藝術與生命

My parents owned six books between them. Two of those were Bibles and the third was a concordance to the Old and New Testaments. The fourth was The House At Pooh Corner. The fifth，The Chatterbox Annual 1923 and the sixth, Malory’s Morte d’Artliur.

I found it necessary to smuggle books in and of the house and I cannot claim too much for the provision of an outside toilet when there is no room of one’s own. It was on the toilet that I first read Freud and D. H. Lawrence, and perhaps that was the best place, after all. We kept a rubber torch hung on the cistern, and I had to divide my money from a Saturday job, between buying books and buying batteries. My mother knew exactly how long her Ever Readys would last if used only to illuminate the hap that separated the toilet paper from its .

Once I had tucked the book back down my knickers to get it indoors again, I find somewhere to hide it, and anyone with a single bed, standard size, and paperbacks, standard size, will discover that seventy seven can be accommodated per layer under the mattress. But as my collection grew, I began to worry that my mother might notice that her daughter’s bed was rising visibly. One day she did. She burned everything.

I had been brought up to memorize very long Bible passages, and when I left home and was supporting myself so that I could continue my education, I fought off loneliness and fear by reciting. In the funeral parlor I whispered Donne to the embalming fluids and Marvell to the corpses. Later, I found that Tennyson’ s ‘Lady of Shalott’ had a soothing, because rhythmic, effect on the mentally disturbed. Among the disturbed I numbered myself at that time.

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.

The psyche and the spirit do not share the instinct of damaged body. Healing is automatically triggered nor is danger usually avoided. Since we put ourselves in the way of hurt it seems logical to put ourselves in the way of healing. Art has more work to do than ever before but it can do that work. In a self-destructive society like our own, it is unsurprising that art as a healing force is despised.

For myself, when I returned to my to my borrowed room night after night, and there were my books, I felt relief and exuberance, not hardship and exhaustion. I intended to avoid the fate of Jude the Obscure, although a reading of that book was a useful warning. What I wanted did not belong to me by right and whilst it could not be refused tome in quite same way, we still have subtle punishments for anyone who insists on what they are and what they want. Walled inside the little space marked out for by family and class, it was the limitless world of imagination that it possible for me to scale the sheer face of other people’s assumptions. Inside books there is perfect space and it is that space which allows the reader to escape from the problems of gravity.

By Jeanette Winterson

藝術與生命

我父母兩人共有六本書。其中兩本是聖經、第三本是新舊約用語索引、第四本是《噗噗熊街角的屋子》（The House at Pooh Corner）、第五本是《1923年話匣子年鑑》（The Chatterbox 1923 Annual），而第六本是馬洛禮（Malory）的《阿瑟王之死》（Mortd’Arthur）。

我發現有必要把書偷運進出家裏，而且沒有屬於自己的房間時，對於於屋外廁所的供應品，我不能要求太多。我第一次讀到弗洛依德和D. H. 勞倫斯，是坐在馬桶上的，而或許，那終究是最佳之處。我們在馬桶水箱上懸吊了一個橡膠手電筒，而我必須將週六那份工作賺來的錢，平分花在買書和買電池上面。我母親清楚知道，她那些永備牌電池，如果光是用來照明區分衛生紙和其功能的空隙，可以維持多久。

有一回我又把書塞在內褲裏，好帶進屋裏。我必須找個地方把書藏起來，而任何人，若擁有一張單人牀，標準尺寸的，以及平裝書籍，標準尺寸的，就會發現，牀墊底下每一層可容納七十七本。可是當我的收集品增加時，便開始擔心母親會注意到，用眼睛就看得出女兒的牀正逐漸升高。有一天她真的發現了。她全給燒了…。

……我成長過程中，必須背下很長的聖經段落。到我離開家庭，自己賺錢以便繼續求學時，便靠背誦來抵擋寂寞和恐懼。在殯儀館裏，我稍稍對着防腐香料液念約翰 ?多恩（Donne）、對着屍體念安德魯?馬維爾（Marvel）。後來，我發現丁尼生（Tennyson）的〈夏洛特〉（“Lady of Shalott”），因爲有節焰感，對於心智失衡者具有一種安撫作用。在那個時候我把自己也算在失衡者之列。

藝術的.療愈力量並非誇大其詞的幻想。我奮力留住語言，語言因而讓我心智正常，具有力量。到現在仍是如此，而且我所知道的痛苦，無一不透過藝術而得到舒緩。對某此人來說，是音樂，另一些人，是繪畫，對我來說，是主要的是，不論出現在詩歌或散文中，詩能夠切穿嘈雜和傷痛，將傷口打開以清理之，然後逐漸教導它自我療愈。

心靈和精神不像受損了的身體具有一種本能。療愈不會自動給引發，而危險也通常無以避免。既然我們會讓自己受傷，那麼讓自己得到療愈也是合乎邏輯的。比起以往任何時候，藝術要做更多的工作，但是這份工作它是做得來的。像我們這樣一個自我毀滅的社會裏，藝術之爲一種療愈的力量，會受到鄙視，並不令人感到訝異。

對我自己而言，夜復一夜回到借來的房裏時，我感到放心且滿溢，而非困苦和疲憊，我意圖避免《無名裘德》（Jude the Obscure）的命運，雖然閱讀那本書是很有用的警告。我所想要的，並不理當屬於我，而雖然它也不能以完全同樣的方式拒我於外，但是任何人若堅持要做某種人或是想要某些東西，我們仍然會給他很微妙的懲罰。當我被關在家庭和階級爲我所劃定的小小空間裏，是想象力那片無限的天地，讓我得以刮除他人那些假設的表層。書中自有完美的空間，就是這個空間，讓讀者能夠逃避地心引力的諸般問題。

詹涅特．溫特森 著