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    Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
    Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
    Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

    By Jeanette Winterson

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A “profound and provocative” reimagining of the Greek legend by the New York Times–bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (Daily Mail).
     
    With wit and verve, Whitbread Award–winning novelist Jeanette Winterson brings the mythical figure of Atlas into the space age and sets him free at last. In her retelling of the story of a god tricked into holding the world on his shoulders and his brief reprieve, she sets difficult questions about the nature of choice and coercion, how we choose our own destiny and at the same time can liberate ourselves from our seeming fate.
     
    “Dazzling . . . Winterson’s embrace of the mythic landscape is evident in her rich imagery . . . cathartic . . . this short novel fulfills a number of the criteria myth is meant to embody” —The New York Times Book Review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802197825
    Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
    Author

    Jeanette Winterson

    Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959. She read English at Oxford University before writing her first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, which was published in 1985.

    Read more from Jeanette Winterson

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    Reviews for Weight

    4/5

    315 ratings20 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Loved it. Lots going on in small text. Explores meaning of duty, boundaries, time, responsibility, love and resentment regarding creations/children/responsibility. How they give meaning and can be expansive, but restrict at same time. Blend of personal and mythic. Time and space, Weight and Wait.
    • 4/5
      Winterson here retells the story of Atlas, without being prescriptive in her myth-telling and allegorizing. In a few simple chapters she is able to contemporize the tale with references as vast as astrophysics (including Laika the Russian space dog) and as personal as what her adoptive mother kept on the sideboard when threatened (a WWII revolver). Thanks, {Jeanette Winterson}! You've just made the burden I carry on my back a little lighter.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful re-telling of the myth of Atlas who led the Titans in their war against the Olympians and whose punishment from Zeus was to hold up the world. The stories of Heracles, Hera, and Prometheus as well as science and humanity intertwine in this modern, lyrical re-telling of Atlas's life. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      For quite a few years, I loved Jeanette Winterson. I bought every book. I wrote quotes in notebooks, on my walls. Then sometime around Gut Symmetries (which I should have loved the most, involving quantum physics as it did), I stopped. They all started to feel like the same book, and it wasn't a book I wanted to read anymore, so I walked away.

      Then I went to the bookstore to buy used copies of books I'd loved to give away at Books, Beer, & Pizza. In addition to a few Winterson books I had loved (I bought a copy of The Passion), there was this. I've always loved retellings of myths and fairy tales, so I had to take a chance on it.

      The story is very Winterson, and also very Greek myth -- with a somewhat disturbing amount of rapes and eternal torture and bodily fluids. But it's a very good story. About fate and free will and what futures we're capable of envisioning for ourselves. I read the whole thing in one night, unable to put it down.

      I am very curious to check out more books in the Canongate Myths series.
    • 3/5
       A spare, hard, amusing, serious parable about the Atlas myth that turns out to be about shouldering responsibilities and accepting fate. A wonderful book to read to children,
    • 3/5
      Ehhh.....this was okay. I did it on audio & wasn't quite so alert during the first disc, so maybe that took away from some of my appreciation of it. I have to agree with another reviewer who referred to the excessive number of Hereclean erections. Enough already. This was my first read of Winterson's, although I have a couple of her others on my waiting pile. This didn't make me want to rush to read her earlier works, but I wasn't turned off enough to not want to read them at all. I'll just get to them when I get to them. This, combined with my previous read by Marie Phillips, has re-initiated my interest into Greek mythology, however.
    • 4/5
      I'd follow Jeanette Winterson just about anywhere, and I'm very excited about this new series of books based on myths written by contemporary authors. This definitely doesn't disappoint.
    • 5/5
      Much has been said about the labors of Heracles, but not often is his mental state addressed in the tales. Winterson comically yet seriously addresses the buzzing 'thought-wasp' that Heracles very seldom engages, being more inclined to smack himself upside the head until the buzzing ceases, couching this tale within her larger exploration of the internal life of Atlas, he who bears the burden of the world's (and we discover, his own) weight. As part of Heracles' twelve labors, in exchange for his help, Heracles assumes the burden of the world while Atlas fetches three golden fruit from the garden of the Hesperides which, in Winterson's telling, was Atlas' own, tended by his daughters, but now gone to seed, save the tree he stewarded for Hera. After Atlas, being of the race of Titans who warred with and lost to the Olympians, was punished by yoking his strength to carry the Earth upon his back, his only other mention is of this encounter with Heracles, played out as if he refuses to resume his burden, but tricked by Heracles into doing so. Passing mention turns Atlas into a fixture, but not a character in the classic tales. Winterson takes this silent Titan and gives him a glorious internal imagining, exploring her stated themes of boundaries and isolation and freedom and responsibility within the character she develops of Atlas. His punishment becomes a space of rumination; he can hear what happens upon the world, he learns over the long years to differentiate the buzz of a bee from the low of cattle, the strains of song from the vilifying attack. He dwells in isolation, supporting life but never able to cross the boundary and interact. Enabled by Heracles to be free, Winterson complicates the scenario by engaging Atlas' deep sense of responsibility - he has carried the Earth for an unfathomable time and not merely let it drop, leading one to wonder why if not for this sense of duty, emphasized perhaps in his pre-punishment devotion to his garden - and while there is an element of trickery involved in Heracles getting Atlas to reshoulder the Earth's weight, it is left arguable that Atlas was complicit in this. Heracles may be portrayed as crafty, but Atlas has the wisdom of long meditation; he knew what he was about. A silent isolation for Atlas commences after this time, bounded by the disappearance of his familial gods, leaving him to ossify and calcify under the weight of the Earth, his mind kept contained within the duty his body performs. 'Then the dog came.' With this seemingly benign yet heraldic utterance Winterson brings us to 1957 and a little dog named Laika shot into space by Russia. Atlas frees Laika from her little pod, saving her from the needle that would end her life, and she in turn saves Atlas from hardening into nothingness - a state he has previously longed for, yet which can never be regained. And then he has the thought that took milennia to come to him: why not put the Earth down? Within this mythic retelling, this central question constantly buzzes in the background; why not just put it down? Why not release the boundaries? By what are we really bounded? Or whom? Winterson revitalizes this tale of Atlas and Heracles, contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of both, pulling from a little space-born pod a reason to dwell upon how we ourselves invoke our own limits.
    • 2/5
      As always, with Jeannette Winterson's work, there are parts of this that caught at me -- phrases, quotable bites, a scene here and there -- but for the most part I was underwhelmed. More underwhelmed than usual, perhaps. It had a very light, dismissive tone that just didn't work for me, and the characterisation of Heracles as a big idiot just... isn't anything new. That exact character has been given so many names.

      Also, weird sex-stuff between Heracles and Hera. Just, what? And weird interludes with another narrator, possibly-maybe intended to be Winterson herself...?

      Yeah, colour me underwhelmed.
    • 5/5
      Jeanette Winterson is a genius in the world of novelists. She doesn't think quite like you or me. Good thing, too. Her take on two 'good ole boys' of the ancient world shows how well she understands men, deception, personal limits, the surreal, individual integrity in a world of corporate values.
    • 4/5
       I love Jeanette Winterson. Weight is a perfect little morsel of a book.
    • 5/5
      Much has been said about the labors of Heracles, but not often is his mental state addressed in the tales. Winterson comically yet seriously addresses the buzzing 'thought-wasp' that Heracles very seldom engages, being more inclined to smack himself upside the head until the buzzing ceases, couching this tale within her larger exploration of the internal life of Atlas, he who bears the burden of the world's (and we discover, his own) weight.

      As part of Heracles' twelve labors, in exchange for his help, Heracles assumes the burden of the world while Atlas fetches three golden fruit from the garden of the Hesperides which, in Winterson's telling, was Atlas' own, tended by his daughters, but now gone to seed, save the tree he stewarded for Hera. After Atlas, being of the race of Titans who warred with and lost to the Olympians, was punished by yoking his strength to carry the Earth upon his back, his only other mention is of this encounter with Heracles, played out as if he refuses to resume his burden, but tricked by Heracles into doing so. Passing mention turns Atlas into a fixture, but not a character in the classic tales.

      Winterson takes this silent Titan and gives him a glorious internal imagining, exploring her stated themes of boundaries and isolation and freedom and responsibility within the character she develops of Atlas. His punishment becomes a space of rumination; he can hear what happens upon the world, he learns over the long years to differentiate the buzz of a bee from the low of cattle, the strains of song from the vilifying attack. He dwells in isolation, supporting life but never able to cross the boundary and interact.

      Enabled by Heracles to be free, Winterson complicates the scenario by engaging Atlas' deep sense of responsibility - he has carried the Earth for an unfathomable time and not merely let it drop, leading one to wonder why if not for this sense of duty, emphasized perhaps in his pre-punishment devotion to his garden - and while there is an element of trickery involved in Heracles getting Atlas to reshoulder the Earth's weight, it is left arguable that Atlas was complicit in this. Heracles may be portrayed as crafty, but Atlas has the wisdom of long meditation; he knew what he was about. A silent isolation for Atlas commences after this time, bounded by the disappearance of his familial gods, leaving him to ossify and calcify under the weight of the Earth, his mind kept contained within the duty his body performs.

      'Then the dog came.' With this seemingly benign yet heraldic utterance Winterson brings us to 1957 and a little dog named Laika shot into space by Russia. Atlas frees Laika from her little pod, saving her from the needle that would end her life, and she in turn saves Atlas from hardening into nothingness - a state he has previously longed for, yet which can never be regained. And then he has the thought that took milennia to come to him: why not put the Earth down?

      Within this mythic retelling, this central question constantly buzzes in the background; why not just put it down? Why not release the boundaries? By what are we really bounded? Or whom? Winterson revitalizes this tale of Atlas and Heracles, contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of both, pulling from a little space-born pod a reason to dwell upon how we ourselves invoke our own limits.
    • 4/5
      Rating: 3.75* of five

      Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.
      No one can ever say Jeannette Winterson lacks authorial chops. Self-aware aphoristic ones. That is a beautiful distillation of the purpose of becoming an author.

      Atlas, he of the weight of the world on his shoulders, had a mother. She was Earth, Gaia, THE Mother. His Titanic self was born of her union with Poseidon, the Sea, her complement in this Universe of Elements called Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. (Not for the Greeks the effete Orientalism of including Wood or Metal! They spring from Earth, are held within her potentialities.)
      Earth was always strange and new to herself. She never anticipated what she would do next. She never guessed the coming wonder. She loved the risk, the randomness, the lottery probability of a winner. We forget, but she never did, that what we take for granted is the success story. The failures have disappeared. This planet that seems so obvious and inevitable is the jackpot.
      As we're learning better and better every day. Over 4000 "exoplanets" (humans and their deep-seated need to discriminate!) later, we still have found no other planet truly capable of bringing forth Life as we know it. Permaybehaps because those other Mothers don't have mates:
      She loved {the Waters} because he showed her to herself.
      Or the *right* mates, anyway. She's unique, our Gaia, and we...
      ...no, not now.

      Atlas the Titan rebels against his younger, prettier siblings the Olympians because he didn't want them telling him what to do. His Garden of Eden was Atlantis, the eternally shining and perfect past that every generation of humanity is certain was without problems or cares, everyone always got along, love and respect were common as pig tracks, and Gaia filled our bellies with all her bounty unstintingly.

      Snort.

      So Atlas pursued his war against the Olympians on the flimsiest of pretexts for both sides:
      My daughters {the Hesperides} had been secretly eating the sacred fruit. Who could blame them, the tree, sweet-scented and heavy, and the grass underneath it wet with evening dew? Their feet were bare and their mouths were eager. They are girls after all.
      I did not see the harm myself, but the gods are jealous of their belongings.
      Zeus and Company prevail in the ensuing war over trivialities, this "we don't like you so we're taking away your stuff because we like doing AND having that." (It's hard for me to read this myth without thinking the Greeks were busy explaining slavery to themselves.) In his "guilt" and its ensuing punishment, Atlas is condemned forever and always to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders as Olympian punishment for the egregious individualistic desire for freedom he went to war to secure:
      I bent my back and braced my right leg, kneeling with my left. I bowed my head and held my hands, palms up, almost like surrender. I suppose it was surrender. Who is strong enough to escape their fate? Who can avoid what they must become?
      And that's the crux of the matter. Atlas accepts his punishment and assumes his burden Because.

      That's it. Really. Just...because. You can blow all the smoke and angle the mirrors however you like: The only thing you'll ever see is "Because" shaped in smoke and reflected at as many angles as there are. Fate is a deeply convenient double-bind technique, like sin and guilt. "You're bad! BAD! Yes, YOU ARE BAD!!" and the punishments needn't even ever be external...they're hefted onto shoulders by the bearers themselves, never to be put down because they are obviously just and fair and right. Why?

      Because.

      So here into the narrative comes Enkidu...oh dear, please pardon me!, I meant to type "Heracles" honest I did!...the unbridled, unreflective Master of the Universe, the id-on-legs that Zeus the seducer tricked his wife into suckling (a story I don't know, but feel I should look into) so as to offer his half-human bonny wee laddie immortality. He's godlike in his strength, beauty, and sense of entitlement. He's a rapist, a murderer, and a hero to those it suits him to assist.

      I think...it's just a suspicion, mind...but I think it's just possible that Author Winterson (a known Lesbian) might have a few smallish issues with cishet toxic masculinity. Enkidu...there I go again, silly old faggot...HERACLES, of course, rapes women, masturbates in front of his cock-tease stepmother:
      Hera was beautiful. She was so beautiful that even a thug like Heracles wished he had shaved. Without a mirror she showed him to himself, muscle-swollen and scarred. He feared her and desired her. His prick kept filling and deflating like a pair of fire bellows. He wanted to rape her but he didn’t dare. Her eyes were all contempt and mild disgust.
      ...as well as his dupe of a cousin Atlas, and offers half-heartedly to wank the latter when he says, "I don't have a free hand," when Heracles asks him to put on the show. Doesn't happen...Atlas says, "I'm too tired," eliciting from Heracles a derisive snort of "you sound like a girl."

      You know the myth: Heracles (literally "the Greatness of Hera") needs Atlas to pilfer the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, in return taking the weight of the world onto his own shoulders. It does not go well for Heracles:
      Hera says, "No hero can be destroyed by the world. His reward is to destroy himself. Not what you meet on the way, but what you are, will destroy you, Heracles."
      ***
      His body was as strong as Atlas’s, but his nature was not. Hera was right about him there. Heracles’s strength was a cover for his weakness.
      Heracles is waking up! At the precise moment he can not run, hide, fight, or fuck his way out of self-reflection, here it is: He's a weakling. He can't do diddly-squat that isn't a feat of his body and using only the basest, most cunning of ruses. Strategy? What's that? But need a tactician and you found your dreamboat.

      The myth runs its well-told course along precisely the lines the Greeks told it for so many millennia. The insights Author Winterson are, for all they're sparkling like bubbles in prosecco, not particularly new. She does a fine job of unpacking meaning from myth. One would expect no less from the author of [Sexing the Cherry]. And, to be fair, she wasn't tasked with Revealing New Levels of Meaning in the myth itself, she was asked to retell it in a modern vein. At this she succeeded admirably. But my reading pleasure, my very real Gollumy glomming onto sentences that I want to have made into Jasperware plaques and sculpted into entire palaces of Chihuly glass, is ultimately...okay. Not superb, just okay.

      She didn't do it wrong. But I've seen it done before, sometimes with the names changed and sometimes not. That is what gave the read a rating under five stars...that and the (not unreasonable, not unjustified) misandry. It wasn't very subtle, nor was it intended to be (or so it seems to me), but it also wasn't particularly insightful. That I *do* expect from Author Winterson.

      Here, as my last salvo, is why I expect the unexpected and the glorious from her:
      If only I understood that the globe itself, complete, perfect, unique, is a story. Science is a story. History is a story. These are the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true.

      What am I? Atoms.
      What are atoms? Empty space and points of light.
      She speaks to us, the reader, directly and she gives herself the best lines. It's her story, she is entitled to do that. But I wanted more of this from the myth-retelling, and while I got beautiful words, I felt I wasn't given quite as much insightful wordsmithing of this last sort.
    • 4/5
      Jeanette Winterson's novella Weight is both a retelling of Greek myths involving Atlas and Heracles and a meditation on the real and metaphoric burdens human beings must bear throughout their lives. Atlas, punished for fighting against the Olympian gods, must hold up the Kosmos for eternity. But when Heracles, the only being strong enough to take the old Titan's place, needs a favor, Atlas sees his chance. Which one of them will walk away free of the oppressive Earth?

      To this myth Winterson adds some autobiographical material and some facts from astronomy and earth science. I am not sure that the meditative part worked as well as the more vivid storytelling angle. However, the book earns bonus points for including a charming characterization of Laika the cosmonaut dog.
    • 5/5
      Weight casts Heracles and Atlas as foils to one another, complete opposites in how they approach problems. Heracles is a libertine, who literally pounds thoughts out of his head as infrequently as he has any, and whose main goal in life is to have sex with many women and kill many creatures (including said women). He goes about his legendary twelve tasks mechanically, with some cunning but not much thought. On the other hand, Atlas has nothing to do *but* think as he holds the weight of the world on his shoulders. He is stoic and, at times, melancholy.

      So how are we called to live? Being burdened by the weight of all the problems of the world is a daunting existence, but so is seeking out mindless carnal pleasures with no meaning behind them. Ultimately salvation comes not from the big conquering forces, but from the small and meek ones; it's the only way humanity can cope with the overwhelming weight of goodness and obligation and desire all tugging life in different directions.
    • 5/5
      I positively LOVED this book. It's the first I read in Canongate's Myth series, and I'm glad I started with this one! I read Weight in a couple of hours, but then it's not all that long (coming in at 151 pages), but in those pages it was fun, outrageous, sad, and well, different! I particularly loved her un-Sorbo like Heracles...he's coarse, vulgar, oversexed...and oh so unlike the Hercules played by Sorbo - and this is a good thing in my book! For Atlas' part, the long suffering god, made to bear the weight of the world upon his shoulders, is relieved of the burden for a short time, but even then he is tricked too early to returning to it...even in this we are given a twist, following Atlas from ancient Greece into the modern space race...I really enjoyed this twist. Weight is kind of a story inside of a story, with side stories even, and I like that about this book, it give one a lot to think about and a whole new twist on these mythic figures.

      I've not read any of Winterson's other work (which I may have to try out based on this reading), so I can't compare this to her other work, nor can I compare it to Atwood's Penelopaid (which I have in my library TBR pile...but this one is due in two days and cannot be renewed, so I had to read it NOW)...which is also in the Canongate's series of myths retold... even so, I give Weight a A, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it for a quick, fun retelling of the Atlas/Heracles myth.
    • 4/5
      As an avid reader, one thing I seem to gravitate to are re-tellings of well-known stories by authors. Something about a different take on the story, possibly challenging my own likes or dislikes about the original tale, has always appealed to me, and is probably why I'm such a fan of the "Wicked" series from Gregory Maguire. So a few weeks ago while I browsed the shelves at the local branch of the library, I stumbled across one of The Myths series written by author Jeanette Winterson that piqued my interest.

      "Weight" presents her take on the classic Atlas and Heracles myth.

      Atlas did the unthinkable -- siding with the Titans in their war against the Olympian Gods. As punishment, Zeus ordered him to support the weight of the entire cosmos on his shoulders for all eternity. While he knelt, listening to the world and not realizing how much time was passing, who should happen to appear but Heracles, laboring through the twelve tasks set to him by King Eurystheus.

      One of Heracles' tasks is to secure three golden apples from a tree in the Garden of the Hesperides, but he himself is not allowed to pick them. So he devises the brilliant idea of having Atlas retrieve the apples for him. Atlas finds this brief respite from holding the world a chance to taste freedom, even if only for a little while, and agrees. The night before they are to temporarily trade places, they talked over a meal, Heracles ranting about having to obey Eurystheus, why did he need to do that? Atlas replied that there is no such thing as free will, only the will of the Gods.

      The next day, after switching places, a question starts buzzing about Heracles' brain: "What if Atlas doesn't return", leaving him to hold up the weight of the world?

      Winterson takes her re-telling one step farther by having Atlas, holding the world, the sky and space on his shoulders, ask the question: "What if he put it down?" It's an interesting take on the myth, focusing more on the nature of boundaries, who sets them, and why we follow them. For Heracles, it challenges his concept of destiny, forced to endure inhuman tasks with the hope of pleasing the Gods; for Atlas, it forces him to re-examine the way he blindly believes everything. "What if": two little words with so much power behind them.

      As she re-writes the myth, Winterson also interjects her own journey as a writer and why she decided to use the myth of Atlas and Heracles to work through her own inner struggles. After all, much of writing is fantasizing on the 'what ifs' and seeing how they play out.
    • 4/5
      I didn't really expect to be terribly impressed by a short little novel that retold the myth of Atlas and Heracles.

      But I've read enough Jeanette Winterson by now that I really should have known better. She blew me away, as always. In her rambling, poetic style, she used the story of Atlas and Heracles to explore desire and boundaries and what weighs us down and how we can let go and escape. It was engrossing, and poignant, and beautiful.

      As always, Winterson injects a deeply personal element into the novel, while at the same time exploring the form of story: I want to tell the story again, she repeats. It is not just the story of two Grecian gods, but it is somehow her story, our story, the story of Earth from the Precambrian to the Space Age. And somehow, in this short little book, it's not overambitious at all--because Winterson is that good of a storyteller.

      And the ending of the book? Simply brilliant.
    • 5/5
      Every word is the best one, every page is my favorite, every idea is the best I've ever heard. This is my favorite novel of all time - and she only wrote it last year.

      "I want to tell the story again." That's how Winterson opens her astonishing interpretation of the myth of Atlas and Hercules. Altas and Hercules, the two strongest men in the universe, both prisoners to Fate. Hercules is Id, gratifying every urge, exercising every rage, indulging every vanity, smashes his way through life. Atlas is Superego, carrying his outrageous burden because he feels he must, enduring humiliation and isolation because he believes he brought it on himself. Ego floats someone in between them, in the story itself. Ego is Will, ego is Choice...something that Atlas and Hercules both attempt after a lot of soul-searching.

      Around her central story, she contemplates all the scientific breakthroughs and advances in knowledge we've acquired since the first telling of this story thousands of years ago. And she demonstrates - especially at the end - that you can have modern science and these extraordinary myths at the same time. They coexist because they are both truth, both eternal. And the ending is so powerful I cry just remembering it.

      Every other week I find myself saying, "I want to read the story again."
    • 5/5
      I was a bit nervous about this because I read 'Oranges ...' years ago and wasn't sure I enjoyed it, so have avoided the author ever since. However, having read this, maybe I need to give her another try.

      I wasn't sure about the 'me' sections, but the bits that were retelling the myth I enjoyed. I think the idea of Heracles as a braggart is spot on and there are wonderful descriptions of the relationship between Earth & Poseidon.

      Near the very end is a little bit that summed up my feelings on the day that I read it, and I've put it below after lots of returns because it might be a spoiler.







      Let me crawl out from under this world I have made.
      It doesn't need me any more.

      Strangely, I don't need it either. I don't need the weight. Let it go. There are reservations and regrets, but let it go.

      I want to tell the story again.

    Book preview

    Weight - Jeanette Winterson

    Introduction

    Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision.

    Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a café, years ago.

    These chance sightings, these portents, these returns, begin the unconscious connection with the subject, an unconscious connection that waits for an ordinary moment of daylight to show its face.

    When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realised I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written.

    Re-written. The recurring language motif of Weight is ‘I want to tell the story again.’

    My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the re-telling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text.

    Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Hercules takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere.

    Of course I wrote it directly out of my own situation. There is no other way.

    Weight has a personal story broken against the bigger story of the myth we know and the myth I have re-told. I have written this personal story in the First Person, indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this leads to questions of autobiography.

    Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

    Right now, human beings as a mass, have a gruesome appetite for what they call ‘real’, whether it’s Reality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary, or at the better end, the factual programmes and biographies and ‘true life’ accounts that occupy the space where imagination used to sit.

    Such a phenomenon points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic, of the non-material, of the contemplative.

    Against all this, a writer such as myself, who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities, and who believes that language is much more than information, must row against the tide rather like Siegfried rowing against the current of the Rhine.

    The Myth series is a marvellous way of telling stories – re-telling stories for their own sakes, and finding in them permanent truths about human nature. All we can do is keep telling the stories, hoping that someone will hear. Hoping that in the noisy echoing nightmare of endlessly breaking news and celebrity gossip, other voices might be heard, speaking of the life of the mind and the soul’s journey.

    Yes, I want to tell the story again.

    I want to tell the story again

    The free man never thinks of escape.

    In the beginning there was nothing. Not even space and time. You could have thrown the universe at me and I would have caught it in one hand. There was no universe. It was easy to bear.

    This happy nothing ended fifteen aeons ago. It was a strange time, and what I know is told to me in radioactive whispers; that’s all there is left of one great shout into the silence.

    What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

    Your first parent was a star.

    It was hot as hell in those days. It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist. Those ceaseless burning fires and volcanic torments are lodged in us as ultimate fear. The hells we invent are the hells we have known. Hell is; was not, is not, cannot. Science calls it the world before life began – the Hadean period. But life had begun, because life is more than the ability to reproduce. In the molten lava spills and cratered rocks, life longed for life. The proto, the almost, the maybe. Not Venus. Not Mars. Earth.

    Planet Earth, that wanted life so badly, she got it.

    Moving forward a few billion years, there was a miracle. At least that’s what I call the unexpected fact that changes the story. Earth had bacterial life, but no oxygen, and oxygen was a deadly poison. Then, in a quiet revolution as explosive in its own way as a star, a new kind of bacteria, cyanobacteria started to photosynthesise – and a bi-product of photosynthesis is oxygen. Planet earth had a new atmosphere. The rest is history.

    Well not quite. I could list for you the wild optimism of the

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