Free Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson

was night, about a quarter to twelve, the sky divided in halves, one cloudy, the other fair. The stars were deep recessed, not lying on the surface of the night but hammered into it. The water, where the ship cutted it, was broken and white, but once the ship had passed the water healed the intrusion and I could not see where the black of the sky and the black of the water changed into each other. I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; Stella maris of the upper air. There are many legends among seafaring people of a bright fish so hot that it shines in the deepest water, a star dropped and finned from God, an alchemical mystery, the union of fire and water, coniuntis oppositorum that transforms itself and others. Some writers mix the Stella maris with the remora, a tiny fish that sticks to the rudder of a vessel and brings it to a halt. Whatever it is, the fateful decisive thing that utterly alters a confident course.
    My father had told me about the rémoras and how the Greek fishermen in the little boats still fear him. My father feared no remoras.
     
    Dog. Dog-fish. Dog star.
    Horse. Sea-horse. Pegasus.
    Monk. Monk fish. Angel.
    Spider. Spider-crab. Cancer.
    Worm. Eel. The Old Serpent.
     
    I was at the age of making lists but the lists I made were correspondences, half true and altogether fanciful, of the earth the sea and the sky. Perhaps I was trying to hold together my own world that was in so much danger of falling away. Perhaps I wanted order where there was none. As the QE2 floated so confidently on the waters I thought of the Titanic, ghostly and abandoned beneath, and somewhere above, in the secretive blackness, the Ship of Fools navigating the stars. Was it the comet?
    Legend has it that the Ship, while seeking the Holy Grail, sailed off the end of the world and continued forever. At particular conjunctions of time and timelessness, it appears again as a bright light, shooting its course through the unfathomable universe, chasing that which has neither beginning nor end.
    What can a little girl see that astronomers and telescopes cannot? There was no comet sighted on the official log of the journey. What was it then that hooped together ordinary night with infinity? I saw the silver prow pass over me and the sails in tattered cloth. Men and women crowded at the deck. There was a shuddering, as though the world-clock had stopped, though in fact it was our own ship that had thrown its engines into reverse. In the morning my father told me that we had identified an unknown signal, thought to be a vessel just ahead of us, though nothing at all was found.
    For myself, in the dark, watching the thin silver line speed away, I had joined that band of pilgrims uncenturied, unquantified, who, call it art, call it alchemy, call it science, call it god, are driven by a light that will not stay.
     
    The Godspeed. My father at the wheel. My mother on a hard couch giving birth to me.
    My mother lay with her skirts up over her face, her perfect stockings round her ankles, her pain groaning against the heavy noise of the engine.
    My head was engaged and I was pushing out of my mother's chthonic underworld into my father's world of difficulty and dream. I never expected to go back down again.
    My grandmother was singing a hymn, essentially praising God but effectively preventing my father from hearing what was happening. It was a quick birth and when I was laid on my mother's breast, my grandmother ate a sandwich and went to tell my father that he had the pleasure of a daughter.
    He lit every one of his distress flares and burnt up the river in a blaze of phosphorous red. Every tug and patrol boat on the stretch surrounded us, but far from sinking we were celebrating. My grandmother called it the Miracle of the Sardines and the Gin. She had only fetched enough for herself but there seemed to be plenty for everyone and so I was born, in dirt, in delight, in water