blood trail

In the Odyssey, Odysseus, for all his adventures and far-flung wandering, is always urged to ‘remember the return’. The journey is about coming home. When he reaches Ithaca the place is in uproar with unruly suitors for his hard-pressed wife. Two things happen: his dog scents him, and his wife recognises him by a scar on his thigh. She feels the wound.

There are so many wound stories: Chiron, the centaur, half-man, half-horse, is shot by a poisoned arrow tipped in the Hydra’s blood, and because he is immortal and cannot die, he must live forever in agony. But he uses the pain of the wound to heal others. The wound becomes its own salve.

Prometheus, fire-stealer from the gods, is punished with a daily wound: each morning an eagle perches on his hip and rips out his liver; each night the wound heals, only to be scored open the next day. I think of him, burned dark in the sun where he is chained to the Caucasian mountains, the skin on his stomach as soft and pale as a little child’s.

The doubting disciple Thomas must put his hand into the spear-wound in Jesus’ side, before he can accept that Jesus is who he says he is.

Gulliver, finishing his travels, is wounded by an arrow in the back of the knee as he leaves the country of the Houyhnhnms — the gentle and intelligent horses, far superior to humankind. On his return home Gulliver prefers to live in his own stables, and the wound behind his knee never heals. It is the reminder of another life.

One of the most mysterious wounds is the story of the Fisher King. The King is the keeper of the Grail, and is sustained by it, but he has a wound that will not heal, and until it does heal, the kingdom cannot be united. Eventually Galahad comes and lays hands on the King. In other versions it is Perceval.

The wound is symbolic and cannot be reduced to interpretation. But wounding seems to be a clue or a key to being human. There is value here as well as agony.

When we notice in the stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift: the one who is wounded is marked out — literally and symbolically — by the wound. The wound is a sign of difference. Even Harry Potter has a scar.

Freud colonised the Oedipus myth and renamed it as the son who kills the father and desires the mother. But Oedipus is an adoption story and wound story too. Oedipus has his ankles pierced together by his mother Jocasta before she abandons him, so that he cannot crawl away. He is rescued, and returns to kill his father and marry his mother, unrecognised by anyone except the blind prophet Tiresias — a case of one wound recognising another.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always there return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps, the reconciliation.

There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood trail.


-- Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?