That Razor Edge of Balance

It evaded her now when she thought of her picture.  Phrases came.  Visions came.  Beautiful pictures.  Beautiful phrases.  But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything.  Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel.  It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. […] For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel.  And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?

 

~ To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, born on this day in 1882

 

Georges Seurat, 1886

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Puddles in the Path

In the works of Virginia Woolf, puddles often represent a metaphorical chasm between significance and anonymity, solidity and vagueness, reality and illusion.  Frequently her protagonists, upon confronting a puddle, find themselves unable to cross, thereby remaining – like Woolf – locked in the debilitating delusions of their mind.  

On this day in 1941, the tormented Woolf succumbed to her manic depression, filled the pockets of her overcoat with stones, and walked into the River Ouse and drowned.  As a tribute, some of Woolf’s literary puddles are presented here. 

 

Some cleavage of the dark there must have been, some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough issued […].  The mystic, the visionary, walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves “What am I,” “What is this?” […].   

~ To the Lighthouse (1927) 

 

“There is the puddle,” said Rhoda, “and I cannot cross it.  I hear the rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head.  Its wind roars in my face.  All palpable forms of life have failed me.  Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever.”  

~ The Waves (1931) 

 

There was the moment of the puddle in the path; when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle; I tried to touch something . . . the whole world became unreal.  

~ “A Sketch of the Past” (1939) 

 

I wished to add some remarks to this, on the mystical side of this solitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with.  It is this that is frightening [and] exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is….  Life is, soberly [and] accurately, the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality.  I used to feel this as a child – couldn’t step across a puddle once I remember, for thinking, how strange – what am I? 

~ Diary 3, as quoted in The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness by Thomas C. Caramagno

 

 

  

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The Trees of the Mind

While conducting research for a current essay project on identity and self-definition in the works of Virginia Woolf, I keep stumbling over the roots of Sylvia Plath’s trees – the shriveling figs and ancient yews, black pine and seeding winter trees, the diseased elm, and Polly’s dream tree, a “thicket of sticks” with a larkspur star.  With their multifurcating branches of options and opportunities, decisions and offshoots, Plath uses tree imagery to portray stages of self-consciousness, inner chaos, confusion, isolation, and desolation. 

Obviously, these are not the sort of cheerful trees under which you would spread a blanket and picnic.  However, they aptly convey the paradoxical desires and inner conflict Woolf’s characters (and many of us, I would venture) encounter on the journey to consciousness and self-definition. 

My favorite Woolf tree is the one Lily continually moves in her painting in To the Lighthouse.  Each time she is beset with self-doubt, bowing “like corn under a wind” (usually at the hand of Charles Tansley, who insists that women can neither write nor paint), she rights herself by shifting the tree in her painting: “She must make it once more.  There’s the sprig on the table-cloth; there’s my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters – nothing else.” 

Lily’s spontaneous urge to make a shift in her drawing conveys her need to put order to the swirl of emotions and conflicting desires in her mind.  She begins to realize that her vision requires balance and fusion.  Plath’s trees, conversely, are tragic and dark, representative of the deepest recesses of our thoughts before reconciliation occurs.  And I keep tripping over them.

 

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black.  The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

~ from “The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath

 

Reenadinna Yew Wood by Nigel Cox from geograph.org.uk, 2006, with permission by the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0

 

 

 

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The Butterfly of the Moment

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. ~ Vita Sackville-West, author known best for her love affair with Virginia Woolf

As a tribute to the publication anniversary of the first volume of The Essays of Virginia Woolf by Andrew McNeillie (Harvest, November 22, 1989), I have posted excerpts from my recent thesis on chaos theory and the butterfly effect in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.  (See Original Work or click on the new Angels and Butterflies page tab above.)

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Where to Begin?

For my first Major Authors essay of the semester, I’m attempting somewhat ambitiously to apply the butterfly effect of chaos theory to the love and life choices of Clarissa Dalloway and Lily Briscoe.  With the premise solid in my mind and supported amply by a week’s worth of fruitful research, the words should be flowing onto the page.  However, like Lily, I’m struggling a bit with my own creative commitment issues and where to begin…  

She took her hand and raised her brush.  For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air.  Where to begin? – that was the question at what point to make the first mark?  One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions.  All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by deep gulfs, and foaming crests.  Still the risk must be run; the mark made.  

~ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse 

 

The Pointe du Grouin, France, by Alan Hughes, October 2005

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Fear No More

The third week of my course on the life and works of Virginia Woolf entailed the reading and analysis of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf’s brilliant and richly complex novel that explores the activities and innermost thoughts of one day in Clarissa Dalloway’s London life and their juxtaposition with the suicide of a war veteran.  While brimming with stunning passages that resonate innumerably throughout, the narrative’s early depiction of Clarissa’s internal suffering and foreshadowing (via Shakespeare) of impending tragedy is, for me, the novel’s most poignant moment: 

She had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married […].  She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.  She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.  She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. […]

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.  Tears and sorrow; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.

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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“There are many times, writing this, when I have been afraid of Virginia Woolf.  I think I would have been afraid of meeting her.  I am afraid of not being intelligent enough for her.  Reading and writing her life, I am often afraid […] for her.” ~ Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf  

The fall semester begins at Chapman University this week, which, for me, launches a sixteen-week examination and analysis of the life and works of Virginia Woolf.  Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 and a prominent member of London’s famous Bloomsbury Group, a circle of writers, intellectuals, and philosophers, Woolf was arguably one of the greatest thinkers of our time.  Although widely regarded as the most influential woman novelist and essayist of the 20th century, this is the first semester that Woolf has been featured in Chapman’s Major Authors graduate course.   

The study will be fast-paced and intense to provide the time and opportunity to explore Woolf’s most significant works, including Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1931), Flush (1933), The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938), and the unfinished Between the Acts (1941), the novel Woolf was writing at the time of her death.  Many of Woolf’s essays, letters, diaries, and memoirs will also be reviewed.  

While the brilliance of Woolf’s writing is alone immensely compelling (if not somewhat intimidating), of particular fascination will be the study of the relationship between her life and her works, the dark voices that haunted and tormented her, and “the violent moods of [her] soul,” as Woolf describes them in her mid-1920s diary.  It’s an examination I look forward to with great anticipation and slight trepidation.  Like Lee, I, too, am just a little afraid… 

Woolf in 1902, by George Charles Beresford

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Bird by Bird

“I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print.  It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.  Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled but stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal – a spiny blenny, for instance – from inside your tiny cave?” ~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life  

This summer so far has found me immersed in the insights and writings of great women literary figures like Virginia Woolf and Anne Lamott, whose self-proclaimed neuroses and inner crises were assuaged by the pen and its validation.  What I love most about these writers is their willingness to share the confusion and mess of their minds so openly.  From acute shyness to depression to alcoholism to mental illness, it’s all there; their work is purposefully transparent, to put the darkness in perspective, illuminate and analyze it, or to simply and sacrificially “throw the lights on for [the] reader” (Lamott, Bird by Bird). 

In his 1999 biography The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Manic Depression and the Life of Virginia Woolf, psychiatrist Peter Dally avows this about Woolf’s own urge to write: “Virginia’s need to write was, among other things, to make sense out of mental chaos and gain control of madness.  Through her novels she made her inner world less frightening” (St. Martin’s Press, NY). 

While my own inner world and mental muddle are undoubtedly far less frightening than, say, the idea of transparency in my writing, the opportunity to become unstuck, peer out from inside the cave, and make sense of it all has genuine appeal.  So back to the drawing board, er, computer, I go…to those sweetly innocuous third and fourth drafts, to infuse more of what takes place in the dark spaces of my mind, and to slay and (gulp) display those inner demons, bird by bird.

Vintage Woman and Bird Stretched Canvas Wall Art can be found at shopplasticland.com.

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“No need to hurry.

No need to sparkle.  No need to be anybody but oneself.” ~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf, oil on canvas by Vanessa Bell (1911-1912)

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Moments of Being

Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London on January 25, 1882 into what she described as a very communicative, literate world, was arguably one of the greatest thinkers and writers of our time.  While she is best known for her groundbreaking novels such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, she was also a master essayist, diarist, and writer of short stories.

Woolf’s experimental style and illuminating candor transformed the art of the narrative and the essay form.  In her most notable nonfiction work, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf examines the struggles and future of female writers and intellectuals and women’s role in society.    

The diaries and letters Woolf wrote during the course of her life reveal her wit, humor, and depth of her emotional capacity, as well as the dark gloom that haunted her and made her long for death.  

The collection of Woolf’s only autobiographical writings, Moments of Being, provides fascinating insight into this remarkably gifted and tormented woman.  Woolf committed suicide on March 28, 1941 at the age of 59.

Portrait by George Charles Beresford, 1902

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