boat, a bed, a lantern, a love-potion, a wound. The world is contained within a word – Isolde.
The Romantic solipsism that nothing exists but the two of us, could not be farther from the multiplicity and variety of Darwin’s theory of the natural world. Here, the world and everything in it forms and is re-formed, tirelessly and unceasingly. Nature’s vitality is amoral and unsenti-mental; the weak die, the strong survive.
Tristan, weak and wounded, should have died. Love healed him. Love is not part of natural selection.
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?
In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth’s crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.
Darwin overturned a stable-state system of creation and completion. His new world was flux, change, trial and error, maverick shifts, chance, fateful experiments, and lottery odds against success. But earth had turned out to be the blue ball with the winning number. Bobbing alone in a sea of space, earth was the lucky number.
Darwin and his fellow scientists still had no idea how old earth and her life forms might be, but they knewthey were unimaginably older than Biblical time, which dated the earth at 4,000 years. Now, time had to be understood mathematically. It could no longer be imagined as a series of lifetimes, reeled off like a genealogy from the Book of Genesis. The distances were immense.
And yet, the human body is still the measure of all things. This is the scale we know best. This ridiculous six feet belts the globe and everything in it. We talk about feet, hands, spans, because that is what we know. We know the world by and through our bodies. This is our lab; we can’t experiment without it.
It is our home too. The only home we really possess. Home is where the heart is…
The simple image is complex. My heart is a muscle with four valves. It beats 101,000 times a day, it pumps eight pints of blood around my body. Science can bypass it, but I can’t. I say I give it to you, but I never do.
Don’t I? In the fossil record of my past, there is evidence that the heart has been removed more than once. The patient survived.
Broken limbs, drilled skulls, but no sign of the heart. Dig deeper, and there’ll be a story, layered by time, but true as now.
Tell me a story, Silver.
What story?
The story of Tristan and Isolde.
Some wounds never heal.
The second time the sword went in, I aimed it at the place of the first.
I am weak there – the place where I had been found out before. My weakness was skinned over by your love.
I knew when you healed me that the wound would open again. I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.
The love-potion? I never drank it. Did you?
Our story is so simple. I went to bring you back for someone else, and won you for myself. Magic, they all said later, and it was, but not the kind that can be brewed.
We were in Ireland. Was there ever a country so damp? I had to wring out my mind to think clearly. I was a morning mist of confusion.
You had a lover. I killed him. It was war and your man was on the losing side. As I killed him, he fatally wounded me; that is, he gave me the wound that only love could repair. Love lost, and the wound would be as bloody as ever. As bloody as now, bed-soaked and jagged.
I didn’t care about dying. But you took me in out of pity because you didn’t know my name. I told you it was Tantrist, and as Tantrist you loved me.
‘What if I was Tristan?’ I asked you one day, and I watched you grow pale, and take a dagger. You had
The Romantic solipsism that nothing exists but the two of us, could not be farther from the multiplicity and variety of Darwin’s theory of the natural world. Here, the world and everything in it forms and is re-formed, tirelessly and unceasingly. Nature’s vitality is amoral and unsenti-mental; the weak die, the strong survive.
Tristan, weak and wounded, should have died. Love healed him. Love is not part of natural selection.
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?
In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth’s crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.
Darwin overturned a stable-state system of creation and completion. His new world was flux, change, trial and error, maverick shifts, chance, fateful experiments, and lottery odds against success. But earth had turned out to be the blue ball with the winning number. Bobbing alone in a sea of space, earth was the lucky number.
Darwin and his fellow scientists still had no idea how old earth and her life forms might be, but they knewthey were unimaginably older than Biblical time, which dated the earth at 4,000 years. Now, time had to be understood mathematically. It could no longer be imagined as a series of lifetimes, reeled off like a genealogy from the Book of Genesis. The distances were immense.
And yet, the human body is still the measure of all things. This is the scale we know best. This ridiculous six feet belts the globe and everything in it. We talk about feet, hands, spans, because that is what we know. We know the world by and through our bodies. This is our lab; we can’t experiment without it.
It is our home too. The only home we really possess. Home is where the heart is…
The simple image is complex. My heart is a muscle with four valves. It beats 101,000 times a day, it pumps eight pints of blood around my body. Science can bypass it, but I can’t. I say I give it to you, but I never do.
Don’t I? In the fossil record of my past, there is evidence that the heart has been removed more than once. The patient survived.
Broken limbs, drilled skulls, but no sign of the heart. Dig deeper, and there’ll be a story, layered by time, but true as now.
Tell me a story, Silver.
What story?
The story of Tristan and Isolde.
Some wounds never heal.
The second time the sword went in, I aimed it at the place of the first.
I am weak there – the place where I had been found out before. My weakness was skinned over by your love.
I knew when you healed me that the wound would open again. I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.
The love-potion? I never drank it. Did you?
Our story is so simple. I went to bring you back for someone else, and won you for myself. Magic, they all said later, and it was, but not the kind that can be brewed.
We were in Ireland. Was there ever a country so damp? I had to wring out my mind to think clearly. I was a morning mist of confusion.
You had a lover. I killed him. It was war and your man was on the losing side. As I killed him, he fatally wounded me; that is, he gave me the wound that only love could repair. Love lost, and the wound would be as bloody as ever. As bloody as now, bed-soaked and jagged.
I didn’t care about dying. But you took me in out of pity because you didn’t know my name. I told you it was Tantrist, and as Tantrist you loved me.
‘What if I was Tristan?’ I asked you one day, and I watched you grow pale, and take a dagger. You had
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