My father was Poseidon. My mother was the Earth.

      My father loved the strong outlines of my mother’s body. He loved her demarcations and her boundaries. He knew where he stood with her. She was solid, certain, shaped and material.

      My mother loved my father because he recognised no boundaries. His ambitions were tidal. He swept, he sank, he flooded, he re-formed. Poseidon was a deluge of a man. Power flowed off him. He was deep, sometimes calm, but never still.

      My mother and father teemed with life. They were life. Creation depended on them and had done so before there was air or fire. They sustained so much. They were so much. To each other they were irresistible.

      Both were volatile. My father obviously so, my mother more alarmingly. She was serene as a rock but volcano’d with anger. She was quiet as a desert but tectonically challenged. When my mother threw a plate across the room, the whole world felt the crash. My father could be whipped into a storm in moments. My mother grumbled and growled and shook for days or weeks or months until her rage fissured and crumpled entire cities or forced human kind into lava-like submission.

      Humankind … They never could see it coming. Look at Pompeii. There they are in the bathhouses, sitting in their chairs, wearing skeletal looks of charred surprise.

      When my father wooed my mother she lapped it up. He was playful, he was warm, he waited for her in the bright blue shallows and came a little closer, then drew back, and his pull was to leave a little gift on her shore; a piece of coral, mother of pearl, a shell as spiralled as a dream.

      Sometimes he was a long way out and she missed him and the beached fishes gasped for breath. Then he was all over her again, and they were mermaids together, because there was always something feminine about my father, for all his power. Earth and water are the same kind, just as fire and air are their opposites.

      She loved him because he showed her to herself. He was her moving mirror. He took her round the world, the world that she was, and held it up for her to see, her beauty of forests and cliffs and coastlines and wild places. To him she was both paradise and fear and he loved both. Together they went where no human had ever been. Places only they could go, places only they could be. Wherever he went, she was there; a gentle restraint, a serious reminder; the earth and the waters that covered the earth. He knew though, that while he could not cover the whole of her, she underpinned the whole of him. For all his strength, she was strong.

      I was born. I was born one of the Titans, half man, half god, a giant of a giant race. I was born on an island where my father could lie over my mother for a day and a night before subsiding. From this prolonged intercourse, riddling himself into every crack, I was bound to be a fatal combination of them both. I am as turbulent as my father. I am as brooding as my mother. I act suddenly. I never forget. I sometimes forgive, compassion washing away memory. I know what love is. I know love’s counterfeit. At the same time, my good nature makes me easy to deceive. Like my brother Prometheus, I have been punished for overstepping the mark. He stole fire. I fought for freedom.

       Boundaries, always boundaries.

      I keep telling the story again and though I find different exits, the walls never fall. My life is paced out – here and here and here – I can alter its shape but I can’t get beyond it. I tunnel through, seem to find a way out, but the exits lead nowhere. I’m back inside, leaning on the limits of myself.

      This is the body, the sealed unit that cautiously takes in what it needs to survive, that stoutly repels invaders of the microbe kind. This is the body, whose boundaries weaken only in decay and then the freedom it brings is useless. United with the world at last, I am dead to it.

      This is the body, and my body is the world in little. I am the Kosmos – the all that there is, and at the same time I was never more outside, never more than nothing. Nothing bounded by nothing.

      Nothing has an unlikely property. It is heavy.

      The story is a simple one. I had a farm. I had cattle. I had a vineyard. I had daughters. I lived on Atlantis, the perfect synthesis of a wealthy mother and a proud father. The Titans bowed to no-one, not even Zeus, whose thunderbolts were like a game to us.

      When I wanted gold and jewels I asked my mother where she kept them and she indulged me as mothers indulge sons, and showed me her secret mines and underground caves.

      When I wanted whales or harbours or nets lined with fish or pearls for my daughters, I went to my father, who respected me and treated me as an equal. I dived with him into hot springs that blasted the floor of the ocean. We swam wrecks and tamed porpoises. Land and sea were equal home to me, and when Atlantis was finally destroyed, I even felt a kind of gladness. All that loss was after all, only my mother and father’s embrace. I was nothing. I returned to nothing. I wish it had been so.

      Boundaries, always boundaries, and the longing for infinite space.

      I built a walled garden, a temenos, a sacred space. I lifted the huge stones with my own hands and piled them carefully, as a goatherd would, leaving tiny gaps to let the wind through. A solid wall is easily collapsed. My mother stirring in her sleep could do as much. A wall well built with invisible spaces will allow the winds that rage against it to pass through. When the