raphaelite, because Janey Morris was thin, and not suited to being played by an egg.
• I did Streetcar Named Desire out of pipe-cleaners, an embroidered cushion cover of Bette Davis in Now Voyager, an oregami William Tell with real apple, and best of all, a potato sculpture of Henry Ford outside the Chrysler building in New York. An impressive list by any standards, but I was as hopeful and as foolish as King Canute forcing back the waves.
• The midgets acted all of the tragedies and many of the comedies. They acted them all at once, and it was fortunate that Tetrahedron had so many faces, otherwise he might have died of fatigue.
  They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished.
  Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing:
  that no emotion is the final one.
• Did that mean that all over the globe, in all innocence, women were marrying beasts?...
  If only there was some way of telling, then we could operate a ration system. It wasn’t fair that a whole street should be full of beasts.
• Remember Jane Eyre and St John Rivers.’ A faraway look came into her eye. <> I did remember, but what my mother didn’t know was that I now knew she had rewritten the ending. Jane Eyre was her favourite non-Bible book
  A sort of nostalgic pilgrimage. I found out, that dreadful day in a back corner of the library, that Jane doesn’t marry St John at all, that she goes back to Mr Rochester. It was like the day I discovered my adoption papers while searching for a pack of playing cards.
• She lay on the couch while the doctor prodded her stomach and chest, asking if she ever felt giddy, or fizzy in the belly. My mother coyly explained that she was in love, and that she often felt strange, but that wasn’t the reason for her visit.
  ‘You may well be in love,’ said the doctor, ‘but you also have a stomach ulcer.’
  Imagine my mother’s horror. She had given away her all for an ailment.
• TIME IS A great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away. There was a time in England when everyone was much concerned with building wooden boats and sailing off against the Turk. When that stopped being interesting, what peasants there were left limped back to the land, and what nobles there were left plotted against each other. 时间能抹杀一切。
• and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget. And if we can’t dispose of it we can alter it.
• So the past, because it is past, is only malleable where once it was flexible. Once it could change its mind, now it can only undergo change.
• and if we are eighteenth-century gentlemen, drawing down the blinds as our coach jumbles over the Alps, we have to know what we are doing, pretending an order that doesn’t exist, to make a security that cannot exist.
• The salt beef of civilisation rumbling round in the gut. Constipation was a great problem after the Second World War. Not enough roughage in the diet, too much refined food. If you always eat out you can never be sure what’s going in, and received information is nobody’s exercise.
• ‘She’s my mother.’
  No sooner had I said that than I felt a blow that wrapped round my head like a bandage. I lay on the lino looking up into the face.
  ‘I’m your mother,’ she said very quietly. ‘She was a carrying case.’
• When I looked out over the town, nothing had changed. Tiny figures moved up and down and the mill chimneys puffed out their usual serene smoke signals. On Ellison’s Tenement they had started to run the fair. How could it be? I had rather gaze on a new ice age than these familiar things.
• ‘I will read you the words of St Paul,’ announced the pastor, and he did, and many more words besides about unnatural passions and the mark of the demon.
  ‘To the pure all things are pure,’ I yelled at him. ‘It’s you not us.’
• ‘Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed,’ the thing began, ‘but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it.’...
• ‘Well, the demon you get depends on the colour of your aura, yours is orange which is why you’ve got me. Your mother’s is brown, which is why she’s so odd, and Mrs White’s is hardly a demon at all. We’re here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you’re quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it’s all part of the paradox.’
• In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.
• stop it or cop it 所以你们别唱了，要不然让你们吃不了兜着走！
• Then the Salvation Army arrived and began to put up their music stands. They’d brought the drum. People watched and waited, and sure enough, within ten minutes there were two sets of carols going strong. My mother pumped and puffed as best she could, and May banged so hard that she split the skin. All the people who had been standing by the barrel organ at the side of the fish market came running round to find out what was happening. Then someone took a photograph.
• The sand was full of sprats gasping as the tide left them behind. As I left Katy behind, she was crying. 沙子里满是奄奄一息的小鲱鱼，海浪把它们冲上来，又让它们留在了那里。
• There was uproar, then a curious thing happened. My mother stood up and said she believed this was right: that women had specific circumstances for their ministry, that the Sunday School was one of them, the Sisterhood another, but the message belonged to the men. Until this moment my life had still made some kind of sense. Now it was making no sense at all.
• Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.
• they chewed in companionable silence 他们静静做伴
• she’d like to see the Eiffel Tower. She’d heard it had been built by acrobats, and that a troupe of trained monkeys had put up the last and highest girders.
• The need for the city fastens her heart to her mind.  对城市的渴望让她心神一念。
• a past was precisely that.  过去顾名思义就是过去。（！！）
• The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
• It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.
• That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have become confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.
• But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend.
• But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.
• She said it was very difficult, but she’d done it, just the same, and now she regularly spoke to Christians all over England, as well as listening to the radio. Already, there were plans of a meeting, and a newsletter for electronic believers.
• She felt she’d had a lot of experience and would be a help to other distressed parents with demon-possessed children. She’d begun a self-help kit for the spiritually disturbed. What not to do, who to contact, which passages of the Bible to read... I was glad she had a hobby, but not pleased that my particular sins were listed in the self-help kit.
• ‘You’ve cheated,’ exclaimed my mother, as I fitted the last red leg on my insect. ‘Never trust a sinner.’
• It was an elephant’s foot, with a hinged top. She hesitated a moment, then flung back the lid. It was an elephant’s foot Promise Box; two layers of little scrolls, all rolled up, each with a promise from the Word.