In her introduction to 'Weight', a cover version of the myth of Atlas, Jeanette Winterson talks about knowing which myth to rewrite before she was even asked. She says the recurring motif of the book is I want to tell the story again, that all we do as a culture is retell the same stories over and over; all we do as a person is tell the same story, over and over. She says the point of choosing lies in recognition. We see someone, something, and we remember it, we recognise it, and we choose. It's about returning, our life a story of return, a nostos.

One of my evening classes this semester is 'Psychoanalysis and Pop Culture'. We discuss Freud's theories and see how they are used or evidenced in films, songs, poetry. Freud believes that we are born a blank sheet of paper and by the end of the first six months of our life the paper is tight and bruised with ink. There's no going back. He writes about his eighteen-month-old grandson playing with a bobbin. The boy throws it over the edge and away and he says "gone"; he reels it in and he says "back". He sits alone in his cot playing this game over and over and Freud says it's his coming to terms with his abandonment, with realising that he and his mother are separate beings and that she can and will and does leave, has left him alone. He uses the bobbin to represent his mother, leaving and coming back. He's experiencing the pain of loss but by making a game of his trauma, he learns to control his reaction to it, to be able to deal with it. The child teaches himself to be alone, he learns himself left. We take what hurts most and we try to deal with it, we have to deal with it, so we turn pain into pleasure. We make games of our trauma, we tell the story again.

( long cat is loooooong )